But Don Omar was uninterested in remaining in his stylistic comfort zone. Following his 2003 debut, The Last Don, 2006’s King of Kings smashed glass ceilings to become reggaetón’s highest-charting album yet, debuting atop Billboard’s Top Latin Albums Chart and reaching No. That the working-class sound of reggaetón still struggled against government criticism only made Don Omar’s success all the sweeter. The same year’s “Dile” paired reggaetón’s signature drums with another island export, bachata, confirming Omar’s role as a standard-bearer for Puerto Rican sounds.
By his breakout hit, 2003’s “Dale Don Dale,” Don Omar had perfected his style, switching between monotone, dancehall-inspired sing-rapping and melodic hooks delivered with a flamenco-like trill. Born William Omar Landrón Rivera in 1978, in the Santurce barrio of San Juan, Puerto Rico, he was a teenager when the genre took shape in the ‘90s, and he came up under pioneering artists like Luny Tunes and Noriega, cutting his teeth on raw mixtape cuts.
Endowed with a powerful bark that cuts cleanly through synth-heavy riddims, Don Omar emerged as one of the key figures in reggaetón’s international explosion of the early 2000s.
