Concert preview
Don Omar named his tour The Last King, but the title lands less like a farewell than a reminder of how much territory he helped claim.
Don Omar. Photo: Lunchbox LP/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
The Puerto Rican star brings The Last King World Tour to Barclays Center on Saturday, Oct. 10. The Brooklyn date sits near the beginning of a North American run that began in September and moves through arenas across the country. His own tour schedule lists the Barclays show between Chicago and Newark, a three-city stretch that says something about the size of the audience still waiting for him.
Don Omar’s career began before reggaeton became a default language of global pop. His 2003 debut, The Last Don, and 2006 follow-up, King of Kings, arrived when the genre was still being explained to large parts of the American mainstream. By the time “Danza Kuduro” became an international hit, much of that explanation was no longer necessary.
A catalog with gravity
The obvious temptation with a legacy tour is to treat the set list like a museum. Don Omar’s catalog resists that because the rhythms never became archival. Reggaeton’s dembow pulse moved from clubs and car stereos into the basic grammar of twenty-first-century pop. Songs that once sounded like evidence of a movement now sit inside a world that movement helped create.
That gives older material a peculiar kind of freshness. “Dale Don Dale,” “Salió el Sol,” “Bandoleros” and “Danza Kuduro” carry the recognition of hits, but they also document different stages of the genre’s expansion. Hearing them in an arena in Brooklyn, rather than in the historical order in which they arrived, turns the concert into a compressed history of what happened next.
The tour title is carefully chosen. Don Omar has been called “El Rey” for years, and King of Kings made the claim explicit two decades ago. “Last King” adds age to the mythology. It suggests a figure looking back across a field that has changed beyond recognition, in part because artists like him changed it.
Brooklyn is a fitting stop. New York’s Latin music history has always depended on neighborhoods, migration and the constant rewriting of what counts as local. Reggaeton came out of Puerto Rico and Panama, but New York was one of the places where Caribbean audiences, radio and nightlife helped make its American scale legible.
The useful question on Saturday will not be whether Don Omar can prove his old importance. The size of the room has already answered that. It will be whether the songs still feel like monuments, or whether an arena full of people can make them unruly again.
Don Omar: The Last King World Tour
Saturday, Oct. 10
Barclays Center, 620 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn
