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2. Beginning a new Cuban dream: An interview with Carlos Varela
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Cumaná,María Caridad, (Author) and Dubinsky,Karen, (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- Fall; Fall-winter, 2013
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Latin American music review/Revista de música latinoamericana
- Journal Title Details:
- 34(2) : 196-222
- Notes:
- Carlos Varela is one of the best-known singer-songwriters to emerge from the Cuban nueva trova movement: heir to the musical traditions forged by Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés. Parochially, if accurately, known in North America as “Cuba’s Bob Dylan,” he has produced eight CDs since he began recording in 1988 and has toured Europe, the United Kingdom, Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America. In Cuba he is known as the voice of the generation that came of age during the Special Period of the 1990s, those raised with the promise and seeming collapse of the Cuban Revolution, for whom his songs have become generational anthems. In this interview, Varela discusses the meaning his music has for Cubans in the diaspora and on the island, the benefits and liabilities of creating music in today’s Cuba, censorship, history, the current Cuban hip-hop scene, and the ongoing significance of music as a political language for his own and other generations of Cubans. He also shares some reflections about his own career and his song-writing process since the 1980s., unedited non–English abstract received by RILM] Carlos Varela es uno de los cantautores más famosos surgido del movimiento cubano de la nueva trova, y heredero de la tradición musical de Silvio Rodríguez y Pablo Milanés. Celebrado como el “Bob Dylan cubano”, ha producido ocho discos desde que comenzó a grabar en 1988, y ha dado giras por Europa, el Reino Unido, América Latina, el Caribe y América del Norte. En Cuba, Varela es conocido como la voz de la generación que se formó durante el Período Especial de los años noventa, los que crecieron con la promesa y, a la vez, la desilusión de la Revolución Cubana, y para quienes sus canciones se convirtieron en himnos generacionales. En esta entrevista, habla sobre el significado de sus canciones para los cubanos dentro y fuera de la isla, sobre los beneficios y las dificultades de la creación musical en la Cuba de hoy, sobre la censura, la historia, el escenario actual del hip-hop cubano, y el constante significado de la música como lenguaje político, tanto para su generación como para las otras generaciones de cubanos. También, Varela comparte algunas reflexiones sobre su carrera y el proceso de creación de sus canciones desde los años ochenta.
3. Billy Ocean: Sea change
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Kantor,Justin M., (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- 01/01; 2011
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Wax poetics
- Journal Title Details:
- 47 : 84-90
- Notes:
- Before finding international success and stardom with a string of well-known radio hits, Billy Ocean grinded on the U.K. circuit for well over a decade. The singer-songwriter released a handful of singles and four relatively unknown albums prior to the breakthrough in the mid-1980s, which included a mix of ballads, Caribbean-influenced R&B, club-shaking disco, synth-filled boogie, and even country-inflected Southern soul. The pre-fame arc of Ocean's career is traced record by record.
4. Discordant beats of pleasure amidst everyday violence: The cultural work of party music in Trinidad
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Guilbault,Jocelyne, (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- 01/01; 2011
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- MUSICultures
- Journal Title Details:
- 38 : 7-26
- Notes:
- In spaces of violence, scholars and activists have typically addressed music as sites of resistance. In postcolonial Caribbean, the focus of most studies unsurprisingly has thus been placed on the work music has done for the oppressed—or conversely, on the ways the (neo)colonial regimes have used music to increase their control over the masses. Until recently, few publications have addressed the music that has been performed to fortify and gather people together in times of hardship. In this case, what is at stake is not so much a matter of 'us and them' or of resistance, but rather the ways in which the 'us' is mobilized to strengthen senses of belonging and networks of solidarity. Amidst the escalating everyday violence since the mid-1990s, party music in Trinidad continues to thrive. Instead of dismissing such music as merely a source of escapism or hedonism, I want to examine what makes it so compelling and what it does for people. This paper is based on in-depth study of soca music making and mumerous ethnographic interviews with Trinidadian soca artists and fans over the past 15 years.
5. Joe Arroyo y La Verdad: Me le fugué a la candela
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Yglesias,Pablo, (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- 01/01; 2011
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Collected Work: Wax poetics.49 (2011): Latin issue.Pages: 96.(AN: 2011-12593).
- Notes:
- With Joe Arroyo's passing on 26 July 2011, the world has lost a superstar and true innovator of modern Latin music. His work combined lyrics of protest, romance, and spirituality with a joyful music that was at once fresh and accessible. The sixth album Arroyo put out with La Verdad marked a transition from a less adventurous to a more radical approach, where the diverse mix heard on later records is fully embraced for the first time. With Me le fugué a la candela (I escaped the fire) his players gelled, and the pan-Caribbean sound they became famous for came into its own, especially on side two.
6. Salsa/bhangra: Transnational rhythm cultures in comparative perspective
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Kabir,Ananya Jahanara, (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- 01/01; 2011
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Music and arts in action
- Journal Title Details:
- 3(3) : 40-55
- Notes:
- The dance-music complexes known as salsa and bhangra have not been subjected to any comparative academic scrutiny, despite clear parallels in their respective histories as cultural processes born out of multiple ruptures and conjunctions, including European colonialism, migrations during the postcolonial period, and transnational cultural and commodity flows. While salsa has resulted from the movement of people, music, and rhythmic cultures across Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, bhangra evinces their movement across the partitioned space of Punjab, the United Kingdom, and the post-Partition nations of India and Pakistan. Both salsa and bhangra have, moreover, moved beyond original regional ambits to become cultural signifiers (albeit often contested as much as claimed) of wider Latino/a and Desi (pan-South Asian) identities respectively. Undoubtedly, it is the academic and cultural embedding of salsa within a Hispanophone postcolonial paradigm, and of bhangra within its Anglophone counterpart, that has prevented serious comparative work between these two musical expressive cultures which are equally but differently exemplary of the complex relationship between music and migration. Yet across the world, from Delhi to San Francisco, the two dance-music complexes increasingly meet each other in the same space, particularly that of the dance floor. Drawing on such evidence as well as on personal experience of dancing both salsa and bhangra, I will advance in this article a theoretical framework for their comparison as transnational musics, suggesting ways in which such a framework can illuminate the circuits of pleasure and politics that traverse each of these dance musics as embodied histories of a traumatic yet life-affirming postcolonial modernity.
7. The routes and roots of danzón: A critique of the history of a genre
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Malcomson,Hettie, (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- May; May, 2011
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Popular music
- Journal Title Details:
- 30(2) : 263-278
- Notes:
- Examines the history of a genre that spans several continents and several centuries. Material from Mexico, Cuba, France, and Great Britain are brought together to create anew, expand upon, and critique the standard histories of danzón narrated by Mexico's danzón experts and others. In these standard histories, origins and nationality are key to the constitution of genres that are racialized and moralized for political ends. Danzón, its antecedents, and successors are treated as generic equivalents despite being quite different. From the danzón on, these genres are positioned as being the products of individual, male originators and their nations. Africa is treated as a conceptual nation, and Africanness as something extra that racializes hegemonic European music-dance forms. Political leanings and strategies determine whether these music-dance forms are interpreted, adopted, or co-opted as being black or white.
8. “Tropical mix”: Afro-Latino space and Notch’s reggaetón
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Rivera,Petra R., (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- May; May, 2011
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Popular music and society
- Journal Title Details:
- 34(2) : 221-235
- Notes:
- Examines how Connecticut-born reggaetón artist Notch incorporates oratorical, visual, and musical cues in his music video, Qué te pica (What's itching you?), to establish connections between Latino and Caribbean communities in the U.S. These communities have typically been disavowed by hegemonic racial categories that distinguish between them. While Notch’s music disrupts these particular racial hierarchies, he also maintains hetero-normative patriarchal relations in his video. An analytic, Afro-Latino space is proposed to account for the ways that reggaetón as a musical genre, and Notch more specifically, unsettle certain distinctions between blackness and Latinidad, while simultaneously relying on stereotypes of black hypermasculinity.