The Opium of the Colombian Masses

Reflections on el reggaeton

Of all the senses Bogotá accentuates, it is sound which you are hard pushed to escape from. First there is the weather; like clockwork the post-lunch rains fall heavily, clattering the pavements, inundating the roads. Then, whirring sirens, accelerating motors, belligerent klaxons and screeching brakes all instruments in the orchestra of Bogotá’s traffic. Most of all, it is music that fills your ears full to the brim. In taxis, restaurants, bars, clubs, bakeries, salons, even Churches, music is blared from radio stations from dawn till dusk. During the day there is a good deal of diversity in genres to listen to. There’s English and Spanish Rock n roll, plenty of salsa and cumbia, bachata, a little bit of calypso from the Caribbean, even some Brazilian and Cape Verde tunes represented on the airways. Come the night and all these great genres get thrown out the window, replaced by the new opium of the masses: el reggaeton.

For the uninitiated or unfamiliar, reggaeton originated in the 1990s in Puerto Rico. It’s a genre influenced by Jamaican reggae, hip-hop, Jamaican dancehall, bomba and plena music. The story goes that Jamaican labourers, working on the Panama Canal, introduced Jamaican music to Panamanians which eventually created Spanish reggae. A little later, a few Puerto Rican producers put some Jamaican dancehall riddims as the backbeat to Spanish reggae and reggaeton was born.

Today, it’s a genre found all over the world. Arguably the most globally recognized superstars, are Puerto Rican maestro Bad Bunny and Catalán superstar Rosalia. So reggaeton is the hot ticket. Back in Europe reggaeton is fun and still benefits from being relatively new and sparingly played. Over here, it is played ad nauseam, the same fifteen or so songs on repeat. And Bad Bunny and Rosalia aside, they’re the same hits from the last twenty years - Daddy Yankee’s Gasolina charted in 2004; Baila Morena dropped eleven years ago; Despacito six years ago.

Music listeners tend to be split between those who intuitively make note of the lyrics and those who feel their way through the beat. Belonging to the latter category makes reggaeton particularly frustrating. The building block of all reggaeton music is the dembow riddim. You use a four-on-the-floor kick drum and a snare to produce a – do forgive the futility in attempting to spell out a beat –   dumdadumdumdum, dumdadumdumdum. Hopefully, those familiar with reggaeton will be able to hear what I intend. And that, dumdadumdumdum, is repeated the whole way through. In every song it’s steady, labouring its way to the end. Just as you think – ok that one’s over the next one will be different - it never is.

Before you cast me as a cynical boomer, an Adrian Mole whining about Latinx culture, I do want to stress that I have tried. Some songs I even like. I reckon that my patience has been force fed to the point that I can last probably an hour at a party doing my utmost to display sincere enjoyment. But after three, four, five hours of same dumdadumdumdum, I go mad.

Allow a brief digression. Picture, if you will, an English wedding: the band have stopped and someone’s now taking requests, everyone crying out for their jukebox favourite. There’s ABBA, Sweet Caroline, Come on Eileen, Madonna, and inevitably someone puts on Hey Jude. It’s great; the crowd, screaming the words that they all know, having a grand old time. That’s a wedding, a special occasion, a one-off. Now, picture the same scene repeated every single Friday, Saturday and, on bank holiday weekends (which Colombia has the second most of in the world), Sunday. Let’s keep going - now, imagine if every one of those all-time classics had the same beat. Different lyrics, different melodies sure – but the same beat. That’s the closest analog to what reggaeton is, here in Bogotá.

In a way, the frustration I feel after more than an hour of only reggaeton has its benefits. Resigned to the fact that the rest of the night will involve the same four beats and people chanting every word to all the songs they know, I tap out, find somewhere to sit, and decide to pretend I am conducting ethnographic research.

The first thing to observe at a Colombian reggaeton party is the dancing. Here I want to tread carefully. The British are not the best dancers. It simply is not inculcated into us at an early age like it is in Colombia. This is fine. Brits and, for that matter most Europeans, get around their awkward dancing by believing that having fun is an adequate substitute for arrhythmic flaying of limbs. And perhaps the lack of ability also helps explain why so many prefer to dance individually. In fact, there is a sort of sanctity we have assigned to our little dancing space. Sure, we may decide to break out and spin a partner around, but this won’t last long.

Then there’s the question of clubbing etiquette. You don’t go out to pull, or if you do, you’re a loser, or worse – a creep. The notion of going up to someone, either from behind or to their face, and make out or grind, is derided. You don’t know the person; you don’t have their consent, so what are you doing? Selecting the night out has, in large part, to do with where the music will be good and where the crowd will be fun and hassle-free. It is undeniable that Berlin’s techno scene has had a sizeable impact on the tenor of clubbing across Europe. In Neukölln, bouncers are not big burly musclemen but rather the edgiest dressed clubber who, like St. Peter barring heaven’s gates, asks simple, effective questions to decide whether you are worthy to enter. If you are among the chosen, you are expected not to take pictures, not to harass anyone, just to enjoy the music, ya. Inside, the mass shakes its collective body in whatever way, each raver confined to their individual bubbled space. There might be leather, there might be skin on show, but this is by no means an invitation to try it on.

Now transpose a similar scene to Colombia. First, everyone here can dance. I have already written about the Colombian rite-of-passage learning salsa. It is not something instinctive or automatic but it’s part of a cultural learning how to move with rhythm, find the beat and move in tempo. And while salsa was every Colombian’s introductory dance, reggaeton predominates the clubbing scene. On the dance floor there is no individualized space; the vast majority of people partner up and move as one, hips locked, bodies grinding to the beat: dumdadumdumdum. It’s hard to describe it as anything other than sexual. Sexual it obviously is – I’ve seen a man, left-leg raised, thrusting as hard and rhythmically as possible for about twenty minutes while his partner moved enthusiastically to the same beat. This is not, however, to indict Colombians and reggeaton as somehow prurient.

There is a wealth of literature about how highly sexualized dancing is feminist. Colombian academic, Carolina Sanín, wrote a brilliant piece about her conversion to appreciating the virtues of reggaeton. I will write a separate piece about the line she draws between eleventh century troubadour verses and reggaeton lyrics. Here, I want to concentrate on the final paragraph of her article in which she argues that reggaeton does away with the ritualised courtship that other dances imitate. De-ritualised, reggaeton is sexually realistic and places the woman at the centre. The circular movements of hips meshing to the percussive beat, for Sanín, mimics the movement required to bring about the female orgasm. Reggaeton demands that men feel their way rather than blindly thrusting to what the woman wants and how she enjoys sex.

It's an interesting take, one counterposed to the view that reggaeton and the dancing that accompanies it are emblematic of Colombia’s machismo culture. It is easy to see machismo on display when you go clubbing in Colombia. Where in Europe the etiquette has arrived at a point where clubbing is about enjoying the music and not modern ritualised courtship, in Colombia many, though not all, still see the dance floor as a place to meet people. For my part, I don’t see the two mutually exclusive. Reggaeton and the culture is produces can be both feminist and machismo at the same time. It is not a case of having to square some circle.

At the most recent party, I noticed one woman who was asked up to dance by a fellow Colombian. I was struck by how utterly disinterested she was. If her body agreed with the music and went along with the dumdadumdumdum beat, her face, by comparison, was off in the distance, her expression flat. She even took out her phone to read her messages at one point. Later on, I asked her how she was enjoying the party. Her reply: fine, I just hate reggaeton, it’s boring. My spirits soared. Perhaps this means reggaeton’s days are numbered. Perhaps it just means I have one ally in my anti-reggaetonism. Either way is good enough for now.