Sound Taste

Good-will hunting and sonic weapons

A NYT piece last week about the 1950s USIA program to have jazz musicians tour "hot spots" around the world to improve the image of the US prompted a lively email discussion among a group of friends, some frequent Sound Taste commenters.

One of the key questions was, if the govt. were to embark on a similar program today, what would it look like, given the diminished grab that jazz has?

We all agreed that hip hop is the equivalent globalized musical form that is nonetheless squarely identified with American cool. But how would it work?

Robert (aka Sovietiko) asked

Pero si es Hip Hop, que considero el mayor export de U.S.A ahora mismo, entonces quien seria?  Los que estan rapeando de to'el billete q tienen? Taria duro enviar un artista a Iran a que le diga a ellos "Pana, nadamas el reloj mio vale mas que lo que tu vas a hacer en un ano !!"
o Black Eye Peas con "mi hump, mi hump" ?

If it's hip hop, which I think is the biggest US export right now, then who would it be? The ones rapping about all the money they have? It would be rough to send an artist to Iran to rap "Son, just the watch I'm wearing is worth more than what you make in a year" or Black Eyed Peas with their "my hump, my hump."

This recent piece about Nas made me think he'd be an intriguing choice.

Kiko didn't think it would work at all today.

Como intercambio cultural, cool. Pero NADA tiene ese tipo de relevancia hoy en dia. DONDEQUIERA tan haciendo jazz, rock, hip-hop, etc. Si ha de ir alguien a'pero--o por lo menos popular--el bulto se lo harian, pero de seguro ya ellos tienen su version criolla. Por ej, cuando Paul McCartney toca en Moscú, el bulto no es por el rock, sino porq el es un ex-Beatle.

As a cultural exchange, cool. But NOTHING has that sort of relevance these days. Jazz, rock, hip hop etc. is being made EVERYWHERE. If someone great -- or at least popular -- were to go, the public would love it, but surely they have their own local version. Eg, when Paul McCartney plays Moscow, the big deal is not that it's rock, but that he's an ex-Beatle.

We disagreed a bit on this point. To me, local versions do not entirely substitute for the "authenticity" still credited to, say, gangsta rap stars.

And I totally agreed with Jorge's musical osmosis via military invasion theory:

pensandolo bien, es muy posible ke esten mandando mas artistas de lo ke pensamos ya ke a estas alturas hay tropas gringas en todas partes del universo, or so it seems...

thinking it over, it's quite possible the US govt. is sending out more artists than we think, given that US troops are all over the universe, or so it seems...

American music has often been imported via military occupation (e.g. Dee Dee Ramone first heard rock n roll as an army brat in Germany, and Japan developed a strong jazz culture fed by the American military presence there post-WWII). A couple of folks have started looking at the playlists of soldiers in Iraq & Afghanistan. I wonder how much of that music is filtering locally.

Thinking about this the past couple of days, I guess that the more interesting cultural exchange can no longer be government-sponsored, not just because there's no one with decent taste left working in government, but because it was a pretty suspect endeavor in the first place.

I think the interesting stuff is happening more at the NGO/indy level. Jeff Chang argues here that although gangsta rap is the soundtrack of the world (especially in conflict zones) there might be some room for more "conscious" hip hop to spread grassroots to various non-Western locales.

Not to say I have a rose-colored vision of the possibilities of cultural exchange, given recent co-optations of anthropologists and other social scientists by the military. Michael at La Guayabita wondered whether ethno/musicologists are likewise being recruited. Seeing recent uses of music as a weapon, I woudn't doubt it.

[1958 pix of Dave Brubeck in Baghdad from Brubeck collection via NYT; pix of Nas by Justin Stephens via NY Mag; pix of soldier w iPod via weikhang.com]

Friday Panamá

I'll admit I don't know much about Panamanian music outside of Rubén Blades, El General and the criminally ignored Los Rabanes. But I haven't been able to get this new-stylee típico remix, "Oiga Morena," outta my head all week.

Squeezytunes (thx for da tip!) calls it "accordion reggaetón." To my ear, it sounds like vallenato processed through some serious machine-generated highhat and snares with hip hop/reggaetón verses laid on top.

Ignore the corniness of the video and just enjoy the song. The remixers are Comando Tiburón, featuring Nenito Vargas on voice (in a singing style that reminds me of Totó la Momposina), and killer accordion courtesy of Los Plumas Negras.

Poking around for more info I also ran into the song below, DJ Black's "Chucha de su madre," which is not as musically compelling, but still has a pegajoso beat and is a great protest song against political corruption, overdevelopment and worsening conditions for the poor. Apparently it was one of the biggest hits in the 2008 Carnaval in Panama.

The video's pretty cool too, with the early-80s looking new-waveish graphics interspersed with street scenes that look like Santo Domingo, like Rio, like Angola.

Dj black - chu... de su madre (sin censura)
Uploaded by antonyoso23

No more stuff!

I saw this coming, and yet I wish that, for once, we had not followed the trend. There is now a site called Stuff Latin People Like. (The first post is dated April 4.)

You already know what this looks like. It's the same as Stuff White People Like and Stuff Black People Love (not to be confused with Stuff Educated Black People Like), except not even mildly funny (like I thought SWPL was, until I read Gary's spot-on critique here) and not even mildly telling about nonwhites' class anxieties (the way SEBPL is).

And what do we get for the wait? Novelas (#2) Pretend Relatives (#7) and Wal Mart (#15). These barely pass the Homer Simpson test (it's funny coz it's true) and would never get past the first go-around on those email chain letters (I still occasionally get the tried-and-true "you know you're Latino/Puerto Rican/Mexican/Dominican if..." lists, with proper local slang subbed in).

As Daniel Hernandez, among many others, said about SWPL, it was a list that had more to do with class/education/tribe than race/ethnicity.

The site seems to be suffering from the Guanabee syndrome: it must have seemed like a good idea late night and drunk, but the joke cannot be sustained past the first few entries. For satire done right, visit Ask a Mexican.

[image: SLPL banner]

The other f'd up campaign for prez

We interrupt our regularly scheduled Friday video with a note on presidential elections that have been more tedious and annoying than the one in the U.S. Dominicans are voting today for prez, and you don't have to be a genius to guess that incumbent Leonel Fernandez will be re-elected.

At this time last year, the three major parties had spent RD$409M (about US$12M) -- by now, they've probably spent ten times that amount. Among the expenses? Ads with celebrity endorsers like Vin Diesel.

One of Leonel's big initiatives in this past term (aside from the metro for the misbegotten) has been making the DR a Hollywood-friendly location. He's taken a few trips to the Dream Factory with his wife to cozy up to movie execs, spending millions from the public till.

This "work," and the fact that a long list of celebs have getaways in Cap Cana and other tropical fortresses in the vicinity, has yielded a couple of shoots -- The Good Shepherd and Miami Vice.

Now where does the muscly ex-bouncer and living video game avatar fit into all this? According to a couple of reliable sources, Vin's bio-dad is some Dominican tiguere, and he spent some time there last year getting cozy with his padre patria. That may explain my unholy attraction to him.

Diesel ran some acting and directing classes last year (don't laugh), and has talked about opening up a film school there. (What Godardian or Almodovarian or Scorscesian insights into film Diesel might offer are still a bit of a mystery, but given the current quality of Dominican-made film, it can't possibly hurt).

All of this greased and facilitated by Hollywood-craving Leonel. So payback time came around, as it did for more unambiguously Dominican celebs like merengueros, bachateros & peloteros.

There's a series of 5 Diesel spots, with overlapping material. Most have amped-up behind-the-scenes action film footage and feature various versions of the following dialogue:

"Dominicanos, que tanto quiero, que lo bueno no cambia. Para mi gente, vota por Leonel, el presidente. Es p'alante que vamos" (the last is the campaign's slogan)

Not as cool as the Obama videos Gary Dauphin wrote about this week, but hey.

Listening to Vin, it appears he's just starting to learn Spanish, but already the tigueraje seems to be rubbing off.

Junot in Dominilandia

I swear I don't have a Junot obsession, and that he doesn't pay me to promote him. But it's not every day a Dominican writer is top literary news in the U.S. When the next one (and the one after that) hits, I'll be there too.

I was curious about how he was received in the DR post-prize. Last week he was one of two featured guests (the other was Derek Walcott) at the Feria del Libro, the country's annual book fair.

When Drown came out and he visited the island, he was as roundly trashed as Julia Alvarez was, for the same stupid reasons those of us living in English are: we've been away too long, we write in English, we write about cultural references they don't get, we're not obsessed enough with Trujillo, and if we are, we get our facts wrong. Nuyoricans can chime in any time.

I wondered if the AngloAmerican literary establishment's seal of approval would change things.

Media reports like this one and this one mostly stuck to the facts: he was there, he was controversial, everyone wanted to kiss his ass. The Listin Diario gave more space to announcing he'd be attending a lunch with the U.S. ambassador than to anything he said. And he was named Literary Ambassador of the Dominican Republic. Um. Yeah. Whatever.

The pull-quote of choice was a good 'un: "Dominican racism prepared me quite well for dealing with racism in the U.S." He shared an anecdote about being kept out of a nice Dominican club a few years back for being too dark.

Other remarks that appeared in press accounts which I suspect hit DR audiences a little hard were his comment that when he hears late dictator lite Joaquín Balaguer called "the genius of the people," "I die laughing."

Film/video editor Harold Martinez was at the talk, and shared some quick comments (we'll update with a more thorough account once he sends it in). He said that for the Dominican literary and political establishment, Junot is "almost an alien" and that "many criollos are pissed because he's not, according to them, Dominican."

The book, the Pulitzer, the visit and the reaction to it in the DR, said Harold, "has just raised the bar in terms of how much we [are] separate from each other...The one's born and raised in the motherland, vs the one's raised in the united."

At the Dominican Studies Association conference last week, I think the same day that Junot spoke in the DR, CUNY trustee Hugo Morales suggested we have an encuentro between island-based writers and diaspora writers. In theory, it's a great idea, but in this world, I have no interest in such a meeting.

We in the diaspora have the vantage point that lets us see links across countries, past superceded rivalries, down to the rooted structure of common oppressions. And many of us have lost our patience with educating a puny intellectual bourgeoisie that sees us as desecho rather than the future.

An exchange like that Morales proposes already happened, in 2001, thanks to a Rockefeller grant secured by Prof. Silvio Torres-Saillant. While Dominican intellectuals were happy to travel to the US on the foundation dime, they did not support the U.S. folks when they traveled to the island. No, thanks.

On the other hand, I do have hopes for the younger generation. As I've noted here, they are not as rigid about distinguishing between aquí y allá, possibly because many of them have moved back and forth. Strengthening those ties would be a more fruitful project.

[Feria del Libro pix via El Nacional; Leonel/Balaguer pix via britannica.com]

Nuyoricans and NuNuyoricans

Is Nuyorican poetry a relic of the past? Judging by the Nuyorican Poets Café's 35th Anniversary celebration at Town Hall last weekend, it's "Aloud and Alive," for real.

There were moments of self-parody in the evening. That came both with some of elders and with some of the younger people, especially the Nuyorican National slam team. They seemed like nice kids, but slams have bred a focus on flash and hectoring energy, a performance pattern that can be, that must be, copied and pasted in order to win, to outshout the other team.

In that setting, poets trying other voices, other tones, things that don't sound like hip hop MCs, tend to get eliminated. Some eventually find their individual sound, but I can't say I have the patience to sit through it all to wait out the chaff.

But on to the show. Some highlights:

Santo Pedro Pietri: The Rev. Pedro Pietri was invoked more often by more poets of all generations than any of the others in the lengthy list of the dead. And when the Café offered an award to the Acentos crew in the Bronx. it came in the form of a life-sized bust of Pedro.

The bust remained on stage the rest of the show, watching over the proceedings. Pedro's young son Speedo came out in Pedro drag and recited a couple of his dad's poems, including one from my favorite "Telephone Booth" series.

Vindicating Rosie Pérez: She was the Hollywood juice in the event, and despite the unbearable squeak of her voice and the treacle of her film, I give Rosie props for maintaining a real, living commitment to her Nuyorican community and important issues like AIDS, unlike some other girl from the block. Funny to think that back in In Living Color, Rosie was the choreographer and that girl was just one of the dancers.

The Black-Latino Alliance: Despite all the ridiculousness about Black-Latino conflict (Who's the biggest? Who's more victimized? Who gets the thin slice of pie?), the show demonstrated some deep historical and contemporary ties, by calling up Black Arts Movement writers and, among others, by the electrifying joint performance by poet Carlos Andrés Gómez and hoofer Savion Glover (a nice surprise for sure).

Best use of annoying pop song: La Bruja really is blossoming from a poet to a well-rounded performer. She came out in the guise of a silly boy, and after a couple of poems, segued into singing to a suspiciously familiar backup track. The chorus: "arroz con habichuelas, elas, elas, elas, eh, eh, arroz con habichuelas, elas, elas, eh, eh." Yup, that song. She had the whole audience singing along.

Yerbabuena is ready for prime time: Why in the world was their four-song set sandwiched in the middle of the show, while the downtempo Banana Pudding got to open and close? People were walking out when the jazz-lite band came back at the end. What we should have had was the rousing voices and drums of the tight-tight YB. All in red and black, they were sharp. And having Flaco Navaja sing with them (which he no longer does on a regular basis) was a treat. We would have bomba'd out of the theater if they'd closed.

[Pix of Yerbabuena, Rev. Pedro bust, Speedo & Rich Villar, Rosie, Carlos & Savion and La Bruja & Flaco by mamarazzi via Flickr]

Junot footnote

On a Facebook group called Junot Diaz Appreciation (I'm a fan but taking a break from joining more groups), there's a link to a just-post-Pulitzer interview with el escritor on an Amazon site called Omnivoracious.

One question references my piece "Why Wao's Pulitzer Matters:"

Amazon.com: I read online that "Diaz is not the first Latino to win the prize, but he is certainly the first cat from the streets to do so." How does that make you feel?

Diaz: I didn't have an easy childhood (who ever does?). I grew up super-poor, welfare, section 8 and food stamps all the way, in a community where us boys worried all the time about getting jumped and where mad people got recruited by the military. My mother was raising five kids on an income that didn't break ten grand a couple of years. She cleaned houses for people a lot better off than us and I still have this image of her on her hands and knees cleaning bathrooms. I'm as nerdy as they come, a deep lover of books, but those long hard years marked me as deeply as that river marked Conrad and maybe that's what the writer means when they say that I'm "from the street." If that's what the writer's getting at then I'll take it, I've no interest in erasing my particular version of the "American Experience." But if this is some hollow ghetto glorification... I didn't think I was so cool when I only had three shirts in high school and had to repeat twice a week. I didn't feel too "street" then. I felt like a goddamn loser.

For the record, "cat from the streets" was my rendering of tiguere. So no, no ghetto glorification going on, especially since I think Díaz is often read as ghetto by ig'nant folks when he's speaking multi-culturally and multi-lingually, at registers all over the cultural map.

But the real reason to read the shorty online interview is because it features a preview of the science-fiction vein Díaz is mining for a book currently called Dark America. A short scene atop a transport, where assorted Travelers hang on to the precarious handholds on the roof despite fast speeds and trash bombs from overpasses, is much as one sees in buses all over the world.

Score another one for the coming canon of brown sci-fi, finally seeing us in the future.

[tiger = tiguere image via solarnavigator.net; bus in India pix via Excellence in Mediocrity blog]

RIP Aimé Césaire

Maybe it just means I'm getting that much closer to death myself, but I feel like too many of the imprescindibles are leaving us these days. Martinican poet and revolutionary (valga la redundancia) Aimé Césaire died today in the island's capital Fort de France.

At 94, Césaire was around to see, and help bring about, the decolonization of his homeland, of Algeria (he was Frantz Fanon's mentor), the Black Power and Pan-Africanist movements. Not all those enterprises worked out perfectly, but they were still essential in moving realities.

Not only was he the founder of the pan-Black Négritude movement, and author of earth-shaking works like Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) and Discourse on Colonialism, but he had a long political career as well.

He helped draft the legislation that turned France's Caribbean colonies into départments d'outre-mer and represented Martinique in French National Assembly. Representing the Communist Party, he was mayor of Fort de France from 1945 until 2001. Himself to the end, last year he refused to meet with Nicholas Sarkozy for his colonialist positions, instead supporting Ségolène Royal.

Reading Césaire's work as a graduate student opened up so many things for me: thinking of the tropics as a source of knowledge (not just a shadow of EuroAmerican originality), finding that punk spirit of creation-in-destruction in his quest for a new language to properly describe new realities, knowing that home and the world are not separate things, and that a lifetime's sustained fight for liberty is a worthy endeavor, even for a writer of ephemeral things.

Check a multimedia (image/sound) homage funded by UNESCO featuring work inspired by Césaire's universe and images. Love this quote from Césaire for the "necessary utopias" section:

Liberty is an act, a fruit. It is nothing more than actualization without end. At the end of the 20th Century, it is nothing more than a serene dream. Ideologies, with their heavy certainties, have shown their limits. Does the need for utopia reside in us, like a hardheaded dream? (My trans.)

Césaire is for me an example of how crucial it is for us to see how splitting the atom of language can happen even from a tiny island. Or rather, that the best views of the world as it is and as it can be only ever really happen from some sort of tiny island, or forgotten hill or lonely desert.

[pix of Césaire young, with Francois Mitterand and by the Caribbean via www.matinikphoto.com]

Breaking News: "Wao" wins Pulitzer

I know, the news is a couple of hours old, but I just got out of class. As I felt in my gut would happen (ask my friends: I've been predicting this for months), Junot Diaz has become only the second Latino ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for "Oscar Wao."

I'm excited not only because he's a Dominican diasporic congenere (generational peer), but because finally I can talk about "the Latino Pulitzer winner" and not mean Oscar Hijuelos, whose Mambo Kings I always found sexist, sentimental and reconfirming in the eyes of the U.S. market the worst stereotypes about Latin heat, obsession with nostalgia and pinga-centrism (Count the number of penis references per page if you don't believe me).

Yes, Junot had already won the National Book Critics Circle Award, which is nothing to sneeze at, but everyone knows the big kahuna in American letters is the Pulitzer.

The only thing that would make me happier this year would be to see the Mets win the World Series.

UPDATE: Here is a quickie commentary I did for New American Media on the significance of Junot's Pulitzer. I claim him as the first tiguere to win the prize.

How We Go to Church

Easter Sunday in "Passing Strange," our curvy narrator Stew slips an exultant  interjection into the crescendo of the first-act closer, when our hero has been freed from his constricting middle-class LA milieu: "This is how we go to church, to the church of rock'n'roll!"

In the play, church is a point of origin, but not a refuge, except for how it helps Youth connect the musical dots between spirituals, blues, soul, gospel and rock. In the youth choir with its bitter, cowed, reefer-smoking director, whose bohemian dreams of "La Baker walking a panther down the Champs Elysées"  always exist elsewhere, away, he finds music as his church, his calling as an artist.

Even as we giggle at callow Youth's rejections of the hipocrisy of his community, as we cheer his passage to loopy Amsterdam and humorless Berlin (which come off as affectionate cartoons), we recognize his Pilgrim's quest, the one that concludes when he realizes that music/art is the ultimate home, but one that must be rooted in history and love -- the real.

Saturday night at Radio City Music Hall, the Queen of Soul complained about her gown. I'd never seen Aretha Franklin before in concert (and I'll never beat the man next to us, who's seen her 527 times), so I don't know if this is part of her intersong routine. She asked for scissors to cut herself out of the sparkly black mermaid gown, a stormcloud of sequins and tulle.

As amazing as it was to see her play American standards like "My Funny Valentine" and "In the Mood for Love," soul classics like "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher" and, duh, "Respect," what got me was the gospel. I'll admit it, I've appreciated gospel mostly at a distance, on recordings. It's a whole other thing to see an artist so in control of her instrument -- and with a backing chorus that included Cissy Houston, so we're not playing around here -- sing "Precious Memories," lifting us in the pauses between notes, up and away from our earthbound worries on the loft of the rising bell of her voice.

And in between these two performances, I was thinking about Cachao, who died over the weekend in Miami, the third of recent deaths (Patato, Tata Güines) taking out important bricks from the foundation of Cuban, Afro, universal music.

His innovation was not just inventing mambo -- saying he came up with a new genre belies the sonic revolution of syncopating the danzón -- but summoning the spirits in every descarga, busting out from the metronome, turning the big European symphonic contrabajo into a drum (I saw him bang on his stand-up bass, the wooden box of it, the deep vibrating strings of it), seeding flowers all over the sound lanscapes of the Afro-verse -- jazz, mambo, son, salsa.

As opposed to the mostly superficial obits in much of the mainstream press, check this recent appreciation by master drummer Rebecca Mauleón.

As much as I dislike Andy García, I have to admit that Master Sessions, Vols. 1 & 2 revitalized Cachao's career and are slammin' discs to boot. "Cachao's Güiro" always makes me feel the gates opening up to the other side, the side of the Real, the side of redemption.

["Passing Strange photo by Ari Mintz/Newsday via Passing Strange site; Aretha Franklin photo by Rahav Segev for the NYT; Cachao photo via photo.net]