last night a dj saved my life

Yes, once again (look at March 07) I was 'saved' by the much maligned reggaeton. Instead of a dance floor I was driving from Pittsburgh to Milwaukee. During some point of boredom and exhaustion and just plain not paying attention I missed not only the toll road through Gary, but also 94 through downtown Chicago! So I was stuck trawling around the city on the slow and costly 294. This is a boring route through 'hillbilly hell'-like suburbs as well as the usual strip malls, airports, and nowheresville that Chicagoland is to me. This was the final leg of my trip and that extra hour through the suburbs just sucked.

I was also sick of my music and growing tired of the stale stuff I heard on Chicago-area Quiet Storm shows, though I do like the fact that there are around 3 or 4 R&B stations to choose from in Chi-town. I happened to come across a good reggaeton cut and just stayed on the station out of curiosity. To my luck it was a nationwide broadcast of a reggaeton mix spliced w/house, techno, and some merengue. Some dj bloggers think that famous DJ Kazzanova on 103.1FM sucks, but hey, to my Anglo ears it was nice, and it did a heck of a job keeping me awake to the Wisconsin border. I almost crashed a few times paying the ever-changing toll rates, 80cents, to $1 to $1.50. Just when I narrowly avoided crashing into a barrier counting out my 80cents for the toll, the rate changed! But hey, the music was still good.

And what intrigued me was the periodic between tune shout-outs in Spanglish. Granted, I missed half of em, but could at least hear the names and cities. What is interesting about reggaeton is that it really is a 'pan-Latin' thing and you get the props going to Mexicans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Salvadorians, etc. And then it got me thinking about the intense immigration networks going on here that exist 'below the surface' to most of our eyes. Those of us not somehow connected to the Latino community can live our lives wholly oblivious to this huge part of our country, though just below 'the surface' of our lives exists a huge sub-culture, if it is even sub. And then you have these migration networks scattering families all over the place with kids in Arizona shouting out their friends in Oregon, girls in Chi-town giving big-ups to the crew in Jersey City and Atlanta, and on and on. Someone should probably walk a couple miles with these kids. It is a trip some cultural anthropologist or sociologist should undertake, though they'd probably render fascinating cultural insights into academic babble that makes me want to burn the book and fire all the professors. Why is that when dealing with something as fascinating and relatively accessible as Latino youth culture, academics have to make the entire study entirely unreadable to anyone without a PhD in Sociology. Oh well, I'll go look for this treatise on reggaeton, probably published by University of California Press or worse yet, some tiny East Coast liberal arts school. We'll see and I'll let you know. Interesting stuff happening in this country, interesting stuff.