Reggaeton had a big year: Bad Bunny maintained his title as Spotify’s most globally streamed artist for the second year running. Karol G’s latest project, KG0516, set a new record for the biggest album debut for a Latina recording artist on Spotify. And Rauw Alejandro’s “Todo De Ti” was named among NPR’s Best Music of 2021. It’s also been a dynamic year for Katelina Eccleston, a.k.a. Reggaeton Con La Gata, who has built a femme-focused platform dedicated to the intersectional analysis and history of reggaeton.
Eccleston first became exposed to the genre via her upbringing in Boston. “The culture there is amazing,” the multimedia creative tells BAZAAR.com. “There’s a large Puerto Rican and Dominican community, and a direct connection with some of reggaeton’s biggest innovators. I mean, Nicky Jam is from Lawrence, and [production duo] Luny Tunes used to work at Harvard in the [Leverett House] kitchen.”
Eccleston became dedicated to the cathartic power of reggaeton after surviving a sexual assault during her freshman year. “You can’t really be sad when listening to reggaeton. When I was silenced by the police following my assault, that pushed me to gravitate towards [the study of] communications. While I was studying it, I wondered, ‘Has [reggaeton] ever been analyzed? Have these intersectional theories ever been applied to this music?”
She continued, “Then I found the work of Marisol LeBrón, who authored Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico, and the work of Wayne Marshall and other people who studied reggaeton critically before me. That influenced my senior year capstone, ‘Studying Implicit Bias in the Latin Music Industry.’ And that data was damning!”
She recently gave a lecture at Harvard based on her bilingual Apple podcast Perreo 101 to spotlight these issues. In it, she explores how the genre developed—from its Jamaican and Panamanian roots, to the hard-core street influence of Puerto Rico’s El Underground sound in the ’90s, to the way it broke into the mainstream as the sexy perreo reggaeton of the 2000s.
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Decades later, the sound continues to diversify into varied styles under the umbrella of El Movimiento and Reggaeton Mundial. Eccleston observes these changes in real time on her new curated Spotify playlist, Cultura 360. “One of the greatest things about reggaeton is how it reinvents itself,” she says. “My brain is exploding right now with all of the examples. I’m glad that perreo and bellakeo enthusiasts are revamping their desire to experiment with this type of music. People are asking questions and daring to be different.” She adds, “We’ve been able to tackle aspects of race, gender, class—the intersections right along with this music—and that’s the most honest way to chart this ongoing history. Now that it’s become very mainstream, we can’t forget its political ties and where it came from.”
Recognizing Eccleston’s expertise, Spotify brought her on as a producer for its new reggaeton podcast series, LOUD, which debuted in August. The nostalgic series is narrated by perreo icon La Diva, a.k.a. Ivy Queen. “She deserves all of her flowers,” Eccleston says of Ivy Queen. “Giving people their flowers while they’re here and alive to smell them … I feel like that sentiment permeated throughout our entire team to then give Ivy Queen her space in telling ‘her-story.’”
Most poignantly, LOUD affirms Black Latinx visibility, underscoring how the culture has influenced the music at every step—regardless of the music industry’s insistence on whitewashing the genre. Black artists have rarely received the credit they deserved as reggaeton evolved into a lucrative pop commodity. “LOUD shows that a story that centers Blackness is powerful. And that’s a narrative you rarely see in the Latin music space,” she says. “Blackness has sort of been commodified, appropriated, and it’s even been tokenized, but it’s not at the center anymore.” She adds, “That speaks volumes about where this music has landed. … As a whole, the Latin music industry needs these deeper conversations. There needs to be an initiative to create equity for Black artists, especially Black female artists.”
Eccleston’s research indicates that only 10 percent of artists in reggaeton are Black women. And she notes issues of colorism that Black women with darker skin tones experience: “How did this music start from ‘La Chica de Los Ojos Café’ by [Panamanian singer] Renato, which celebrates a Black woman with brown eyes and Black features, to that discourse then being reassigned to artists who aren’t Black at all?”
Reggaeton’s current top earners are white Latinx artists, including the ever-popular Colombian “Latino Gang” singer/rapper J Balvin, who’s had a run of gaffes around racial injustice, including his callous attempt to support Black Lives Matter by posting a video of him dancing with a Black woman and hashtagging it #LatinoLivesMatterToo. He also had to take down the music video for his song “Perra,” featuring Dominican artist Tokischa, after backlash to a ghastly scene where Balvin is walking Black women in animal prosthetics on chains.
In a recent interview with PAPER magazine, Eccleston had a discussion with the artist around the release of his José album. “Authentically, his heart is in the right place,” she says. “He’s a product of his environment. I’m not trying to absolve him of the lack of education, because at the end of the day, he’s a grown man. There’s a huge amount of guilt and fear of being seen as racist or being labeled a racist. I feel like people just need to get past that, because racism has real-world consequences … so that’s where I was coming from in recognizing that it’s structural and not all on him. There’s a bigger monster at play here. I was very intentional in ending the story that way.”
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As for “Perra,” which also received criticism for its sexually explicit lyrics, Eccleston wants to make clear that she loves the song, but hates the video—mainly that one scene. “The whole exchange between a guy and a girl in a sexual manner, as a theme in reggaeton, I actually really miss that. I talk about that all the time on Twitter, about how I miss that ‘sexual reggaeton.’ I’m finally old enough to listen to that without caring about what my mom thinks, and now everyone wants to be romantic—like, what? I’m a sexual human being, and I feel like the music no longer matches my level of putería,” the historian says with a laugh.
Now that women artists have gained more prominence in the field, Eccleston hopes that artists like Tokischa, who have received backlash for owning their power and sexual agency, can continue to talk about their escapades and fantasies, as well as topics like consent.
These are subjects Eccleston will cover when taking a crack at creating her own music. “I’m young, so why not? [My music] is everything that I’ve ever wanted to hear—anthems of love for Black women,” she says. “Although, even with that, I’ve started to change my tune about representation because of how it’s been tokenized. Sure, now there’s representation, but I’ll only see that as Black women being sexualized in music videos. I don’t see them as the main subject in music videos about love or being desired. We’re just being fetishized once again, and when we bring this up, we’re called haters. That constant desire to put a cap on racism comes from white supremacy, so I’m trying to nip that in the bud—so to speak—with my music, which will focus on love for Black women and, since I’m queer, queer love too.”
Eccleston plans to release her debut song before the New Year. Currently, she’s finishing up the Perreo 101 lecture tour, as well as launching her newly teased project, ¡Dimelo Cantando!, a bilingual podcast that invites a wide range of Latin music artists to talk about race, gender, sexual empowerment, and all their intersections. For her, there’s no point in sitting on the sidelines anymore: “I give the artist the floor to speak, so the public can know exactly where they stand with these topics.”
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Katelina Eccleston Is Giving a Decolonized History Lesson in Reggaeton
Source: Filipino Journal Articles
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