Tego Calderon is exhausted, but he still can't stop.

The man who's been called the king of reggaeton got up at 5 a.m. in Phoenix to get on a Miami-bound plane. Fourteen hours later he's twitching next to an open window in his suite at the Victor Hotel on Ocean Drive, sucking in fresh air and smoke from his cigarette, looking at the moon and ranting about the music industry.

"I'm hating the business so much," he says. "These people, they lie to your face. They're just interested in what they can get from you."

Yet here he is at the center of an event that's as commercial as the industry gets -- performing for last week's free South Beach concert and media circus celebrating the kick off of the NFL season.

"I would prefer not to sell as much and just make the music I want," Calderon says, laying back on the couch until he's almost horizontal, heavy hooded eyes propped up by determination, his gravelly voice made even rougher by jet lag. "But you know, I got to do my part. If it helps sell the record and get my message out, OK."

Calderon is one of a very few artists in reggaeton with a message besides "party and buy my music." When his debut album El Abayarde hit the states in 2003, fresh from selling a record-breaking 150,000 copies in Calderon's native Puerto Rico, it wasn't just his stinging rhymes and original musicality that drew the attention of everyone from hip-hop magazines to thousands of non-Latino record buyers. It was also his sharp social and racial critiques in a genre mostly known for booty bouncing celebration.

That creates a lot of expectations for the follow-up, The Underdog/El Subestimado.

Calderon, 34, doesn't just want to be popular, he wants to be taken seriously. He wants to define reggaeton -- or at least his version of it -- as original Latin music with as much depth as salsa and the street cred and political consciousness of old school hip-hop, but made for Latinos.

His own success, and that of reggaeton, has made him even more conscious of how he's seen.

"I think it's more important to talk about the strong stuff, that people don't want to talk about," he says. "I want to be more serious. My audience likes it when I hit on strong ideas. And I feel like I have this responsibility now, that I'm going to leave a legacy, that what I write is going to last. When I have something in my head I can't wait to record it."

Craig Kallman, the president and CEO of Atlantic Records, which is releasing Underdog, believes Calderon has the same kind of credibility and connection to the Latin world and beyond that Bob Marley found in Jamaica and then globally.

"He's principled, uncompromising, musically ahead of the curve," Kallman says. He's counting on Calderon's reputation in the hip-hop world, and the range of styles on Underdog, to help it cross over to a broader audience in the same way as Gypsy Kings and Buena Vista Social Club, which Atlantic also distributed.

"We're going to try to broaden the exposure to outside Spanish speaking individuals," Kallman says. "It's about identifying some key songs that can push something fresh and new and different from an artist . . . who can kick down some doors and push the envelope a bit."

The industry demands that can make Calderon seem so bitter may have helped him to push the envelope a bit. In the last three years he's been slapped around by fame and personal pain.

He has been inundated with attention, and jealousy, too, to judge from all the put-downs he issues on Underdog. He is still in a bitter legal dispute with his former partner, Elias Leon of White Lion Records, which distributed Abayarde. Though he was the first reggaeton artist to sign with a major U.S. label when he closed a deal with Atlantic last year, the much anticipated release of Underdog was pushed back from last October to last week.

Calderon lost his father two years ago, and went through a nasty period with a former girlfriend, the mother of his daughter. He married his live-in girlfriend and had a son, Malcolm, who turned 2 on Sunday, and the couple have a third on the way.

All of it is in the lyrics on The Underdog. But he had to step back to see it.

"I never thought all this would happen with the music," he says. "I had to get out of the game for a while. I took my time to organize my thoughts and make a record I could be proud of. It was a hard process, because there were a lot of things happening in my life, a lot of changes, a lot of pain."

On A Mi Papa Calderon pays tribute to his father, to whom he was very close and who died suddenly from an aneurysm two years ago. On Oh Dios he lets loose his rage about the dispute with his former girlfriend over their daughter Ebony, now 5. He says they've since resolved their problems.

"Really I just wanted to get rid of the pain," Calderon says of A Mi Papa. "I did the song like I was talking to him, telling him about the respect I have for him, how I wish he could meet my new son, how my older daughter misses him." He says it just poured out. "I wrote it like a letter, quickly, it seemed like I already had it in my head. I had never written a song so fast, in an hour and a half. Oh Dios took a little longer, but it was the same way -- spontaneous, like I had it inside."

It was his father who was largely responsible for Calderon's independent outlook in politics and music. Both parents were part of the minority that supports Puerto Rican independence, which Calderon says caused them to reject American traditions like Santa Claus and Thanksgiving. Although it made him feel like an outsider as a child, he says it also fostered his ability to go his own way.

"It made me stronger," Calderon says. "My father didn't go along with the rules. I got a lot from him."

Calderon's politics come out directly on Veo Veo (I see, I see), where he rips into the criminal justice system, the war in Iraq, and hypocrisy and injustice in general. But they also show in his rejection of the usual glittery status symbols. He took off his bling bling before going to Sierra Leone this summer to participate in a VH1 documentary on conflict diamonds, the sale of which has funded that country's brutal civil war.

He says he was ambivalent at first.

"It was hard for me to record all these people's pain when we weren't going to do anything for them," he says. "It was really hard to see the people, no water, no electricity, no food, living in so much pain and still content. I saw kids, old people with their legs missing. I didn't see any commitment from the government towards their own people. It's crazy, they have nothing and their land is full of diamonds."

But it also made him more determined to focus on values besides the material glorification that he sees dominating hip-hop and now reggaeton.

"I don't think people in Puerto Rico have pride in themselves," he says. "We're trying to act like hip-hop, like Americans, but that's not us. I understand, you come from a humble family, you want to show off what you got. … You gotta be grateful for what you have. When I came from Sierra Leone I thought, why am I paying attention to such stupid stuff?"

Yet he loves making music, even if he's ambivalent about reggaeton.

"I don't want to be part of this reggaeton pop thing," Calderon says. "The record companies are just doing it to make money, and it's hurting the music … Reggaeton is part of the present of Latin music, no one can erase that. But it needs to evolve, to develop more creativity."

If some songs on Underdog exult in the juicy, exuberant heat of the scene, others mock its posturing, whether by MC's or fans. The music ranges into blues, funk, even jazz, and salsa singer Oscar D'Leon guests on a version of his hit Llora, Llora. Calderon's favorite track is a full-tilt, old school salsa, with live musicians, called Chango Blanco (White Crow), about a crow who tries going white and decides he's better off black.

"My pride isn't making reggaeton," Calderon says. "My pride is that I make music."