I Wonder If I Take You Home: Freedom in Freestyle

For this week’s Latino USA, we’re bringing you an episode from the newly released podcast series from WNYC Studios and Futuro Studios, La Brega, The Puerto Rican Experience in Eight Songs.

Created by Nuyorican street kids in the mid-80s, freestyle music became the sound and story of second-generation Boricuas. Hip-hop and pop, Latin Caribbean rhythms and instruments, all came together in freestyle. The sound was ubiquitous in New York and later in Orlando, FL. Young Puerto Rican women became the face of the genre. They sang about love, heartbreak, and their sexual desires. In Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam’s “I Wonder If I Take You Home” —a huge hit in the genre— a young woman sings about that on her own terms and without shame, opening up mother-daughter conversations that weren’t happening.

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