Latin hits, non-stop
Reggaeton is the style that carried the dembow pattern out of the Caribbean and into everyday Latin pop. Its outline is simple enough to recognise in a second and flexible enough to have absorbed most of what has happened in Spanish-language music since.
Two threads meet in reggaeton. The first is Panamanian reggae en espanol of the late 1980s, where Jamaican dancehall records were sung in Spanish for a Spanish-speaking audience. The second is the underground cassette and club scene in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the early and middle 1990s, where those records were cut together with rap and with local vocal styles.
The name itself stuck to the Puerto Rican strand. By the end of the 1990s the style had a settled rhythmic identity, and through the 2000s it moved from that underground scene onto mainstream radio across the Americas and then well beyond it.
Almost every reggaeton record sits on a variant of the dembow pattern, named after a Jamaican dancehall record whose rhythm was widely sampled. Counted in eighth notes across a bar, the snare or rim lands on the first, the fourth, the fifth and the eighth, while a steady kick anchors the downbeats.
That gives the swung, slightly lopsided feel that separates reggaeton from a straight four-on-the-floor dance record. Producers vary the pattern by moving one hit, thinning the kick, or letting a bar pass with the pattern removed entirely, which is why the same rhythm has stayed usable for three decades.
The modern production palette is sparse: a deep synthetic bass, a handful of percussion samples, and a lot of empty space for the vocal. Melodic material is often a short looped figure rather than a chord progression, and the hook usually arrives early.
Because the tempo band is narrow, reggaeton mixes cleanly into bachata at the top of its range and into cubaton and other Caribbean urban styles almost invisibly. That is why it so often anchors a hit-music hour rather than sitting in a specialist slot.