there is no cumbia on Puerto Rican radio…

… and knowing why that is (and why there’s generally no cumbia in the islands) might tell you a lot about both cumbia and the Caribbean. But sorry, honey, I ain’t the one.

There’s a lot of other stuff of course, from 80s grocery store pop — Tears for Fears may be the world’s most ubiquitous band — to rock en español, salsa, merengue, reggae, and corporate pop. Heard some of that Ke$ha for the first time, and can I say, this is what media conglomerates throw money at these days? To quote the name of a tourist trap Mexican place in the Condado neighborhood of San Juan, “Orale, guey!”

The urban stuff rules of course, which means LOTS of merengue de calle, a bit of dancehall, a (tiny) bit of U.S. commersh hip hop — the latter a music that conquered the globe five years ago only to all but completely recede into U.S.-centered provincialism a few years later. It would seem Lil Wayne doesn’t export well. And oh yes, Pitbull, who, along with mentor Lil Jon, anticipated the way to maximize international saturation would be to go deeper into the club, mining the trendiest house tracks of the year. They certainly speak Americano in this respect.

And, oh yes, reggaeton! You’ll hear the big pop tunes that you get on the radio in the states, autotune ballads. And Don Omar’s self-conscious global cross-pollination never sounded better pumping from a Jeep Wrangler on the north coast of the island.

This is of course the watering down of the wilder cacophonic kuduro that pricked up the ears of a thousand bloggers a few years back, smoothing things out for something more Carnival-ready. Gotta say I miss the dreds, Don.

What doesn’t make it over here, or at least to the Latin radio dominated by Central American tastes in the DC area, is reggaeton’s current throwback phase, exemplified by two of the best songs on PR radio. The first recalls the teched-out DJ Blass stuff that knocked me head-over-heels back in ’04, but with some of-the-moment (at least in Latin pop) autotunage. In PR, they don’t stop at the club, they tear the beach up too. And you’re in the right place if you can’t tell the difference between the two.

Quick digression: one of my favorite tracks of 2010 was the similarly Blass-inspired remix of Bomba Estereo’s “Fuego” by the Frikstailers. With this and moombahton, ersatz reggaeton was killing it last year.

Next, a track by reggaeton’s prettiest pretty-boy, Tito el Bambino. His last album was almost totally ballads underscored by gentle dembows, but here he teams up with my favorite spanish “ragga moofin,” Don Chezina, for a deliberate recall of the proto-reggaeton era of DJ Playero. The beat switches up mixtape-stylee, with some vintage Playero-riddims thrown in for good measure.

Perhaps post-crossover-crash, reggaeton’s nostalgically revisiting its roots.

Speaking of Playero, I scored a couple of mixes (37 and 39) at a record store at the seen-better-days mall/market of Rio Piedras, along with an Omega bootleg. You would think this would be the ideal place for CD-R mixtapes, but you’d be wrong. It does have an amazing food court, though. You know your roast pork’s coming from the right place when you’re getting it from a 350-poung guy named Junior who’s being assisted by an older gentleman with a prominent bypass surgery scar.

Speaking of Omega, he’s more prominent than Daddy Yankee these days. His CDs were everywhere. Check out his own Dembow homage. Fuerte!

I finally came across that universal figure of hood modernity, the bootleg guy, hanging at a pool hall on Luquillo Beach, where the cars are hot, the music is loud, and the ballcaps are askew at impossible angles. And the mixtapes are more expensive than what I get in DC. I tried to go for the 3-for-10 deal I get from the go-go dudes at the Florida Market, only to be told by my very stoned vendor that he works for someone else and can’t make deals. Todos somos trabajadores!

The mambo I got there was some of the most creative music I heard on the island. As it emerges from its convention-establishing phase, mambo is mixing with club sounds in a variety of weird ways. Zombie Nation’s soccer anthem “Kernkraft 400” makes an impromptu appearance among Dominican polyrhythms:

Fútbol is really the path towards global crossover, which, just like capital, is where pop music wants to go.

The compilation closes with a timely remix of MJ’s “Remember the Time” (labeled presumptuously “Omega FT Michael Jackson”). I noted the explosion of mambo remixes of Michael Jackson acá.

Here’s the whole compilation, which is the first I’ve ever purchased with a prominent twitter link printed on the cover. Don’t sleep on the merengue remix of 704 Boyz, or the soon-to-blow-up Prophex.

DOMINICANHITS.COM PRESENTS: MERENGUE ELECTRONICO VOL. 1 (103 MB ZIP)

 

Neocolonialism, Authenticity, and the Ethics of World Music

Boima has a post on the neocolonial aspects of crate-digging that caused some furor when said crate-diggers descended on the comments section, but the result was interesting, and I’d like to weigh in on a few dynamics of contemporary global music the discussion crystalized.

The first thing that struck me was that authenticity is not the dead horse the popists beat to a pulp back in the early Oughts. Its spirit has migrated away from production — in which authenticity was ascribed to certain types of sounds and their presentation — into the realm of consumption.

The cataloging tendency tends to be a colonial one. Also, many of the DJs and label owners, perhaps because of its shared lineage with Hip Hop, have concentrated on Afro-Beat, or have given more weight to genres that are popular in the west like Rock and Funk. For African artists, these are generally styles that artists often used as tools, or influences to fuse with their own popular local styles. The reissue train has been slow to recognize larger genres in Africa like Soukous, Highlife, or Benga, unless they find an artist that has an added funk or rock influence. In the past the tendency was to look for “authentic” music that sounded more “traditional.” Are they now shying away from things that sound too … African?

Certainly a weird reversal is at work here. Previous critiques of world music accused compilers (and by extension, yuppie listeners) for exoticizing non-Western music, for fetishizing its lack of modernity, and finally, for ascribing authenticity to what was essentially constructed for Western tastes. We have moved to a new periodization. Boima criticizes compilers (and by extension, hipster listeners) not for exoticizing Africans, but for disregarding actual tastes of Africans in favor of music that sits alongside American funk and rock more comfortably. Now hybrids — music that belies a fusion of African and Western — are inauthentic for not being “African” enough. “African-ness” is no longer a pre-modern essence as it was for first-gen world music. Now it’s been filtered through the analytic lens of our best science of consumption, market research: In the words of a recent Guardian article, “African music the actual African diaspora likes.” Actual. Real. Authentic.

The “authentic listener” is even more flawed concept than the “authentic artist.” For one, it’s difficult to pinpoint why particular music strikes someone in a particular way. Does that French DJ like Afrobeat because it’s exotic or because it’s Western-sounding? Unfortunately for both marketers and sociologists, demographics never match easily with musical tastes. But there’s a bigger problem: the frame of analysis. To examine and criticize individual actors in a tiny corner of the music industry, itself but a portion of the economy, is to miss what is important and revealing about the phenomenon Boima is commenting upon.

Boima makes an analogy between these vinyl tourists and colonial extraction: “it does seem that the current mad-dash for rare African vinyl could be analogous to Europe’s 19th Century Scramble for Africa, a mad-dash for rare African minerals.” He gets raked over the coals in the comments by the diggers, who don’t exactly appreciate being associated with violent exploitation. They argue variously that they listen to a wide variety of African music, that they make little money, that they are actually helping some of the artists on their compilations. Boima is taken to task, and rightly in my view: his resort to the “authentic listener” is just a shaky defense for an argument that was falling apart even before the diggers pile on in the comments section. Even if we had a bunch of European DJs releasing benga and soukous, we could still use this argument. Whenever “non-Western” music is released to “Westerners,” it provokes anxiety for the more multicultural-minded. It even pushes left-leaning people into defending things you wouldn’t think they would: property, nation, the buying and selling of culture, “tradition,” and yes, authenticity.

What Boima gets right is his analogy. There is a connection between Westerners crate-digging in Africa and 19th Century colonialism. But to narrow in on a tiny section of Western operations in Africa, and castigate the individual operators misses the point. The heritage of imperialism, which is not the past at all, but our very real and ongoing present, is not their fault. The presence of Western music and technology in Africa, the infrastructure that enables tourists to fly there, the economic imbalances that allow a European of modest means to purchase thousands of rare records, the lack of distribution channels for commodity export on the continent — these are larger, structural factors. Even on the level of desire — for the rare, for the exotic, for the familiar, for the exotic-but-not-too-exotic, for the authentic — are conditioned and manufactured by a system that has compressed time and space, thrown disparate peoples together, and fused and warped culture in uncountable ways. The practices examined in the debate, and the debate itself, are symptoms of much larger, much more insidious processes: actually existing imperialism. The crate-diggers are in a sense enabled in their task by Leopold chopping off hands in the Congo and by Shell dumping oil into the Niger Delta. They are part of this story. But they are not the villains.

This historical perspective is obscured by another problem lurking in current world music (fuck it, that’s what it is) discourse — the version of authenticity it draws upon. The authenticity-as-essence (especially pre-modern essence) argument is pretty much dead, so we can leave that in the dustbin of shitty NPR shows. But the more ethical stance that Boima raises — the one of responsibility, of being an ethical musical tourist — is alive and well, and also problematic.

Philosophers of the liberal tradition such as Charles Taylor and Lionel Trilling argue that authenticity relies on a kind of relational stance towards others, one of mutual recognition and sincerity. Without getting too theoretical, these positions rely on a long tradition of thought about the liberal subject — self-contained, self-directed, individualist, tolerant. If I am a good liberal subject, and you are a good liberal subject, then we can find a way to behave ethically, authentically, towards each other, and make the world a better, more civil place through recognizing each other as legitimate beings. But if I don’t recognize you, if I “fetishize” or “exoticize” you, or improperly represent your cultural artifacts, I’m acting unethically. You see this argument pop up all the time; one of the commenters, “wills,” states

if we continue to fetishize the psychedelic African past at the expense of a more mature, nuanced relationship with the present (and other eras), we might end up stuck in graceland (or on some blog).

There’s no shortage of advice on how the proper relationship you should have with African music. The problem is, no one knows what it means. How do you listen to something in a “mature” and “nuanced” way? How is releasing a compilation of Afrobeat “fetishizing” and making an mbalax remix of Akon not? These words are what Adorno would call the jargon of authenticity — they are essentially meaningless, erected only to set arbitrary boundaries. As a good dialectical materialist, Adorno has no patience for this stuff about mutual recognition and ethical stances. The liberal subject position assumes that we have ultimate control over our actions, which leaves out the history that inflects and conditions so much of who we are and what we do, the travels we take, the art we consume and how we react to it, the blog posts we write. We are not independent, self-contained actors in the world; we move through larger structures that determine more than we care to admit. And so any critique of transnational production or consumption, especially if you want to politicize it (as you should) has to discuss this, and not haggle over the tastes of individuals. The “colonial tendency” is both ours and not ours — it is there, we must acknowledge it, but attempting to ameliorate it in ourselves while ignoring actual imperialism just makes imperialism function more smoothly. Our responsibility is not to our taste — it is to ending the neocolonial project.

This starts at home.

Some Were Masked

I looked at the newspaper cover photo, really looked, the first time I’ve really done so in over two months in Mexico. It was full of dead bodies, as usual, so I don’t know why this one struck me. Men strung up on a fence, in a crucifixion pose, bloodily executed. Some had rags over their faces, others didn’t — ASSASSINATION: SOME WERE MASKED the headline screamed. They looked my age, maybe younger. The first thing I wondered: Were they alive when they strung them up to the fence? And then: What were they thinking? At what point did they know they would die? What did they say to their killers? What were their last moments like?

A professor had remarked about the ubiquitous organ grinders in Mexico that it’s a pity that it makes more economic sense for a young able-bodied man to crank an organ for pocket change than do anything else. What the fuck is this then?

Like the other gawkers crowded around the newsstand, I didn’t buy the paper. I’ve already paid for this disgusting spectacle.

Read more: The brutal face of Mexico’s 21st-Century War

Sweetness

A product that the poor eat, both because they are accustomed to it and because they have no choice, will be praised by the rich, who will hardly ever eat it.

–Sidney Mintz, The Sweetness and the Power, p. xxii (1985)

Mintz here refers to an unrefined sugar loaf commonly eaten by Jamaican plantation workers; it is small-scale domestic production and consumption using the scraps of the colonial sugar industry. Sugar is grown on colonies — Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico, much of the rest of the Caribbean — but the “last and most profitable step” is carried out on the mainland. Consumers of the British, French, and American empires use refined sugar, a sugar lightened from dark brown to white for no reason other than aesthetics, rooted in racism (whiteness as sign of purity). On the colony they cobble together innovative cultural objects from the scraps the empire leaves behind. The rich praise this, as it de-emphasizes the exploitation that is the crucible of this innovation while emphasizing the ‘cultural’ difference between exploiter and exploited. Yet the fascination is real, and powerful. This is the commodity fetishism of imperialism: the labor extracted from diaspora, dislocation, racism, and brutal working conditions can be tasted, enjoyed, contemplated. It binds disparate parts of empire together phenomenologically.

The parallels to food tourism and exotic eating such as featured on Anthony Bourdain’s television shows are obvious. What does this quotation say about the consumption of other forms of culture? Are there musical sugar loaves? I suspect there are. I don’t want to go there yet. And this rich quotation, from a rich introduction of an excellent book, points, in perhaps an oblique way, at the nexus of pleasure, exoticism, empathy, and imperialism at the heart of cultural tourism, a predominant form of consumption under globalization.

Comparative Travel Advisories

So I’ve been in Mexico City for a week, and will be here for at least seven or eight more, something I haven’t written about, because, well, why should I have anything interesting to say about Mexico City? I just got here and I don’t know anybody. Ideally this will change. I spent a large portion of that week listening to people with more interesting things to say at Postopolis!DF in between bouts of delicious food.

As a conscientious traveler, I took advantage of the concerns of my government and read the State Department Travel Advisory for Mexico. It’s a terrifying and salacious document, full of narco-terror, resort rape, taxi kidnappings, prison torture, natural disasters, rehab cons and killer hotel pools. Nothing like the State Department to make a country seem like a land of corruption, violence, and crime, as if American news media didn’t already do that enough.

Of course, the tables can be turned, since foreign ministries issue their own travel reports about the good ol’ U.S. of A. These reveal as much, if not more, about the country issuing the warnings, a fascinating look at cultural norms. A friend forwarded me the travel advisory from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the U.S. — a Google-translated synopsis follows below.

First of all is the obligatory warning about terrorist attacks, with a helpful link to the terror alert system, which apparently still exists.

With that out of the way, the ministry takes care to outline the particular neighborhoods to avoid in major U.S. cities. Specifically, the ones where black and hispanic people live. And helpful maps!

Watch out -- minorities live here!

• “Boston traffic on foot and at night should be avoided in the neighborhoods of Dorchester, Mattapan and Roxbury.”
• “Do not go alone in Harlem, the Bronx and Central Park at night.” Not sure how Brooklyn didn’t get a shout out here.
• “Washington: avoid areas northeast and southeast, and the bus station and train station ‘Union Station’ at night.” Apparently the French haven’t been alerted to the district’s newest nightlife branding effort. There’s even a shuttle so you can avoid the prolish bus system! Well, it’s probably better to declare half the city off-limits at night. Don’t forget, “The Anacostia neighborhood is not recommended day and night,” so the French will have to forgo Nation of Islam bean pies on their visit.
  

  Minorities are also in these places!

• “Philadelphia: avoid frequent the northern districts except group.”
• “Baltimore is considered a dangerous city except downtown.”
• “Chicago: avoid the West Side and south of the city after 59th Street.” This was a sop for Hyde Park, so feel free to explore the wonderlands of State and 35th!
• Some of the sharpest words are reserved for our most French of cities. “New Orleans: do away from tourist areas that are the old square (French Quarter) or the Garden District, including that day. At nightfall, walk out, whatever the area, including Garden District would take a risk statistically significant (with the exception of the busiestcentral streets of the old square). Also, do not walk around with bags or equipment visible value (cameras), even in broad daylight in the busiest areas. Do not hesitate to take a taxi, even for a short distance. … In general, it should always be on guard, not to stop when you are arrested, not to resist in case of aggression or racketeering: possession of weapons at an attacker is common.”
• “Los Angeles: Large areas should be avoided in particular neighborhoods east, south and south-east as Watts, Inglewood and Florence.” I have no idea why tourists would go to these places, unless their itinerary has been shaped by Dr. Dre songs. But better to exercise caution.

After that embarassing show and the cursory warnings of natural disasters, we move on to some rather interesting cultural differences.

• “Medical infrastructure is excellent, but expensive. There is no social security agreement covering the health insurance between our two countries. In an emergency, an ambulance only provides a priority upon arrival in the emergency department of the hospital (conditional admission to a financial guarantee).” Yes, other countries warn their citizens of our fucked-up health care system!
• As in any good militarized nation, “Americans are generally very respectful of the law, respect is expected of tourists who are required to comply strictly with the regulations.” And don’t forget that in a police state, your ass could be beaten for any suspected insubordination: “In case of contact with the police, it is imperative that we do not raise your voice, make no sudden movements or aggressive and not make false statements.” Ne me taze pas, l’homme!
• And then of course the legendary romantic inclinations of the French must be attenuated to: “Remarks, attitudes or jokes, harmless in the Latin countries, can lead to court. Complaints of sexual harassment may also be filed against the minors.” And a good note to end on: “Having or attempting to have sex with a minor constitutes a crime punishable by law. The law severely punishes all forms of use, encouragement, persuasion or coercion of minors in the production and dissemination of explicit sexual images, using traditional or electronic.” Sometimes we find out a little bit more than we expected!

Monokinis also forbidden -- how the mighty have fallen

I haven’t spent any time looking up other nations’ travel advisories, but I can only hope they are as revealing and entertaining as these.

Post-Post

It seems to us that postmodernists and the current wave of fundamentalists have arisen not only at the same time but also in response to the same situation, only at opposite poles of the global hierarchy, according to a striking geographical distribution. Simplifying a great deal, one could argue that postmodernist discourses appeal primarily to the winners in the processes of globalization and fundamentalist discourses to the losers. In other words, the current global tendencies toward increased mobility, indeterminacy, and hybridity are experienced by some as a kind of liberation but by others as an exacerbation of their suffering.

-Hardt and Negri, Empire, pg. 150 (2000)