Paige Hall's Crane Room thumped unusually loudly yesterday as students enjoyed a symposium that examined the juggernaut genre of reggaeton, which combines reggae and hip-hop musical influences with mainly Spanish lyrics.
The symposium, entitled "Reggaeton Rising," was organized by Raquel Rivera, an Andrew W. Mellow postdoctoral fellow in Tufts' sociology department.
Wayne Marshall, a scholar and producer currently completing an ethnomusicology Ph.D. focused on the intertwining of reggae and hip-hop, also creates his own music and writes widely on music throughout the area.
Using only his laptop to produce a surprisingly large array of sounds and beats, Marshall showed students that the origins of much of today's reggaeton can be traced back to basic "riddims" - or beats - that originated in Panama's dance hall reggae.
Panama, Puerto Rico and New York all claim to be the originators of reggaeton. According to Marshall, each can claim important influence within the genre.
Drawing on his mixing experience as a laptop DJ, Marshall also explained to students how specific lines of different elements combine together to form different familiar beats.
These specific mixes and combinations, he said, depend on the "difference of rhythm and the placement division of the bar." To illustrate his point, he changed his settings to produce a techno beat, a hip-hop beat and a reggae beat.
Then he added a certain "poly-rhythmic syncopation" and some other adjustments. "This is much more reggaeton-ey," he said as he cranked up the volume. Smiles broke out around the room and heads started to nod as the familiar boom-ch-boom-chick emerged.
After discussing the origins of Spanish-language dance hall reggae in Panama, Marshall then traced the evolution of a beat called Dem Bow that began a "very fertile period of playing with reggae rhythms" in Puerto Rico in the early '90s.
Music now characterized as reggaeton was called Dem Bow music in the '90s, Marshall said. Its evolution continued, incorporating the Jamaican tradition of "recording many vocalists over the same rhythms," he said, adding that "it's important because this practice was also adapted by reggaeton producers."
Accordingly, this basic Dem Bow rhythm became a "staple used for freestyle and club sessions, the underlying track over which MCs would come up with songs and routines," he said.
The evolution of this
"staple" highlighted the fundamentally electronic nature of the developing genre, in which vocals are imposed over pre-recorded beats without new instrumental input.
These basic sounds are indicative of "a small set of resources that people are using to generate the same rhythms," Marshall said, adding that this small group of particular rhythms has "such a strong resonance" and instills in people "a real strong connection to the song."
"Dem Bow has that special quality," Marshall said. One sharp element from the Dem Bow, the timbal, "you hear crop up on so many reggaeton tracks today. It'll be sampled and looped as a textural element underneath everything else."
Marshall played two other recordings that incorporated the same vocals by Shabba Ranks and Gregory Peck.
He pointed out a nearly identical beat in Daddy Yankee's ubiquitous "Gasolina" and elements of the same line in Wayne Wonder's "No Letting Go," Sean Paul's "Get Busy" and LumiDee's "Never Leave You."
Marshall employs the same laptop tools he showcased yesterday in his work with local community centers in Roxbury, Dorchester and Lowell, where he teaches children how to make their own reggaeton music.
Ejima Baker, a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at the City University of New York (CUNY) graduate center, discussed issues of racial identity surrounding reggaeton in her presentation, entitled "BET: Be Careful, It May Make You Black: The Remixing and Reshaping of Latina/o(s) on Black Entertainment Television."
Baker described herself as the child of a new generation of a very visual music culture in which music is inextricably tied to "television and marketing."
"I'm a music video queen," she said with a laugh. "At one point in my life, I'd learn all the dances."
With music, Baker said, "people like to wax nostalgic," assured that everyone can be united in their love and passion for music. But on the contrary, she argued, music can demonstrate how racial identity can be quite ambiguous.
Latinos, she said, straddle an "entrenched racial dichotomy."
The 2000 U.S. census was the first to distinguish the designation "Latino" as an ethnic category and not a racial category. In the results of the census, more than half of Latinos checked "white" as their racial identification.
With much intermingled racial diversity stemming from the Caribbean, however, many Latinos may identify more with non-white culture.
As reggaeton's momentum grew, Baker said, its music videos made their big-time debut on mainstream MTV, with BET offering reggaeton little coverage.
But as reggaeton's momentum accelerated further over the past few years, "BET has really been going after this audience," Baker said. She said the channel now has many more reggaeton videos in its circulation, a special documentary on the history of reggaeton, and "very attractive Latinas" featured on its programming. Julissa Marquez, a self-identified Latina, also hosts one of the channel's major programs, BET Live.
"Especially when bringing in the marketing angle, it's very much a racial tug of war," she said. "BET is offering a whole new spin on blackness."
These constantly shifting identities are gathering to form new groups and new identities, she said. The combined term "Afro-Latinidad" includes not only those who identify with both groups, but "people who live somewhere in hyphen-area - or the people who move fluently from side to side," she said.
Baker went on to analyze different multicultural elements that play out visually in reggaeton videos. She described music videos as "a really great gauge of what's going on politically and what's marketed."
The symposium was sponsored by the ASNE Diversity Fund, the Latino Studies Program, the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows Program and the sociology
department.
