Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan's recording of “Stone Cold Dead in the Market” was a major R&B and pop hit in 1946. In narrating a woman's murder of her abusive husband from a sympathetic first-person point of view, the recording's depiction of domestic violence raises the question of how it achieved mass popularity in a cultural milieu that discouraged frank discussion of this topic. This article accounts for this popularity by tracing the musical and lyrical changes between the hit recording and its sources, the Caribbean folk ballad Payne dead/Murder in the market and calypso performer Wilmouth Houdini's 1939 adaptation He had it coming.
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.
Develops data from interviews about stereotypes of Jamaican and Barbadian men and women. The popular music from Jamaica and Barbados is used as a lens for understanding the cultures within which the respondents develop their gender stereotypes. The stereotype data is then compared with the music that is popular during the interviews.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
276 p, The history of Haiti throughout the twentieth century has been marked by oppression at the hands of colonial and dictatorial overlords. But set against this "day for the hunter" has been a "day for the prey," a history of resistance, and sometimes of triumph. With keen cultural and historical awareness, Gage Averill shows that Haiti's vibrant and expressive music has been one of the most highly charged instruments in this struggle—one in which power, politics, and resistance are inextricably fused.
Explores such diverse genres as Haitian jazz, troubadour traditions, Vodou-jazz, konpa, mini-djaz, new generation, and roots music. He examines the complex interaction of music with power in contexts such as honorific rituals, sponsored street celebrations, Carnival, and social movements that span the political spectrum.
An overview of choral activity in Latin America, including cathedrals, missions (particularly Jesuit missions), and musical centers such as the Escuela de Chacao in Venezuela and the Escola Mineira in Brazil. The 20th century witnessed a renaissance of choral music, along with the development of national conservatories and a variety of choral institutions. A regional survey highlights some of the activities in Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico; the Caribbean region, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic; and the Andean region, including Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chili, and Uruguay. Composers have been inspired by the burgeoning choral ensembles, writing music that may use contemporary compositional techniques, popular music, folk music, as well as arranging popular music for choirs.
Explores the idea of diaspora and musical exchanges in relation to changes in Colombian popular music, specifically that from the Caribbean coastal region of the country, often identified as more or less African-influenced. It traces changes that occurred from the 1920s onward, with the commercialization of cumbia and porro and related styles, and looks also at more recent developments around vallenato, champeta, and rap.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
614 p, Cuba has been central to popular music developments throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, the United States and Europe. Unfortunately, no one has ever attempted to survey the extensive literature on the island's music, in particular the vernacular contributions of its Afro-Cuban population. This unprecedented bibliographic guide attempts to do just that. Ranging from the 19th century to early 2009 it offers almost 5000 entries on all of the islandâ¿¿s main genre families, e.g. Cancion Cubana, Danzon, Son, Rumba, and Sacred Musics (Santeria, Palo, Abakua, and Arara), as well as such recent developments as timba, rap and regueton.
Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
343 p., Explores issues associated with Caribbean women, music, and the global community. By placing the Caribbean within the global community, these essays contribute to the discussion of diasporic musicians and elucidate the relationships between the Caribbean and the larger world. Emphasis is on the remarkable extent of the Caribbean’s influence, especially in the last 50 years.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
267 P., Like rap in the United States, bachata began as a music of the poor and dispossessed. Originating in the shantytowns of the Dominican Republic, it reflects the social and economic dislocation of the poorest Dominicans.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
661 p., Focuses on the diffusion of Cuban popular musical styles throughout the Americas as well as the creation of new hybrids in places such as Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Latin New York. Students, scholars and librarians will find Baila! to be an essential resource on Afro-Latin music and dance, language, literature, aesthetics, and more.
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.
During the early 1970s the U.S. songwriter, musician, and producer Van Dyke Parks completed work on a series of albums exploring the musical contours of the circum-Caribbean region and, through them, broader patterns and issues in 20th-century relations between the U.S. and the Caribbean.
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
704 p., Comprehensive reference to a range of musical styles, from Bailanta to Bossa Nova and from Salsa to Ska. It includes discussions on cultural, historical and geographic origins; technical musical characteristics; instrumentation and use of voice; typical features of performance and presentation; and, relationships to other genres and sub-genres.
Avelar,Idelber, (Ed.And Intro.) and Dunn,Christopher, (Ed.And Intro.)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2011
Published:
Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
376 p, Covering more than one hundred years of history, this multidisciplinary collection of essays explores the vital connections between popular music and citizenship in Brazil. While popular music has served as an effective resource for communities to stake claims to political, social, and cultural rights in Brazil, it has also been appropriated by the state in its efforts to manage and control a socially, racially, and geographically diverse nation. The question of citizenship has also been a recurrent theme in the work of many of Brazil's most important musicians. These essays explore popular music in relation to national identity, social class, racial formations, community organizing, political protest, and emergent forms of distribution and consumption.
"This paper examines the tradition of misogynistic picong or satire in calypso songs recorded as artists moved from Trinidad to Britain during the period immediately after World War II. I argue that, while these traditions of anti-woman representation began in conflicts around race and class inequalities within Caribbean culture during the Depression, they came to take on an anti-colonial animus when translated to the mother country. Calypso singers' tales of their exploits with hapless wealthy Englishwomen thus functioned not simply to express superiority over other men from the Caribbean, but to challenge the forms of racial subordination that black male migrants encountered in Britain during the 1940s and 1950s." --The Author
Against the backdrop of a tremendous surge in ethnic identity politics and social movement organizing over the last two decades in Ecuador, two complementary musical trends are explored that have emerged in reference to the country's Afro-Ecuadorian population. The first showcases the traditional music and dance of the marimba as a symbol of Afro-Ecuadorian identity. The second features numerous popular music fusions of the marimba repertoire with genres including rock, salsa, reggaetón, and more, with broad appeal to audiences throughout the country and beyond.
Located in the eastern Brazilian Amazon roughly three hours by boat from the open Atlantic, the port city of Belém do Pará has been an important point of convergence for transnational flows of commodities, people, and culture, including a vast array of up-tempo Caribbean dance genres known locally as lambada. Since the late twentieth century, inhabitants of Belém and surrounding areas have sought to make a virtue of their liminal position between the hegemonic centers of southeastern Brazil and the circum-Caribbean. This article shows how musicians, dancers, listeners, and culture brokers draw on the local history of Caribbean cosmopolitan musicality to articulate an alternative Amazonian regional identity, one characterized by connectedness and proximity to their Caribbean neighbors rather than by isolation and provincialism. In so doing, the article contributes to the remapping of the cultural contours of Brazil, the Caribbean, the Amazon, and Latin America.
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.
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.
Pages: 1-17., Examines the songs of the insular Caribbean as a contribution to the oral literature of the Caribbean region, with particular reference to the songs and singers of Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and to a lesser extent, Barbados. Among the artists discussed are Trinidad's African Queen of Song, Ella Andall, Dominica's Nascio Fontaine, and Carolyn Cooper's perspectives on the Jamaican dancehall and Kittitian legend King Ellie Matt, 'De Hardest Hard', who reigned supreme during the 1970s and 1980s. He influenced the late Daddy Friday, whose songs still receive significant airplay today. Trinidad's chutney soca songs speak to the presence of its East Indian singers while Jamaican sisters Tami Chynn and Tessanne Chin of Chinese, Cherokee, European, and African descent have become known, respectively, as pop and rock reggae singers.
Adieu foulard, adieu madras is a very popular tune from the French Caribbean. It is just as popular today in continental France, where it has been adapted to different musical genres. Yet, for those familiar with the simple melody and its evocative lyrics, which encourages carefree humming, not many may be aware that it is so deeply rooted in the history of French colonialism, island tropes, and ethnic relations. This essay uses Adieu foulard, adieu madras and its multiple sonic meanings as the lens to better understand the dynamics of the (post)colonial relationship of the people of the French Antilles, particularly from the island overseas departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe, many of whom have now migrated permanently to metropolitan France. For these, Adieu has now also become their song of exile.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
201 p, Contents: Cultural history and the arts -- Festivals and Carnival -- Music of the French-speaking Caribbean and its diaspora. General works; Canada; Cuba; Dominica; Dominican Republic; France; French Guiana (Guyane); Guadeloupe; Haiti; Martinique; Puerto Rico; St. Lucia; United States -- Biographical and critical studies.
Berkeley: University of California Press Berkeley, CA, U.S.A
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Examines the role music has played in the formation of the political and national identity of the Bahamas. It analyzes Bahamian musical life as it has been influenced and shaped by the islands’ location between the United States and the rest of the Caribbean; tourism; and Bahamian colonial and postcolonial history. Focusing on popular music in the second half of the twentieth and early 21st c., in particular rake-n-scrape and Junkanoo, the author finds a Bahamian music that has remained culturally rooted in the local even as it has undergone major transformations. Highlighting the ways entertainers have represented themselves to Bahamians and to tourists, he illustrates the shifting terrain that musicians navigated during the rapid growth of tourism and in the aftermath of independence.
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
1 DVD (63 min), The Afro-Cuban Big Band Play-Along DVD gives the drummer/percussionist an opportunity to play contemporary Afro-Cuban music in a big band setting. The DVD features play-along tracks (minus the drums), an E-book containing the complete charts and examples demonstrated on the DVD, and bonus tracks of additional tunes from Afro-Bop Alliance.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Examines a variation of samba called pagode baiano in several peripheral neighborhoods of the city of Salvador. Dance parties organized around this genre provide the context for the affirmation of a racial identity discourse as well as the reterritorialization of 'easy women', 'dishonest and lazy people', jobless people, homosexuals, and blacks. Pagode reintegrates aspects of traditional African manifestations found in Brazil, such as dance, call-and-response song, and the emphasis on polyrhythm. It embraces a sub-altern gender (feminine) and sexuality (homosexual) and undermines the hegemony of the macho. It exists as a musical experience whose feelings are particular and shared amongst certain subjects. Musicians and the public share a language and a way of speaking about themselves and others that reveal an emergent, imperfect citizenship.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
402 p, Exploration of the musical heritage of Latin America and the Caribbean, arranged by region, focusing on the major countries/regions (Mexico, Brazil, Peru, etc. in Latin America and Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, Haiti, etc. in the Caribbean). In each chapter the author gives a complete history of the region’s music, ranging from classical and classical-influenced styles to folk and traditional music to today’s popular music.
Belafonte,Harry, (Author) and Shnayerson,Michael, (Collab.)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
01/01; 2011
Published:
New York: Alfred A. Knopf
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
A personal account of an era of enormous cultural and political change, which reveals Harry Belafonte as not only one of America's greatest entertainers, but also one of our most profoundly influential activists. Belafonte spent his childhood in both Harlem and Jamaica, where the toughness of the city and the resilient spirit of the Caribbean lifestyle instilled in him a tenacity to face the hurdles of life head-on and channel his anger into positive, life-affirming actions. He returned to New York City after serving in the Navy in World War II, and found his calling in the theater, before transitioning into a career as a singer and Hollywood leading man. During the 1960s civil rights movement, Belafonte became close friends with Martin Luther King, Jr., and used his celebrity as a platform for his activism in civil rights and countless other political and social causes. This book tells the inspiring story of an original and powerful entertainer who has always engaged fiercely with the issues of his day.
As Angola restructures following a long civil war and Brazil takes a leading role among the rapidly developing BRIC nations, new questions arise pertaining to the African heritage in Brazilian music and to Brazil's role in Angolan cultural initiatives and musical markets. Through examination of Brazilian discourse about such exchanges, combined with a comparative analysis of three versions of Angolan musician Teta Lando's 1974 song, Angolano segue em frente—the original, a recent Brazilian re-recording, and a Brazilian remix—new attention is given to the South-South dialogue that builds on historical connections yet also establishes new resonances in musical evocations of Atlantic affinities.
Crossroads populate religious and folkloric beliefs all around the world. Stories of an intersection of dimensions, as well as of roads where a guardian-trickster deity awaits to carry human desires to the gods, are widely encountered in European, Caribbean, and West African lore (as well as the legends formed around blues and rock stars). The symbolism of the crossroads speaks directly to one's innate recognition of a charged metaphorical space; a space that is liminal, betwixt-and-between. This notion of the crossroads serves as inspiration for examining the relationship between U2's music and listeners' progressive political awareness—the marriage of critical consciousness and action for social justice and change. To this end, an in-depth study is carried out of six listeners' experiences at the potent crossroads of their developing progressive awareness and their encounters with U2's music.
Examines the political and cultural possibilities and limits of the wide-ranging reggae scene that has emerged along both sides of the U.S./Mexico border since the 1990s. It investigates why and how members of seemingly disparate border communities, including Mexicanas/os, Chicanas/os, and Native Americans, find common social and political ground playing Afro-Caribbean inspired music. It also interrogates how people living in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands have responded to the impact of economic and political globalization by using reggae to fashion multiethnic and post-national political formations and social relationships at the grassroots.
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
386 p., Boggs presents a history of salsa, showing how Afro-Cuban music was embraced in New York City, how it has undergone cycles of popularity, and how it has been replicated abroad. The text contains interviews with such key figures as Palladium Mambero and Ernie Ensley
The band Cortijo is contextualized within the socioeconomic changes in Puerto Rico from the late 1940s to the early 1960s as it adjusted to its new status as a commonwealth. Cortijo documents the realities of Puerto Rico's rapid urbanization and modernization at the time. The band's gritty reflections of a black, working class, urban, and marginalized population contradict the official rhetoric and imagery of an idealized rural landscape promoted by the government as the symbol of the commonwealth. Cortijo enjoyed immense popularity and visibility, despite, or perhaps because of, its critique of the euphoria of modernization and its questioning of the sociopolitical effects of internal migration that ran counter to the official stance.
Colorism and skin bleaching is evident in contemporary Jamaica as expressed in some dancehall songs which praise skin bleachers, and the explanatory narratives of skin bleachers that bleaching makes them pretty and sexually attractive to potential spouses. Similar themes are reflected in the criticism that the browning Dancehall Queen Carlene was deemed sexually attractive and choreographically talented only because of her brown physicality. Some spouses request that their partner acquire the bleached physicality because they find it sexually attractive similar to many male clients in 'massage parlors' who only request female sex workers who bleach their skin.
Argues that Haitians used music, and particularly religious singing, self-reflexively, in a culturally patterned way, to orient themselves in time and space, and to construct a frame of meaning in which to understand and act in the devastated Haitian capital. Non-Haitian observers noted with astonishment Haitians’ widespread use of song, but could not make sense of the singing.
Caribbean identity is informed by the condition of being islands and also by its sociopolitical conditions of colonialism, (e)migration, and pluralism. The uncertainty of not being grounded to the specificity of place is in conflict with generalized notions of nation and cultural identity. As people migrate, they create shifting identities following the process of addition and flux that has characterized the region. Cultural identity and migration are central issues in songs, which play a key role of lending continuity to culture and reconstructing symbols.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Following a brief introduction to the origins and aesthetics of calypso, soca (the child of calypso), and go-go music, the author suggests that, despite differences in location and sound, both genres share a common goal: offering underrepresented populations the power to negotiate and express their African heritage through music. Both soca and go-go also share three African musical traits: polymetric ensemble drumming, call-and-response techniques, and the use of allusive repetition that can span the works of various artists over a number of years.
The third album by the Clash, London calling captured the zeitgeist of its time with references to various domestic and international news items that had captured the attention of Joe Strummer (née John Mellor) and Mick Jones as they composed the songs. Many seek to represent the state of Britain in the late 1970s, where an inflation rate of 25 percent and high unemployment fueled anger at the government and sparked attacks on minorities who were blamed for taking jobs that might otherwise have employed Britons. The album tackles such issues as racial disharmony, police brutality, unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, and the sense of alienation felt by many working-class youths and contextualized these social ills in a broader international frame with references to similar political and social crises in Spain, the Caribbean, and the Middle East.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi Jackson, MS, United States
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
The Brazilian berimbau, a musical bow, is most commonly associated with the energetic martial art/dance/game of capoeira. But the instrument has played a prominent role in several genres of Brazilian music from the 1950s to the present, including bossa nova, samba-reggae, música popular brasileira (MPB), electronic dance music, Brazilian art music, and more. Berimbau music spans oral and recorded historical traditions, connects Latin America to Africa, juxtaposes the sacred and profane, and unites nationally constructed notions of Brazilian identity across seemingly impenetrable barriers. The berimbau is discussed beyond the context of capoeira, exploring the bow's emergence as a national symbol. It engages and analyzes intersections of musical traditions in the Black Atlantic, North American popular music, and the rise of global jazz.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Throughout Brazil, Afro-Brazilians face widespread racial prejudice. Many turn to religion, with Afro-Brazilians disproportionately represented among Protestants, the fastest-growing religious group in the country. Officially, Brazilian Protestants do not involve themselves in racial politics. Behind the scenes, however, the community is deeply involved in the formation of different kinds of blackness—and its engagement in racial politics is rooted in the major new cultural movement of black music. In this account, the complex ideas about race, racism, and racial identity that have grown up among Afro-Brazilians in the black music scene are explored. The author immersed himself for nearly a year in the vibrant worlds of black gospel, gospel rap, and gospel samba in order to better understand racial identity and the social effects of music. Delving into the everyday music-making practices of these scenes, it is shows how the creative process itself shapes how Afro-Brazilian artists experience and understand their racial identities. The results challenge much of what some people thought they knew about Brazil's Protestants, provoking one to think in new ways about their role in their country's struggle to combat racism.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
772 p., George Gershwin introduced Afro Cuban Music in America in 1926. Xavier Cugat during the 1930's introduced The Rumba dance. Three great innovations based on Cuban music hit the USA after World War II: the first was Cubop, the latest Latin jazz fusion. The rumbustious conguero Chano Pozo was also important, for he introduced jazz musicians to basic Cuban rhythms. Cuban jazz has continued to be a significant influence. The mambo first entered the United States around 1950, though ideas had been developing in Cuba and Mexico City for some time.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
The definitive group biography of the Wailers—Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Livingston—chronicling their rise to fame and power and offering a portrait of a seminal group during a period of exuberant cultural evolution. Over one dramatic decade, a trio of Trenchtown R&B crooners swapped their 1960s Brylcreem hairdos and two-tone suits for 1970s battle fatigues and dreadlocks to become the Wailers—one of the most influential groups in popular music. A history of the band is presented from their upbringing in the brutal slums of Kingston to their first recordings and then international superstardom. It is argued that these reggae stars offered three models for black men in the second half of the 20th century: accommodate and succeed (Marley), fight and die (Tosh), or retreat and live (Livingston). The author meets with Rastafarian elders, Obeah men, and other folk authorities as he attempts to unravel the mysteries of Jamaica's famously impenetrable culture and to offer a sophisticated understanding of Jamaican politics, heritage, race, and religion.
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.
Examines aspects related to the plural constitution of Afro-descendants informed by black discursiveness in Salvador, Bahia. This discursiveness is strongly marked by the role of black music and by the history of Afro-descendant Carnaval. This essay shows that these subjects are a product of modernization and operate in it, while giving it a specific configuration. Social agents as reflexive audience play a decisive role in the review and criticism of such modernity, pluralizing it and pushing the boundaries of democracy and of representation politics, in their demand for recognition and changes. Music, as discursive production and as sociability experience, plays a key part in this process.
In Colombia, armed conflict, exacerbated by the war on drugs and the effects of neoliberal economic policies, has forced Afro-Colombian communities in the Chocó region off their land. The author studies the lyrics of a collection of vallenato songs that affirm the identity of the displaced of Chocó and help create solidarity and consciousness about their struggle. She explains the ideological roots of the armed conflict between the state military, the guerilla groups, and the paramilitary units of Colombia. She also describes the displacement she believes is caused by specific economic development projects resulting from 21st-century free-trade agreements between North America and Colombia. She analyzes how the villanato songs bring visibility to an otherwise invisible group of displaced peoples.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Jamaican deejay Yellowman is best known for 'slackness': lyrics centered on masculine heterosexual potency, sexist objectification of women, and graphic sexual narratives. Yet a deeper look at Yellowman's life and recorded output suggests that when his slackness is read in the context of Afro-Jamaican culture, reggae history, and his Rastafarian faith, a more complex interpretation of his slackness is needed. The study draws on Carolyn Cooper's (2001) theory that slackness is a 'metaphorical revolt against law and order, an undermining of consensual standards of decency' (p. 141). Whereas the term 'culture' is used in reggae to depict music that is Afrocentric, Rasta-inspired, and socially conscious, and is normally seen as the antithesis of slackness, it is suggested that for Yellowman, the slack/culture dichotomy is eroded when slackness becomes part of the religious repertoire of resistance against mainstream Jamaican society. The dissertation presents: a) an overview of theory and methodology b) an ethnographic case study based on Yellowman's life and career, and c) four analytical chapters that offer itineraries to theorize slackness in Yellowman's music. First, it is argued that through slackness Yellowman subverted embedded Jamaican cultural notions of sexuality, gender, race, nationality, and beauty by promoting the dundus (black albino) as sexually appealing, hyper-masculine, and part of the imagined black nation. Second, it is demonstrated how Yellowman's sexual lyrics are an example of Obika Gray's (2004) thesis that slackness was a conscious political project employed by the Jamaican poor to contest the normative values of dominant society. The pitting of Yellowman and slackness in reggae journalism against Bob Marley and culture is contested. Third, it is refuted that Yellowman employs slackness for the purpose of moral regulation based on conservative Afro-Jamaican sexual mores and his understanding of Rastafarian morality. Finally, Yellowman's perforating of Christian dualistic ideas of carnal/spiritual is situated in the Rastafarian Babylon/Zion binary, demonstrating how Afro-Caribbean religion has redefined Christian dualism using an Afrocentric body-positive ideology.
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.
