When it comes to reggaeton royalty, there’s only one reigning queen: Ivy Queen.

Born Martha Ivelisse Pesante Rodriguez in 1972 in Puerto Rico’s west side, Ivy Queen kicked off her career as a member of the all-male collective The Noise in San Juan. In those days, reggaeton was hardly an identifiable genre; artists primarily fused reggae, hip-hop, dembow, and adjacent genres to get a crowd going. Ivy Queen’s talents made her a legend in the underground, which was made more impactful by the fact that she was a woman in an almost exclusively male world. In fact, her focus on the female experience and female empowerment in her lyrics–a rarity even in the 90’s–led her to a solo career with Sony as one of the pioneers of the nascent genre of reggaeton.

“I was doing freestyle. I was doing hip-hop. I was doing reggae. Because in those days, there wasn’t even such a thing as reggaeton,” Ivy Queen said about the early stages of her career. “Then the music changed. Then comes reggaeton, and there I am waiting for my turn.”

After two commercially unsuccessful solo albums, Ivy Queen’s turn would come with the 2003 release of Diva; to call this album, a “hit” would be an understatement. Diva paved the way for the reggaeton boom and brought the soul of Puerto Rico to a global audience for the very first time. Its most successful track, “Quiero Bailair,” stood out for its sexually-empowered, female-focused lyrics that celebrated women’s bodily autonomy and enjoyed unprecedented momentum on charts around the world. Diva went platinum and was nominated for Reggaeton Album of the Year at the 2005 Billboard Latin Music Awards. By then, everyone knew what reggaeton was.

In the years following, Ivy Queen’s rightful claim as the Queen of Reggaeton was cemented by her addictive, perreo-worthy tracks and creative lyricism that explored music through a female lens and through memorable collaborations with artists such as Divino and Baby Rasta. Ivy Queen’s latest song and video, “Bye Bye”, shows why the Queen is still the Queen.