Reggaeton, words, and things: continuities, tensions, and shifts in the music videos and lyrics of Ivy Queen, Karol G, and Rosalía (1998-2024)

Abstract

More than a musical genre, reggaeton is a high-impact style within the cultural industry that is meaningful to broad sectors of Latin American society. This makes it pertinent to examine how its lyrics and music videos construct ways of enunciating, visualizing, and imagining the world. Within a predominantly male-dominated universe, this article analyzes the expressive space configured by Ivy Queen, Karol G, and Rosalía—artists who challenge the genre’s status quo. The article presents a comparative analysis of gender representations across all music videos released by these artists between 1998 and 2024 (n = 130), through visual analysis, as well as an examination of their lyrics using computational models of language analysis. The results reveal a gradual transformation across generations: from the classic reggaeton represented by Ivy Queen, characterized by visual and lyrical narratives of public affirmation of the body, authority, and experience; through Karol G, who functions as a bridging figure by translating and amplifying these repertoires within the mainstream; to Rosalía, whose work is oriented toward experimentation beyond the genre’s traditional codes, marked by greater lexical restraint and visual abstraction. This transformation is manifested in the reconfiguration of the body and its exhibition, in dominant verbal nuclei, in patterns of vocabulary use, in the gradual expansion of ethnic diversity, and in the displacement of space from a narrative setting toward a symbolic backdrop. The study contributes to broadening the discussion on the lyrical and visual expressions of reggaeton, which have conventionally been characterized as poor and monothematic.