Plena is the Puerto Rican music genre that has received the most international exposure thanks to local pop artists like Ricky Martin and Yolandita Monge, or urban artists like Bad Bunny. One reason ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Credit: Eric Rojas* For the past week, the number one song in the world has been a plena. On January 11, the title track of Bad ...

In Santurce, a poor suburb outside San Juan, Puerto Rico, there’s a bus that doesn’t run anymore, but the stops it once madeparadasstill lend their names to the densely populated neighborhoods. Ask ...

Plena Libre combines the traditional Plena and Bomba rhythms with other Afro-Caribbean styles and jazz to create a contagious dance music that honors the group’s deep sense of the unique indigenous ...

In the Latin music scene, there's always an innate pairing of the musical styles bomba and plena as one genre, but the two Afro-Puerto Rican genres are quite distinct. In this, the 27th segment of ...

With its infectious call and response vocals and topical lyrics commenting on the events and gossip of the day, the music genre plena is known in Puerto Rico as the people’s newspaper. And much like ...

Michael Eckroth had clear goals in mind for this project—"to create music that was lyrical, modern, true to its Afro-Latin roots, but never purist in its approach"—and he's accomplished his mission ...