"Everybody wants a piece of Yankee," said Lourdes Perez, his chief publicist, as we sat inside an air-conditioned shopping mall on the east side of San Juan, waiting for her charge to surface. By late January, it would become the fourth-most-requested video on MTV's decidedly mainstream show "Total Request Live." He had also finished up a frenzied round of corporate deal making with a squad of marketing executives who seemed to have finally grasped Daddy Yankee's exceptional ability to reach and influence the Latino youth market. The early release of his single, "Rompe," a pulsing dance track embroidered with Yankee's trademark staccato rhyming, was climbing to No.
and Latin America, plus studio sessions to record new songs to add to "Barrio Fino en Directo," a live version of "Barrio Fino," which would make its debut in mid-December. When I flew to San Juan in November to meet Daddy Yankee, he had just returned to Puerto Rico for the first time in several months, having completed a 16-stop tour of the U.S. Reggaetón's biggest hits, which are almost exclusively in Spanish, have found their way into the mix at Top-40 radio stations, playing at health clubs and high-school dances all over the United States. At least some of that success is owed to reggaetón and by extension to Daddy Yankee, its top-selling act. The album's hit single, "Gasolina," became a party anthem that - akin to Ricky Martin's 1999 hit "Livin' La Vida Loca" - broke out of the Latin niche and was embraced by masses of clubgoing, booty-shaking Anglo-Americans.ĭespite the fact that Americans bought 48 million fewer record albums last year than in 2004, one bright spot for the music industry was Latin music: sales grew by 12 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Daddy Yankee's album "Barrio Fino," which was released in 2004, has sold more than 1.6 million copies in the United States, spent 24 weeks on top of Billboard's Latin charts and won Yankee several prizes, including a Latin Grammy.
With its signature syncopated boom-pa-dum-dum beat and boisterous, often raunchy lyrics - not to mention the libidinous grind it inspires on the dance floor - reggaetón has infiltrated nightclubs and radio airwaves with a speed and vigor that has surprised even canny record-company executives. All this is meant to emphasize his place at the forefront of reggaetón, a rapidly growing musical genre that mixes Spanish-language hip-hop with the complex rhythms of Caribbean music. These days, when Daddy Yankee, who is now 29, performs before throngs of adulatory fans, he will sometimes shout out alternative names for himself, including El Cangri (the chief) and El Rey (the king). In street slang, it means "powerful man." The next year, he started rapping in Spanish, using a friend's four-track recorder, spitting out unrefined lyrics over a speeded-up beat borrowed from Jamaican dancehall reggae.
At 13, he rechristened himself Daddy Yankee. He was, by his own account, a pudgy young kid with no money but possessing a certain brazen faith in his own possibility, a sense that he, too, would outgrow not just his name but his circumstances too. Dre and Rakim and Big Daddy Kane, the first-generation rappers, even though he was a Spanish speaker who'd never left Puerto Rico and couldn't understand a thing they said. He watched music videos on MTV and BET and loved what he saw there. He picked this name for himself back when he was a teenager obsessed with rap music. To just about everybody else, he is Daddy Yankee.
When he is at home in Puerto Rico, his parents still call him Raymond, as does his older brother Nomar, who works as one of his managers, his wife, Mirredys Gonzalez, who is another manager, and his former neighbors at Villa Kennedy, the run-down San Juan public-housing project where he lived until a few years ago. A long time ago, before he started draping himself in huge diamond medallions, before flocks of teenage girls began trailing him nearly everywhere, before he had a staff of 15 working day and night on the maintenance of his image, Daddy Yankee had a regular name, which was Raymond Ayala.