Something of a tradition ’round these parts. In the spirit of Xmas I keep the tracks separate, so you can treat ’em like Legos and re-arrange and combine to your liking. This year has lots of soca and a lil Bieber (chopped up and not slopped up), but my favorite is DJ Mingo’s reggaeton remix of “El Burrito Sabañero.”
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 postsI’vemade on merengue de calle. The original post is a response to Paul Austerlitz’s book on merengue, which is quite good.
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.
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.
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.
Ok, so after I check out this awesome mambo mixtape I got in the Dominican Republic, of course I wanted more. And I knew from my days combing for bongoflava that this wouldn’t be as simple as firing up the ol’ Soulseek. This was going to be navigating through the slapdash HTML slums of the Third World Internet armed with only Google and a passable knowledge of Spanish. Luckily I stumbled upon something promising right off the bat, something that was much more than the mambo treasure trove I desired. This was Tecnorumba, a Spanish-language social-networking site hosting videos, chat, and most importantly, thousands of mp3s. I found plenty of mambo (I think Tecnorumba is based in the Caribbean, if not the Dominican Republic) as well as… well, everything else. The latest American rap, Eurodance, reggaeton, bhangra, old school salsa, and LOTS of homemade remixes branded with that mark of piracy-based mongrel music — “Made with Sonic Foundry ACID.” This was something foreign and yet familiar at the same time, and I could almost envision the soundwaves of the poorly beatmatched 50 Cent/cumbia mashups as I started a massive binge of downloading.
What I find interesting about Tecnorumba is that it’s a node in the vast series of Intertubes in which the music of the Global Postmodern — mainly indigenized and hybridized forms of hip hop, reggae, and dance music from throughout the developing world — collects and mutates, almost with a mind of its own. Indeed, sifting through the vast amount of music on the site, my browsing imitated a data-mining virus more than a record connoisseur. I scooped up as much as I could through a series of preset inputs (“search ‘reggaeton'”; “search ‘remix'”), then went back through to pick out the valuable pieces of information. So several weeks later, after picking through bad songs, broken links, odd titles, shitty mastering, and the kind of bizarrely wonderful cultural soundclashes you only find through a mixture of serendipity and perseverance, I could come out with this value-added compilation of harvested data that will fit on any standard CD-R: Tecnorumba: The Mix.
The music of Caribbean has always been subject to clashing cultures wrought by economic imperatives, and Tecnorumba is just a late installment in this long history. Still, I wonder at the weird kinds of identities being produced by this proliferation and collision of culture, where Turkish DJs make reggaeton hits big in Dominican clubs, where Tanzanian hip hop mixes made by Dubai DJs find their way into Eastern Europe via digital trade routes through the Caribbean, where microgenres formed in the crucible of geographic and cultural isolation suddenly invade the hard drives of youth worldwide hungry for shared contexts. This is what I mean by “Translatinidad,” in which identity becomes ingrained more through cultural collaboration and mixture than through political boundaries or racial categories, although a shared language seems to be one major organizing principle. I’ve got at least one more installment of the Translatinidad theme planned, hence “Vol. 1.”
DJ Mauro Martinez – Cumbia Crunk – excerpt from a mix of cumbia rhythms and rap acapellas
Omega – Me Persiguen Los Mamberos – Omega is the king of mambo: although not necessarily its most representative artist, he could be the genre’s most talented. He’s got a whole band, and his songs have that spontaneity of a live performance, although structurally they’re similar to other mambo songs.
DJ Hakki – Kolbalsti – From what I can tell, DJ Hakki is a Turkish DJ who makes reggaeton-inflected Turkish club-dance. Reggaeton is HUGE in the nascent Turkish pop industry, and Hakki’s in turn found fans in the Caribbean.
Africanos – DRAGON ROJO – Champeta used to be a kind of Spanish afrobeat from Cartagena, Colombia, but now can refer to any number of sonic mixtures hailing from the area. This one is more cavernous Latin house than anything.
rumba portuguesa – I have no information on the artist, but it sounds like it’s from a mix of rave-influenced Latin music. There’s some cubia-style accordion as well as trancey synths.
Punto Rojo feat. Nastasja – Calabria (Dominican Remix) – The 2007 reggae-fied remixes of “Calabria” by Danish producer Rune are blowing up Spanish radio. Here’s the Dominican version.
Mambo Infinito feat La Mayor – Coje Lo Tuyo – This is basically mambo ghettotech and as such IT OWNS. We’ll see how long it takes for this to migrate from my blog into Diplo’s DJ sets.
DJ Sam – Minimambo Mix – A 10-minute mix of merengue, street and classic.
Huaynos – Llaqta – Ok, I don’t know if I got the info right, but this is an example of the guitar+female vocal music of the Andes that influenced cumbia. Heartwrenching singing!
Charly Dyen– Esposa amp Amante. This is labeled “Bachatatango,” which means you get that arpeggiated guitar with some FUNKY bass for your troubles. Oh, and some drum machine kicks and claps for good measure. This cuts off abruptly, so was probably part of a mix I wish I had.
DJ Blu – Chingue Tu Madre. Yes, they are acquainted with the dance genre of ‘breaks’ in Latin America as well (proximity to Florida probably helps).
Don Chezina – Te Pongo Mujer. Don Chezina was in Playero 38, the DJ crew that got reggaeton started from a hodge-podge of Spanish dancehall and 90s hip hop. This particular track is a perreo-style romp through the beatboxing from Doug E Fresh’s “Freaks.”
Tempo – Donde Estan Las Girlas – Another older Puerto Rican track, with the synth riff from “I Like to Move It Move It” and some dem bow drums. Tempo was the doyen of dirty lyrics in the pre-crossover days of reggaeton; unfortunately he was in prison when Daddy Yankee broke big. Truthfully he is a bit lacking as an MC.
DJ Ricky – Los Power Ranger En Mambo – El nombre dice lo que es. DJ Ricky is the go-to guy for mambo remixes (sort of like DJ Kazzanova in reggaeton). Here he covers the Power Rangers theme, while throwing some 50 Cent and Nate Dogg acapellas over top apropos of nothing. Zany!
El Original – Te Doy (rmx) – This is the token cracked-out cumbia track, with a reggae interlude for good measure. I had hoped to find more druggy-as-hell cumbia in Tecnorumba, but came up short.
Omega y Su Mambo Violento – Por Telefono No – Omega begging his girl not to break up with him over the phone. Great theme for a track like this, and once again Omega’s performance doesn’t disappoint.
Arcangel – Siente El Mambo – Another DJ Ricky remix. The hushed vocals and unreleased tension remind me of the Whisper song.
Hector El Father – Tumba -Reggaeton heavyweight with some merengueton; melodically this owes more to standard merengue than the ultra-minimal mambo/merengue de calle. A nice spice to what otherwise could be one of those drearily portentuous reggaeton anthems.
Guanabanas – Chinga – Some bhangra drums and bed-squeaking (a la Trillville’s “Some Cut”) with your reggaeton? Yes, please. “Chinga” means “fuck,” so you can guess what this song’s about.
El Rookie – Papel y Pluma – Old school (1998) Spanish dancehall! Maybe Panamanian?
Residente Calle 13 – Japon (DJ Sticky Remix) – Another mambo remix of a reggaeton track, with all the appropriate seriousness that Residente commands.
Jessly – Adios Amor – More of that beautiful musica de indios Andeando, but very well produced. The shimmering off-kilter guitar rhythm has a “glitch-remix” feel to it, but it’s all natural. Does Bjork listen to this stuff?
Coming soon: More Translatinidad mixes! And should you find anything worthwhile on your own Tecnorumba expeditions, drop me a line.
Posted by Gavin Mueller 
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