What up mi gente?! The UCLA Queer Studies Conference 2009 just wrapped up and it was fantastic. Thanks to all the people who made it out to our panel, "The Queer Vicissitudes of Hip Hop Expressive Culture."As a New Yorker I find L.A. to be a bit of a strange town, there's smog, cars everywhere, and a "reggaeton station" that plays like 2 reggaeton songs per hour. I can't front on L.A.'s food scene though... Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles was like a religious experience. Nonetheless, L.A. was uncanny and my experience is summed up by the song "Watagatapitusberry."
Apparently I had missed the magical nonsense that is "Watagatapitusberry" while I was in NYC. As soon as we were on our way to the hotel from LAX we turned on Latino 96.3 and heard "Watagatapitusberry ."
This song only added to my L.A.- induced disorientation and confusion. What kind of madness was this? Every time I turned on the radio without fail the song came on and I only grew more confused. I mean, seriously, wtf is a "Watagatapitusberry" anyway? I'm still not cienporciento sure, but what ever "Watagatapitusberry" is its magical, silly, weird, and fungible. Check out all the different YouTube fan videos dedicated to this song.
This video is probably the most famous and has been circulating around the web for a while, inciting some questions about the queerness of the performance...
There are a ton of homosocial buddy videos of dudes just wildin' out together to "watagatapitusberry," like the ones below...
There are also a handful of videos of young women getting down and lipsyncing to the song...
A little co-ed number...
And last but certainly not least, watagatapitusberry para ninos....
I don't know what it all means but if you ask me how was L.A. I might respond "Watagatapitusberry" (QUE?!)
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6 comments:
These are great! The beat on this derives from Baltimore house, which became the national club rhythm over the past couple years. Listening to some of their other tracks on youtube, they definitely have something going - post-reggaeton? Are they Dominican?
-Gavin
awesomeness! thx for sharing, marisol. (and glad the conference was fun.) loving yet another set of homosocial homegrown dance vids via the latin@ youtubosphere!
do you know the backstory on this song/video? is it an LA thing? where's the original from?
(ps--your blog is still throwing popup ads at me. need to check that sourcecode.)
@ Wayne - Urgh! I'm sorry about the pop ups, I have an intense blocker so they don't pop up for me and I don't know how to disable them. I'll look into it though.
As for "watagatapitusberry" the artists, Black Point & Del Patio, are Dominican rappers and the song came out in DR before it hit the states. I thought it was an LA thing until I looked into it, but its interesting that its so popular out there since there isn't a large Dominican population, I guess it speaks to the Pan-Latinization of reggaeton and even what we're now referring to as post-reggaeton sounds.
From the little I've been able to gather, the songs has a double meaning -- "watagatapitusberry" is supposed to refer to sex and also poke fun at guys who try to impress/hit on girls but have a poor command of English.
@ Gavin - I didn't catch the B'more house beat, but that's really interesting considering reggaeton's recent gravitation toward rock, house, and electro beats. Do you have any examples of the original B'more beat?
Yeah, here's a good example...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRorr1JCjDg
The first half is a lot of breaks, but at around :52 it kicks into another typical Bmore rhythm.
Here's another one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHQee6EqHIo
These are older songs. As it nationalized through hipster booty bass channels, it lost a lot of the breakbeats. You can kinda hear it in this M.I.A. track (produced by a Baltimore club producer)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcT69Bfpbto
For a few years this was THE rhythm of blog-distributed homemade remixes.
-G
This makes me happy for no good reason.
Yeahh...I'm Dominican and I live in BMore and when I first heard this I was like QUE?!?!Dominican/B'More club music???LOLOL Watagatapitusberry supposedly has many meanings, all from dominican slang the main one being...
wata=hit
gata=girl
pitus=pa tu or para tu
berry= vagina
lol!!! watagatapitusberry!! baby you spaghetti =]
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