Daddy Yankee Essentials

Born Ramón Luis Ayala Rodríguez in 1976 in the Río Piedras barrio of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Daddy Yankee grew up in a musical family: His dad played bongos in a salsa band and his mother’s family was full of musicians. Yankee mastered the skill of verbal improvisation early, rhyming with friends and appearing on some of DJ Playero’s underground rap mixtapes in the early ’90s. He would soon embrace (and, by some accounts, name) the nascent genre of reggaetón, a rap hybrid evolving out of dancehall’s dembow riddim. Yankee began releasing albums steadily, and 2004’s Barrio Fino, with its irresistible “Gasolina,” broke through internationally, introducing the world to Daddy Yankee’s verbally acrobatic rhymes about violence, easy money, women, and marginalization. He quickly became a pop-savvy evangelist for música urbana, collaborating widely with artists such as Héctor El Father (“Machete”), Wisin & Yandel (“No Me Dejes Solo”), Anuel AA (“Adictiva”), and Bad Bunny (“La Santa”), and even reaching back to his dancehall reggae roots with “Con Calma” and “Dura.” But it was alongside Luis Fonsi and Justin Bieber, on 2017's slinky, world-beating smash “Despacito,” that he shattered language barriers and ushered in a new era of Latin pop prosperity.