When Daddy Yankee's ‘Gasolina’ entered the pop charts of the USA in 2004 and the UK in 2005, its mix of Spanish lyrics, dancehall reggae riddims and synthetic snares appeared to signal the arrival of a new genre called reggaeton. Puerto Rico might have been its home but hip-hop's hegemony in the USA was being undermined by a new form of Hurban (Hispanic + Urban) music which was becoming popular with young Latinos in cities like New York but also more marginal places like Springfield, Massachusetts and other small towns which contained Spanish-speaking immigrants from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. (My first and only experience of hearing reggaeton in a club occurred in 2008 when the Art of Record Production Conference was being hosted at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, a small town which had lost its industries and its nightlife. A desire to do some late-night ethnographic research and the sound of sub-bass led me to a restaurant/bar playing reggaeton rather than R&B with no Jay-Z, Beyonce, or any other English language music on the menu.) The editors of Reggaeton were aware that the genre ‘had not yet received scholarly analysis commensurate with its musical and cultural significance’ (p. 13) and this is an attempt by academics to compile an anthology which explores the musical roots that predate its explosion into more mainstream media channels and geographical routes which include Jamaica, Panama, Dominican Republic, Miami and Cuba, as well as Puerto Rico.

One of the strengths of the book is its inclusion of articles by journalists and artists as well as academics, although it might have been interesting to read about the creative practices of Tego Calderon, one of the ‘great poet[s] of reggaeton’ (p. 328) as well as his experiences of racism which, when told to a journalist from the New York Post, are sometimes more prosaic than poetic. After a useful introduction on reggaeton's ‘socio-sonic circuitry’, it is left to Wayne Marshall to map the development of a musical genre as the sole contributor to Part One of the book. Marshall's mix of anthropology and musicology works well and his chapter benefits from a strong focus on production practices and the technologies used by reggaeton producers. He skilfully traces how the musica negra of Puerto Rico's underground in the 1990s became the reggaeton latino that was marketed and distributed by the global music industries a decade later, and part of this change included a move away from a sample-based music which relied on well used breakbeats familiar to hip-hop DJs of the 70s and 80s and more contemporary hip-hop hits of the 90s.

The new reggaeton that would achieve international success with Daddy Yankee was constructed with other digital tools. Marshall writes that ‘the advent of new music production technologies, in particular synthesiser and sequencer software, has a great deal to do with this shift in sound. Programs such as Fruity Loops, with telltale ‘preset’ sounds and effects, served to expand and change the sonic palettes of reggaeton producers' (pp. 51–2). These include Luny Tunes from the Dominican Republic whose name highlights the humour of the genre; the cartoon reference is also reminiscent of the irreverent approach of 90s rave producers in the UK. Marshall mentions ‘the duo's use (and recycling) of 2, 3 and 4 chord vamps, accentuating their simple but moving chord progressions with melodic lines and arpeggios that follow and bring out the underlying harmonic motion’ (p. 56) and this is one of the few points where the musicological language might be more relevant to Radiohead than reggaeton, such is its clash with the latter's priorities on fun and functionality.

It is the rhythms of reggaeton which Marshall is most adept at analysing and his use of grids rather than notation to explain how the beats we hear in reggaeton are constructed is helpful for the sociologist or other scholars with only a minor understanding of different drum patterns. Supported by footnotes with links to audio examples on his wayneandwax blog, we are able to hear and see the kicks and snares of the staple boom-ch-boom-chick beat and compare it with various reggae riddims such as the Dem Bow on which much reggaeton is based. This attempt to ‘construct a metanarrative about reggaeton’ (p. 63) succeeds in its aim of not being too grand a narrative but is slightly long and more contributions about the music of reggaeton would have been welcome in a collection which devotes as much attention to questions of gender and politics.

In their introduction, the editors write that reggaeton has ‘animated contentious debates around issues of race, nation, class, gender, sexuality and language’ (p. 1). The danger is that these usual subjects contribute to a determinism which dominates certain disciplines and are only of secondary importance to its musicians and fans. Another problem arises in the attempt by academics to defend reggaeton from its conservative critics. Raquel Z. Rivera traces the actions of the police in Puerto Rico who censored the precursors of reggaeton by confiscating underground recordings in the 1990s. She rightly draws attention to the difficulties in creating a causal relationship between music and moral behaviour, but in doing so glosses over the reception of violently misogynistic lyrics which would make Snoop Dogg's skin crawl. Rivera is more interested in blaming a society which ‘constantly punishes and stigmatizes sexually aggressive or promiscuous women’ (p. 120) than criticising reggaeton performers who we can only assume are passive victims and are not allowed to be singled out for unfair treatment. It is left to Jan Fairley in her chapter ‘How to make love with your clothes on: dancing regeton, gender, and sexuality in Cuba’ to tease out some of the tensions and power struggles in sexually explicit dance moves where women appear to be far from deferential. Using empirical eyes, she describes movements including el perreo (or doggy-style) as it is known in Puerto Rico and a simulated sexual sandwich involving two men and a woman. She asks where back-to-front dance positions, which are also common in Jamaican dancehalls and the bump and grind of R&B, have come from, without necessarily providing any convincing answers other than recent female empowerment. This is partly undermined when one of the women in the sandwich is asked how she felt about the experience: ‘It started out fun and flirty then it got rather heavy and I felt cramped and heavily pressed into and “used”’ (p. 286).

Interestingly, and a little ironically considering its origins, it is another article about reggaeton in Cuba which is most valuable in understanding the importance of the genre for the study of popular music. Like Fairley, Geoff Baker (in ‘The politics of dancing: reggaeton and rap in Havana, Cuba’) locates the female-centred dancing of reggaeton and its overt displays of sexuality in ‘the social and economic upheavals in Havana since the early 1990s’ and ‘renegotiation over gender roles and liberation from social conventions’ (p. 176). What he also does is to examine the reception of reggaeton in Cuba which, despite criticisms by members of the Union of Young Communists who interpret it as ‘banal, corny, trashy’, has become the most popular type of music among young Cubans. Its emphasis on the body and pleasure provides a challenge to Adorno-esque Cuban academics who fear reggaeton will ‘retard the individual listener in the evolution of his/her aesthetic personality’ (p. 167) and the conscious rap of Cuba which has a social message and a dislike of dancing and ‘shaking your ass’ (p. 168). This creates a crisis for communists because, as Baker argues, ‘reggaeton artists tend to stand outside socialist principles altogether, refusing to engage with ideology on any level’ (p. 169). It also provides a valuable lesson for popular music studies scholars about the inability to impose ideologies on musics which are created through collaboration and conflict and whose meanings are always complex and contradictory. This might remove the idealistic impulse to ask whether reggaeton or any other genre of music ‘has the potential to change the status quo’ (p. 63) and instead force us to listen more clearly by dancing and thinking about the rhythms of those producers and musicians who aim towards the feet.