Over the years, he has continued to release his music on El Cartel through distribution deals with different labels. Yet even as his reach has expanded to a global stage, much has stayed the same for Daddy Yankee. Karol G Fought Her Way to the Top of the Reggaetón World. That’s something only the greats can do.” We all started from the bottom, but he started from zero, when the genre didn’t even exist. Anuel AA matter-of-factly calls him “a legend” who “paved the way for many of us. “ was, and is, an inspiration for me, not just musically, but also as a visionary of the entertainment industry and a great advocate of our genre,” says Ozuna.
Along the way, he introduced a DIY, independent business model - in which he financed his own recording, marketing and promotion licensed out only distribution and, most significantly, kept ownership of his masters - that has become a blueprint adopted by many of today’s top-selling Latin acts. He set the standards for everything from how reggaetoneros dressed to how their music was created to the way the genre’s biggest artists negotiated collaborations and song splits. With it, Yankee irrevocably altered the sound and business of Latin music, not only propelling the rise of a genre that today is a global phenomenon, but quite literally building it from the ground up. Distributed by Universal Music Group (UMG) imprint Machete, it debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart - the first-ever reggaetón album to hit that spot - and stayed there for 24 weeks, ultimately becoming the top Latin album of the 2000s. The track became the second single from 2004’s Barrio Fino, Yankee’s third album on El Cartel Records, the label he’d created three years before. However his audience interpreted it, “Gasolina” turned out to be the fuel that reggaetón, and Yankee, needed to explode. “People looked for a hidden meaning: Was I talking about alcohol, about drugs? But that track is completely literal.”
He’s sitting in the library of the Palacio Provincial, a newly opened hotel in a 19th-century building in the heart of trendy Old San Juan - a 10-minute drive but a lifetime away from that old Villa Kennedy apartment. “The verse was so simple and easy to remember,” recalls Yankee today. Together with rapper and lyricist Eddie Dee, they fleshed out a track, adding the sound of gunning motors in the introduction along with Yankee’s rapid-fire verses and, atop Luny’s thumping, aggressive beat, that earworm of a refrain that sounded like a schoolyard taunt. He took the chorus and flow to his friend Luny, of production duo Lunytunes, then the leading producers on the scene.
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