EXPLORING REGGAETON: Part 3, Conceiving a New Style, El General and the Panamanian Nexus
Written: Jun 21 '06 (Updated Jul 31 '06)
Product Rating:
Pros: A straightforward collection of early 90s El General tunes
Cons: Nothing newer than '97, few songs
The Bottom Line: Part 3 of my ongoing study of reggaeton focuses on the early 90s sound of El General, whose Panamanian reggae interpretation was the seed....
mrkstvns's Full Review: 10 De Collecion by El General
Concensus is always a hard thing to build, opinions and personalities being what they are. In the world of reggaeton music, there's a sense of local pride and heritage among the Puerto Rican artists to want to claim the genre as a completely Puerto Rican thing, and some Puerto Ricans claim that reggaeton didn't even exist prior to 2000 or so. That's not the prevailing view.
The overwhelming concensus in the latin music world is that reggaeton was born in Panama and that the most significant originator was El General. It's hard to say what the very first reggaeton song really was, because it depends on how rigorously you define "reggaeton". The dembow beat was first heard in a latin song in El General's 1991 release of Son Bow, but that track was a very reggae sounding tune that hadn't yet worked in the urban hip-hop influences.
El General's songs from the early 1990s bear a very strong reggae signature. There are some influences of rap here and there, but no more often than techno or salsa. In fact, you hear more of the Colombian cumbia influence in his 1990 style than you do a "reggaeton sound". It's in the mid 1990s that you hear El General really start pulling in a stronger hip-hop sound with much more rhyming and a stronger tendency towards "mature themes" and double entendre, and that's when you really hear all the elements of reggaeton coming together at once. But we'll get into that a bit more when we spin up the disc. But which disc?
There are a lot of albums to choose from in El General's discography, with his last studio album being the 2004 release of La Ficha Clave --- an album that I don't feel is very enlightening to a study of reggaeton. Better to look at one of his hits collections (of which there are several). That's why I'll be talking about his 2005 release of 10 de Coleccion --- it's readily available in music stores, it's a fairly straightforward compilation of very representative tracks, and best of all for the student of reggaeton, it's tightly focused on the 1991 to 1997 period --- essentially the gestation period of reggaeton.
About El General...
American country music icon, Johnny Cash, did a classic tune called Get Rhythm that plays out in my memory when I hear stories about how El General (whose mama named him "Edgardo Franco") came to fame.
Before he was "El General", yound Edgardo had to learn the ropes as "El Buck Private", which he did as a shoeshine boy in the town of Rio Abajo Panama. But he was a shoeshine boy with rhythm...a rhythm that shook all the troubles from his worried mind. By the time he was 12, he was singing songs of his own invention. He listened to the island sounds of Jamaica, and by the time he was of an age when he could be drafted into the Army, he was in the studio recording his first hit --- a latin pop reggae tune called Tu Pum Pum.
That was in 1988, and the hits continued. In 1991, he recorded what was probably his most well-known hit, Muevelo, and by the period of 1995 to 1997, he'd adapted American hip-hop sounds to his familiar reggae repertoire. Reggaeton was born, and the style started sweeping through the Caribbean, remaining primarily the province of young urban listeners. By 2004, the style had morphed and changed and countless innovative young artists had picked up its sound, while at the same time, El General was becoming quickly overshadowed, and developing new interests elsewhere.
Today, El General focuses his attention on children. He produced his own television series, and he founded a charitable organization to benefit disadvantaged kids and orphans.
But I'd better shut up about all the background B.S. --- I'm starting to put myself to sleep as surely as if I'd tuned in the Biography channel. Let's cut to the chase and spin up some tunes...
The Sounds of El General... 10 de Coleccion is a tight little hits compilation: just 10 tracks for a total running time of 40 minutes 13 seconds. All of the tunes come from El General's peak period --- the early 1990s --- and they're a good representation of how El General brought the pieces of reggaeton together.
There's four tracks here that show off the reggae roots period of the early 1990s. Te Ves Buena has a big reggae sound that sways with steel drums and the sound of the islands under a summer sky. If you're like me, you probably didn't understand half the stuff that guys like Bob Marley or Peter Tosh were singing about even though their albums were theoretically done in English, so it shouldn't be asking too much to focus more on the sound than on the lyrics.
The sound of Te Ves Buena is pure reggae...no hip-hop influences here that I spot (not that I'm exactly the guru of hip-hop around here, you understand). The same kind of very close affinity to Jamaican reggae can be heard on the other 1991-era tunes here, namely the funky fusion sound of El Gran Pana, the playful sounding El Pare, and of course, Muevelo.
Muevelo is a song that bears particular attention. It is reggae, but its also extremely seductive and smooth sounding.
There's another element of reggaeton that I haven't gotten around to talking about yet, and that's the dance side of the equation. The reggaeton culture spawned its own style of sexually suggestive dancing called perrea, which gets its name from "doggy style" (and I'm not talking about urinating on fire hydrants). Perrea appeals to prurient interests (the best kind of interests to have, in my opinion). Watch a few reggaeton videos and it won't take too long to catch on that there's a strong likelihood that the next video will feature very sexy young latinas rotating their hind quarters in a very inviting kind of way. This is perrea.
Why talk about perrea in terms of Muevelo? Well, because this song has the kind of mood and rhythm that perrea suits to a T. Muevelo is also a song charged with sexual tension and suggestive undercurrents and a feeling of joyful voyeurism. That feeling comes from a layered approach to the sound, with a bold repetitive refrain of "muevalo, muevalo..." but then the softer layer just below it with hissing and alternating men and women softly grunting, "mmmmm". (I also bet this song was a big influence for Azul Azul's hit tune, La Bomba).
You can't define an artist by any one song or one time slice. A good artist is going to mix things up, and is going to adapt to influences one step at a time.
The first El General songs that seem to mark a definite change towards hip-hop were from 1995, with the big urban hip-hop sound coming to fruition on Raperos, though '95 was also the year of El General's popular, but very unusual Rica y Apretadita.
Rica y Apretadita is a song of surprises and a study of contrasts. Its got moments of furious passion, and it has softness and gentleness. It's recorded as a duet with Anayka, whose gentle sing-song tone reminds me of the kinds of songs you hear Japanese soldiers listening to in old World War II movies. It's a retro sound, and more oriental in feel than latin or any kind of American influence that you might expect. Yet that soft, gentle, tonal sound is worked around El General's bold rapping lyrics and his interspersed commentary and questioning grunts of sexual approval. It's a very cool tune. It's classic El General, but it's more a warning not to pigeon-hole his style than it is enlightening towards an understanding of reggaeton.
Raperos though, that's another matter entirely.
Raperos is the song here that most clearly paints a picture of El General switching trains in 1995, from a mostly reggae-oriented sound to a much more strongly hip-hop influenced sound. You have some reggae beats here, but for the most part, the song carries a huge hip-hop punch and ends up sounding more like Vico-C of the era than of any of the El General tunes to date, and the trend continues with all of the tracks here that date from the 1997 era.
By 1997, the elements were pretty well integrated. La Medicina walks perilously close to the line between recited and sung rhymes with a sound that still has some of the clanging steel drum edge of Jamaican reggae, but that really revolves more around big pounding bass. It's also got the kind of vaguely misogynistic double-entendre lyrics that will become the forte of reggaeton in the new millenium. Yeah, I'm gonna give you your medicine, I got your medicine right here, open up baby. It's not as blatant as what's in store for 2005, but light island sounds it is not.
The other 1997-era songs underscore that the age of reggaeton has really begun. Rapa Pan Pan strikes me as playful on first listen, but the sound is a lot grittier than the lighter El General sound of the 1991 tracks. The delivery is more staccato, the tone more insistent. It doesn't yet have the sense of strident belligerance that marks many hip-hop tunes, but it's quite clear that El General's attentions are becoming more Afro-American than Afro-Caribbean, but it will be the Puerto Ricans who really get that basis defined.
Bottom Line...
I normally prefer studio albums to compilations, but for educational purposes, I think El General's 10 de Coleccion is an excellent (and affordable) way to get a picture of how his sound evolved over a 6-year period and how the elements of reggaeton first started being incorporated into popular latin music.
El General is often referred to as "the Godfather of reggaeton", and when you listen to a collection of his early hits, you can practically hear the development of reggaeton unfolding before your ears.
1991 - the era of pop latin reggae
1995 - the beginnings of urban hip-hop influence
1995 - integration achieved .... the details will be left to the Puerto Ricans (as we'll hear in Part 4 of the series)
Tale of the Tracks...
10 tunes, 40:13 total running time. Here's what's here, and to help you spot your own trends, the year the tune originally came out.
1. Rica y Apretadita (1995)
2. Te Ves Buena (1991)
3. Raperos (1995)
4. Samba Hey (1997)
5. Adam's Fiesta (Noche de Fiesta) (1997)
6. Muevelo (1991)
7. El Gran Pana (1991)
8. El Pare (1991)
9. La Medicine (1997)
10. Rapa Pan Pan (1997)
EXPLORING REGGAETON:The Series... This has been Part 3 of a 10-part series exploring the roots, heart, soul, and future of the reggaeton style. Stay tuned as we delve deeper into the works and influences of the artists who are forging the new flavor of urban latino music, and seeing it spread to unexpected corners of foreign genres. Here's where we've been and where we're going on this musical journey...
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.