The use of the term timba in popular language and songs points to a close semantic relation between the words timba and rumba Discussing the origins of tumba, Leon relates the word to “a series of terms of Afroamerican origin like tumba, macumba, tambo, and others meaning collective partying, with the general meaning of group, meeting.” This seems to suggest an identity of words such as tumba, timba and rumba, meaning both drum and the occasion where drumming and dancing takes place. The hypothesis seems to be corroborated by folklorist Rogelio Martinez-Fure, who “suggests that mba, the root of the word rumba, now refers to dance and is found throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. According to him, it represents similar festive dance events and has similar accents in the dancing, e.g., on flirtation, chase of the female, or bumping the pelvis area.” This might confirm a semantic connection between words such as rumba and timba and names of other Afro-Latin American dances like Cuban mambo, Puerto Rican bomba, Colombian cumbia, Brazilian samba, Argentinian and Uruguayan candombe and Peruvia malambo.

–Vincenzo Perna, Timba: The Sound of the Cuban Crisis (2005)

Enjoy the Symbolic. Don’t trust the state.

Badiou offering some sage advice on the Obama victory. I actually think that people in the U.S. are less sanguine about Obama than Europeans, but nicely stated all the same. Via Lacan.com — seems like bit of a rough translation unfortunately, but lots of nice nuggets, such as this:

We are much closer to the 19th century than to the last century.

Maybe this explains steampunk? Anyway, I can’t argue with this:

Just like maybe after 1840, we are now confronted with absolutely cynical capitalism, more and more inspired by the ideas that only work backwards: poor are justly poor, the Africans are underdeveloped, and that the future with no discernable limit belongs to the civilized bourgeoisie of the Western world. All kinds of phenomena from the 19th century reappear, extraordinarily extended forms of misery within these countries themselves.

And thus the world once again finds itself ready for the Communist Hypothesis. Not some sort of program, but the expansion of the boundaries of what is possible — true freedom and equality. This dovetails well with my fashion prognostication: Communism is about to be sexy again. Let’s reclaim the term, comrades!

Reading Benjamin for the umpteenth time…

Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.

If that’s the case, we’ve been fascist since at least World War 2… Something I’ve suspected for a while, really. I wonder if Marcuse had any rejoinder to this.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.

Ah, yes. The kicker.

Epilogue from Mussolini:

We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality. It is a reality in the sense that it is a stimulus, a hope, is faith, is courage. Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! For us the nation is not just territory, but something spiritual. A nation is great when it translates into reality the force of the spirit.

Your trippy sound effects, retro drum machines, reverb and delay…. and all I can think about it cheese cascading down a taco, bathmats on sale at Target, the latest romantic comedy dressed up in vintage clothing….

I’m blogging at hist525.wordpress.com as part of a class I’m taking in transnational popular music. I thought I’d cross-post this, since it’s relevant to posts I’ve made on merengue de calle. The original post is a response to Paul Austerlitz’s book on merengue, which is quite good.

Original post:

This concept definitely caught my attention. On page 93:

Many bands practiced what was called fusilamiento (shooting, assassination), basing merengue arrangements on foreign hits.

In Austerlitz’s account, merengue is a very, shall we say promiscuous style, able to adapt to many forms, which is the key to its popularity across Latin America. Of course, covering hits to get attention is nothing new and certainly not limited to merengue, but that there is an entire concept built into the culture is certainly interesting! In my limited exposure to merengue, I’ve definitely come across many versions of popular songs, including Western pop covers. I like this video because I also had the experience of hearing the merengue version of “Don’t Worry Be Happy” in a cab in the DR. I’ve also heard it on Spanish-language radio in DC.

Side note: I visited the DR for a long weekend a couple years ago. My driver was also a cop (remember, Austerlitz says they make very little money — tourism is the only way to get paid), middle aged and conservative in composure. We didn’t listen to much merengue or bachata in the car — his favorite station played 80s soft pop — think grocery store music. He did like Aventura, but who doesn’t?

Here’s an example of fusilamiento at work. The first song is a classic by the Spanish singer Camilo Sesto. I first heard this on the Mexican oldies station in Chicago, called “Recuerdos” (Memories).

Here’s a merengue version I found on YouTube. I have an mp3-CD from Guatemala with a similar merengue version, but with some drum machines and a few other electronic effects added.

Another merengue style (though it’s classified as “mambo,” which in the DR is an urban style of merengue).

Here’s a bachata version for good measure. I’ve also heard other bachata versions of this song.

But the fusilamiento concept permeates lots of Latin genres. Here’s a cumbia version.

I’d like to explore this concept further: does it originate in merengue? Do other genres have names for it? And how does it relate to more contemporary music practices such as remixes and mashups? Here are some recent “assassinations” of Michael Jackson songs done in the mambo/merengue de calle style. There are dozens of these on YouTube.

One of the settings on the Long Range Acoustic Weapons deployed at the G20

sounds just like the ants from Them! (1954)

whose sounds were taken from recordings of the bird-voiced treefrog.

Or, you know, a car alarm.

Me: “Hey, how do I get some of this Obama money floating around?”

Economist at the Federal Reserve: “Be too big to fail.”

I’ll be blogging over here for the next few months, along with my classmates, as part of the seminar I’m taking on Popular Music in the Americas. You can check out the syllabus here.

I’ve finally revamped the design of this blog, with an according (slight) adjustment in what I do here. First of all, I’m dropping the pseudo-anonymous character I’ve inconsistently deployed in the past — so inconsistent that I was outed almost immediately. I’m Gavin Mueller, a PhD student in the Cultural Studies program at George Mason University. I live in Washington D.C. Pleased to meet you. Please don’t steal my credit card information.

Today I’m reading the requisite Clifford Geertz to prepare for tomorrow’s classes, so no big updates. Instead, why don’t you check out the newly-minted blogs of a couple of friends. At For The Commonweal Matt shares his thoughts on teaching, writing, and the academic grind in general. Katherine at Pomegranate Express muses on issues on Armenia and the Caucasus; if you’ve enjoyed my posts on Armenian music in the past, make sure to check out her post on the current Armenian-Azeri Eurovision controversy.

As a follow up to my previous post, I thought I’d check out Chicago’s annual Puerto Rican Pride Parade and accompanying festival in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. Rumors of reggaeton’s death are be greatly exaggerated — there were certainly dem bows to be heard, but lots of other sounds as well.

The parade goes through the South Loop, featuring lots of tricked out rides, floats, and contributions from Chicago civic groups, politicians, and businesses.

Music was heavily featured in the parade, almost exclusively salsa. Practically every float had its own DJ or band. Even a few cyclists got in on the act.

One float was blasting reggaeton: B96, a station that recently altered their format slightly away from Top 40 to popular club dance. I haven’t heard any reggaeton on their station lately, but they lent their support to the parade.

The Parade is the big mainstream showing for Chicago’s Puerto Rican community. The Humboldt Park neighborhood is where they throw the party for themselves. The floats and politicians don’t show up, but the cars and bikers reconvene on Division Street to continue the parade.

Chicago architecture + Puerto Rican culture

The park itself turns into a carnival, with rides, food, vendors, and music. A local promotions company had a “reggaeton contest” where contestants (teenaged or younger) danced for Wisin Y Yandel tickets. There were a couple of young boys who danced as well, to my surprise. Unfortunately I missed winning performance, but the park was so crowded in the areas that weren’t mudpits that rushing around wasn’t an option. The crowd mostly took on the role of dutiful spectators, waving their flags when prompted, but I did notice a few guys grinding on each other in front of me. There was a sizable amount of gay pride to go along with Puerto Rican pride at the festival, which was great addition; I would love for gay activists to increase their visibility in Chicago neighborhoods that aren’t always on their radar.

Of course in any type of street market setting, I make a beeline to the mixtapes. In Chicago, that means that house will be in abundance. The Violator DJ Squad booth had dozens of house and freestyle mixes; I picked up a couple juke-centric CDs. I snagged another mix from bountiful Mother Earth, where it had been dropped.

DJ Cholo, who hails from Pilsen (where I hang my headphones), had a quite nice offering on his mix — he didn’t lean too heavily on the classic booty tracks and paid attention to sequencing and flow. I’m providing a sample germane to the reggaeton topic: a juked out remix of Jowell y Randy’s “No Te Veo,” one of the more recent reggaeton popular hits. Cholo substitutes the original soca-influenced backing track for a traditional Chicago-style drum machine workout. The smoothed-out autotune-vox (the Caribbean had been autotuning years before it took over American hip hop) is left intact.

DJ Cholo – Track 08 – Juke & Club Mix

Juke is a genre that stays visible by constantly offering remixes of the latest popular hits, so I wouldn’t call juketon a trend or anything like that (the next track gives a similar treatment to “Ayo Technology”).

Here’s a video (there are many versions of this song) of the original, apparently shot at a European harbor. Looks chilly.

DJ Phantom’s Latin Takeover is chock full of contemporary Latin club hits. The Dem Bow is definitely muted or completely absent in a lot of these tracks, instead there’s a kind of digital-dancehall feel, with lots of effervesynths and autotune. The way reggaeton (if you can call it that) is looking in 2009 is a hybrid of T-Pain R&B, Caribbean pop, and hints of trance. In spite of its futurism, the music draws the line at withdrawing completely from the human like techno does, grounding the songs in the traditional pop realms of sex and sentimentality. And it has a polished commercial sheen; earlier techno-reggaeton outings, like this for example, mined a vein similar to UK Hardcore — chopping, decontextualizing, ironizing, and dehumanizing the human voice. A few examples of the new stuff:

Ok, so on one hand these guys are trying out some Timbaland/lake styles which are big in big-tent clubland. But check out the videos and the lyrics: instead of the poststructuralist de-centering of the subject you see in hardcore and earlier reggaeton-trance, there’s a re-centering of the whole giddy confusing mediated world around individual sexual desire. Don Omar brings some heavy technology metaphors to seduce robots; Alexis and Fido praise technology for keeping (mediated) booty calls on the DL. These artists (along with counterparts in other genres) suggest a sexual pleasure obtained by interfacing with the machine, not leaps and bounds away from beating off to online porn in front of the computer (a recent cultural practice in sore need of examination); however, they cushion this radical notion (if we can call it that, it’s practically a commonplace by now) by underlining their humanity and individuality created means of their desire. And really, what could be more in tune with the dictates of late capitalism than a highly mediated desiring subject?

The night is a carnivalesque atmosphere of car stereo bass, inebriation, smoked meat, fistfights (and tales of them), and the occasional police helicopter. But I’ve already gone off on several tangents, and put in more work than one should have to on a lazy Sunday after a long night in Humboldt Park. I’ll end things here for now and tend to the grill.