Thank you, Eddy, from all the strippers of the Southern hemisphere, who can now pretend they're angels doing God's work while pole-ing to your dolled-up reggaeton. Still, with the unexpected release of one frighteningly catchy “Cinco Letras” in late 2009, these understudies slid in for the save — breaking a funky spell of bad reggaeton that was starting to jinx the era. He's got the fullest, most musical flow in Spanish-language rap, hands down, and it fits like the most enjoyable of ball gags into reggaeton's ready DSLs. Also, the newer the better, because reggaeton's heydey did last pretty deep into 2006 and 2007. b) Repetitive, nasally, shouty shit will be kept to a minimum. Don Omar, otherwise known as “El Rey,” experienced somewhat of a fall from grace after being catapulted to stardom at the climax of the U.S. love affair with reggaeton — including a desperate song about MySpace. But Don Omar labors us through a thick gravel of blood and beat, forcing us to grind even harder than before. And his gap tooth makes Samuel L. Jackson's look like the negative space in a fine-toothed comb. We've got a feeling even an OG like Tego would have few regrets spooning with his down comforter to that voice. The competition for this spot on the list included newer, sweeter gems like “Mi Cama Huele a Ti” by Tito El Bambino — so we could argue the genre was on the ups, or whatever — but in the end, we always crawl back to “Ella Me Levantó.” Damn you, Daddy Yankee! “No Quiere Novio” — Ñejo (featuring Tego Calderon). Though Residente, the lyrical half, mostly sticks to straight, sarcastic battle raps — between, uh, him and the world — and spastic ADD trips to the “Fiesta de Locos,” he's never been one to deny his deep fondness of down-home reggaeton. That doesn't change our feelings about Ñejo. But as Pitbull and his contemporaries have slowly (and skillfully) watered down the Latino presence on U.S. airways to fit the electro revolution, reggaeton — the stubborn bastard — kept right on folding in on itself. This track went almost nowhere, compared to some of the stuff Ñejo has done with his main man Dalmata. Doesn't get more solid than this 2007 banger of a ballad — an expressway to slutty mistakes in Vegas lounge areas, if memory serves. This may come as a surprise to some, but Daddy Yankee is not Pitbull. In fact, he's managed to weasel his way onto our list here by way of a single piece of fanboy imagery in “Atrevate Te Te”: Residente watches as his regular target, the gringa wannabe, is hypnotized off her “pop-rock Latino” pedestal by a Dem Bow beat that travels up her skirt and through her intestines like a submarine (roughly translated). When you love this game as much as Daddy Yankee does, an unforgiving rhythm is the only way to work. And saying they're the same person because they're both light-skinned Latin American dudes in sunglasses is like saying Kanye West is P. Diddy. a) When the choice must be made between hard/grimy and catchy/danceable, we're going with the latter. Violins that echo through marble drug mansions! One UCLA professor even devoted an entire book, this year, to graphing reggaeton's infiltration of the Top 40. Reggaeton is such a hit today that it seems like every day a new song is released. Do The Reggay. Even more than Daddy Yankee, these prolific smooth-then-smack-talkers are leading reggaeton into the 2010s with subtle, effortless shifts in gate and aggression. Though they are not active right now, they did give us some really cool reggaeton classics. Reggaeton is dead in the same way hip-hop is dead — the popular stuff no longer resembles the gritty, lo-fi ups and downs of the working class, from whose beaters and back-alleys both genres were born.