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5. Ideological Negotiations: Between Hegemony and Resistance
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c h a p t e r f i v e Ideological Negotiations Between Hegemony and Resistance Opposition in Form Puerto Rican historian Angel Quintero Rivera has identified several structural elements of salsa music as symbolic sites of liberatory values and of freedom. First, the “free and significant combination of forms”1 that salsa represents, as illustrated in Ruben Bladés’s hit “Tiburón.” This song is characterized by smooth transitions from a rumba form to harmonic elements of the seis, a Puerto Rican traditional country music form associated with a strong sense of community and friendship. Quintero Rivera believes that the diversity of the song’s musical forms and the usage of the seis as a subtext for communal values are the elements that allow a strongly antiimperialist song such as this to have been a popular hit for so long in Puerto Rico. Second, the descargas (jamming sessions) typical in salsa performances, according to Quintero Rivera, may be constructed as an instance of freedom. Exemplified in the percussion “bursts” of “Tiburón,” the descarga is followed by the trombone or brass section and the cuatro, also embracing the other instruments in this manifestation of virtuosity and creativity.2 In literature , Víctor Hernández Cruz’s poem “Descarga en cueros” articulates the transformative and liberating potential of a jamming session through the hyperbolic imagery of dancing: “at the bar people’s drinks flew out they hands the vibrations knocked people to the floor / & the lights began to bust / & the floor to crack . . . the floor began to rock people fell off the balcony / t.p. was smiling / his face ready to rip / o.k. you win / hands in the air ready to fly / heads outside beyond the buildings.”3 Cruz’s poem plays with the blurred boundaries between dancing, jamming , and social disturbance or violence. The perceptions that many cultural outsiders have of this type of music—that it is primitive, loud, chaotic, and subversive—constitute historical repetitions of the same vestigial fears A Literary Prelude / 83 Ideological Negotiations / 83 expressed by the Spanish colonial government about the performance on drums by African slaves in Cuba, also evidenced in the banning of the merengue in Puerto Rico in the first half of the twentieth century. Thus, jamming sessions in urban centers around the Americas concretized spaces of opposition and counterculture, simultaneously connecting contemporary Latinas/os and African Americans to the liberatory practices of their slave antecedents and to the cimarrones’s state of mind, a maroon conscience about their own contradictory freedom and bondage found in marginality. The soneo, the long section of improvisation in any salsa song, also exemplifies “liberty and spontaneity.”4 The soneo is characterized by a calland -response structure between singer and chorus (the instrumentalists), and as such it is a trait that represents continuity with older forms of AfroCaribbean musical folklore and with West African music. It allows salsa music to articulate a collective voice in its chorus section and to establish a dialogic texture in its montuno section. When the singer improvises on the main theme of the song (the art of the soneo) he or she creates new utterances and also rearticulates and culls phrases from other songs of various traditions. The singer opens up a sonorous space of freedom, improvisation , and innovation, clinging simultaneously to musical tradition and reaffirming collective memory. This structure, perhaps the most creative aspect of salsa music, also allows the lead singer, or sonero, to intersperse political commentary or social criticism in a less blatant mode. Contesting Theodor Adorno’s earlier dismissal of the liberatory value of improvisation (accusing jazz improvisation of being normalized),5 Roberta Singer’s analysis of the role of improvisation in Latin popular music vindicates this practice. Improvisation for Latina/o musicians is a complex process, although not necessarily innovative, since it lies at the roots of Afro-Caribbean musical traditions. According to the Latin musicians interviewed by Singer, improvisation implies “an incorporation of all that one knows musically” and thus the quality of improvising is a function of the musician’s repertoire. The more one knows, the more freedom he or she enjoys in choosing musical selections in their potential for combination. Improvisation also implies a sensitivity to nuances, for “if you know the nuances then even repetition is not repetitive.”6 As in other forms of popular music, improvisation in salsa contests the institutionalizing processes of musical education in the Western mind and world. Music educators have generally fostered and trained students...