Artist
El General
Panamanian artist who brought reggae en español from Panama City to Brooklyn in the mid-1980s. He arrived to find a booming dancehall scene underway and linked up with Jamaican producers at Philip Smart's HC&F studio in Long Island, where engineer Dennis "The Menace" Thompson created the Dembow riddim for his track "Ellos Benia." He helped create the Spanish-language dancehall template that would evolve into reggaeton, bridging Afro-Panamanian communities descended from West Indian canal workers with New York's Caribbean diaspora. His work laid the foundation for the genre's emergence, translating Kingston's sound into Spanish and spreading it north.