Reggaeton's 2010s Global Mainstreaming

Reggaeton—the urban Latin dance-music genre rooted in Puerto Rican and wider Caribbean practice—spent the 2010s moving from regional and diasporic circulation into sustained international reach, the decade in which it became globally accessible, worldwide-consumed popular music.^[1] That ascent produced a generation of performers who built their careers under conditions of production and audience markedly different from those that had shaped the genre's founders, and scholarship of the period treats the gap between the two cohorts as its central analytic frame.^[1] The contrast between artists who emerged before and during reggaeton's worldwide consumption is productive precisely because it exposes how mainstreaming reshaped not only the genre's market but the linguistic and performative choices of its most visible figures.

Sociophonetics: the lateral [l] as an identity marker

The linguistic side of the shift is documented in a sociophonetic study of eight male, Puerto Rican–born reggaeton singers. Combining raciolinguistic and variationist methods, it measured how often the word- and syllable-final tap /ɾ/ surfaces instead as the lateral [l] across the artists' recorded lyrics.^[2] Linguists treat that lateralization as a salient feature of Puerto Rican Spanish, a variant that can signal in-group belonging and affirm Puerto Rican national identity.^[3] The feature recurs more often in the work of global-era performers such as Bad Bunny and Ozuna—whose careers began once reggaeton had attained worldwide reach—than in that of earlier figures such as Daddy Yankee and Nicky Jam.^[4]

The pattern runs in two directions. As the newest recordings show the highest rates of the lateral variant, the artists who debuted in the early 2000s—before the genre's global consumption—are documented reducing their use of [l], a retreat the study reads as an effort to set their output apart from that of younger entrants to the field.^[5] Pronunciation thus emerges as a deliberate resource for constructing performative identity within a globally consumed music industry, with the racialization of [l] bound up in expressions of ethnonational pride.^[5]

Performing masculinity: camp and hyperbolic virility

Scholarship of the period attended equally to gendered self-presentation. A discourse analysis of Bad Bunny's camp aesthetics situates him within a cohort of mainstream Afrodiasporic urban Latin artists whose masculinity performances are marked by hyperbolic virility.^[6] That virility, the analysis argues, is typically enacted through themes it terms "violence-oriented, sex-driven, and wealth-flaunting," voiced across both song lyrics and music videos.^[7] Beyond the recordings, this star image is assembled across additional media—promotional photographs, Instagram posts, and press coverage among them.^[8]

Crucially, the same analysis reads Bad Bunny's camp as ambivalent rather than straightforwardly subversive. His exaggerated individuality is held to expose "the artificial naturalness of hegemonic masculinity" within Latin trap even as it reinforces that masculinity's boundaries, yielding a performance that is transgressive without either dismantling or widening the limits it makes visible.^[9]

Read together, the sociophonetic and discourse-analytic findings recast the 2010s mainstreaming as more than an enlargement of audience: it was a period in which reggaeton's most prominent artists actively negotiated identity, locality, and gender before a newly global public.