The Trouble With Tastemakers

Why music curators are bad at telling us what's good

In 1997, a young rapper from Puerto Rico named Martha Ivelisse Pesante Rodríguez released her debut album, En Mi Imperio, under the stage name “Ivy Queen.” The album was a mix of hip hop and a new-ish genre called reggaeton, which had spent roughly the last decade spreading across the Latin American world. Brash, raunchy, and powerfully danceable, regga…