Things Ecuadorians Like: Reggaeton

Check out the nightlife in Ecuador and you will quickly discover how popular Reggaeton is in this country. Reggaeton is a style of Latin urban music that plays in dance clubs, and it has grown on me tremendously since being here due to how ridiculous it is.

The first thing I love about Reggaeton is how ugly the artists are. It seems like in most genres of music, good looks are just as important as talent. I haven't met too many people who think that Shakira is a good singer, but no one talks about that when she is gyrating in a cage dressed in a skin-colored leotard (one ticket to boner-city, please).

The way that most areas of the music industry filter out talented musicians and singers just because they aren't attractive means we are not exposed to a lot of great music, but Reggaeton gives anyone a chance to make a hit regardless of their appearance. Due to this, there are a lot of average looking guys in Reggaeton who make great music and prove that unattractiveness and popularity should not be mutually exclusive.

Hey Nacho, the Black Eyed Peas called; they want their guy whose name nobody knows back

They guys from Plan B try to hide their looks by wearing sunglasses, flashy accessories, and pointing at less attractive people, but they're not fooling anyone

Another thing I love about Reggaeton are the lyrics. While all songs have a catchy beat and are great music to hear at a dance club, they also treat a wide variety of themes and topics that range from having sex, to dancing, to having sex while dancing.

The songs about sex rarely employ innuendo or subtlety, but instead go for explicit references to sexual acts. My current favorite song of this variety is called "Dándole" (translation: giving it to her). In the song, the singer inquires to some lucky woman, "Mami, who doesn't like sex/Baby, who doesn't love this" followed by the chorus "I would spend the night giving, giving it to her." Since Spanish isn't my first language I'm a little slow on the uptake, so I sang this song non-stop for weeks before someone told me what it was about.

Other songs focus on the dancing, and the singers are sometimes considerate enough to encode dance moves into the lyrics of the song so that those of us who aren't Latino know what to do when the music starts. "Danza Kuduro" has a dance with numerous steps including: waving your hand, moving just your hips, spinning around, and not getting tired now because this just started.

The final group of songs combines the two previous themes with sexually charged dance moves, like "Contra la Pared" (translation: against the wall). You better believe that when this song comes on, people find a wall and get against it. The movement that follows is what my high school literature teacher once referred to as "the simulated anal sex dance." The Wikipedia article for Reggaeton also tells me that this style of dance, which is often associated with Reggaeton music, is referred to as perreo in Spanish, a word deriving from the Spanish word for "dog" (and no doubt that animal's associated style). When all the wall space is taken up, I have seen people make alternating guy/girl chains emanating from a single person on the wall so as not to disobey Jiggy D's command.

Sometimes I have no idea what a song is about even after I look up the lyrics. But that's just fine, because Reggaeton music is supposed to get people dancing, and if it can do that then who really cares what a guachinanga is anyway.