A favorite pasttime when I come to the DR is to survey street music vendors.
The results so far this trip? Tops are reguetón and "merengue de la calle," a speeded-up rhythm heavy on the bass (the big hit these days is "El baile de la maraca" which looks a lot like current soca; more observations on the genre in another post).
But there are some interesting twitches in bootleg CD sales that say a lot about local tastes.
At the truck stop Turey on the road north out of the capital, the seller said that Omega y su mambo violento, Tulile and some guy named El Lápiz were the biggest sellers. But I found a CD copy of a rare LP by 1970s folkies Los Guaraguao, "Casas de cartón," which he said had been so popular that the copy I bought was his last.
He also had CD of Haitian gagá music with a home-made cover (not a copy of a legit cover, as many of the others had). So much for the popular perception that all Dominicans hate Haitians.
The rest of the stock included merengue, bachata and reggaetón mixes (Lo mejor del 2007 for each genre), old standby balladeers (i.e. Camilo Sesto) and assorted porno DVDs. The market, in its rawest form.
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