Very polite … Pitbull. PR
Of all the cliches associated with rappers, one with more truth in it than most is their fondness for epic entourages: staff, sidekicks and assorted hangers-on designated a token menial role in the group. (It's usually to do with not wanting to leave old friends behind in a poverty that the rapper has escaped.) Pitbull, it transpires, is different: as I await instructions regarding the interview time and place, he has casually made his own way across Miami to our hotel, arriving unexpectedly and entirely without company. Though rowdy on record, he is the epitome of politeness in person: when a hotel maid arrives with drinks, she is visibly taken aback to be greeted, unwarned, by a man who is something of a celebrity hero in his hometown – let alone one so eager to be solicitous and to help her with her tray.
Pitbull, aka 30-year-old Armando Christian Pérez, has been knocking around for seven years – though it is only since 2009 that he has exploded into an unpredicted and still confounding ubiquity. Most in the UK will know him merely as one of the more inescapable figureheads of the urban/electro fusion that has dominated in the pop landscape for the last three years. It has offered endless permutations – or rather, the same permutation, endlessly deployed – of a basic ABC formula: abrasive Auto-Tune, boshing beats, cheesy chatup lines, and it's the default safe option of a certain kind of pop star, on both sides of the Atlantic:Usher, Jennifer Lopez, Alexandra Burke. As often as not, a guest verse from Pitbull is an inevitability: as with Sean Paul and Ludacris in years past, his name seems to be appended to 99% of the instances of the word "featuring" in any given top 40. His own latest album, Planet Pit, is shamelessly populist – to its detriment at times, such as playing up to a cringeworthy Latin cliche on Shake Señora, but often to its benefit, with tracks such as Give Me Everything and Rain Over Me hammering you about the head until you cave in rather than seducing you with innovation.
Though his combination of good-natured randiness, dancefloor exhortations and slightly dubious objectification has gained him worldwide hits, Pitbull wins few critical plaudits for them these days – curious, given his reputation before he started bothering the charts, when he was the go-to MC for the various movements of southern hip-hop that came in and out of fashion over the last decade: crunk, reggaeton, Dirty South rap. Particularly in partnership with crunk maestro Lil Jon's bass-heavy, hyped-up sound, Pitbull rode beats designed for the dancefloor and turned them into ferociously lascivious anthems: Toma, Culo, and guest spots on the Ying Yang Twins' Shake and Twista's Hit The Floor were among his highlights. Nonetheless, Pitbull attributes his mid-career explosion less to a change of musical style than a change of label: TVT Records, which folded in 2006, had limited the number of official collaborations he was allowed to do. (No wonder he's so willing to work with anyone who asks these days.)
Pitbull says he feels no loyalty to any specific genre: he readily admits he is "constantly looking for the next movement", and those sick of relentless Europump will be pleased to know that he has one fingered for the future: "I think it's gonna be baile funk. Baile funk is a lot of fun right now, very big in the clubs and in the streets." (It's also seven years since baile funk first hit western clubs, due largely to its influence on MIA's debut album, but that misses the point: Pitbull is not talking about baile funk hitting niche hipster dancefloors, but about massive populist success.) But, in all his incarnations to date, what defines Pitbull is the way in which his background – both his Cuban heritage and his upbringing in Miami – enables him to stand at the intersection of so many overlapping styles and demographics: the Latin audience (last year, he quietly released a Spanish-language album, Armando) as well as the hip-hop audience, and the vast variety of club music for which Miami is a hub. "I grew up around salsa, merengue, bachata, bass music, freestyle, hip-hop, techno, house, rave," he elaborates. "Miami is special for that. It's a city where you don't know if it's more a part of the US, or of the Caribbean, or of Latin America, or of Europe."
It is also a city that can take outsiders by surprise. The fortysomething man walking his poodles down Ocean Drive in the middle of the day, for instance, wearing just Nikes and a pair of perturbingly small Speedos as orange as his skin. "We're definitely a lot more liberal than the rest of the US," Pitbull laughs. "Down here it's nothing to be in a club and two women start jumping on the bar and kissing each other, doing crazy things. When you're growing up in this sexually free atmosphere, it's obviously the kind of music you're gonna make."
For his part, Pitbull started his club life at "13 or 14", coached in its ways by his older brother – but it wasn't drink, drugs or causing trouble on his mind. What the teenage Armando loved was "the women and the way they danced. You'd see the way they'd react to different parts of the music; how they'd wait for certain parts." It was a foreshadowing of how, in 2006, the adult Pitbull first realised house music would be the next big thing. "I was in the Dominican Republic," he remembers, "and Bob Sinclar's World, Hold On comes on. And the women don't speak English, but I see them dancing and whistling, and I don't know what the hell they're singing but they're losing their minds – and I say: 'This is the next movement.'" Pitbull's lyrics may sometimes veer between sleazy and cheesy, but for all the criticisms of objectification levelled at him, what's worth remembering is that his music is explicitly geared towards a female audience: when the DJ drops his songs at local hot spots such as the Sky Bar and the Delano, those who respond are the girls in the crowd, rushing to the dancefloor.
In light of this, Pitbull's political side might come as a surprise – unless you'd paid attention to his album titles. El Mariel, from 2006, and The Boatlift, from 2007, refer to the mass emigration of Cubans to Florida in 1980 – an exodus Pitbull's father helped organise. His grandmother fought for Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolutionary war, but sent her daughters – his mother and aunt – to the US during Operation Peter Pan in the 1960s, when "it became clear he wasn't the best for the country", Pitbull says. Though he raves about playing all over the world, there is one country he refuses to set foot in: "I won't perform in Cuba until there's no more Castro and there's a free Cuba. To me, Cuba's the biggest prison in the world, and I would be very hypocritical were I to perform there. The people in Cuba, they know what I stand for, and there's a lot of people in Cuba that stand for the same. But they can't say it." He makes sure to call out any acquaintances he sees wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt. "It's like wearing an Adolf Hitler T-shirt and not knowing," he sniffs disapprovingly. "You're gonna offend a lot of people."
In the US, though, it is the treatment of immigrants that concerns him. "The United States was built by immigrants, so it's very sad," he says. "I know everything in life has to have boundaries, rules and regulations. I agree with that. I don't agree when the USA, that lives by a constitution, says, OK, just because you look this way, we're going to ask you for your documentation, or you gotta go back to your country. The Arizona law is like we took 10 steps back. I'm watching all the refugees entering Italy from Libya, too, and all the things going down in Sri Lanka – when I watch these different forms of migration, I relate to it, because my family did the same." Pitbull avoids focusing on such matters in his music – he claims that his aim is to become successful enough to be able to make a change through other channels, citing the charity work Angelina Jolie has been able to do. Still, he makes sure to slip in a resonant line or several, whether expressing solidarity with "ilegales" on 2010's Orgullo, or on this year's global No 1 Give Me Everything, delivering the line, "My family's from Cuba, but I'm an American idol" in the middle of what appears to be a straightforward club pop anthem. "That little line for a lot of us means a lot," he says. "That is me rapping for our people, for anybody who's had to go to another country and develop a whole new life."
"Everyone always looked at us like a bunch of booty-shakers," Pitbull says of music industry attitudes to Miami rappers over the years, from 2 Live Crew to his own peers such as Trina and Trick Daddy. It's an image he prefers to dispel through his actions rather than his music, which he emphasises is escapism to help clubbers forget "their bills and the negativity of the world for two hours". And indeed, there is no reason at all why being a booty-shaker and making a difference should be mutually exclusive.
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