SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Even after three CDs and a dozen Grammy Awards, much about Calle 13 remains a mystery or a contradiction. For five years this band has been one of the most popular and innovative in Latin music, without fitting any recognizable mold; Calle 13 is certainly not a salsa band, but neither is it rock, rap or reggaeton.

Then there is the group’s confrontational frontman, who spews political invective onstage and on record and has also offended sensibilities across Roman Catholic Latin America with the sexual explicitness of some of his lyrics. Yet the largest of the many tattoos on his torso is one of his mother .

“If you are writing and really being honest with what you feel, you’re going to be writing about everything you live with, about the society that surrounds you, and not leaving things out because they might bring you problems,” Rene Perez, the band’s lyricist and lead rapper, said in Spanish . “Besides, I haven’t really used all that many bad words.”

Calle 13’s booking at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, and the release of a new CD planned for late this summer, perhaps with some bonus tracks in English to follow, appear to be the start of a concerted effort to expand the group’s audience to include English- speaking pop fans.

“Our goal and objective is the world, and to do that you have to pass through the United States,” said Angelo Medina, who manages Calle 13 and other major Latin pop acts.

In live performance Calle 13 is an 11-piece ensemble, including horn and percussion sections, fond of mixing every pop genre it can think of. But the group’s founders and creative core are a pair of stepbrothers: the boisterous, restless Mr. Perez, 32, whose stage name is Residente, and the slender and restrained Eduardo Cabra Martinez, 31, known as Visitante.

Calle 13 emerged in 2005 as part of the global reggaeton craze . But Calle 13 did not overtly identify itself with that movement and from the beginning sought to incorporate other influences, like rock guitar, cumbia and jazzy clarinet, into its music. “The truth is that the first record had only four reggaetons,” Mr. Cabra said, referring to “Calle 13” (White Lion/Sony), which yielded a pair of hit singles that helped the CD go gold. “Those were the cuts used for promotional purposes, and so that’s the brand that was put on us. But from the beginning, to me, reggaeton never offered anything musically. My brother liked it, yes, but we always tried to execute it in an organic way, with real instruments and mixing it with other genres.”

Born here, Mr. Perez moved in 2001 to the American mainland to go to the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. While Mr. Cabra, who has a computer science degree, played keyboards and guitars in varied bands , Mr. Perez remained there for three years, earning a master of fine arts and studying animation, illustration, sequential art and film.

All of that became useful after he returned home and began making demos with his brother. “What I used to do with my visual art is the same thing I do now with my lyrics,” he explained. “My songs are descriptive, very visual.”

Early in 2007, as they were wrapping up their second CD, “Residente o Visitante,” the brothers made a monthlong trip through the Andes and the Amazon. It was the first time, they said, that they had ever traveled in Latin America on their own .

That journey has been chronicled in “Sin Mapa,” or “Without a Map,” a documentary that Sony released last year. “In a way they were quite innocent, growing up as solidly middle- class guys in Puerto Rico, which because of its relationship with the U.S. can be incredibly insular and sheltered,” said Marc de Beaufort, the Colombian co-director of the documentary. “But they have this enormous curiosity and dedication. Of all the pop groups in Latin America, they struck me as people who want to see things differently.”


By LARRY ROHTER


AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
René Pérez of Calle 13, which plans to release a new CD for late this summer.