Dembow Paper Proof

DEM BOW, DEMBOW, DEMBO: TRANSLATION AND TRANSNATION IN REGGAETON
WAYNE MARSHALL Reggaeton has been profoundly shaped and reshaped by transnational flows of people, music, and ideologies, and one can hear and trace these movements in the very forms of the songs themselves. This essay offers an overview of the history of the genre and the shifting shapes of its forms, as well as how these formsarticulate with social and cultural movements, by following a particularly audible thread through time and space. Although reggaeton’s national provenance remains a hotly disputed issue, attending to particular sonic details can provide a persuasive resolution of various claims to the genre, which has been defined, by various stakeholders, as essentially Jamaican, Panamanian, North or LatinAmerican, and/or Puerto Rican.1 Seeking to tease these threads out, my narrative begins with a seminal 1991 recording by Jamaican DJ/vocalist Shabba Ranks, Dem Bow. Not only has the song been covered, or re-recorded, by performers in Panama, New York, and San Juan, but elements of the song’s accompanimental track (or RIDDIM) appear in upwards of 80% of all reggaeton productions.2 Thus, DEM BOW – alsorecorded and referred to as SON BOW, DEMBOW, and DEMBO, among others, demonstrating the mutations of translation and localization – offers a rich set of

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I have been cataloguing such online debates, a list of which is available at the following URL: http://del.icio.us/wayneandwax/reggaeton+messageboard+debate. Moreover, in a forthcoming article, I attempt to tease out these various claimsin great detail. See Wayne Marshall: Música Negra to Reggaeton Latino: The Cultural Politics of Nation, Migration, and Commercialization. In: Reading Reggaeton: Historical, Aesthetic, and Critical Perspectives (Duke University Press, forthcoming). For more detailed description of what is implied by the term RIDDIM, see Peter Manuel/Wayne Marshall: The Riddim Method: Aesthetics, Practice, andOwnership in Jamaican Dancehall. In: Popular Music 25, No. 3 (2006), pp. 447–470. My estimate of the percentage of reggaeton songs in which elements of the Dem Bow riddim appear is more intuitive than quantitative, but, as I will explain below, the fact that it has become a constitutive, and often crucial, building block in reggaeton productions makes it utterly ubiquitous. Indeed, I may beunderstating the percentage here. Lied und populäre Kultur / Song and Popular Culture 53 (2008)

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examples for understanding the transnational transformations so central to reggaeton’s aesthetics and cultural politics. The changing shapes and enduring elements of DEM BOW illuminate in particular how migration and commercialization have contributed to the formation of a genre which todaystands as one of the most popular youth musics across the Americas. More specifically, an examination of the transformations of DEM BOW calls attention to some of the central political commitments underpinning reggaeton’s resonance, as well as how this orientation – the very cultural politics of the genre itself – has changed rather radically over time, especially with the genre’s increasing appealto a »mainstream«, pan-Latino listenership. Since reggaeton emerged as a viable commercial product capable of transcending its initially subcultural or »underground« audience, in particular with the pop chart success of N.O.R.E.’s Oye Mi Canto (2004) and Daddy Yankee’s Gasolina (2005), it has been hailed as a symbol not just of important demographic trends in the US but of an emergent pan-LatinAmerican identity. In the process, however, reggaeton has also undergone a kind of whitening, or BLANQUEAMIENTO, and a »cleaning up« to befit the commercial aspirations of artists, producers, and other music-industrial entrepreneurs.3 During the mid-90s, artists and audiences alike referred to the music as MELAZA (molasses), MÚSICA NEGRA, and even simply HIP-HOP and REGGAE, all evoking or...