Atrevete-te

Calle 13 released “Calle 13,” their first album, when I was wearing a white uniform to high school, which means that it must have been somewhere between freshman and junior year. Seventh to eighth grade boys (affectionately called "mojones" or "little turds" by the older guys) wore blue uniforms, the ninth to eleventh grade boys wore white, and the seniors had their own thing going on, varying each year—one time it was turqouise, another red, etc.

            The staple song that got everybody shaking their asses was “Atrevete-te” which won awards and used the Cumbia rhythm, a classic Colombian rhythm, an evokation of Latin American history. And that was so strange for a reggaetón album (reggaetón has nothing to do with reggae—it’s Puerto Rican hip hop). And “Atrevete-te” means “Dare-are” in Spanish. And there’s a line about Coldplay and Green Day, bands also popular in the time among the English-speaking students who always hung out by the stairs beside the library. 

             On the other side of the social spectrum, language-wise (and hang-out-wise), were the scholarship kids, who knew how to speak English, yes, but were proud of how broken they spoke it, and in turn knew all the corners of slang Spanish and most importantly Puerto Rican slang, who flaunted their rolled R's and their mastery of the slang to their English-speaking fellow students who slurred through their R's, both in English and in Spanish:

Mera mamau

(Look, you sucked cock)--Mamau comes from mamabicho, which means "cocksucker." Mama means "to suck," and it has a maternal, breast-association (mammogram, etc); bicho means "bug" in all the Spanish-speaking countries in the world, but in Puerto Rico it means "dick" or "wang" or "cock" or "penis" (think of "fag" in England vs. America). To say you are a "mamau" is to say that you are a "sucked one," or a dick after it has been sucked. And what is a dick after it has been sucked? It's a flaccid little thing, and to these guys, it was a Puerto Rican who spoke English better than they spoke Spanish.

And there was nothing like getting told that by a scholarship kid who had been raised in the hood and who wielded biceps that could break bones as well as hearts. It was the way they threw Puerto Rican at the English-speaking students. 

The scholarship kids. The ones from the projects, the ones completely different from everybody, the ones who played basketball or baseball or were Protestants—hung out on the other side of the school and looked down on the English speaking kids who liked to talk about Green Day and Coldplay and Rihanna and South Park and Bush, even though they couldn't vote for Bush or Gore or Kerry, because, you know, Puerto Ricans don't vote for the president. That's why they say we're a colony.

Anyway, here's the Atrevete-te refrain:

atrevete-te

salte

del closet

destapate

quitate

el esmalte

 deja de tapalte

que nadie va a retratalte

levantate

ponte hyper

...
Qué importa si te gusta Green-Day?
Qué importa si te gusta Col-play?

And so in English it would say something more like this:

Dare dare

Get out of the closet

Take the cap out of the bottle

Take off the lipstick

Stop covering yourself

Nobody’s going to take a picture

Stand up, get hyper.

…
Who cares if you like Green Day?
Who cares if you like Coldplay?

(Looks like a hooligan, right? Well, guess what, he got a degree from SCAD.)


The point is, it wasn't just women jiggling their stuff. It was men and all kinds of men, too. The scholarship kids, the rich kids--even though with them (the white ones, the rich ones) there had to be an "irony phase," where one liked Calle 13 with irony, as a joke, before one could say that, hey, this stuff is actually enjoyable.