Shooting for Latin music stardom
On album, rapper Myke Towers collaborates with titans of reggaeton
Outside the Crypto.com arena in January, a frenzy of young Latinos assembled for Calibash, Los Angeles’ annual festival for musica urbana.
With his performance sandwiched between MCs Jhay Cortez and Arcangel, rapper Myke Towers, 29, the spitfire from Puerto Rico, was raring to rise above the pack. Onstage, Towers kicked off his 30-minute set with the first song that landed him in the U.S. Latin mainstream: “Si Se Da,” a reggaeton earworm that he wrote with hitmaker Farruko in 2019.
A couple of days earlier, he spoke about whittling down his initial 50 tracks to his final 23 for his third studio album. The March 23 release of “La Vida Es Una,” or “Life Is One,” had been delayed twice, due in part to his relentless pursuit of perfection.
“I gave myself a brutal headache,” said Towers.
“La Vida Es Una” is a graduation ceremony of sorts for Towers. With his chart-topping 2020 debut “Easy Money Baby” and 2021 follow-up “Lyke Myke,” Towers set himself apart with a streetwise Spanish flow, cribbed directly from New York rappers such as the Notorious B.I.G. and 50 Cent. Yet with a little sugar, and a simmering dembow beat, Towers’ gristly timbre elasticized into a warm, caramelized tone all his own.
On his latest record, Towers’ melodic versatility becomes the focal point, as he coasts effortlessly through trap, Afrobeats and reggae sounds. And in collaborations with Daddy Yankee, Ozuna and J Balvin — reggaeton titans who expedited the genre’s crossover to the international mainstream through the 2010s — Towers, once a young king of Puerto Rico’s trap underground, now stakes his claim to a seat at their table.
Raised on foundational 2000s records by Don Omar and Tego Calderon, Towers is part of a rising tide of Puerto Rican MCs who are duking it out for prominence on the world stage. Of this new generation, Towers was the emerging artist worth betting on, says Hector Ruben Rivera, senior vice president and head of A&R at Warner Music Latina.
“His business is music, and he is serious about it,” said Rivera, who signed Towers in 2021. “His confidence and performance reminds me of the O.G. rappers from the U.S.”
Born Michael Torres in Rio Piedras, home to the University of Puerto Rico, Towers grew up in neighboring Quintana, where he’d cycle through his parents’ reggaeton
CDs, shoot hoops with his friends and narrowly avoid trouble with the authorities.
At the behest of his friends, Towers recorded a handful of freestyles on SoundCloud, most of which “will never again see the light of day,” he says with a laugh. The oldest that remains is a hearty Spanish-language freestyle from 2014 titled “La Nueva Droga,” or “The
New Drug,” which lifts the Alchemist’s piano loop from “Keep It Thoro,” the 2000 classic by New York rapper Prodigy.
“I was always drawn to the sound of hip-hop,” he said. “I studied it closely. At first that’s what I wanted to sound like, but obviously I had to adapt to what we do in Puerto Rico. I mean, I was born in the cradle of reggaeton.”
After captivating Puerto Rico’s trap underground with his 2016 mixtape,
“El Final del Principio,” or “The End of the Beginning,” Towers spent the rest of the decade fortifying his catalog with collaborations with then-nascent stars like Eladio Carrion, Rauw Alejandro and Bad Bunny.
As trap and reggaeton became dominant forces in Latin music’s historic global expansion, Towers carefully considered his next move. He pivoted into the commercial Latin pop realm in 2019 with “Dollar,” a flirty collaboration with Chicana star Becky G; it wasn’t long before he fielded calls to work with Selena Gomez, Anitta and Cardi B.
In January 2020, Towers and his longtime girlfriend, Ashley Gonzalez, welcomed their first child, Shawn. It was, unsurprisingly, Towers’ idea to christen his son after his favorite rapper: Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter.
“My son became No. 1,” said Towers, who posed cradling Shawn on the cover of “Easy Money Baby.” Now 3 years old, Shawn is quick to mimic his father’s every move. “When
I go to the barber for a haircut, he wants one too,” said Towers with a chuckle. “It is much more than giving him material things; (it’s) about working to give him that parental love. I had to put in a little discipline and sacrifice, but the reward is very great.”
It was the discipline that Towers began to cultivate as a father that he says expedited his songwriting and, eventually, his professional ascent. “Easy Money Baby” climbed to the No. 1 spot on the Top Latin Albums chart and was nominated for urban music album at the 2020 Latin Grammys; six months later, he released his sophomore album, “Lyke Myke,” his major-label debut.
As the final chapter in what Towers calls his trilogy, “La Vida Es Una” is a testament to his maturation as a man and as an adventurous young artist from the Caribbean.
“I insert myself into different worlds from time to time, just to see what kind of essence it brings out in me,” he said, noting that cuts like the synthy “Experimento” or the Afrobeats fusion of “Mundo Cruel” were inspired by sounds that were foreign to him. “I always bring it back to the Caribbean.”
The region’s musical past and present course through the new album, first in the bachata flourish of “Conocerte” with Ozuna; then in the Arcangel-assisted “Don and Tego,” a throwback to reggaeton’s Y2K-era vanguard; and in the reggae bounce of “Flow Jamaican,” which pays respect to reggaeton’s Anglophone predecessors, Shabba Ranks and Bobby “Digital” Dixon.
Colombian rapper J Balvin, a record-breaking artist who withdrew from the spotlight after his own son’s birth, makes a rare appearance with Towers on “Celos,” an effervescent reggaeton jam produced by Sky Rompiendo; and the since-retired Daddy Yankee joined Towers for one of his final recordings, “Ulala (Ooh La La).”
It was Towers’ collaborations with his reggaeton idols that spurred him to envision his own longevity and to impart some of the wisdom he has gained to reggaeton’s next crop of innovators.
“Everyone wants to win, but not everyone wants to play hard,” said Towers. “I made this album with the hope of inspiring the next generation. People waste time when they don’t follow their dreams.”