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 Best Tony Acceptance Speech Ever

In the Heights is, at heart, a classic old-timey Broadway musical (as I said here), and Passing Strange has a story in subject and expression closer to my sensibilities. But I was still bowled over by ItH's Best Musical win last night.

But the real fun in the Tony show came earlier, when show creator and star Lin Manuel Miranda accepted the award for Best Score, with what has to be one of the best speeches I've ever seen, if only because it was rapped.

Not only did he thank everyone he needed to, and name-checked lifetime award winner Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, but he managed to do it under the alloted time. Here it is (no videos up yet):

I used to dream about this moment, now I'm in it!
Tell the conductor to hold the 'ton a minute
I'll start with Alex Lacamoire and Bill Sherman
Kevin McCollum, Jeffrey Seller and Jill Furman
Quiara for keeping the pages turning
Tommy Kail for keeping the engine burnin'
For bein' so discernin' through every all nighter
Dr. Herbert for tellin' me "you're a writer"
I have to thank Andy Blank for every spank
Matter fact thank John Bizetti for every drink
Thank the cast and crew for having each other's backs
I don't know about God but I believe in Chris Jackson
I don't know what else I got, I'm off the dome
I know I wrote a little show about home
Mr. Sondheim, look, I made a hat
Where there never was a hat! 
It's a Latin hat at that!
Mom, Dad and Cita, I wrote a play,
Y'all came to every play
Thanks for being here today
Vanessa who still makes me breathless
Thanks for lovin' me when I was broke and makin' breakfast
And with that, I want to thank all my Latino people
This is for Abuela Risa in Puerto Rico
Thank you.

While it was not the sweet brown sweep one would have hoped, the two shows did well overall. In the Heights won Best Musical, Best Score, Best Choreography, and Best Orchestrations (4 out of 13), and Passing Strange won Best Book (not too shabby -- most of its seven nominations were against tough competition, primarily from ItH).

Now let's see if this opens the Great White door for more quirky shows that are not revivals, and feature brown people not playing lions in a cartoon adaptation.

UPDATE: Guanabee uploaded the video. Here it is.

[Lin Manuel photo via Broadway.com; Stew pix via Tony Awards site]

What's up with John Leguizamo?

Hangin' with the Homeboys is not only one of my favorite reel New York movies and a great exploration of male friendships, but to date it's one of John Leguizamo's best naturalistic roles. And those are far and few in between.

Leguizamo is usually best when his performances border on the ridiculous. For every Summer of Sam or Romeo and Juliet, where his Tex Avery mania works, there are goo explosions like The Pest and Spawn, or lugubrious messes like Love in the Time of Cholera. Leguizamo has only occasionally translated his onstage genius into a good cinematic groove.

He sometimes falls into a cliché of himself. In the recent Paraiso Travel (which screened at the Tribeca Film Fest but not sure when it's going into general release), he is once again the bitchy queeny gay/tranny (see To Wong Foo and several character skits in his theater work). Paraiso trailer here.

Leguizamo is super talented but needs directors with an inner crackhead to channel his craziness. Hence, Spike Lee, Baz Luhrmann and George Romero get him. Ironically, while he seems a living cartoon, I have never liked any of his comic book, video game or animation roles (I'm on the fence about Ice Age). And I give him credit for doing what few Latino actors do, appearing in Latin American productions (Crónicas, Paraiso Travel).

For a while, he kinda disappeared, but this year he's back with a vengeance. Aside from Paraiso Travel and The Happening, which opens Friday, he's coming out in Alfredo de Villa's Humboldt Park with Freddie Rodriguez, Righteous Kill and The Ministers. I know little about the last two, and have no high hopes for the Shyamalan flick. But let's see how he makes out in the Chicago-set drama.

Tonight, he's going to be giving a talk sponsored by the NYT. Alas, the event is sold out. But there'll be plenty of him to go around for the remainder of 2008 (he'll also be onstage in a play he did not write, American Buffalo. Hmmm.)

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]

Who's local? NYers and belonging

"No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey's, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge. That before the internet cafe plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mom-and-pop operation that used to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now." (Colson Whitehead, "City Limits," The Colossus of New York)

It's the eternal fight. Who belongs here? Who gets to claim New Yorker status? Who are the arrivistes and who are the natives?

My family's been here since 1959, I was born here, went to public school, have witnessed the city up close and personal for at least half of my life. I have no doubts about my New York-ness. But there are others who can also claim it.

When Whitehead's essay came out, it hit a chord with me and all my old New York friends. It was a point of connection between us native-born and those who had gone native. But it still required a price of entry. While Whitehead focuses on personal geographies, what is implied is a series of relationships, not just to sites, but to communities.

Which brings me to a couple of pieces that came out this week. David Gonzalez, the NY Times' BoogieRican conscience, wrote a post in the City Room blog about the unbearable whiteness (and occasional blackness) of the city's "Ask a Local" tourism campaign.

David has several beefs, but one is that of all the celebs featured in the ads, 80% are white and none are Latino, in a city that's currently 27% Latino. NYC&Co. said that Willie Colón will be in a future ad, as will America Ferrera (Mexican Ugly Betty is from Jackson Heights; Honduran America is from LA).

But the deeper issue is that the celebs featured, whether only nominal NYers (Jimmy Fallon?) or bona fide New Yorky people (Debbie Harry, born and raised in New Jersey), end up giving very Manhattan-below-96th St.-centric advice, as if there is nothing to see in the nabes where non-whites live.

This was one of the reasons I co-wrote Nueva York. I wanted others to come to my city and do the sort of tourism I do when I travel. Check out different nabes, different groups within a city, their clubs, their markets, their everyday lives. But NYC&Co. (which was supremely uninterested in our project) has no imagination.

Then there was the hanging-on-a-slim-thread cover story in this week's New York magazine, another retread of Brooklyn as the site of anxiety over who "belongs" more: the "brownstoners" or the "bitter renters." All assumed to have access to home ownership if only they tried hard enough. Public housing people (never mind any Section 8 or been-in-the-hood-before-it-was-desirable folks) are only background at best, a nuisance at worst.

It's one of my basic beefs about changes in NY chemistry. The city has always had ambitious young white things moving in among the native poor. But it used to be they had to learn to get along. What's new is that people with $3M homes think that somehow entitles them to more rights about the space than their poorer neighbors. Call it emotional eminent domain.

[pix of my high school, Newtown, in Elmhurst, via forgotten-ny.com; Screen cap of Debbie Harry "Just Ask the Locals" ad via NYC&Co.; illustration for "The What You Are Afraid Of" via NY Mag]

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]

Latinos opened the door for gay marriage

I have to admit, I only read the headlines in California's Supreme Court gay marriage decision this week.

So I did not notice the revealing tidbit that Gary Dauphin footnoted a couple of days ago: the Supremes' decision was largely based on the 1948 case Perez v. Sharp, which challenged interracial marriage bans way before Loving v. Virgina (1967) and involved a Mexican American woman and a Black man.

The reason the couple was denied a wedding license and the case went to court was that Andrea Perez was considered "white." Gary posted her picture. I'm re-posting it here. If she's white, I'm downright Aryan.

Like Mendez v. Westminster, the school desegregation case that predated Brown v. Board of Ed by almost a decade, Perez v. Sharp was also a key precedent-setter with Latino plaintiffs that crowbarred the door open to extend fundamental civil rights to others.

Gary argues that it's no coincidence that this case (I would argue both cases) took place in the other state I consider home, California. This supports Roberto Lovato's theory that California is ground zero for Latino-led radical social change in this country.

Yet another instance in which we are erased from the history of fighting for American civil rights, human rights. Been here all along, time to make sure others notice.

Tony-torn

The Tony nominations announced on Tuesday have me in a pickle. I am, improbably, cheering for not one, but two musicals.

In the Heights amazingly received the most nominations of any of this year's contenders, 13 total. I wasn't as wowed by it as everyone else was, mostly because I like my entertainment a little darker.

But I know how rare it is for a Latino-made play about Latinos to make it on Broadway. It's only happened a handful of times before: Short Eyes (which won an Obie and was nominated for six Tonys), Zoot Suit, Freak (which lost the Tony to "Art" as best play in 1998).

In the Heights is bubbly, and carried by the lightness and bounce of Lin Manuel Miranda. The other actors are uniformly kinetic and sweet. And the songs are not what you'd hear in the Copa, but hey, this is musical theater. And I do appreciate the break this play represents from the rut of portraying Latinos as always already only being involved in drugs-prison-gangs. (Although the curmudgeon in me wonders if the appeal to whites isn't a hunger to see happy darkies.)

And then there's Passing Strange. I am still kicking myself for missing the original run at the Public Theater, but I was blown away when I saw it at the Belasco, which still felt as close to a cabaret as a biggish theater can. As I wrote about here, it hit a deep chord in me (and in a lot of my other artist/intellectual/bohemian friends) as an accurate portrayal of our journeys to the Real.

The two plays are head to head in every category inn which Passing Strange is nominated (it has a total of 7 nominations). I'm just hoping for some kind of Salomonic solution. I mean, their main competition is Xanadu and Cry-Baby (how in the hell did that wonderful pervert John Waters become a preferred Broadway musical source?).

[Lin Manuel pix via Moxie the Maven; Passing Strange pix via variety.com]

Literary insularism: a wee rant

My post last week about the diasporic-phobic intellectuals in the DR prompted some intense responses, mostly by dominicanos here and mostly in private.

But island-based poet/editor Frank Báez wrote a longish, eloquent assessment in the comments section I share with you in translation below.

When Junot came to Santo Domingo to present “Drown,” not only did people think his book was garbage, but at the reading one guy stood up and offered to punch him.

That was more than 10 years ago. Since then, Dominican intellectuals strived to destroy the book and as the years went by and Junot did not publish a follow-up they put him down.

The funny thing is that all those people who destroyed him and made fun, people I imagine sticking pins into a Junot voodoo doll, are the same who weeks ago were photographed at his side in the home of the gringo ambassador and in the National Palace, celebrating his Pulitzer. “The first Dominican Pulitzer.”

The sad thing is none of these intellectuals have written about the book. Sad, but good for some, was also his visit to the Feria del Libro in 2006 when only a handful of people went. Since everyone dissed him, some of us were able to get to know him, speak to him and stay in touch. This led to his working with our magazine Ping Pong and the journal Hermano Cerdo.

My girlfriend tells me that of the people who went to the talk at this year’s Feria del Libro, an audience of more than 300 people, only a couple of students, no more than a dozen people, had copies of Drown or Wao with them. The people who introduced him and those who asked questions used a wikipedia entry as reference. They knew nothing of his work, and asked only the most general of questions, nothing related to the books. I think that says it all.

When we talk about Dominican literary intellectuals, we still only refer to people who are no longer qualified to make those judgments by the simple fact that they do not partake of a literary life. Meaning, they’re not publishing books that are interesting, or keeping an active, thoughtful life in the literary world and media. They’re people who only attend literary cocktails, who I call coctelistas.

Did I mention media? In Santo Domingo, we no longer see literary sections in newspapers. They’ve all been dismantled. Journals are nowhere to be seen. The only presence of Dominican writers is on the internet.

I think that instead of organizing meetings that are used for tourism (which is not bad in and of itself), it would be more fruitful to find a way for literary projects here and there to get to know each other. Let’s translate, and edit good books.

For example, we could do one called “La Isla Entera” (The Whole Island) where Dominicans from all places can write. Not just the ones on the island, but the ones in the U.S., in Spain, Holland, Argentina, etc. An anthology to pull all those folks together.

Title aside (which to me implies that it should include work from Haitian writers), I love this project. Anyone who wants to give me or Frank names of folks who should be in there can do so by emailing me via this site, or him at his site.