Sound Taste

What happened to rock en español?

The first cover piece I ever wrote (many moons ago) was for the SF Weekly, on a Mexican rock band called Maldita Vecindad, which was going on its first US tour, and on the (then) growing phenomenon of home-grown Latin American rock. This predated the marketing term "rock en español" by a couple of years.

The blooming of RNE scenes in the early to mid-90s in Latin America and the US was a heady experience to live through. I'd grown up a Dominican rockera/punk, which even in NYC made me a freak. So hearing Mexican kids worship the electric guitar and sing in DF slang felt like home.

I became part of the SF rockero scene, befriending bands, writing about them in the alternative press and in a local zine, going to every show from Berkeley Square's Rockola on Sunday nights to warehouse shows in San Jose. I even wrote a piece in Spin that claimed that RNE was one of the ten harbingers of the future in rock. 1995 was a good year.

More than a decade later, though, aside from Aterciopelados, Café Tacuba and Kinky, few Latin American bands (and no U.S. Latino bands) are known outside of a small subculture. Part of that is the fact that the U.S. music public has pretty much splintered into nothing but subcultures -- with the exceptions of globalized hip hop/pop -- but part of that was the colony collapse disorder that hit the U.S. RNE scenes starting about 1997.

What made me think about this was a recent Mun2 piece forwarded to me by Enrique Lavin trying to retrospectively analyze what happened to Latin American rock. The writer interviewed several folks who were in the trenches from the get-go, like Elena Rodrigo, who was a manager, show organizer, and worked at the first Latin rock indie in the US, Aztlán Records, and Ed Morales, who at the late, great Village Voice was like me one of a handful of Latino writers championing the "movimiento"; label peeps Tomás Cookman and Camilo Lara and other scenesters, organizers and promoters.

Their basic post-mortem is: RNE was a niche music, the term was a marketing imposition, reggaetón/hip hop is more "universal" and easier to market, the industry never properly supported the genre.

Of the comments on why U.S.-based bands never blew up the way Latin American bands did, I agree the most with Ed Morales' comment:

As much as I liked bands like Pastilla, Volumen Cero and Maria Fatal, I think the bands that developed in the U.S. didn't have as much quality and grassroots support as bands from Latin America. When bands like Caifanes, Fabulosos Cadillacs, Tacvba and Aterciopelados toured the U.S., I saw tremendous enthusiasm. I also saw them play in Latin America and there was even more enthusiasm. These bands represented the passion of Latin American kids who, for the most part, have a more difficult life than kids in the U.S. They also represent an organic part of a local Latin American culture. The U.S. bands did not represent "community" in the same way, despite their talent and passion.

Here are my dos cheles of analysis. It was basically a failure of infrastructure.

The industry: Definitely there was never the proper support, bc labels saw Latinos as a niche market, and Latin rockeros as a niche within a niche. They're just barely catching on to how big Mexican regional (another marketing invento) is. And as Morales points out, by the time RNE arrived, the major label ship had already sprung a big leak. With few exceptions (usually on public/independent radio), neither rock nor Spanish-language radio ever made any space for RNE. Only places like Tower or Ritmo Musical carried the stuff. And the mainstream music press fell into the "perpetual novelty" syndrome. Even into the early 2000s, I was asked by editors to explain that, yes, Latin Americans and Latinos listened to and made rock music.

Venues/touring: In the halcyon days of the mid-1990s, SF had several weekly/monthly spaces that booked bands from abroad and local bands. LA had even more. And NYC had a few: Brownies, the Spiral, La Kueva (which I always despised), and a couple of others. La Kueva still exists, in a seriously diminished form, and D'Antigua in Jax Hts has some shows but finding a show takes a lot of active effort. When there is a regular venue where you can expect a certain kind of show to happen, you keep up with their bills. Even in the email list/MySpace age, it takes a lot of effort to find where and when shows are in NY. Only LA really still has a vital scene. But even back then, few bands toured beyond their immediate area. Lack of venues made it difficult to put together a tour, so bands lost out on one of the tried-and-true ways to build a public.

Scenes/Audience: While there were significant regional differences, I don't entirely buy the idea that East Coast, West Coast, Miami, Chicago and TX were too dissimilar to amount to a cohesive "scene." Witness the punk/hardcore "movement" of the 80s. There were massive regional differences, yet people felt connected to a larger thing. I had that same feeling at the start of RNE (btw, I hate the term too, but it's a convenient shorthand), but I never saw the level of DIY I had seen with punx.   

Musical quality: This is a big bugaboo, which a couple of the Mun2 interviewees mention (esp. re: Pastilla, Maria Fatal, Volumen Cero). A lot of US-based bands either stayed safely within the confines of their subgenre (power pop, heavy metal) without making their music as polished as a glass marble, or took on the mestizo aesthetic (Latin American traditional rhythms plus electric guitar or ska) and never fully digested all their influences. As I think Kiko has said to me, the seams always showed. Most gave it up before making a breakthrough. Remember when Luaka Bop signed local heroes King Changó and we thought that was it? RNE needed its Malcolm McLaren, its Bernie Rhodes, its Ian MacKaye.

When people say that the Latin American groups were better, they forget that what we saw here in the US was the cream of the crop of the entire continent (that's where MTV Latin America and the Latin American subsidiaries of labels come in).

Maybe it's that old desire for "transcendence," to fit into an international market, that ends up compromising the sound/vision of the groups. I'm thinking of No Wave which was tiny, tiny movement, but some people argue was tremendously influential. (It was for me, and it did give the world Sonic Youth, though I think the claims of ultimate "importance" are a little overstated).

Are there good Latin American rock bands now? Sure. And I don't just mean the usual suspects. Are there good US-based bands? Probably, though I basically have to stumble on them online. They have ZERO industry resources available to them, since the labels have decided that the best bang for the buck is with bands from the big countries (Mexico-Colombia-Argentina) who have large national audiences, play well in other parts of Latin America and play well in the US. Never mind bands from Central America or the DR/PR, or Andean groups, eg.

Clearly, I could go on for days on this subject.

[image of Maldita's self-titled debut album via wikipedia; Kinky pix by hookm3up via flickr; Ian MacKaye pix via Aquarius Records]

"Stupid design"

Summer's a little more random, so enjoy, as I did, a great science lesson, courtesy of the only Black astrophysicist most of us know, Neil deGrasse Tyson. (thanks to Liza at Culture Kitchen for the tip).

Be warned: The slide show includes nasty pix of fetuses with birth defects.

DeGrasse Tyson suggests that better engineering would have given us, like dolphins, separate orifices for eating and breathing, to cut down on the possibility of choking. But my favorite line comes near the end: "What is up with what's between our legs? An entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system. No engineer would ever design that."

I've been stunned hearing what I thought were educated, intelligent people buy into the stupidity of an anthropomorphic higher being consciously designing specifics of life on earth and the universe (as opposed to designing the rules that allow those things to happen).

NdGT is not just a fortunate affirmative action spokesman for science, but one of the rare people who has both the abstract skills of the scientist and the social-verbal skills of the poetic streetcorner philosophizer.

We should all be able to explain basic science in a way the inner 8-year-old in us can understand. But fewer of us understand basic science concepts well enough to explain it even to ourselves. Hence, the gap that religious know-nothings have exploited. So go out and ponder the principle of the lever.

The City of Lost Cassettes

A while ago, I wrote about how cassettes are still a viable format in some places outside the U.S.

Last week, I found a place in NYC where that's also true.

Walking down Moore St., in the last holdout of old-school Boricuosity in hipster-infested Williamsburg, I stopped by one of my fave record stores, Johnny Albino's. Here is what I saw:

Click on the pix to enlarge it, but the two key elements are these: the sign saying "$1 each cassettes" and the stacks and stacks below.

Johnny Albino's is one of the last salsa middens in the city (Casa Amadeo in the Bronx and Casa Latina in El Barrio are two other ones holding out). Not only does it have a great cross-section of old-school salsa and merengue, and one of the funkiest boogaloo one-off selections (Albino himself was a trío singer back in the 40s and 50s), but it has concert DVDs, new stuff -- reggaetón and local groups like Yerbabuena. But really, what you go there for is to excavate.

There was lots of stuff I recognized in the cassettes -- La Lupe, Trio Reynoso, Milly y Los Vecinos -- and some crazy-looking stuff that had me salivating, from the days when you could tell a record by its cover.

There were hundreds of tapes, an assortment of close to a hundred different recordings. "You should see the boxes I have back there, unopened!" said Johnny.

So, who the heck buys these? Johnny said that cassette buyers fell into the following categories:

1) folks who never swapped out the cassette player from their cars;
2) old folks who never quite got used to that new-fangled shiny disky thing;
3) fans who know how rare some of these are and buy the tapes to transfer them to digital.

Makes sense. I have nothing I can play these on, but I am tempted to go back and drop an Andrew Jackson. I mean, each of these cassettes is only one cent more than a single song on iTunes.

The Practice of Everyday Music

I’m not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.... The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world’s popular music is a good thing, for the most part.

David Byrne, discussing his current intriguing project, "Playing the Building."

It's not the first time the insightful Byrne has pondered the future of music. He's talked about it here, here and here, among other places.

I guess what struck me the most in the quote above was the image of music-making returning to a more generalized practice, a part of everyday life, rather than something reserved for "professionals."

When I visited Morocco a couple of years ago, a couple of wacky Spaniards (there's always a couple of wacky Spaniards in every Morocco story) latched onto my group's Sahara excursion. They brought rum, wine, kif and a guitar. They sang Joan Manuel Serrat and the Beatles. They jammed with the Berber guides. Were they great? No. But they made the evening so much more fun.

One of my lifelong regrets is not playing an instrument (I know, it's never too late, but integrating practices into my schedule is more than I can manage right now). Used to be that at Latin house parties, there would be live music, not because people knew musicians, but because someone brought instruments, there was a common corpus of songs and everyone was encouraged to participate.

This doesn't mean that everyone was equally good -- talent still counts -- but that being OK was fine. It was about participating in a collective activity.

When we discussed the role of music in community-making in my Puerto Rican culture class this semester, we found out that none of my 15 students knew how to sing or play an instrument. Which cuts them, us, off from alternate ways of transmitting knowledge. Talking is not always the best way to communicate.

Even with the accessibility of digital music-making means, I see too few of us taking up music as fun, as a relaxing form of self-expression, as communal activity. Most kids I see, once they get past a certain age, can only see music as a commodity.

Phenomena like American Idol is both antidote and symptom: at the start, you have "regular people" who can (allegedly) sing well. But the point is not just the approval of the collective, but the possibility of using the contest as a short-cut into the market. Even runners-up get recording contracts. Otherwise, they're real losers.

Sleep Dealer at BAM

Sleep Dealer, the border sci-fi film I wrote about here and here is screening tomorrow in Brooklyn as part of Sundance at BAM series.

I'd recommend you go see it, but scoring tix might be difficult. According to the BAM website, you can no longer buy tickets online, but "a limited number of tickets may be released at the box office on the day of the screening."

This weekend director Alex Rivera told me that he scored a distribution deal with Maya Entertainment (which I would have known if I'd read the story here). He added that the film should be released next February, which he said "feels like a long time away." Funny to hear him say that when the film itself took the better part of a decade to make.

So, if you can't catch it at BAM, stay tuned for the wider release. And the film's website also lets you sign up for a mailing list that'll alert you to other screenings.

Latinas opened the door for gay marriage, Pt. 2

This week we found out New York has opened a back-door way to legalize gay marriage in the state. And once again, like I wrote about here, there's a courageous Latina setting precedent.

Gov. David Paterson's decision to have state agencies draw up rules consistent with accepting same-sex marriages performed in places where it is legal to do so (such as Canada, Massachusetts and, maybe soon, California) was based on a court case decided a few months back, Martinez v. Monroe County.

Rochester residents Patricia Martinez and Lisa Ann Golden won the right to have Martinez's health benefits as a community college administrator extended to her spouse, who she'd married in Canada in 2004. Not a shocker that health insurance has become important enough to warrant enduring a rough, invasive court proceeding.

The case was reported when the decision came down, and was clearly recognized as a precedent-setter. The news this week in the low-key directive drafted by the gov's legal counsel was that by asking state agencies to revise their policies and regulations to recognize same-sex marriages performed legally elsewhere, Paterson was institutionalizing a potentiality.

Let me be clear. I'm not a defender of the importance of marriage as a concept. After all, the institution was invented to control women and property (thanks, Engels!). But seeing families and couples denied rights automatically granted to any random married couple is just wrong.

[Pix of Patricia Martinez and Lisa Ann Golden via NYT]

To Boldly Go

Just as a friend thought enough of my post about the Cali Supremes decision on gay marriage and Latinos to re-post it in its entirety, I can't say that I can improve on mole333's post over at the fabulous Culture Kitchen. Nothing like the meeting of geekery and social justice.

Now that the California Supreme Court (all but ONE of whose judges were appointed by Republican Governors, mind you) has declared marriage equality Constituional, we can congratulate George Takei (better known as Mr. Sulu in the original Star Trek) and Brad Altman for their upcoming marriage.

Photo from George Takei.com.

I should note that when non-controversial (which often means "safe-seeming to your Average American) do controversial things, it breaks barriers better than when controversial people do controversial things. The death of Rock Hudson from AIDS made it acceptable in America to die of AIDS. That may sound strange to many, but before Rock Hudson died of AIDS, I remember many people who died suddenly "after an illness" and no one would dare speak the name of the illness. It may have been Magic Johnson who made it okay to LIVE with AIDS in America, but Rock Hudson taught America to accept AIDS as something we didn't have to speak of in mere whispers.

Perhaps the marriage of likeable (and "safe-seeming to the average American") George Takei and his parnter of 21 years (longer term than the vast majority of "traditional" marriages) can break down barriers better than the marriage of someone like Ellen DeGeneres could.

Congratulations to George and Brad.

Congrats indeed. They're going early, but many are following.

The Return of Harold & Kumar

The Saturday 9 pm screening of H&K at downtown Brooklyn's multiplex was the place to be. Not only was the audience very brown, even for Brooklyn, but we ran into several friends there. As my friend Roberto put it, "the beanerati, the chinorati and the Gujarati" were out in force.

First things first: was it as good as the first one? Yes and no. As a sequel, it could never be the breath of fresh air that H&K Go to White Castle was. And as much as I loved the intent of the more politicized humor, the satire of white privilege and racism was blunter than in the first. Writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg are good-natured rather than acidic. This is no "South Park" or "Colbert Show."

Structurally, this is a reprise of "White Castle." H&K's road trip through the American South west to Texas (rather than South through Jersey) has them meet the same sorts of characters they did in the first. Chris Melloni is back, as is the anthropomorphic bag of weed (only the deus ex machina cheetah from the first movie is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he had a contract dispute?).

And thank god for the extended cameo by Neil Patrick Harris. Never enough of his whoring, snorting alter ego.

The extended trailer that's been circulating online gives away a lot of the movie's punchlines and funny set pieces. Which doesn't make 'em less funny. But here are a couple of things I noticed.

The new Harold: Like the 6 million dollar man, he's "Better. Stronger. Faster." While my devotion for Kal Penn burns bright, John Cho/Harold Lee got a little extra zing in this version. (Look for a hilarious backstory detail in a flashback to H&K's college years). And how can I not love a guy obsessed with food?

The Latin/Asian alliance: In the last movie, the Harold-Maria romance was a small glimpse into a different social order, not dependent on the Black-white racial axis. In this movie, there are a couple of key moments that establish Latin-Asian solidarity. H&K escape Gitmo with the help of some Chevy truck-powered balseros, and in the KKK rally they stumble into, they are called out as "Mexicans!" Implicitly, we're all in the same yola.

Too blunt: Aside from the caricatures of "Arab-looking" Gitmo prisoners, the weakest moment of the film is the extended scene with "President Bush," which plays up his "regular guy" image. Even under the fellowship of a shared joint, it's hard to reconcile the guy who says "I'm in the government and I don't trust it" with the guy who has pushed us into a security state that, um, puts our heroes in secret custody in a judirical no man's land.

And of all the racial stereotype-jokes put in the hands of zealot DHS agent Rob Corddry, one scene where he points a gun at a black man with a cell phone hits just a little close to home days after the Sean Bell verdict.

The writers' biggest political statement -- aside from the obvious one about racial profiling -- is arguing that despite the war on drugs, we are one nation under a bong, and that anyone who pretends otherwise is a "hypocritizer." Characters of all ethnicities, social levels and security clearances are stoners at heart. A weed utopia.

Speaking of people who must be high, Racialicious has a great discussion based on Tom Carson's GQ article on the movie that bizarrely claims that H&K are, alternately, "Happy-Go-Lucky Negros" and closet Jews. The piece is a perfect example of how stuck mainstream society still is on Black-white racial paradigms and Jews as the only minority with assimilation issues.

Carson's reading of the movie completely discounts how the first became successful, in great part, because it was discovered by Asian Americans eager to escape the binds of model minority status. It's not always about you, white man.

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]