Pop Music and Culture: CuBop, Up-Rock, Boogaloo and Banda. Latinos Making Music in the United States

Pop Music and Culture: CuBop, Up-Rock, Boogaloo and Banda. Latinos Making Music in the United States

CFA MH333/433 A1

MWF 12-1 CFA (855 Commonwealth) B36

Prof. Michael Birenbaum Quintero

Surveys the musical styles of Latinos in the US. Discusses the role of these musics in articulating race, class, gender and sexual identities for US Latinos, their circulation along migration routes, their role in identity politics and ethnic marketing, their commercial crossover to Anglo audiences, and Latin/o contributions to jazz, funk, doo-wop, disco and hip hop. Case studies may include Mexican-American/Chicano, Puerto Rican/Nuyorican and Cuban-American musics; Latin music in golden age Hollywood; Latin dance crazes from mambo to the Macarena; rock en español; the early 2000s boom of Latin artists like Shakira, Enrique Iglesias, and Jennifer López; reggaetón, race politics, and the creation of the “Hurban” market; and the transnational Latin music industries of Los Angeles, New York, and Miami.

Thursday, February 13, 2020

Tango fever

The Castles, Vernon and Irene.



Vernon & Irene Castle doing their thing.



Among other things, Irene Castle was responsible for a change in the standards of female beauty from the corseted vuluptuousness of the so-called "Gibson Girl" (like Camille Clifford, below)...



... to an  uncorseted, more lithe figure, bobbed (short) hair, more comfortable dress allowing for freer movement, and a look described as "boyish" or "spritely." Irene Castle:

Paragon of white masculinity, Teddy Roosevelt:

Famous (Italian) latin lover, "tango pirate," and dance world habitué Rudolf Valentino: 
Valentino played an Argentine cowboy in the famous tango scene from the silent film "The Four Horsemen."

Musical contagion and social class is a big theme in this country...

One of few actual Argentine tangos popular in the US was "El Choclo."

Facundo Posada, Argentine tanguero, represents the lost Afro-Argentine component of tango, also reflected in Candombe drummimg from Uruguay.

The great James Reese Europe


One of the tangos recorded by Europe's "Society Band" in late 1913. Listen here.




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