Review Essay: Run Lola Run and Berlin Calling

Abstract

When certain products or practices attain a more secure place in a particular cultural landscape they tend to become naturalized in the minds of those who experience such landscapes; it is almost as if they had always been there, they become "authenticated".This seems to be the case with reggaeton.As I sit down to write this review I ask myself when I heard about reggaeton for the first time and I cannot find an answer.When pushing myself to remember anything related to what I now believe belongs to the reggaeton performance complex, a number of fragmented images and sounds come to mind.I remember El General in local, low budget shows from the Telemundo or Univisión TV networks in New York City and Boston in the early 1990s; then students asking me about the genre (and actually calling it reggaeton) almost ten years later in Chicago; finally, its explosion into the mainstream media in 2005, and its pervasive presence in clubs in Havana, Cuba, that summer.Although most of these memories are rather vague and patchy, what I do remember clearly is not being able to explain thoroughly what reggaeton was.The sounds and the images seemed to have always been there since the 1990s, but in fact, reggaeton was something relatively new, and as such, also somehow elusive.Since the mid 2000s reggaeton has arguably become the most danced and talked about Latin music genre.It is omnipresent in Latin American and Latin media in the U.S.; yet, with few exceptions and disregarding its artistic success and its importance as a marker of the transnationality that characterizes contemporary Latino and Latin American experiences of identity, reggaeton had largely remained absent from academic discussion.Reggaeton, edited by Raquel Z. Rivera, Wayne Marshall, and Deborah Pacini Hernandez, is an appropriate, timely, and thorough response and reflection on the genre's popularity.The volume is an impressive collection of academic essays and artistic statements that deals with reggaeton's cultural significance and stylistic meaning, and the history of transnational migration, oppression, and racial struggle behind its production, consumption, and dissemination.The aesthetic, sociological, anthropological, and political complexity of the reggaeton phenomenon can only be seriously approached from a multidisciplinary perspective.Reggaeton offers a multi-logic reading where several disciplines and fields of artistic expression come together to answer questions that no disciplinary field could comprehensively answer alone.The demonstrated expertise in the fields of sociology, ethnomusicology and anthropology of the editorial team, as well as their commitment to the study of music through a transnational lens almost guaranteed the extraordinary depth and variety that this collection of essays, interviews, poetry and visual arts offers.

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