walking upstream…
El General
photo: festivaldevinachile · cc by 3.0 ↗El General
sourcesVice — El General Pioneered the Sound of Reggaeton, Then Disappeared Entirely (New York club scene, Michael Ellis, the Estas Buena/Dem Bow cover, retirement) · LaMezcla — From Panama to the World · Remezcla — Tu Pum Pum · Wikipedia — El General (biography, discography, years active) · Wikipedia — Burro Banton (career, digital dancehall era)
In a working-class Panama City neighborhood thick with the descendants of Caribbean laborers who had dug the canal, a boy named Edgardo Franco built his first instruments out of buckets and bottles — "con cubetas, sacábamos flautas de las botellas," he later remembered. He was twelve when he started writing songs, and still a teenager when he talked his way into a vocal group, Renato y las Cuatro Estrellas, on one condition: he had to improvise. "El requisito era ser muy bueno improvisando," he said, "y como yo me hice experto en hacerlo, me pusieron El General." A business scholarship took him to New York, where he threw himself into the club scene and refined his sound with the Jamaican producer Michael Ellis; he came home and turned reggae and hip-hop into reggae en español, the sound reggaetón would later claim as its root.
the sound in question
1990
Tu Pum PumEl General
walk the tributaries ↓
Shabba Ranks1990s · Dancehall / Reggae
By 1990, Shabba Ranks's dancehall chant "Dem Bow" — riding Steely and Clevie's rolling riddim — was blasting from the Diablos Rojos, the retrofitted buses that doubled as Panama City's mobile sound systems, the same buses El General had once ridden as a teenager, improvising over borrowed rhythms. His answer wasn't subtle: he titled his own cut "Son Bow," translating the Jamaican original into Spanish almost word for word. Vice later summed up the debt bluntly: his catalog could pass as a straightforward dancehall album wearing new, Spanish-language clothes.
listen: upstream & heresource: WhoSampled — El General, "Son Bow" (confirms the direct cover/translation of Shabba Ranks's "Dem Bow") ↗
1990
Dem BowShabba Ranks
1991
Son BowEl General
listen forPlay Shabba Ranks's "Dem Bow" against El General's "Son Bow" and the shared skeleton is unmistakable — the same clipped riddim pattern that would later give the whole genre its name, dembow. Shabba's toasting stays in dense, hard-consonanted Jamaican patois; El General keeps the identical rhythmic placement and clipped phrasing but swaps in Spanish party slang, chanting over what is almost the same drum pattern underneath. It is less a cover than a translation — the riddim untouched, the language rebuilt entirely around it.
Burro Banton1980s–90s · Dancehall / Reggae
In that same 2016 interview, El General paired Burro Banton with Marley in a single breath — not reggae's founding conscience but its most feared mid-1980s deejay, a gruff-voiced chatter who helped launch Jamaica's digital dancehall era under the producer King Jammy. Where Marley gave El General reggae's gravity, Burro Banton gave him something more immediately usable onstage: proof that a raw, rapid-fire toast riding a stripped digital riddim could hold a room by itself. That is the delivery El General borrowed wholesale for his own chant.
listen: upstream & heresource: Vanguardia — ¿Dónde quedó Edgardo A. Franco, "El General"? (his own testimony on Bob Marley/Burro Banton as influences, childhood instrument-making, stage-name origin) ↗
1985
Boom Wah DisBurro Banton
1995
Rica y ApretaditaEl General
listen forCue up Burro Banton's 1985 "Boom Wah Dis" beside El General's "Rica y Apretadita" and listen to the attack, not the language: both chop their phrases into short, percussive bursts landing just ahead of the beat rather than settling into a smooth melodic line. Burro Banton rides a stripped digital riddim built for sound-system punch; El General keeps that same clipped, boastful cadence but layers it over a fuller, Latin-inflected groove built for radio play rather than a dancehall clash.
Bob Marley1970s · Reggae / Roots reggae / Ska
Asked in 2016 who shaped him musically, El General did not name a producer or a chart hit — he named reggae's patron saint. "Bob Marley y Burro Banton," he told the Mexican outlet Vanguardia, "recuerdo que casi borro un casete de música de Jamaica de tanto escucharlo" — he had nearly worn through a cassette of Jamaican music from replaying it so often. That devotion is why he called earning acceptance in Jamaica itself "más que un triunfo monetario... un triunfo espiritual" — more a spiritual triumph than a financial one.
listen: upstream & heresource: Vanguardia — ¿Dónde quedó Edgardo A. Franco, "El General"? (his own testimony on Bob Marley/Burro Banton as influences, childhood instrument-making, stage-name origin) ↗
1973
Get Up, Stand UpBob Marley
1991
MuéveloEl General
listen forThe connection is not lyrical — Marley's "Get Up, Stand Up" is a call to political conscience, El General's "Muévelo" a command to dance — but listen for the shared move: both open on a chanted, second-person hook aimed straight at the listener, riding a rhythm built to make bodies answer physically. Marley's reggae one-drop slows that pulse into a march; El General speeds the same insistent address into a dancehall gallop built for a club floor instead of a rally.