Ivy Queen
In 1995, a shy twenty-something walked into DJ Negro's garage studio in Carolina, Puerto Rico, so nervous she performed with her back to the room. "I had never sang in front of anyone huge like that before," she told Rolling Stone. When she turned around, DJ Negro was floored: "Welcome to The Noise," he said. "You know we don't have girls here, right? You're the first one." Martha Ivelisse Pesante Rodriguez became Ivy Queen, the lone woman inside reggaeton's most notorious all-male crew, mocked for a voice so deep and raspy that early fans assumed she was a man. She refused to trade on her looks, writing instead about survival, betrayal, and consent. That refusal crystallized in 2003's "Quiero Bailar," a blunt claim to bodily autonomy on the dance floor that reshaped what a woman in reggaeton was allowed to say.
Ask her in any interview and the answer never changes: "the person who I always refer to as my biggest influence is Celia Cruz," Ivy Queen told Rolling Stone. What she studied wasn't a sound so much as an entrance -- she keeps a DVD of a Fania All-Stars concert in Africa where Cruz walks onstage in towering heels and a spectacular wig, and the label's other singers step to the corners so she can command "Quimbara" alone. "Celia taught me that having a singular, particular voice is a gift," she said -- the same raspy voice that got Ivy Queen mocked as sounding like a man.
listen forOn the 1974 original, Celia Cruz enters late over Johnny Pacheco's horns and doesn't so much sing the title as detonate it -- "Quimbara, quimbara, quimbara, quimbara-quim-bam-ba" -- a scat hook built to fill a room by itself, with no melody to hide behind. Ivy Queen's 2015 "Tributo a Celia" reprises that same hook, but drops it into her own huskier, lower register; where Cruz rides bright horns, Ivy Queen leans on a heavier low end, the hook now carried by the voice critics once said didn't belong to a woman.
By her own account, the scene she broke into already had its king: "The earliest stage was Spanish rap, which was controlled by Vico C," she told NPR in 2020 -- the rapper Rolling Stone calls hip-hop en espanol's "founding father," and the one her mentor DJ Negro had spent years trying to turn into a star. Ivy Queen came up rapping in that same plainspoken, syllable-dense Spanish tradition before reggaeton had a name of its own, and the connection outlasted the underground: two decades later, Vico C guested on her ballad "Me Acuerdo," trading verses with the artist he'd once been the standard for.
listen for"La Recta Final" rides on Vico C's unhurried, storytelling cadence -- full sentences delivered plainly over a spare beat, no flash for its own sake. On "Me Acuerdo," recorded decades into both careers, that same conversational rap resurfaces inside a slower reggaeton ballad: Vico C raps a verse in that same plain, sentence-driven style, sitting apart from Ivy Queen's sung hook around him rather than matching her melody.