Song You Need to Know: Myke Towers, Pin Pin
Salsa meets trap on a highlight from Puerto Rican rapper s Lyke Mike album
Elias Leight, provided by
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Lyke Mike, is 65 minutes of dogged, hard-nosed trap full of blaring bass that’s sure to wake up the neighbors, clenched, claustrophobic drums, and drubbing raps.
But “Pin Pin,” which comes early in the 23-song set, offers a welcome moment of levity: Towers builds the track around a cheery salsa sample, a brassy snippet borrowed from Tommy Olivencia’s “Periquito Pin-Pin.” This salsa/hip-hop hybrid has proved effective in the past, from Meshell Ndegeocello’s “Hot Night” to Common’s “Stolen Moments – Part III” to C. Tangana’s “Mala Mujer.” Towers’ take on the sound is fleet-footed but thunderous, like tap-dancing with cinderblocks. The horns surge upward in a joyous, irrepressible loop, while the hard-bitten drums serve to tether everything to the ground.
It s been a rough year for award shows. Despite the ravenous collective appetite for live performances after more than one year in lockdown, audiences have largely opted out of the hours-long ceremonies in 2021 even as producers have adopted a hybrid of at-home and in-studio celebrity appearances.
The Golden Globes, Emmys, and Grammys all saw ratings nosedive this year (albeit following years of steady decline), with February s Premio Lo Nuestro standing out as a notable exception. The 2021 edition of the long-running Latin music awards ceremony aired live from the soon-to-be-former American Airlines Arena. The newer Latin American Music Awards is undoubtedly hoping its move to South Florida yields similar success.
It s been a rough year for award shows. Despite the ravenous collective appetite for live performances after more than one year in lockdown, audiences have largely opted out of the hours-long ceremonies in 2021 even as producers have adopted a hybrid of at-home and in-studio celebrity appearances.
The Golden Globes, Emmys, and Grammys all saw ratings nosedive this year (albeit following years of steady decline), with February s Premio Lo Nuestro standing out as a notable exception. The 2021 edition of the long-running Latin music awards ceremony aired live from the soon-to-be-former American Airlines Arena. The newer Latin American Music Awards is undoubtedly hoping its move to South Florida yields similar success.
While it’s true that hip-hop and Latin music have dominated
Billboard’s global charts since their September launch, pop music is far from monolithic. “There are two sides to the coin,” says YouTube trends manager Kevin Meenan. “On one hand, music has become super global and is traveling like never before. But we’re also seeing that local music still really resonates locally.”
In fact, the hitmakers in most countries are local, according to the findings of a YouTube analysis of the top 2020 acts in 10 world markets. (See charts below.) The video streaming platform which counts over 2 billion logged-in users across 100 countries and 80 languages (and is a data provider for
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Couple the era of streaming with a pandemic imposed lockdown and you have a perfect storm for creativity. In a business that is increasingly about singles, never in recent memory have we seen such an output of material from Latin artists of every stripe. Throughout 2020, it felt like every single week brought with it an avalanche of singles.
From major hits like Ritmo, the Black Eyed Peas smash alongside J Balvin, to gems that catapulted careers like Carin Leon s Tú, here are our editors picks for our favorite 25 Latin singles of the year, arranged in alphabetical order by title.