Exploring participatory online music fandom through reggaetón

My project examines reggaetón, an Afrodiasporic musical form derived from Puerto Rican Underground rap in the 1990s and repackaged as a “Latin-urban” genre during its commercial crossover in 2004. While previous musical forms have crossed over from the periphery to the empire, reggaeton’s challenges to musical and bodily expressions as well as to discourses of nationhood have been deemed revolutionary enough by governments, social institutions, and individuals to generate a broad range of reactions and regulations, few of which have been successful as the rapid transformation represented by this musical form is both transnational and intersectional. Focusing on participatory online music reception, I explore how anti-fans/fans interpret mainstream media coverage of reggaetón online. I textually analyze 3 online reggaetón music forums and anti-fan/fan-generated content archived (2004-2009). The author suggests that fans/anti-fans negotiate reggaetón in relation to the ways they are interpellated as target audiences based on shared language alone. This research contributes to an understudied area of new media work on ways Spanish-language dominant Internet users assert themselves as interactive subjects online. Situated at the crossroads of digital/new media, popular music, and Latin American/Latino studies, this project offers innovative approaches to examining the convergence of transnational music flows and participatory audiences online.