Cubatón's Transnational Creolizations

Check out KU American Studies Doctoral Candidate William Garcia-Medina M.A.'s work: "Cubatón's Transnational Creolizations". It was published in "Scattered Musics" from the University Press of Mississippi.

The 2014 musical hit “Bailando,” performed by the Afro-Cuban duo Gente de Zona and the Spanish singer Enrique Iglesias, took the Latin music industry by surprise with the song’s timba-reggaetón fusion. When reggaetón music was beginning to rise on the Billboard charts during the early 2000s, several artists in Latin American countries began searching for success by creating innovative songs capable of reaching a mainstream audience. Despite reggaetón’s notoriety—with dances replicating sexual intercourse and lyrics about material capitalism—“Bailando,” by contrast, elicited emotions of love, friendship, and passion, ushering in new possibilities for marketing Cuban music.