Customer Reviews

Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures (Music Culture)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Frances Aparicio's work is a powerful blend of critical analysis of lyrics, styles of performance, and ethnography on the reception of listeners to salsa's meanings. She relies on an obvious and powerful training in literary analysis to consider the history and multiple uses of salsa as a form of expression, communication, and community formation. However, the most important contribution of this work is its concentration on gender and on the ways in which desire, identity and language are negotiatied upon music. It is clear that years of research went into the production of this monograph, especially since it manages to balance historical exploration with critical analysis. The benefit to this multidisciplinary approach is that the book can serve a variety of purposes, from providing basic information, to offering complex textual analyses. This makes the book useful for non-academic readers, as well as the academics for whom it was intended. However, since the book doesn't come with a CD, those not well-versed in the songs discussed might need to do extra research. With the increasing popularity of Latin music, it is imperative that everyone who listens to salsa be involved in analyzing why we like it, and what we do with the music we consume. This book can help lovers of salsa start to frame these questions. Hopefully, it will also encourage other listeners to write their own perceptions on salsa and how it connects with other aspects of daily life and with self-identity. It is time to value popular culture in terms other than dollars and cents, which is what this project begins to do. Now, if only someone wrote a book on West Coast salsa my library would be complete.

"Listening to Salsa" is a scholarly wake up call to anyone who is interested in this genre. After reading it, you will probably never listen to Salsa the same way and it is probably just as well! What I discovered by reading this book is that I was hearing the music but not really listening. "Listening to Salsa" will give you a deeper appreciation of the nuances, intricacies and gender issues that comprise Salsa.

As an aspiring writer on the subject, I know that I will be referring back to this book time and time again. Congratulations to the author and I look forward to reading and enjoying more of her work in the future!

I strongly disagree with the other reviewers. Some research was done in writing this book, but the writer lacks in depth knowledge of salsa culture. Also too much analysis is drawn from other genres such as the bolero, danza and plena and the conclusions applied to salsa too liberally.

The author is happy to mention that black innovators Ismael Rivera and Cortijo they pushed black Puerto Rican culture into every household in the island. But rather than rejoice in this success, she destroys it by commenting that the contributions of light skinned latinos have "whitewashed" and diluted the music. Tito Puente, Ismael Miranda, Hector Lavoe and even the non-hispanic Larry Harlow were all light skinned innovators in the hard salsa scene of the 60s and 70s.

Her second point of contention is the relationship in which salsa music deals with and portrays women. As the vast majority of musicians, singers and songwriters are men, it should be no surprise that salsa offers a mostly male point of view. But it is problematic that she chose to use a study of a Tex-Mex nightclub to make inferences about salsa when those genres never come together, and Mexican culture differs significantly from the Puerto Rican she focuses.

Finally these two lines join together into a conclusion about Puerto Rican males and their view of women in relationships, white as wives, black as prostitute lovers. And hence she goes on to explain that in salsa lyrics when they sing about "mi negrita" or "mi mulata", all they are talking about is their prostitute lovers. The problem is that all salseros, including her black heroes, use those terms.

But the biggest problem is that a lot of her sources for explaining her viewpoints do not come from those same musicians, singers and songwriters who she is analyzing, so she makes basic mistakes. Regarding Cortijo's and Rafael Ithier's bands she claims that the "Combo", was a greater musical outlet than an "Orchestra". A problem arises when one considers that Puerto Ricans use the word "Orquesta" when referring to all salsa bands, regardless of whether it is a sonora (trumpets band), trombanga (trombones and flute band) or combo (trumpets and saxes band).