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Listening to the Listeners: An Introduction
- Wesleyan University Press
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Listening to the Listeners / 187 Listening to the Listeners An Introduction Así son, así son las mujeres. Así son, así son cuando se quieren. [Such, such are women. Such are women when we love them.] —El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, “Así son” Así somos. Somos atrevidas, ya no somos tan cohibidas, tan dejadas. Ahora ya hacemos lo que queremos . . . podemos dejar a los hombres. [Such are we. We women are daring, we are no longer inhibited, submissive. Now we do what we want . . . we can leave men.] —A Latina after listening to “Así son” El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, the very institution of salsa music [la instituci ón de la salsa] as a Puerto Rican man reminded me, released their record album entitled “Aquí no se sienta nadie” in 1979.1 Out of the hundreds of albums they have recorded in their thirty years of existence, this particular record, released during the group’s golden age, contained many songs that would mark their privileged role in molding the salsa canon. Cuts such as “Brujería,” “Más feo que yo,” and “Así son” became musical staples in everyday life on the island during the late 1970s and early 1980s. These songs were played on the radio and “en las patronales y en fiestas y en vivo” [at the patron saints’ festivities, at parties and at live concerts].2 As one young Puerto Rican man observed, “todos los números de ese disco pegaron, todo el mundo los cantaba, en la radio todavía se escuchan de vez en cuando” [all the songs became hits, everybody sang them, still today we can listen to them on the radio]. Moreover, he insisted that “cualquier cosa que esta gente toque le gusta a la gente” [whatever El Gran Combo would play, people would love it]. El Gran Combo’s tremendous popularity, evidenced in the pervasive social circulation of their songs, is particularly illustrated in the cuts from Aquí no se sienta nadie. “Así son” serves as an ideal case study of the articulation between the local and the transnational, marking the shifts through which popular culture—the aural, the visual, and mass media—have become the central markers of cultural literacy in Latin America. As Jean Franco has noted, in these times of postmodernist globalization, “the small scale and the local are the places of greatest intensity.”3 “Así son” embodies the processes of signifying, the semiotic circulation and the multidirectional flow of signifieds that characterize the life story of any cultural text. The song was an immediate hit after its release; both men and women have sung its lyrics and danced to its rhythms and musical arrangements. The open-ended nature of its refrain—así son—has allowed multiple interpretations to be constructed throughout the years and across diverse interpretive communities within Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Indeed , the phrase “así son,” although uttered and developed throughout the song as a male diatribe against women, was appropriated by Puerto Rican feminist writers Ana Lydia Vega and Carmen Lugo Filippi in their short story “Cuatro selecciones por una peseta” as a vindictive parody of men as listeners and consumers of popular music. From a different structural location, across the stage perhaps, Latinas who are active listeners and consumers of salsa music continuously rewrite patriarchal and misogynist salsa texts. They engage in “productive pleasure ,” which allows them as culturally bound receptors the opportunity to produce meanings and significations that are relevant to their everyday lives.4 As the second epigraph of this section shows, a cultural text like “Así son” does not embody semantic closure, nor is it limited to its gendered genesis. Rather, it becomes, by means of its circulation across plural contexts , a cultural text that triggers diverse and even contradictory and conflicting meanings in and among its receptors. Many scholarly readings of popular music silence listeners by assuming how they will or will not react, and in doing so, they impose on the “masses” the most “correct” or “liberatory” interpretations of cultural texts. In contrast, my intent here is to integrate the voices of Latinas and Latinos in a collage of significations, memories, desires, disagreements, affect , and pleasures—what Lawrence Grossberg has termed “affective economies”5—that partly constitute the cultural and gender semiotic space of salsa music. As a recent incursion into audience research suggests, “any critical theory of audiences within democracy must address the monopolization of communications and the cultural strategies necessary to ensure audiences the right...