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The Book of Salsa: A Chronicle of Urban Music from the Caribbean to New York City

2009; Duke University Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2008-116

1527-1900

Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof,

Music History and Culture

Though long out of print, El Libro de la Salsa, published in 1980 by a Venezuelan disc jockey and journalist named César Miguel Rondón, has been an underground hit among scholars for more than two decades. Now, happily, the book’s incorporation into the world of academic writing on music is official. Leaving out the photographs, cover art, and lyrics that appeared in the original, UNC Press has published an excellent English translation of Rondón’s text. The classic narrative of the origins and trajectory of salsa, which has informed the best academic writing on the subject for years, is now at the disposal of readers of English.Rondón argues that salsa was a reinvention of Cuban and other Caribbean music in the context of working-class Latino New York after the Cuban Revolution. In the 1960s, as the great New York mambo orchestras went into decline and musical innovations no longer arrived from Havana, small conjuntos led by Ray Baretto and Eddie Palmieri restructured the sounds of Latin big bands to fit in the smaller clubs in the Village, el Barrio, and the South Bronx. They, and younger barrio musicians like Willie Colón, wrote lyrics that recounted everyday experiences in New York and in some cases offered critiques of the racial and class oppression in that city. In the early 1970s, the record industry, led by Fania Records, helped to consolidate this new scene under the umbrella term salsa. Some of Fania’s interventions, like all-star jam sessions at the Cheetah Club, allowed musicians the freedom to develop the new style. But, Rondón recounts with regret, between 1975 and 1978, record companies created a commercial boom dominated by what he calls the Matancera style — a rejection of the New York sound with its gritty feel and edgy lyrics in favor of the nostalgic reproduction of Cuban music from the 1950s, in the style of the Sonora Matancera. Much of this production was musically uninteresting. But even the virtuosic recordings the Sonora’s brilliant singer Celia Cruz made for Fania were not, he argues, really salsa.Writing in the late 1970s, Rondón sought to distinguish between music marketed as salsa by the industry and true salsa, the evolving New York sound kept alive in the hands of artists like Papo Lucca, Roberto Roena, Manny Oquendo, and Willie Colón. This helped him to rebuff the contention of many Cuban musicians that salsa was merely a marketing strategy designed to repackage and profit from Cuban music. Commercial salsa might be an invention of the marketing department, he retorted, but true salsa was the invention of the barrio. The separation of true from commercial salsa also helped Rondón respond to nationalists in Venezuela, who saw rural folklore as the true expression of popular culture and salsa as a foreign, commercial, and imperial influence. Within Latin America, he contended, “authentic, popular music” has always crossed national boundaries (p. 7). And, he added, New York barrios are properly part of Latin America. True salsa, in other words, was the popular music of the urban Caribbean, including New York, Caracas, Ponce, and Santo Domingo. Thus his first major contribution was to situate salsa in a particular social milieu, identifying a key relationship between musical production and ethnic expression in marginalized working-class barrios in New York. His second major contribution was to trace the circulation and evolution of the New York sound in Puerto Rico and Venezuela. Long before transnational media studies came into fashion in academic departments, Rondón analyzed the cultural exchange (often mediated by culture industries) between Latino diasporas and Latin American societies in transformation.These groundbreaking interventions aside, in some ways Rondón’s vision translates awkwardly for contemporary academic audiences. The distinction Rondón proposes between the “truly popular” music and “trends created by the industry” relies on an uncomplicated notion of authenticity that many scholars will find suspect and that is frequently undermined by his own account. Much of the music he likes best comes not from the barrio, but from socially conscious but commercially successful, middle-class songwriters (Rubén Blades and Juan Luis Guerra). The barrios Rondón urges us to consider appear more as symbolic places than real ones, abstract and heroic counterpoints to the villains in the industry. It is therefore useful to remember that, despite the well-deserved imprint of an academic press, Rondón is not an ethnographer or a sociologist. He is a disc jockey and journalist with a vast collection of recordings and an impeccable ear. His best evidence is the music itself, which he catalogues and deconstructs with a liveliness that will send all but the most insensible readers running to the record store (though some may find themselves overwhelmed by his thoroughness). This explains why his arguments about authenticity don’t fall totally flat. The nature of his project is to identify music with sabor (the Spanish word for “flavor”) and distinguish it from music that is second-rate. His efforts to explain these matters of taste in social as well as musical terms sometimes leads to an overly simplistic vision of social relations, but they are also what make the book a classic.