Renegade Latino

The Billboard Latin Music Conference and Awards 2007, or Los Premios Billboard de la Música Latina as Telemundo calls it, has in it’s infinite wisdom given Don Omar the Reggaeton Album of the Year for King of Kings. I could not agree more. I believe that Don Omar has a distinct style of reggaeton that isn’t quite like other artists. Not to take away from anyone else, really, cause I was pissed that Wisin Y Yandel’s Los Vaqueros album wasn’t nominated (or maybe that’s for next year), but Don Omar is different. His songs don’t really have that generic reggaeton sound to them. He differentiates himself, he’s unique, he’s down to Earth, his music is incredible, he rightfully has the reggaeton album of the year.

The acceptance speech Don Omar gave was short, to the point, an perfectly in line with who he is and why we all can’t get enough of his music. He first and foremost shared his award with all those artists in the reggaeton genre, including Wisin y Yandel, Rakim y Ken-Y, and others. He spoke about how he was thankful for reggaeton music being able to reach out to whom it has and thanked his island of Puerto Rico for all their love and support. Awesome.

There were plenty of other highlights in the show. Juan Luis Guerra had another classic performance. I remember when I was little I used to pretend to be him and my family would sit down in the family room and I would put on a really long coat and lip sync his songs while I hand my hand over my ear. ¡Ay!, me sube la bilirrubina. Ricardo Montaner showed us all he’s not only a great singer but a great human being. And wow his son looked and sounded exactly like him, my goodness. That Victor Manuelle, Gilberto Santa Rosa, Gran Combo collaboration was a classic demonstration of salsa, very well done.

The closing collaboration between Wisin, Yandel and David Bisbal at the end was incredible. It was truly a combination of sounds and not just each party doing their own thing. It was definitely worthy of being the show closer, we even got to see Yandel without sunglasses for a second.

And I have to give a shout out to Pedro Infante because he too is incredible. If I don’t make it in this life and I go broke and lonely, I’m taking whatever little I have to Mexico and going to a bar and singing “Ella” just like he did while drowning in a bottle of Tequila. I love it.

MySpace has launched latino.myspace.com. It’s the same as the popular MySpace service but it’s all in good old Español. The service says it’s still in Beta but things seem to be working well for me. I signed up on MySpace to get the RenegadeLatino, pero nunca lo he usado. No tengo amigos ni nada, but it’s good to see an internet powerhouse cater to the Latino community here in the United States.

I’m just really happy that they went with Latino and not Hispanic or something else. I don’t think I would have visited that site.

For Spanish speakers from all over the place, MySpace offers MySpace Latinoamerica at la.myspace.com. I feel this is directly correlated with the Latino presence here in the U.S. I’m sure it’s great for MySpace to reach out to even more users and get a bigger piece of that international internet pie, but it’s good for me too to see major players catering to Latinos. Awesome.