SPANISH HIP-HOP
BY JUDY CANTOR
 

Hip-hoppers have taken over the conference room of Universal Music Latino on Lincoln Road. A dozen artists, producers, and managers sit in plush chairs around the long polished table, or lean back against the windows, browsing their cell phones. White, black, and mulatto, they live in Miami, San Juan, and New York City. They have American passports and Boricua, Dominican, or Cuban bloodlines. They speak Spanish, English, and what Portorock Blades, a rapper from the Bronx who has been staying in the Doral neighborhood for the last five months and is here today, likes to call Spanglish sin barreras (Spanglish without barriers), a take on the name of the video English-language course for Latin American immigrants hawked on Spanish-language TV.

At the head of the table are Lito y Polaco, a platinum selling duo who emerged in Puerto Rico's early '90s underground music scene; also seated are Pearl, who after years of struggling for a solid record deal in New York (which explains his Yankees cap), has a new solo album, the bilingually-titled Yo tengo el juego lockeado/I've Got the Game on Lock; keyboardist, producer, and soloist Julio Acosta, another recent migrant to Miami from the Northeast; and, fresh-faced beneath their sunglasses and bandanas, 90 Millas (90 Miles), a college-age rap / reggae / R&B trio from West Palm Beach. Next to them sits Sucio, a rapper who's come over to the Beach from Allapattah, his bedroom eyes focusing downward as he makes careful notes on a pad. The giant letters on his black XXL T-shirt read ``Spanish Hip-Hop 2004.''

Rappers wearing braids, baseball caps, and the urban uniform of big jerseys, baggy jeans, and sneakers haven't usually been associated with the mainstream Latin music industry, whose clean-cut male stars are more typically known for their tight silhouettes and tjuzsed hair. Speaking English with barrio accents, affecting pimp limps, and barking into their cell phones like they were walkie talkies, today's visitors loom large over the sleek contemporary furnishings in the Universal offices.

This group of artists and producers is here for an interview, not an insurrection. But the setting in the major label's offices is symbolic for these representatives of a movement who are sure their domination of the Latin music industry is, finally, at hand.

''Hip-hop in Spanish is getting bigger by the minute,'' Lito, aka Rafael Sierra, an imposing figure with a linebacker's build and shoulder-length dreads, says in English accented with ghetto slang. Lito y Polaco's CD Fuera de Serie (Out of the Ordinary) was number three on last week's Billboard Tropical chart, and has been among the top 100 Latin albums for the last five weeks. ''The salseros, the merengueros, the pop singers, and other people in the music business just can't believe that we're making it so big, and a lot of people are trying to hold us back,'' he continues. ``But this is where the money's going, so everybody is going to have to follow.''
Oscar Guitian is betting on that. His Miami-based entertainment company, Guitian Brothers, has entered into a joint venture with Universal Music Latino for the production of hip-hop in Spanish. ''They used to say this is too ghetto,'' booms Guitian, a vociferous man in a navy suit who would appear more at home sidling up to the cafecito window at Versailles than hanging with a bunch of rappers. ''But now the majors are involved [and] it's going to become money. So what's happening? When you turn on the radio, what do you hear in Spanish? Hip-hop. Where do you see the sponsors like Pepsi? Same thing. Look at my kid -- he's 14 years old, and what does he listen to? Hip-hop.'' Guitian gestures to where his preppily dressed son sits contentedly at the table before a pile of CDs and promo T-shirts.

So what exactly is Spanish hip-hop? More than Latin hip-hop, a name that more easily suggests music that fuses rap with Latin rhythms, Spanish hip-hop is essentially hip-hop with Spanish-language lyrics.

''You can just flip over to the Spanish with the same exact rhythm and beat as the English,'' Sucio explains. ''Rapping in Spanish in itself makes it Latin.'' Maybe so, the term is more commonly used to describe a broader spectrum of sounds. For many in Puerto Rico, for example, Spanish hip-hop has become synonymous with reggaeton, the music based on the nasty infectious beat of Jamaican dancehall. With its party-hearty lyrics rapped over Caribbean drum machine rhythms, reggaeton has overtaken salsa and merengue as the number-one seller in Puerto Rico.

Once circulated underground on cassettes and outlawed outright from radio and TV in 1995, reggaeton artists are now routinely booked to perform at stadium concerts and at the quinces of the daughters of Puerto Rico's elite. Recently, it has invaded the Dominican Republic, and New York, and in South Florida, it's ruling Latin clubs and it's even, in its cleaner versions, making commercial inroads where music with a standard American hip-hop beat could not.

Those gathered today at Universal say mass commercial success for Spanish hip-hop, not just reggaeton, is imminent, and, to them, there's an obvious reason: ''There are Latinos all over the world,'' Lito says. ''We can sell more [in the Spanish-language market] than whatever we can bring to the game in the English market. In a year or two a Spanish hip-hop artist should be able to drop an album and sell two or three million records just like they do in English,'' adds Acosta. The others at the table respond in unison, ``Oh, yeeah.''

Fingers moving on his keyboard, Julio Acosta is laying down tracks on a computer in a tiny rehearsal studio set up in a meandering office complex on West 36th Street in the Doral neighborhood. Booda, a 27-year-old rapper with Cuban and Mexican parents who moved to West Palm Beach from California, stands by his side, nodding to the music as his voice booms from the speakers. The song's called ``Semana mambo (Mambo Week).''

''It's about the weekly hustle to get by,'' Booda says. ``A lot of Latins are going to relate to it. It's up-tempo but still something real.''

Booda started out rapping in English before he was signed to record in Spanish by Guitian, who has positioned himself as something of a godfather of Spanish hip-hop in Miami. ''What I'm trying to do is put everybody together so we can sell all over,'' says Guitian. ``When that happens [in the industry], we'll all get along.''
Guitian, whose artists refer to each other as ''the family,'' is intent on creating a factory for Spanish hip-hop, producing music ranging from 90 Millas' ''fun'' lyrics and funky beats to Sucio's more hardcore hip-hop. Nearly a dozen albums by different artists are scheduled to be released by Guitian and Universal by fall. Guitian's hope is that what's been accomplished in San Juan can be reproduced in Miami, although it might seem an unlikely place for an authentic urban Latino scene.

''Miami is one of the worst markets where we can test and where we can work with this product,'' says Anthony Perez, president of Miami-based production company Perfect Image, which produces mun2's The Roof, the cable channel's music show aimed at Latin youth and generally acknowledged to be the best outlet that exists for promoting Latin hip-hop. ``The ethnic culture in Miami is not the normal urban Latino in United States. The people here come from Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil. They live here, but their culture and spirit are still in their [native] countries; they won't understand [the music].''

Guitian's answer to Miami's lack of urban Latino cred has been to bring some artists down from New York and install them in the Doral. With its planned communities and shopping malls, the Northwest Miami-Dade enclave, though, is a long way from the barrio.

''This is like living in the woods,'' says Acosta, who's been in Miami for two months. In addition to producing tracks for other artists, he's working on an upcoming album of his own to be released this summer. ''I'm used to walking around, seeing people.'' He pats his belly, complaining about the weight he's put on since being introduced to Miami's car culture.

Acosta, 24, is from Manhattan's Lower East Side, where he started working as a studio sound engineer in his teens. He's been playing piano since he was nine, when his mother enrolled him in a Boys Club after-school program to keep him out of trouble. There, he fell under the wing of R&B producer Bob Power (D'Angelo, Erykah Badu), a volunteer at the center.

''There's going to be more mixing in Spanish hip-hop,'' Acosta says. ``There's always going to be reggaeton, but there's going to be R&B mixed with salsa, R&B mixed with reggaeton, a lot more fusion.''

Portorock stops by the studio with a copy of his upcoming release. (Sample lyric: ''Las mujeres de Miami son buenas y andan sin panties'' -- ''The women of Miami are hot and run around without panties.'') ''I got all types of flavas [on my album], a little of everything,'' says Portorock, a friendly guy in his 30s with a shaved head. ``[On the album] I dedicate a song to my mother, there's Puerto Rican pride, a party thing for the clubs, and competitive rap.''

For Portorock, there's a sense of irony about all the talk of Spanish hip-hop as the next big Latin thing. ''I live hip-hop. Its not a fad, it's a culture,'' he says. ``Hip hop has been Latin from the beginning. I was born in Puerto Rico and raised in the Bronx, so I was always involved in it. It wasn't just a black thing. It was black and Puerto Rican.''

In the beginning, Portorock did what came naturally to him -- he rapped in English. ''I used to rap in my house to my moms and my sisters,'' he remembers. ``My mother spoke more Spanish than English, and my Spanish was not so great, but I attempted to do it in Spanish so that she would understand. Now I prefer to rap in Spanish, although I speak mostly English.''

In 1989, Portorock was signed to Atlantic Records, as a member of a rap group called Latin Empire. ''The first bilingual rap group to get a deal with a major label,'' he says. The group did well with a single, ''Puerto Rican and Proud,'' but things went downhill from there. ''They told me I should stick to one language, and it shouldn't be Spanish,'' he recalls. He was dropped from the label.

Things have changed a lot in the past 15 years, courtesy of a new generation of Latin youth in the United States raised on English hip-hop. Hispanics have become the biggest minority in the United States, and, according to the Census Bureau, 78 percent of U.S. Latins speak Spanish, even if they also know English.

''Spanish hip-hop is going through the same struggle that English hip-hop did at the beginning, but evidently it's going to explode,'' says Portorock, who after five months here, has decided to move to Miami. ``Now we're taking our slice of the American pie. And we're bringing the street back to Latin music.''

Certainly, the urban edge supplied by Spanish hip-hop artists and their music is being sought by advertisers scrambling to appeal to Latino youth, America's fastest-growing consumer group thanks to what a recent Business Week cover story referred to as the U.S. bebé boom. Hennessy has tapped Puerto Rican hip-hopper Tego Calderon, the bonafide star of the reggaeton movement, as poster boy for its high-end cognac; the billboards can be seen around Miami. Even the U.S. Navy courts recruits with a growling rap jingle in a current Spanish-language radio spot. At this year's Calle Ocho Festival, Calderon brought massive crowds to the Pepsi stage. Over at the Coca-Cola stage, Miami's Don Dinero, a well-known Cuban-American rapper, performed.

''As a label, we should be aware of what the kids are looking for,'' says Universal Music Latino President John Echevarria, noting that Universal currently has about 20 Spanish hip-hop artists from the U.S., Latin America, and Spain with CDs on the label, including those recorded by independent Pina Records, Lito y Polaco's label and one that's sold hundreds of thousands of reggaeton albums in Puerto Rico. ``What's going on in the streets is the future. We believe that this is really going to grow. We're definitely working with more hip-hop than any other major [Latin] label.''

Even Miami's radios stations, not known for risk-taking, have begun to play Spanish hip hop in its most danceable form. ''Hip-hop was underground. Now it has a commercial name and that's reggaeton,'' says Raffy Contigo, program director of El Zol 95 (95.7 FM), which he describes as ''the reggaeton leader in South Florida,'' with about 20 songs currently in rotation on the station's playlist. Like programmers in Puerto Rico, Contigo feels obligated to play at least some reggaeton in order to keep up with the market. ``People from the Caribbean will always carry salsa and merengue in their veins, but I think reggaeton's here to stay. Salsa and merengue are too narrow a focus for the changing Latin community in Miami. The younger end of the audience is dominated by reggaeton. If you want to keep ahead of your competition, you've got to play the new wave.''

What that ''new wave'' is, though, often depends on where you're standing, an obstacle that may ultimately prove insurmountable to the Spanish hip-hop movement. In California, the new wave would be the sound that's been given the clumsy moniker ''Latin urban regional music,'' which mixes rap vocals with elements from traditional Mexican genres. Akwid, a band signed to Univision Music that blends rap vocals with the rhythms of the traditional Mexican banda, was the best-selling new Latin act of 2003 in the United States, selling over 350,000 copies.

In Miami, it's not surprising that Spanish rap music was grandfathered onto the radio waves by traditional Cuban music. Don Dinero, who is Guitian's younger brother, is most often credited with breaking Spanish hip-hop onto local Latin radio, even before programmers began to embrace reggaeton as the latest dance craze. His ''Pana, Pana,'' a track from an album called Que Bola?, fused rap and Cuban rhythms in a style reminiscent of the Cuban trio Orishas. It became a hit when program director Leo Vela added it to Salsa 98's playlist in 2002.

If the factions of Spanish-language hip-hop sound similar to the many styles that exist in hip-hop in English, they are. But it gets more complicated. Music in Spanish, in general, has always been divided by country and cultural differences, making it difficult for the Latin music industry to capitalize on artists with pan-Latin appeal. In recent years, pop music has transcended borders and cultural barriers, but proponents say that Spanish hip-hop can go further.

They see the hip-hop lifestyle as a unifying factor. ''Hip-hop is music from the streets,'' reasons Mikie, or ''Kuban,'' of West Palm Beach's 90 Millas, who is a native of Santiago de Cuba. ``And Latins from everywhere share that experience. Every, every, every single country has a 'hood.''

Perhaps. But the ''the 'hood'' in West Palm Beach is likely to be a bit different than the one in Bogota. And the fact that the raps are in Spanish doesn't guarantee universal understanding even among Spanish-language listeners. ''The artists have to understand that if they want to break over they have to write in a more common Spanish language,'' Universal's Echevarria says, referring to Spanish-language rap's reliance on a slang that varies not only from Buenos Aires to Caracas, but from Los Angeles to New York to Miami. 'When you're talking about English hip-hop everyone uses `dog' and 'bitch' regardless of where they're from. Spanish hip-hop needs a universal slang similar to that.''

Finally, while the regional focus on language, rhythm, and even subject matter (the most engaging hip-hop in Spanish up to now has been a brand of hard-hitting social commentary inspired by life in disparate Latin American countries) among Spanish hip-hoppers has certainly been an obstacle to the worldwide success the artists and labels are seeking, some in the industry cite another reason why it has yet to completely catch on: it's just not all that good.

Anthony Perez, of mun2's The Roof, says he receives two or three demos a day. ''A lot of record labels are signing different artists because they're desperate,'' he notes. 'They're looking for the rap artists to make a hit right now for them. People think they hire some guy that has the look and that's hip-hop in Spanish. But Spanish hip-hop is [about bringing] a lot of elements together. We don't need to have exactly the same beat as [English-language] hip-hop. We need fusion. We have reggaeton on one side, urban regional on the West Coast -- I don't see that we really have what you can call `Spanish hip-hop.' '' 

A van painted with Sucio's face sits in the parking lot of a warehouse complex in Allapattah. Upstairs, in a warehouse space converted into a loft, ''Big Al'' Almodovar, a former boxing manager who's now handling Sucio, gives a tour of the headquarters of Bum Rush records, which includes a lounge area with a wide-screen TV, a weight bench, a platform stage, a recording studio, and a room jammed with beds referred to as ''the CB4'' (for the 1999 gangsta rap mockumentary). On the walls throughout the loft are posters of 50 Cent, Tego Calderon, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Lee, and a wall with pictures of girls cut from magazines. One guy in a ''Spanish Hip-Hop 2004'' T-shirt works on a computer; another walks around with a video camera. Big Al points out the window, to the truck that he uses to make deliveries for his day job with a wholesale grocery company.

''We'll just stay here until its time,'' says Al. So far it's been almost five years. Sucio's real name is Mikel Lopez, and he's 26 years old. His parents came from Cuba in the '80s and settled in Pennsylvania. Mikel was the only Cuban kid in the Lancaster school district. The other kids called him Scarface. He later came to Miami to be with his mother, who passed away last year; her portrait is tattooed on his upper arm.

''I have Cuban blood, but I was [really] exposed to Cuban culture massively here in Miami -- the language, the lingo, the way of being,'' Sucio says. His biggest jolt of culture shock came when he was asked to lay down some rap vocals over a version of Beny Moré's classic ''Bonito y Sabroso'' for a Moré tribute album.

'When we got the project, we had never heard of Beny Moré,'' says Big Al, who moved /down from New York 10 years ago. ``We did research on the Internet and asked our uncles and stuff. We saw this guy was all over the place so I said, `Sucio we gotta do this. Forget about what the music sounds like'.''

As it turned out, the song was played heavily on local radio, and a video starring Sucio became a hit on Latin music video channels last year. But you won't find any Cuban percussion or sampling of old-timers on Sucio's solo album, Sombras del Juego/Shades of the Game, released last month through Guitian Brothers' partnership with Universal. Although some of the tracks are danceable, Sucio eschews the hyper bump of reggaeton for the cooler, bass heavy vibe of straight-ahead hip-hop. The lyrics are mostly in Spanish, but English words are included too: ''fuck'' is repeated about as many times on the album as in the film Scarface.

Sucio has recorded a promo for Zol 95's morning show, El Vacilón, which, according to host Enrique Santos, is the most popular promo among listeners right now. But that's no guarantee that tracks from his album will be played on the station.

''We have a policy that we're not going to offend our listeners. Talk about drugs or defaming women will not be tolerated,'' says program director Contigo, who adds the station is looking for ``songs that you can chill out to with your girlfriend and enjoy the lyrics.''

Spanish radio programmers have not been the only ones to shy away from what they perceive to be any evidence of the darker side of hip-hop. Many artists say that shows at Univision and other Spanish stations have tried to get them to change their clothes before going on the air, or won't have them on at all. Kulo's Café, a club in the Doral where Sucio and others have performed, has a no-sneakers-allowed policy. 'They say no baseball caps when you perform. I'm like, `Yo!' '' exclaims Big Al.

Even on The Roof, where scantily dressed teen girls gyrate to reggaeton music every evening, there are hard and fast rules. ''You don't need to go with violence, with drugs to try and make hip-hop,'' says Perez. ``There are a lot of ways to make hip-hop clean and danceable.''

For Sucio, it's all good. ''We know what they want and we can do what they want,'' he says, adding that he's made a clean versions of his album for radio play. ``Our goal is to get Spanish hip-hop on the radio like any other kind of music.''

In the meantime, he'll wait right here.

''I think Miami's a good playground for the whole Spanish movement in general,'' he says. ``You've heard of the new South? Well, this is the new Miami. We all have our different backgrounds and different flavors but we all have that sangre (blood) which is Latino.

''It's not like this thing is disappearing,'' Sucio adds with a killer smile. ``It's just getting bigger and bigger and bigger.''
 

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REPLY BACK FROM
WENDY DAY
(CEO OF THE RAP COALITION)
 

Actually, the Hip Hop Generation does NOT lack direction, our generation just does not sanction what their focus and energies are going towards.  We complain to each other about the booty shaking, and the materialism, the gold digging, the blatant in your face attitude, and the champagne poppin' on a Pepsi budget--myself included.  I hear myself preaching to the converted everyday, all of whom are in my age range.  If we want to make positive change in the HIP HOP community, we need to do so through guidance and enlightenment, not through chastising and preaching (unless one WANTS to fall on deaf ears so his or her platform stays in tact for public recognition as a speaker to continue speaking to the already converted, creating no change).  When did we become the old farts that we didn't listen to when we were their age?

The Hip Hop Generation is becoming political for the first time.  As Minister Farrakhan said, I hope they don't give away their vote too easily.  We have to hold the candidates accountable for their plans in the Black and Hip Hop Communities.  We have to force them to give more than lip service and follow through on campaign promises to earn our valuable votes.  As evidenced by stars' positions on whom to vote for (even commercial icons like the Puffster and Russell have public opinions), and the newly formed Hip Hop Political Convention coming to a Newark near you in June, there IS hope in our community.  To effect change in the hip hop community, you actually have to BE in the hip hop community.  C'mon into the trenches, it's nice in here!

Wendy Day (a voter)
Rap Coalition