Plan B
In 1999, two cousins from Guayama, Puerto Rico -- Orlando "Chencho" Valle Vega and Edwin "Maldy" Vázquez Vega -- started rapping together as The Panic, trading a sung hook for a rapped verse over the underground reggaetón beats then circulating on cassette. They renamed themselves after a 2000 single, "Plan B," cut for producer DJ Blass's compilation Reggaeton Sex Vol. II, and built their name on graphic, sung-and-rapped perreo: the 2002 debut El Mundo del Plan B, the 2010 comeback House of Pleasure ("Si No Le Contesto," "Es un Secreto"), and 2014's Love & Sex, anchored by "Fanática Sensual." They split in 2018, both going solo. By then, as Rolling Stone put it, their "forward-looking approach made Plan B an inspiration to younger artists" -- name-checked on Rosalía's "Candy," sampled into Bad Bunny and Rauw Alejandro tracks.
Maldy was studying computer repair at a technical college in Guayama when a classmate recording under the name DJ Blass heard him freestyling and pulled him into his teenage crew, Área 51 -- the same union that, once cousin Chencho joined, became Plan B. DJ Blass later confirmed it from his own side, telling Vice en Español that his hometown in southern Puerto Rico was where "salieron artistas como Sir Speedy, Plan B, grupos así, y empezamos a hacer el nuestro."
listen forCue DJ Blass's 2000 track "Tra, Tra, Tra," from his own Reggaeton Sex Vol. II: ping-pong arpeggios and stabbing synths riding a hard dembow kick, the techno-derived palette a musicology study credits him with popularizing across the genre. Fourteen years later, Plan B's "Fronteo" runs the same trick -- saw-tooth synth leads and swelling "epic strings" cycling the same two-chord move underneath Maldy's verses and Chencho's melodic hook, a sound the same study traces directly back to DJ Blass's productions.
No interview has Chencho or Maldy naming Chaka Demus & Pliers directly, but Rolling Stone's history of reggaetón traces a specific piece of studio craft: Plan B's 2002 single "Guatauba," produced by Blin Blin Music and Barbosa, runs on the same "Bam Bam" riddim that carried the Jamaican duo's 1992 hit "Murder She Wrote" worldwide. It is less a personal debt than reggaetón's dancehall inheritance, made audible in one of the duo's most provocative early records.
listen forListen for the tight, stabbing snare-and-bass pattern under Chaka Demus's toasting on "Murder She Wrote" -- that is the Bam Bam riddim, built with space for a vocalist to talk over the groove. "Guatauba" keeps those same rhythmic bones under Chencho and Maldy's trade-off vocals, the riddim slowed and thickened into perreo tempo, the borrowed pulse still doing the same job a decade later: making a room move.