Reggaeton artists react to police shooting in Puerto Rico
Sep 12th, 2007 - nydailynews.com
Barely 10 days after last month’s cold-blooded police killing of an unarmed father of two in Puerto Rico, the hit duo Calle 13 had a new song out denouncing the violence.“Tributo a la Policía” refers to the brutality of the Aug. 10 shooting of Miguel Cáceres, which was videotaped by a bystander, but also to the killings and beatings of other unarmed civilians over the last decades.
“I wanted to leave a testimony about the killing of all these people,” Calle 13’s René (Residente) Pérez said on the phone from Puerto Rico. “I wanted the song to be part of the case files.”
Urban acts in Puerto Rico are reaching back to the role music used to play in popular culture and are using their art to document and protest current events, quickly reaching wide audiences via the Internet.
Julio Voltio’s “En lo Claro,” a song about police abuse from his latest CD of the same title, went online soon after the Cáceres killing.
“I can’t recall another case that has generated as many songs by such high-profile artists who are putting their music online,” said Raquel Rivera, a research fellow at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, who has a blog called Reggaetonica.
Other Puerto Rican hip-hop acts who operate under the radar have also chimed in on the killing, quickly producing songs and posting them on MySpace sites. Out of Carolina came Welmo with the single “¡No!,” bluntly declaring that “Poverty is not a crime.” It suggested that at the police academy, “the good and the bad sides merge and the community drowns.”
“What I was feeling was such anger, such rage,” said Welmo, who uses one name. “All I could do was write. I can’t take to the streets to hurl things at the police, that won’t solve anything. But I can make music.”
Over in the eastern town of Loíza, Siloé Andino, a Christian MC, weighed in with “Quién,” which questions the role of the police and its relationship to the people it serves. “My goal was to leave some kind of musical legacy, a musical footprint,” said Andino. “I was worried that years from now, my son would ask me if I had done something. I wanted to be able to tell him that I did.”
Calle 13’s “Tributo” is the duo’s second foray into protest music. In 2005, their “Querido FBI” single protested the killing of Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, a Puerto Rican nationalist. This time around, Residente was also inspired by the beating death of a childhood friend at the hands of the police.
Besides taking to the streets to give away 2,000 CDs of “Tributo,” Calle 13 made the track available to download for free on their MySpace page. Residente said the song was downloaded 100,000 times in the first week.
Although they are not working in the style known as plena, most of the urban musicians who wrote songs about Cáceres recognize its influence.
Plena, a percussion-based call-and-response style with Afro-Caribbean roots, is still alive as protest music in demonstrations and popular gatherings, Rivera said, but now rap in Spanish is becoming the genre of choice for young, politically engaged musicians.
“I just want to bring people in Puerto Rico closer together,” Residente said, “so that when things like [the Cáceres killing] happen, people in Puerto Rico rise up. The idea is to create such a dynamic that when people are wronged, they fight back.”