Guest post by Takes One to Know One author Lissette Decos
Lissette Decos is a Cuban American executive television producer with over fifteen years’ experience in reality TV formats. Shows such as TLC’s Say Yes to the Dress, 90 Day Fiancé, and Bravo’s Summer House have helped mold her skills in telling an engaging and oftentimes unconventional love story. In addition to the “unreal” world of reality TV, Lissette also spent a decade in New York as a staff producer for MTV.
About Takes One To Know One (released 1 April): A celebrity romance about a music executive who has to lie about her love of reggaeton music to save her job, and the reggaeton artist she’s forced to work alongside to help promote his new album and fix his image while he works on finishing his album in Puerto Rico. Perfect for fans of Dirty Dancing. (Bad Bunny is a must listen while reading.)
My friend pulled up to the house with urgency. She brought her car windows down, and Bad Bunny blasted at us for the first time. Everyone around me started to dance right on the sidewalk, while I just stood there, confused. What was I supposed to be feeling? Was this rap? Do we dance to rap now? The rhythm seemed to ricochet off me. My body repelled it. Was it the music or the fact that Drake was also on the track?
It felt wrong to be missing out on Puerto Rico’s latest export when I was the only one in the group who was actually Puerto Rican. Well, sort of.
When I was ten, in what I lovingly refer to as my novela moment, my mom told me that the guy I thought was my father was, in fact, no such thing.
I felt like the girl in the Venezuelan soap opera we were watching at the time, who was blind and lived a meager yet blissfully simple life in the woods with her grandparents. One day she discovers she’s actually the landowner’s daughter and was switched at birth with the landowner’s son who she had, just that morning, fallen in love with.
Things worked out for both of us. The girl in the novela ended up taking over the family empire and my life doubled in siblings and in happiness. On the flipside, I was no longer half Cuban, half Puerto Rican. Now, I was technically 100% Cuban, but still very close to my Puerto Rican dad and his culture. Which brings me back to Bad Bunny.
Reggaeton combines hip hop, reggae, and Caribbean rhythms. It’s seductive and sexy and that was my problem. I’ve never been comfortable expressing my sensuality. Certainly not on a Tuesday, before the sun has set properly.
While every girl I knew could shimmy and snake their bodies, mine moved in one solid mass. It didn’t matter if it was Puerto Rican salsa on two, or the Cuban style on the first beat, I sat it all out. It’s why I’m all beaty-eyed and grumpy in most childhood photos of me at a party.
I don’t know exactly when or how the switch happened. It wasn’t so much that I needed to embrace my roots, but more about finding myself in them.
There are no rules to reggaeton. You just have to feel the music. For someone who loves rules (knowing them, following them, pointing them out to other people), this was hard at first. I’m only thankful that it happened before Bad Bunny’s brilliant new album came out. These days, it’s all Alexa plays as I make dinner. The kitchen becomes a dance club and I step into the middle of the room, hips swaying effortlessly, shoulders loose.
And I think writing helped. Though when I first started, I felt like that solid mass at a party again. I’d sit in front of the computer, frozen and find any excuse not to do this thing I really wanted to do. One time, when there was nothing left to tidy, I took a sponge to the walls.
Eventually, I gave myself permission to write. Permission to be bad at it, to have fun, to get lost, be reckless, be brave. Show up and then just do what feels right. When it isn’t working, it physically hurts. My stomach pretzels. When it’s working, it’s easy and fast. Like jogging down a hill.
Bad Bunny doesn’t follow the rules. He makes them up as he goes and then breaks those, too. At the same time, he’s so deeply proud to be Puerto Rican. It’s the well he draws his strength and creativity from. He’s all about expressing his authenticity and having a good time. This is why you don’t even have to speak Spanish to get his music. You just have to feel it.
What got me moving (and writing) was understanding, finally, that there’s more than one way to be true to your roots, you just have to be you. However it looks is okay. However you want to do it is okay.
It’s why it’s perfectly fine that at first Bad Bunny would only speak Spanish in interviews and awards shows and now he’s in his underwear in a Calvin Klein ad, saying “You feel me” in English. Oh, I do, Bad Bunny. I do.
