Listening study guide for the final

Son jarocho

Features the strummed jarana jarocha, usually playing in some rhythm based on (123456 123456)...

 
... and the twangy plucked jarana requinto

There are sometimes other stringed instruments (like harp, a lower pitched jarana) and percussion instruments (like the donkey jawbone (quijada) and the cajón), the zapateo technique of foot-stamping on a wooden tarima, exuberant singing, and the oversized thumb piano called marimbol.

Salsa
Salsa is clave-base music, based on Cuban son and other Afro-Cuban and Afro-Caribbean musical styles. The rhythm section includes congas, bongó/cowbell, and timbales, along with bass and piano, and brass instruments, usuallyincluding trombones, trumpet, and sometimes other stuff as well. The classic New York salsa sound usually has that gritty two-trombone sound and aggressive, up-front percussion:

Cumbia
Cumbia could have many different instruments, but the thing to listen for is the metal scraper (güira)  doing a kind of monotonous 1 and-a-2 and-a-3 and-a-4 (as here) and usually a piano or guitar playing in the off-beats or upbeats, like ska or reggae: 1 AND 2 AND 3 AND 4. You can hear both the scraper and the upbeats here:

Banda
If you hear tuba, and it's in Spanish, it's banda. Tuba (and related instruments like souzaphone and helicon) is the big farty awesome one:

Banda also features trumpets and trombones, paired against clarinets, usually with some kind of stick (not hand) drums like bass drums and snares. The rhythms, as for most northern Mexican and SW Mexican-America music, is either waltz (1 2 3 1 2 3) or polka.

Norteño

This music, like its Texas twin sibling, conjunto, features accordion and bajo sexto. (The differences between conjunto and norteño are really subtle, and I won't ask you to distinguish between them). One thing that modern norteño might have is a banda+accordion combo.

Most of the modern narcocorridos are played by either norteño accordion bands, bandas, or combinations of both.

Reggaetón
Features the dembow rhythm, essentially an electronic habanera.

Punk

Fast, energetic, no frills rock n' roll with distorted guitars with lots of... attitude.

The New Latinx Wave — Folclórico/Experimental and Rebelde

Folklórico/Experimental

We've already seen that the Nuyorican Grupo Folklórico went back to the roots to make new experiments in the 1970s.

A similar dynamic is characterizes the seminal East LA rock group Los Lobos: rockers, who arrived at traditional Mexican and Tejano music in the wake of the Chicano movement. Unlike the slightly older Santana-inspired bands of the Chicano movement, who incorporated psychedelic rock and Afro-Cuban rhythms, Los Lobos, of L.A., started experimenting with traditional Mexican music from Mexico, such as traditional son jarocho from the Mexican Gulf state of Veracruz with  Afro-Mexican roots, as well as the conjunto music of the borderlands. They even featured a fandango (jarocho breakdown) in  their cover of Valens' "La Bamba" (itse;f, you'll remember, a rock and roll cha-cha-chá with a melody and lyrics borrowed from an old son jarocho)for the movie of the same name (2:20).

These pioneering groups paved the way for other roots-focused groups into the present day, as young Latinos, even those born and/or raised in the US, to engage traditional music more directly, often in ways that grow out of political activism. Many of these groups also feature women playing more active roles than in the past, which suggests that many of these groups are not only reviving older musical and cultural values, but also changing some of the old-school machismo that is also part of Latino culture.

Such is the case with the East-LA Chicano group, Las Cafeteras, one of various groups who have taken up son jarocho. Their version of "La Bamba" repurposes the lyrics to talk about crossing borders, and was the theme song for a popular Telemundo soap opera.

Their story shows their links both to traditional music and cal grassroots activism.

Another young LA Chicano band, La Santa Cecilia.

El Hielo.


There are similar trends on the East coast.Young Puerto Ricans are now playing bomba:

Nuyoricans Alma Moyó

Not only are these groups doing traditional music, they're engaging in different kinds of fusion between different folkloric genres, and with popular music, as with El Barrio stalwarts Yerbabuena.

Another New York-based group, Kalunga has directly confornted some of the exclusions in traditional music. Against the politically loaded division between the Dominican and Haitian nations, Kalunga, consisting of both Dominican and Haitian New Yorkers, performs both Afro-Dominican and Afro-Haitian music, arguing for the unity around a shared frame of blackness.

This trend toward investigation, questioning, and fusion of folkloric music has also been important for young Latinos from newer immigrant groups, as with Colombians.Traditional group La

Many of the same musicians with M.A.K.U Sound System:

Gender

Women are taking up leadership and new instrumental roles in many of these groups.

Las Bompleneras de Chicago

Spaces

In LA, the Atomic/Troy Café

Peace and Justice Center

Centro de Regeneración

Eastside Café  

 and others...

Eastside Café

In NY, the Point
Camaradas El Barrio
Julia de Burgos Center
La Casita

and others...

La Casita/Rincón Criollo in the Bronx

Some o these spaces have been predominantly immigrants, with some US-born folks. Others vice-versa. All ofthese rpojects spring form interactions between US-born and immigrant musicians. Many groups work from spaces of collaboration, like Bulla en el Barrio, formed around a charismatic and talernted singer from Colombia.

The same core musicians started a "fusion" project as well, Combo Chimbita:

Politics
The Zapatistas, still going strong
The protests over Vieques in Puerto Rico

Zack de la Rocha, frontman of Rage Against the Machine in the 1990s, co-sponsored Regeneración.

Fandando Fronterizo, at the US-Mexico border in San Diego

#RickyRenuncia Bombazo in New York City

The Caribbeanization of NY Jazz
Miguel Zenón, who has already worked with plena and música jíbara  and the musical exploration of identity.

While many US Latinos move toward traditional music, many immigrant musicians well-versed in tradition are moving toward experimental and avant-garde projects, with jazz an important baseline for both. Here are the percussionists and culture-bearers Pedrito Martínez and Román Díaz, in a ritual setting.

And here in one of Roman's more experimental projects, Enyenison Enkama - abakuá jazz (Harp solo by the Colombian Edmar Castañeda)

And Pedrito's well-regarded Latin/jazz group.

Mexican-American music at the turn of the millenium

 A Mexicanization of Mexican-American music, fueled by:

 NAFTA and immigration 

 

Border militarization (even before Trump)

 

 Anti-immigrant laws (like Proposition 227 in 1998, California and SB 1070 in 2010, Arizona) 

Consolidation of cartels and intensification of drug war

 

Consolidation of music industry (now, Universal, Sony, and Warner - formerly EMI as well)

Tejano (and Selena Quintanilla)

The Onda Grupera - a wave of pop groups from the Mexican music industry, like Los Bukis, was an important influence on Selena.A second influence, from northern Mexico, is a kind of dance music called cumbia (originally from Colombia, but Meicanized sonce the early 1980s).

Grupera and cumbia were both influences on the freakishly talented Selena Quintanilla. But so was US music. Selena's father Abraham, who organized Selena's group, was a former rock and roller, and Selena herself was English-dominant.

But her story is more complicated than talent, involving the familiar story of discrimination against Mexican-Americans in the US music industry, and the consolidation of the Latin music industry in the US - and the troubled place of "Mexican Regional" and Tejano music within that.

AS Tejano groups (like Selena) were gobbled up by major labels in both the US and Mexico, groups like La Mafia, of Houston, Texas, founded in the 1990s, started to tour extensively in Mexico

Norteño
Accordion-driven music, often corridos, had remained popular in Northern Mexico, and became increasinly popular in the US with recent migrants, and as even longer-standing populations began to feel more racialized by anti-immigration forces in the US.

The tremendous Tigres del Norte:

Lyrics

The new corridos, like "Contrabando y Traición" (better known as "Camelia la Tejana"). "Contrabando"is fictional, and it updates the corrido for the drug economy, but it is in many ways keeps up the forms of the old corridos in its lyrics. We'll come back to Narcocorridos in a second...

Banda and its offspring

Remember banda? This was the other German-Czech influnced northenr Mexican form aside from accordion-based conjuntos. This was less popular in the US southwest than in northwestern Mexico, where it continued as a local tradition, that only occasionally popped up in the mainstream Mexican music industry.

Tecno-banda (a grupera version of banda from the late 1980s-early 1990s)

The acrobatic Quebradita dance, was how Mexicans and Mexican-Americans danced banda in places like Los Angeles and Chicago, and the dance became popular in Mexico itself. Quebradita was hugely popular in both countries in the 1990s.

Duranguense - the name refers to the north-central Mexican state of Durango (a traditional home of banda), but applied to music it's actually fast, semi-synthesized banda music from Chicago (often by migrants from Durnago) , taking up Mexican styles and recontextualizing them for Mexican American Chicago in the 2000s.

Another new Mexican-American local scene is "hyphy" (or "jai-fi" in Spanish spelling), a north California slang word meaning "hyper." It's basically super-fast corridos that you dance jumping up-and-down, kind of spazzing out. Right? O sea: hyphy…

Another important Mexican musics movement is not a movement but a single singer who is one of the most popular singers in both Mexico and the Mexican-American US - Long Beach, California's Jenni Rivera. Jenny one of 6 children of two undocumented parents. She had a hard life: a teenage mother at 15 who had to work at the flea market to support herself and nonetheless finished high school (and was valedictorian), she would suffer domestic violence, legal wrangle sixth managers and drama. She was known for not taking nonsense and her humongous voice, which gave real feeling to songs of love, loss, infidelity, and anger. The diva to end all divas, she has songs about being a "Partygirl, Rebel and Insolent," about being - not ballsy - but having "Ovaries," and a song telling an ex to "Go Fuck Your Mother."

Narcorridos

"Los Tequileros" - Los Alegres de Terán

The great Chalino Sánchez was one of theearlt corridistas to speacialize in corridos for the drug trade.

Some of the narcocorridos celebrate the courage, humility and heroism of a particular cartel leader, and their composers were often directly patronized by that person...

Others celebrate the catastrophic violence that cartels are able to visit on their enemies.

 

Like gangsta rap, with which it is in many ways comparable, some of these are clearly posturing, but some singers have gotten wrapped up in the wars between their patrons, as with Valentín Elizondo, below, is only one of the many corrido singers who were assassinated.

Narcocorridos are very popular on both sides of the border, including for people with no relationship or particualr desire for a relationship with the actual drug trade. But if some are merely aggressive fantasy, many, particularly in Mexico itself, decry the narcorrido's violence and use as a tool for glamorizing a deadly lifestyle.

RIP Andy González

A great obituary by Bobby Sanabria here...

Sound Machine: Latinos in the Music Industry 1980s-2000s

The Latino population in the US has sextupled itself since 1970.

As one of the fastest-growing population groups, this also means that Latinos are rapidly becoming one of the largest sectors in U.S. society, passing African-Americans as the largest non-white group in the US in the 2000 census.

This growth is increasingly fueled by US-born Latinos.

So, understandably, advertisers, politicians, and the media are tripping over themselves to endear themselves to Latinos. However, Latino remains a complicated category.

The music industry is no exception. Latino music grew by 20% every year in the 1980s, with proliferating subcategories: Tropical (salsa, merengue, bachata), Regional Mexican and Tejano, and Spanish-language rock, pop, and alternative. 1998 figures show that of this, more than half the sales were of Mexican styles, and 23% Tropical. 

So the industry is still looking for the secret sauce to get at all the prized demographics. And not just the record industry:

OK. The new Latino generation is out there. It primarily speaks English but supposedly 'feels' Latin (according to many published studies). Why then, isn't it buying the alternative, edgier Latin music that should appeal to it? Perhaps because it's in Spanish. Whoever resolves this riddle will make a bundle. (Billboard, 2004)

Clubbing in the Underground: Freestyle and Hi-NRG
In New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, Latinos played a central role in the formation of disco and its hip-hop- and electro-influenced successors in the late 1980s and early 990s. At the time, Latinos, making the post-disco, post-hip hop music called freestyle or Hi-NRG, which was basically an early electronic dance music. Some musicians, like Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam would do fairly well.
(This is the scene that Madonna would eventually emerge from. It's also worth noting the seminal importance of queer Latinx folk in the making of modern dance music, as dramatized in the 2018 series Pose. The gay discos of black and brown NYC also birthed voguing, which Madonna celebrated/ripped off).

Back on the pop charts
A less underground, poppier alternative emerged from Miami in the 1980s, in the person of Miami-based Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine, headed by Gloria's husband Emilio Estefan. Originally only singing in Spanish and marketed only to Latin Americans, Estefan's music. Conga was a direct predecessor to the turn-of-the-millenium Latin Boom, but also helped establish EMilio Estefan in Miami as a major broker of a growing music industry tie-together of US Latino and Latin American markets.

Salsa moderna
RMM records, which took up the mantle of New York and Puerto Rican salsa after the decline of Fania, aimed at a particularly modern, bicultural sound. Producer Sergio George took up young Nuyorican singers who had dedicated themselves to freestyle music, like La India and Marc Anthony, and get them to sing a new, youthful brand of salsa (see also DLG and Proyecto Uno).

Miami and the Latin Boom

The big shift was in the music industry, as RMM went out of business and the 2000 census projected Latino demographic dominance in the US. The Latin music industry shifted toward Miami (and Los Angeles, which we'll talk about next week), where South Beach had been renovated in the 1990s, a large, educated, bilingual population arrived from Latin America. Emilio Estefan's Crescent Moon Studios, a Sony affiliate, brings in 200 million a year, and was well-situated to participate in the Latin Boom of the 2000s.

Christina Aguilera "goes Latin" at the Latin Grammys, although her own attachment to Latino culture was learned late.

Reggaetón and the "Hurban" market
By 2004, the music industry had found a new(-ish) genre capable of being marketed to young people across the hemisphere: reggaetón.

With ongoing migration and return migration between the US and Puerto Rico, and people sending mix tapes back and forth, there was already a rap scene in Spanish in the 1980s in Puerto Rico. The pioneering Vico C, whose ghetto philosopher tales of street life made him one of the best known from that place and time.

In the 1990s, New York hip hop, and subsequently Puerto Rican hip hop, was also increasingly influenced by Jamaican dancehall reggae. In New York, a significant portion of the black population, especially in Brooklyn, is of Jamaican, Trinidadian, and other West Indian/Caribbean ancestry, including some seminal figures in hip hop: Kool DJ Herc, Notorious BIG, KRS-One, Slick Rick, Busta Rhymes, Li'l Kim, Foxy Brown, and others.

 

Many Panamanian artists, of West Indian descent, translated Jamaican dancehall hits into Spanish. So (for example), Jamaican Little Lenny's English-language anthem to the ladyparts, "Punanny Tegereg" was transformed into "Tu Pum Pum," in Spanish, by Panamanian rapper "El General" in 1989. These  became popular among Spanish-speaking Puerto Ricans both in New York and on PR itself.
Dancehall/reggae and rap use different beats (as Marshall helpfully shows us). Hip hop is based on the so-called "boom bap," which rendered graphically, would look something like this.

Much dancehall, and reggaetón, uses the habanera-based rhythm of the Shabba Ranks song "Dem Bow" (1991) (covered by El General in Panama). The song and its riddim is basically a tresillo rhythm superimposed over a straight four count - that is, a habanera.

The "Dem Bow" riddim would become the backbone of reggaetón.

First however, a scene emerged in Puerto Rico associated with the Afro-Puerto Rican underclass of the island's housing projects or caseríos - usually called underground or melaza. This music was released in mixtapes. Here, none other than Vico C explains that the same artists rapped over both hip hop and the Dem Bow beat that would become reggaetón:

On the underground mixtapes, MC's in PR rapped over a background constructed out of samples. These samples rapidly changed between the dancehall-associated dembow and hip hop's boom bap. The famous Playero 38 mixtape for example, released by the San Juan-based DJ Playero in 1993 features (among others) a young Daddy Yankee.

Before  the first two minutes of the tape are up, we hear a Jamaican-style double-time introduction, then dancehall influenced rapping over a West Coast hip hop beat, which turns into the dancehall "Hot Dis Year riddim" before segueing into the beat from Queens hip hoppers' De La Soul's "Talkin' Bout Hey Love," and then back to "Hot Dis Year." Beyond its musical innovation, the melaza scene is important for its explicit borrowing, through hip hop inspired fashion and dance as well as music, of a transnational and expressly black identity, something rarely seen in the Caribbean.

By the turn of the millennium, the conversion of underground/melaza into reggaetón begins (although no one knew it yet). Free and easily downloadable beat-making programs became available online, making it possible for this with access to computers and the internet able to make beats. One of the most important was the free program Fruity Loops (now "FL Studio"). By the time of his 1999 mixtape, Playero 41, DJ Playero's beats (as on "Todas las yales" with Daddy Yankee) were almost entirely synthesized rather than sampled (and heavily influenced by techno music), although the music still featured shifts between dembow and hiphop beats. By 2000, the predominant beat was a Puerto Rican version of Dem Bow featuring bass drops and a syncopated synthesized timbal.

The Puerto Rican underground scene also inspired Francisco "Luny" Saldana  and Victor "Tunes" Cabrera, two Dominican-born DJs from the unlikely setting of Peabody, Massachusetts, a suburb with a mostly white population, who cooked up beats after work as cook and dishwasher at a Harvard University residence house. The beats made by the two were sleek and pop-friendly, beginning with their 2003 "Quiero saber" track with Ivy Queen.

Luny Tunes' 2003 mixtape Más Flow was a sensation in Puerto Rico, and set the formula for reggaetón."Gasolina," their 2004 track for Daddy Yankee was a worldwide mega-hit. In case you spent that year in a coma, it sounded like this.

Luny Tunes' rise coincided with  the moment at which the record industry started to look to market to young Latinos. In the wake of the 1999-2000 "Latin Boom" in pop music, the "hurban" market aimed to unite Latino young people - East Coast Caribbean, West Coast Mexican, Americans, and the sizable markets of Latin America itself, under the banner of so-called "Hispanic-Urban" or "Hurban" music. By 2005, Spanish-language radio stations, owned by gymongous media conglomerates like Clear Channel and the US-based Spanish-language Univisión empire,   across the country was moving to a "Hurban" format featuring reggaetón, hip hop, and dance-oriented pop.

New York's "La Kalle" radio (2006)

Hurban radio (2005)

Hurban (2005)

Wayne Marshall on hurban renewal

The deliberate appeals to a Latinos of various national ancestries, both in and out of the US, is clear in "Oye mi canto," produced by Boy Wonder, a NYC-born musician of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent. The song (featuring Daddy Yankee and Nuyorican N.O.R.E., and PR-born, NY-based vocal duo Nina Sky) explicitly mentions number of different countries, and the video uses flags (helpfully supported by scantily-clad models) to make the international appeal explicit.

This international appeal also is partially responsible for the rise of bachata-influenced reggaetón like Wissin y Yandel's "Mayor que yo," featuring the twangy bachata guitar sound.

LA Punk

The story of punk is a in some ways similar to hip-hop: DIY youth music celebrating the joy of not giving a shit, often in settings of abandonment, whether urban neglect or suburban malaise. It had In the case of punk, there was also a desire to reverse the pretensions and excesses of '70s progressive rock. The musicians for punk rock bands (Punk being a term reclaimed from a homophobic slur on rock that rock critics didn't like) stripped off all that to get at the propellant core of rock and roll music, not unlike the garage rock that was their direct forebear.

New York was important in punk rock history (Ramones, Television, Patti Smith, etc.), as was the LA/SoCal area, home of seminal bands like Black Flag, the Germs, Agent Orange, and many others. Many of these were part of a scene focused on Hollywood and subrubs like Orange County. These scenes were well-documented (for example in the brilliant 1980 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization (full film here, trailer here).

Meanwhile, there was also an important scene in East LA, of mostly Chicano punks and venues like The Vex, but also in people's back yards, a phenomenon that continues today.  The Vex held a the "Punk Prom" in 1980 that brough the Hollywood and East LA scenes together, but a subsequent riot at a Black Flag Show ended destroyed the venue.

Gender

A patriarchal kind of masculinity is an important element of traditional Mexican culture. This might seem odd, but the emotional costs to men of very fixed and patriarchal gender norms is a sub-text to lots of Mexican music, in which weeping cowboys, the mask of toughness loosened by liquor and seasoned by rage, are a constant trope, as in the classic "Tu Maldito Amor" (Your Damn Love) by the great film star Vicente Fernández. Unsurprisingly, country music — which also deals with a lot of masculine sadness —is popular in Texas in particular, and a number of country stars have been Texas-Mexicans. (The most famous was Freddy Fender, (b. 1937 as Valdemar Huerta). He had a big hit with "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights" in 1959, but he couldn't promote it, because he was put in prison for marijuana possession (exacerbated by his association with a married white woman). He'd come back to great acclaim in the 1970s and 1980s, especially with "Before the Next Teardrop" [here sung in bilingual in a medley with another Mexican country standard, "Rancho Grande"].There were a few other Mexican-American country stars, too, though, a tradition that continues). 

Anyway...

Gender themes, or gender-adjacent themes of power and control, is also a feture of punk rock. A lot of the Chicano punk groups featured women, and gender nonconformity, in varying forms and degrees. This seems to underlie a lot of Chicano participation in punk, as well as related goth and emo forms, from punk rock masculine posturing (like The Zeros' "Don't Push Me Around" and "Wimp"), to the Chicano obsession with the working-class sensitivity of English mope-rockers Morissey and the Smiths.

Patriarchy is oppressive to straight men, but even more so to women (a theme of Jim Mendiola's tender punk film "Pretty Vacant") and femmes. The female and gay presence in Chicana punk has been string form the beginning, as with The Brat.



Alice Bags (born Alice Almendáriz) was the frontwoman, along with Patricia Morrison, of The Bags. She'd go on to found Cholita! The Female Menudo with intersex punk rocker Vaginal Davis. Bags is still at it today.

Most punk was in English, but some bands from the Vex scene went back and forth, like The Plugz, who have an amazing "La Bamba" cover and a few Spanish songs on the soundtrack for the cult classic film (starring Emilio Estevez as a punk rock slacker) Repo Man. Los Illegals were important for bilingual songs like "El Lay" (L.A.) and political songs like "We Don't Need a Tan." Ex-Illegals Robert López went on to adopt the alter ego "El Vez/ The Mexican Elvis," a campy send-up of Elvis with a fake Mexican accent.

Meanwhile there's a whole new generation of LA Latinx punks, and all kinds of goth and emo, many of which also engage in a certain amount of play with gender roles.

Mexican-American resources

In case anyone was interested in doing a project on Mexican-American music, the University Arizona recently digitized their collection of Mexican-American newspapers. Here's the press release, in case you're wondering what's in there,  and here's the collection.