Venezuelan DnB makes fun of Reggaeton

Searching stuff on Youtube I stumbled across a video many many people will hate, because it fuses two genres which in my opinion, are angularly different in spirit and idea; reggaeton and drum & bass. DJ Zardonic is a drum & bass artist from Venezuela who is probably familiar enough with reggaeton to understand it and express it in the medium of d&b:

Tito El Bambino - Siente el Boom (Zardonic D&B mix)



Many D&B fans hated the idea of 'polluting' their style of music with this. Maybe it doesn't have the slow swaying thumping military quality of the original hit (which is a pretty crappy song I feel), and instead is really really upbeat, perhaps so upbeat that the idea of perreo (the doggystyle dance ubiquitous in reggaeton) would be ridiculous. Also, I noticed that the typical drum & bass rhythm actually has more affinity with reggaeton than I would have suspected at the beginning. To begin with, the tempos are so similar, that is, moderate reggaeton (100 bpm) will go along with a fast drum & bass rhythm (200 bpm), and of course, the more typical 170 bpm or d&b matches with the slower reggaeton tracks (around 85 bpm which is quite slow, only things like crunk play at slower speeds; 75 bpm).

Second, the typical reggaeton rhythmic pattern (known commonly as the Dembow) is prety much the inverse of the typical jungle rhythm! What do I mean by inverse? The fact that if one switched the bass drum with the snare drum in a reggaeton beat you could get a d&b rhythm.

Here we have the typical reggaeton rhythm, played at around 91 bpm:


Note that reggaeton, like its precursor, dancehall and all the styles of popular dance music that came after and before such as disco, house, dub and trance, it is characterised by a kick drum that marks every 4 beats in a bar (only 2 beats seen here). While in those music styles, the snare marks the offbeats usually, in reggaeton the first offbeat is slightly shifted giving the music a bouncy feel.

If we change the pattern so that the kick drum plays the pattern of the snare and vice-versa (as shown below), like magic, we get a basic drum and bass rhythm. The kick drum no longer marks every beat, but the snare marks every offbeat.


However, the beat is slightly shifted (the kick doesn't begin at the start of the bar), so if we move everything a beat and a half to the left, we truly get the backbone to most d&b out there:



While to me it seems that reggaeton has a strong emphasis on the downbeat (beats 1 & 3 in a bar), drum & bass, while complex it seems to carry an emphasis on the offbeat which it inherits from hiphop (ultimately, the rhythm is like the foundations it got from the Amen Break, as everybody knows, the most famous drumbreak in the history of drumbreaks).

Two styles of music created in very different places with quite different cultures which however share many of the same roots.

Drum & bass is a more commercial, slick, produced version of ragga jungle that appeared in the UK, making the Amen Break secondary to the beat and more like a background filling to the beat illustrated above. Ragga came from the Jamaican toasting (from where hiphop also sprung back in the early 80s), taking in reggae along with it, deep basslines and sped-up Amen breaks.

Reggaeton, well, was dancehall music from Jamaica adapted into the Spanish communities of Puerto Rico and Panama, infused with the specific style of rapping/toasting they developed. Where did the Dembow rhythm come from? Shabba Rank's song Dembow seems to have been the first to have made it famous but it probably dates waaay back into reggae music and from Afro-Latin roots.

Note that along with early Ragga music from which D&B eventually arose, early Reggaeton had a very lo-fi, raw quality, something BOTH drum & bass and reggaeton lost as they developed into popular commercial music. Maybe Jamaica's involvement in the origins of both styles of music serves as a bridge strong enough to allow DJ Zardonic's remix above and other kinds to be possible. Interesting in all of this might be how we can dig back into history and see when they were one kind of musical idea.

So, closing this rather long and unstructured post, I leave you with DJ Zardonic's main page and his other musical projects, in addition to a little musical ''sketch'' of the commonalities between both genres I made this morning rather quickly (strangely enough it was before I found out about the beat-inverting thing or Zardonic's beat juggling in the remix at the beginning of the post):



http://www.myspace.com/djzardonic (industrial drum & bass with a metal touch)
http://www.myspace.com/triangularascension (dark ambient music)
http://www.myspace.com/moreonklipp (minimal house)