Focuses on specific aspects of the independent, creative network of musicians who in the late 1960s and early 1970s bonded together as the nueva canción or nueva canción movement across the Latin American continent, the Caribbean, and Spain. The author traces nueva canción through various key phrases. Nueva canción describes a music enmeshed within historical circumstances which included: the forging of revolutionary culture in Cuba; the coming together of political parties to form a coalition to elect the first ever socialist president in Chile in 1970; resistance to brutal Latin American dictatorships; and the struggle for new democracies. The music was often referred to by different names in different countries. It was known as: nueva cancionero (new song book) in Argentina; nueva canción (new song) in Chile and Peru; nueva trova (new song) in Cuba; and volcanto (volcanic song) in Nicaragua. Nueva canción musicians never saw their music as protest song. Nueva canción was regarded as a social force in itself and a key resource for creating collective bonds. This movement in its various forms was an emblematic music of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Functioning as both a national and international music, nueva canción has become part of the active memory of this period. Its potent legacy can be seen in the fact that many high-profile commercial singers today continue to be influenced by it: nueva canción continues to be perceived as a legitimate, unifying, and active force for peaceful change.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Surveys the origins of rock 'n' roll from the minstrel era to the emergence of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley. Dispelling common misconceptions, this book examines rock's origins in hokum songs and big-band boogies as well as Delta blues, detailing the embrace by white artists of African-American styles long before rock 'n' roll appeared. This study ranges far and wide, highlighting not only the contributions of obscure but key precursors like Hardrock Gunter and Sam Theard but also the influence of celebrity performers like Gene Autry and Ella Fitzgerald. Too often, rock historians treat the genesis of rock 'n' roll as a bolt from the blue, an overnight revolution provoked by the bland pop music that immediately preceded it and created through the white appropriation of music until then played only by and for black audiences. Here, Birnbaum argues a more complicated history of rock's evolution from a heady mix of ragtime, boogie-woogie, swing, country music, mainstream pop, and R&B—a melange of genres that influenced one another along the way, from the absorption of blues and boogies into jazz and pop to the integration of country and Caribbean music into R&B.
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.
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.
The Caribbean coastal region of Colombia is called the costa, and its inhabitants are referred to as costeños. The müsica costeña (coastal music) is a product of tri-ethnic syncretic cultural traditions including Amerindian, Spanish, and African elements, a merging that begins with the colonial period and continues into the republican period on the Caribbean Coast. Traditional music from the Colombian Caribbean coast expresses its tri-ethnic costeño identity in various vocal styles and musical forms and through its types of instruments and the way they are played. This essay describes the aspects and circumstances under which cumbia, a coastal musical genre and dance form of peasant origins characterized by an African-derived style, has spread from its local origins in the valley of the Magdalena River to acquire a Colombian national identity, becoming in a few years a transnational musical phenomenon.
Unedited] Focusing on R&B neo-soul singer D’Angelo’s 1999 album Voodoo, this article explores the relationship (both real and imagined) between African American popular music and Afro-Caribbean religion. While most songs on the album do not use traditional Caribbean rhythms, the album’s imagery appears to equate Voodoo’s blend of funk, soul, and gospel with Afro-Diasporic religious practices such as Santeria or Vodou. Not only do D’Angelo’s own statements about the album affirm this connection, but his fans also contribute valuable evidence supporting the link. Surveying the reception of Voodoo by music critics as well as hundreds of online customer reviews of the album via Amazon.com, I argue that D’Angelo’s listeners characterize the album as an inner-directed musical experience approximating spirit-possession. By consicously linking the repetitious, circular grooves of black popular music with the form and function of Afro-Diasporic religious traditions, D’Angelo and his fans testify to the value of black spirituality and offer a critique of the hypermasculinity and materialism pervading contemporary hip-hop and rap music. Voodoo refocuses our attention on the spiritual qualities of African American music that persist even in an age of mass-mediated global capitalism.
Madrid,Alejandro L., (Author) and Moore,Robin Dale, (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
01/01; 2013
Published:
New York: Oxford University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Initially branching out of the European contradance tradition, the danzón first emerged as a distinct form of music and dance among black performers in 19th-c. Cuba. By the early 20th-c., it had exploded in popularity throughout the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean basin. A fundamentally hybrid music and dance complex, it reflects the fusion of European and African elements and had a strong influence on the development of later Latin dance traditions as well as early jazz in New Orleans. This book studies the emergence, hemisphere-wide influence, and historical and contemporary significance of this music and dance phenomenon. The authors take an ethnomusicological, historical, and critical approach to the processes of appropriation of the danzón in new contexts, its changing meanings over time, and its relationship to other musical forms. Delving into its long history of controversial popularization, stylistic development, glorification, decay, and rebirth in a continuous transnational dialogue between Cuba and Mexico as well as New Orleans, the authors explore the production, consumption, and transformation of this Afro-diasporic performance complex in relation to global and local ideological discourses. By focusing on interactions across this entire region as well as specific local scenes, the authors underscore the extent of cultural movement and exchange within the Americas during the late 19th and early 20th-c., and are thereby able to analyze the danzón, the dance scenes it has generated, and the various discourses of identification surrounding it as elements in broader regional processes.
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.
