Confessions of a Reggaeton lover: My love and hate relationship
Today I want to talk to you about a music genre that has become increasingly popular in Europe particularly in the past years: Reggaeton.
Reggaeton is a musical genre which originated in Puerto Rico during the late 1990s. It is influenced by hip hop and Latin American and Caribbean music and it is typically sung in Spanish. Unless you are part of the 5% world population that has not listened to “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi than yes, you know what reggaeton is.
The funny thing is… If you would have asked my friends two years ago, where was I, you would probably obtain one of the following two answers: 1) she is in "Cuban" (the bar) dancing to reggaeton or 2) she is at home studying/reading/cleaning the house/with her friends listening to reggaeton. Yes! I became totally addicted to it! To the passion and the rhythm that it conveyed, until I started listening more attentively to the lyrics.
As a former music student, I have learned that music highly reflects societal developments and this has been like this for centuries. So here we are… in the 21st century, about to put a reggaeton playlist on Youtube: first song comes along “Felices los cuatro” by Maluma and I am already quite excited to listen to the beat.
Until… you actually hear what they are talking about. So here it goes: Maluma enters in this bar and the other guy says to him “For every wonderful, beautiful and gorgeous woman in the world, well, there is someone who is tired of being with her.”
Ok! STOP! First of all, this is completely treating women as objects, where each man can just throw someone away like an used product when bored. Secondly, women fight everyday to be considered for their intellectual capacity and not only for their looks and here you have a direct quotation focusing on being bored with the looks of a girl. Now, you could argue, it was in spanish I did not understand… Well… (un)fortunately this part was in English.
If this wasn’t bad enough, here it comes the official reggaeton lyrics:
(ES)
“Si conmigo te quedas
O con otro tú te vas
No me importa un carajo
Porque sé que volverás”
(EN)
“If you stay with me Or with another one you go I don’t give a damn (to put it politely) Because I know you'll come back”
Hum… so not only women in general are discardable, but they are also going to come back running back to you, because yeah, they do not have any self-esteem or self-love. This is not very educational is it? This is not the type of message that we want to pass to both boys and girls.
So… my question is… should we be listening to these songs and contributing to this degrading role of women in society, in the 21st century? Is this what we want to teach to the next generation?
Luckily not all reggaeton music portray women in such a way, but in most cases, even if not objectifying them through lyrics, they do by the images of half naked women showing their ass they depict.
Now… here is the decision all of us need to make: do we just listen to the beat and ignore the content of it, contributing to the business with our eyes closed, ignoring the possible societal repercussions it could have? Or do we stop listening to it and stop contributing to the financing of these artists? However, here it comes the second problem… most pop music nowadays is also conducted in such ways… So what do we listen to?