Peso Pluma and Anitta’s Bellakeo is Trending on the Interwebs, These Are My Thoughts.
Bellakeo is a 3:17 track with post 2015 Regueton beat breaks, contemporarily placed synths and the term “bellakeo” repeated continuously by Anitta’s luscious voice over the chorus.The song blends in with the modern club sounds of today, and that is the point of where I am going primarily. I’m a huge fan of Anitta’s and recently had the pleasure of experiencing Peso Pluma’s musical display at his 2023 Tour stop in Boston. And still I recognize that Bellakeo HAS SOME character FLAWS.
There is a trend in the new school wave of Reggaeton to use certain buzzwords largely recognized as a part of “Reggaeton culture”, yet as the genre evolves with ambassadors of non-caribbean backgrounds, it is important to contextualize its vocabulary as it is pertinent to the music, the diaspora and in this particular instance—Puerto Rican identity specifically. Words such as “Perreo” “Bellakeo” are chanted as adlibs in numerous Reggaeton songs, and to original Perreo lovers the misuse of the words reads as cringy and innacurately placed.
In the 2000s when Bellakeo styled Reggaeton was popularly made by artists such as Plan B, Las Guanabanas, Yaviah and Wisin Y Yandel, its artistic gravitas is a sexual fete and therefore no surprise to fans of these hits, as the term “Bellakeo” itself or “Bellakear” deriving from “Bellako” meaning horny.In a pop-culture world where an entire industry is hell bent on popularizing Reggaeton to the height of its synonymity mirroring that of point of mainstream Pop-music, and Latin culture a largely collectivistic culture thrives under monotheistic practices—stripping culture down to symbols and assigning them to new ambassadors is a common practice that regularly result in faux paz such as this one. While artists or non caribbean nationalities join in on the ever evolving madness that is Reggaeton, its important to celebrate their respective cultures in combination to that of larger regueton culture and Afro Caribbean influences as they will always be at the core of the music as its exponential rise increases.
This epic collaboration was an opportunity to musically celebrate something Brazilian or Mexican or even a fusion of both, instead the idea or simply assigning culture, but really Puerto Rican culture was in play and the result was deleterious.The aspects of Puerto Rican islander contributions are not limited to just the vocabulary, but also the informed linguistic pronunciation and inflection that adds the sexappeal to the Bellakeo subgenre as well.
It would have been great to have explore the sexual inuendos in the Mexican experience true to Peso Pluma as well as the Brazilian experience true to Anitta in a song with this framework, maybe in the next?
