Your Mix Fix: DJ Bembona's Reggaetón History Lesson on Perreostoria (Part I) Mixtape

07.23.2014 at 12:10

The word mixtape has plenty of different interpretations. It used to be that mixtapes were actually DJ sets recorded on cassette tapes, but with the coming of the digital music age, the name remained the same, but the definition expanded. Nowadays, people call mixtapes many different things, some of which are not necessarily mixed and most of which were never taped. Here we try to cover them all. In this column, Juan Data gives you a worthy one every week.

DJ: DJ Bembona
MIXTAPE: Perreostoria (Part I)

History has the strange power of redeeming stuff (some stuff) that we previously deemed uncool. I don’t know if we have reached that point yet with reggaetón but, mark my words, we will soon–every trend has its “ironic” revival.

Back in 2010 when I started this weekly column I would’ve never reviewed a reggaetón mixtape, because its mainstream overexposure was still too recent. But four years have passed (and that’s like four hundred in blog years!) and reggaetón doesn’t seem to bother people that much anymore. Now we can take some emotional distance from it, appreciate it at face value, and realize that some of it wasn’t that bad and it still makes girls dance like crazy.

Without a hint of irony, Brooklyn’s DJ Bembona (of Panamanian background) put together this revisionist reggaetón mixtape, exploring mainly the hits that were in high rotation during the genre’s apogee. With a title like that I honestly expected more early stuff, from the pre-2004 era, when they use to call it “underground,” but that was my only disappointment (and I don’t know, maybe Part II of these series will focus on that)– the rest of the time I found myself reminiscing over stuff I didn’t even know I missed.