Reggaeton conquered the world. A new docuseries shows exactly how it happened

If the Puerto Rican filmmaker Omar Acosta wanted to hear new music as a teenager in early ‘90s-era San Juan, he had to hit the pavement. In those days Acosta would roam the streets, seeking out a particular car belonging to a local DJ named Playero, who sold cassette tapes out of his truck or from the tape deck itself for $5. Known for putting on sounds coursing through the island at the time, including hip-hop to dancehall tracks, Playero’s raw tapes had no tracks listed on them. Therein lay the thrill: Anything could be on there.

Shortly before moving with his family to New York City, Acosta found Playero on the street and bought a tape called Playero 37. When he first popped it into a tape player, he couldn’t believe what he heard emanating from the speakers. Featuring emcees and producers from the area, like Daddy Yankee and Master Joe, the music sounded and felt urgent. “I was like, Okay…whatever this is, I’m into it,” Acosta says. “It was like dancehall on steroids, and it was in Spanish.” To him, that era felt “like a Big Bang situation… these planets colliding type of thing.”

The tape blew up and made its way to the Dominican Republic, the U.S., and beyond. But what Acosta heard on Playero 37 was, in those days, simply known as “underground.” It had yet to be dubbed by its more familiar name these days: reggaeton. Long before it became a hit-making genre, people residing in caserios — or housing projects — in Puerto Rico were reflecting their realities into thunderous songs that inspired its own sinuous dance, known as perreo. These were the stories Acosta sought to immortalize in Reggaeton: The Sound that Conquered the World, a new docuseries streaming on Peacock which he directed about the genre’s origins through to its unlikely evolution.

Broken up into four parts, the docuseries traces a through-line between seemingly disparate musical movements in Puerto Rico, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and the U.S, that ultimately shaped what would become our contemporary understanding of reggaeton. Told through archival footage and dozens of interviews with forebears and more recent stars in the genre (there’s too many to name, but include the likes of Bad Bunny, Nicky Jam, Tainy, Karol G, Ivy Queen, Vico C, DJ Negro, DJ Playero, Luny Tunes, among others), it aims for a nuanced view of this misunderstood movement — once outlawed and demonized by the Puerto Rican government — turned worldwide cultural juggernaut. While the story of reggaeton can never be exhaustively told, the docuseries unfurls a rich and layered story; threading a complex needle, it extensively illuminates the story for newcomers to the genre while offering valuable insights to longtime reggaeton heads.

The docuseries opens with shots of the caserios where nascent musicians and producers, including Yankee, DJ Negro, and DJ Nelson, lived in Puerto Rico. For Acosta, centering the narrative on these enclaves became crucial to the docuseries’ backbone — so viewers could see where, exactly, reggaeton came from.

As these musicians absorbed influences from near and far, they transmuted them into sounds they made and played at garage parties called marquesinas. “That’s the other thing that people gotta understand,” Acosta tells The FADER. “Like, the lyrics were the lyrics because of the context.” Places like La Perla and Villa Kennedy are not “like Queensbridge, say, where it goes on and on and on and on and on,” he continues. “[Villa Kennedy] is just a roundabout of a caserio. So for this global phenomenon to have started from these tiny, tiny places, to me, is a miracle.”

As fate would have it, someone else had felt a similar dissatisfaction gnawing at them regarding the prevailing reggaeton narrative: a well-known reggaetonero hailing from Villa Kennedy named Daddy Yankee. A few years ago, when Acosta was wrapping up his documentary Mixtape, about the role of the medium in hip-hop’s development, he was approached for a potential reggaeton film being executive produced by Daddy Yankee. He flew to San Juan in January 2021, and met Daddy Yankee to discuss at the El San Juan Hotel y Casino. Expecting a brief meeting, Acosta and Yankee hit it off and talked for five hours, Acosta says. “Straight up, [Yankee] was like, ‘Every day I get approached to do this documentary and I’m like, no, you don’t get it, you’re gonna tell the wrong story,’” Acosta remembers. “And he’s absolutely right.”

Initially meant to be a 90-minute film, the project takes a granular approach to reggaeton, singling out how earth-shattering breakthroughs — like that of a single stack of speakers; when DJ Blass decided to slow down the sound’s prevailing BPM (which led to perreo); and the commercial boom kicked off by “Gasolina” and cemented by “Despacito” — sparked its own generation-defining culture.

The docuseries also confronts thorny issues, like how the moral panic surrounding reggaeton, propelled by politicians including then-Senator Velda González, impacted the community of musicians and producers. In doing so, she unwittingly helped mint the fledgling genre into reggaeton itself. “She did everything possible to stop it,” Acosta says. “But by going on TV and saying ‘reggaeton, we gotta stop it?’ All of a sudden, that was reggaeton. So it’s these little moments that you’re going, ‘okay, now it’s political.’” The series features women in the genre, including Ivy Queen, Karol G, and Natti Natasha, speaking plainly about what it was like to elbow their way towards the front of the stage in order to command a mic in a male-dominated, sometimes hostile environment.

The series did not come without its logistical challenges, like coordinating many stars to sit down for interviews. But Acosta says the archival footage anchoring the film, including photos of the hard-charged ‘90s parties that happened at DJ Negro’s infamous club in La Perla, The Noise — with its walls slathered in blacklight paint — proved “almost impossible” to get. “These are kids in the caserios of Puerto Rico in the ‘90s, so they’re not walking around taking pictures,” Acosta says. He found a good lead with Tony Touch, a DJ at The Noise who would shoot videos, and DJ Negro, who would sometimes walk around gigs with a video camera. Ultimately, it was coming across musician Richie in the House, who had a magazine documenting the scene, that proved game changing for the project; much of the imagery within it stems from his personal archive.

Eventually, Acosta amassed such a wealth of material, archival and otherwise, that countless gems got left on the cutting room floor. Reggaeton’s neverending reinvention also led to an unexpected hurdle: By the time this series dropped on Peacock in October 2024, reggaeton had changed once again, with new artists emerging and moving the ball in other directions. While that swift clip proved to be a complication for the film in terms of when to end this still-evolving story, it ultimately speaks to the potency of reggaeton itself — and how it’s only become a stronger force in ensuing decades. As Daddy Yankee says in the docuseries: “Many people underestimated the power of reggaeton. When people underestimate you, they give you power.”

‘Reggaeton: The Sound that Conquered the World’ is streaming on Peacock now.