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.