Format War RSS

Hipsters wanking off to obscure off kilter things.

You know, for the kids!

Archive

Jul
16th
Thu
permalink
We arrived by way of galleons and slave ships. We killed and enslaved the Caribs, and at the same time we were enslaved ourselves, squeezed into the hulls of the grand ships playing limbo with the wooden beams of the boat and with each other’s bodies. All that we brought with us was our boleros and our congas and our sambas and our tangos. And for 500 years, the only reminders of the places that we left behind were our music and the color of our skin, and the rage and anger and sadness that bubbled underneath them both. It is what Frederico García Lorca deemed el duende, the indescribable demon and life force that lurks within the dark corners of music. “All that has dark sound has duende”, he says, “that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain.” And if all Latin music contains elements of the duende left behind by the Africans and the Moors, then Cuban vocalist La Lupe is duende incarnate. To say that La Lupe is your Latin lover is nothing less than a lie. La Lupe is not your Latin lover. La Lupe can only be described as tiny ball of twitchy madness and uppers-induced paranoia. La Lupe does not give a shit if you serenade her outside her window. When you come home late, La Lupe will throw her stiletto boot at you, and then begin yowling and wailing and clawing her hair out with her 2-inch nails. I am loathe to use the word “sassy”, as the word itself carries a multitude of stereotypical and racial connotations with it, but La Lupe is nothing less than brazen, audacious, and completely inappropriate. Her 1960’s live and television performances largely consisted of her yelping, jumping, and throwing her earrings at the audience as everyone else would look on in various stages of shock, disbelief, and amusement. My father described her performance in an island airport once; “I saw her, and she just looked like a washed-up junkie, clawing her eyes out and twitching everywhere. She was clapping and yelling and quivering and she was no bigger than a child. But I couldn’t stop watching her; I was mesmerized.” Her music is a strange mixture of bolero, mambo, and soul, her voice sounding like coked-out mixture of Shirley Bassey and Eartha Kitt. The instrumentation of “Yo Te Pedí”, lures the listener into a false sense of security the 1960’s Afro-Cuban bongos and congas playing lurking underneath the sweet, sultry Bond-esque violins and horns. And then Lupe’s voice enters. And within the first four words that she utters, the sheer emotion in her brassy voice unpacks hundreds of years of anguish and oppression in a single bar of music. She intersperses beautiful, coherent harmonies with animalistic yelps that can be construed as pain or pleasure (or both). Unlike the pleading, desperate of “Yo Te Pedí”, “Negrura” uses her passionate, ragged, purring voice to create an atmosphere of sensuality, again playing with the erotic expectations of the music. In her cover of West Side Story’s “America”, the unsavory racist connotations towards Puerto Ricans are removed, and it’s turned into a Cuban nationalist anthem instead, as she yelps “Ay, madre Cuba!” at the start of the song. She marketed herself as a sex symbol, as a figure of brazen femininity and larger-than-life persona in an era where women were expected to be submissive and timid. She functioned as a symbol of blackness, of Latin-ness, of womanity, and of queerness, and perhaps this schizophrenic public personality is part of what eventually drove her from international popularity into obscurity, as if her personality became too big for her to handle and collapsed upon itself. But whether it is in her voice, in her indecipherable interpretations of American standards like “Fever” and “My Way”, or in her haunting rendition of Santeria chants and traditional African drumming in “Guaguanco Bembe”, the duende manifests itself in her music. Video links: El Carbonero and La Salve Plena: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kRIV23LQyI (She may or may not me wearing my grandma’s nightrobe and have Tourette’s in this video) Que Te Pedí: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urPOByq1Eck Negrura: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYh-isyT23o - Miss Cratedigger

We arrived by way of galleons and slave ships. We killed and enslaved the Caribs, and at the same time we were enslaved ourselves, squeezed into the hulls of the grand ships playing limbo with the wooden beams of the boat and with each other’s bodies. All that we brought with us was our boleros and our congas and our sambas and our tangos. And for 500 years, the only reminders of the places that we left behind were our music and the color of our skin, and the rage and anger and sadness that bubbled underneath them both. It is what Frederico García Lorca deemed el duende, the indescribable demon and life force that lurks within the dark corners of music. “All that has dark sound has duende”, he says, “that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain.”

And if all Latin music contains elements of the duende left behind by the Africans and the Moors, then Cuban vocalist La Lupe is duende incarnate. To say that La Lupe is your Latin lover is nothing less than a lie. La Lupe is not your Latin lover. La Lupe can only be described as tiny ball of twitchy madness and uppers-induced paranoia. La Lupe does not give a shit if you serenade her outside her window. When you come home late, La Lupe will throw her stiletto boot at you, and then begin yowling and wailing and clawing her hair out with her 2-inch nails. I am loathe to use the word “sassy”, as the word itself carries a multitude of stereotypical and racial connotations with it, but La Lupe is nothing less than brazen, audacious, and completely inappropriate. Her 1960’s live and television performances largely consisted of her yelping, jumping, and throwing her earrings at the audience as everyone else would look on in various stages of shock, disbelief, and amusement. My father described her performance in an island airport once; “I saw her, and she just looked like a washed-up junkie, clawing her eyes out and twitching everywhere. She was clapping and yelling and quivering and she was no bigger than a child. But I couldn’t stop watching her; I was mesmerized.”

Her music is a strange mixture of bolero, mambo, and soul, her voice sounding like coked-out mixture of Shirley Bassey and Eartha Kitt. The instrumentation of “Yo Te Pedí”, lures the listener into a false sense of security the 1960’s Afro-Cuban bongos and congas playing lurking underneath the sweet, sultry Bond-esque violins and horns. And then Lupe’s voice enters. And within the first four words that she utters, the sheer emotion in her brassy voice unpacks hundreds of years of anguish and oppression in a single bar of music. She intersperses beautiful, coherent harmonies with animalistic yelps that can be construed as pain or pleasure (or both). Unlike the pleading, desperate of “Yo Te Pedí”, “Negrura” uses her passionate, ragged, purring voice to create an atmosphere of sensuality, again playing with the erotic expectations of the music. In her cover of West Side Story’s “America”, the unsavory racist connotations towards Puerto Ricans are removed, and it’s turned into a Cuban nationalist anthem instead, as she yelps “Ay, madre Cuba!” at the start of the song.

She marketed herself as a sex symbol, as a figure of brazen femininity and larger-than-life persona in an era where women were expected to be submissive and timid. She functioned as a symbol of blackness, of Latin-ness, of womanity, and of queerness, and perhaps this schizophrenic public personality is part of what eventually drove her from international popularity into obscurity, as if her personality became too big for her to handle and collapsed upon itself. But whether it is in her voice, in her indecipherable interpretations of American standards like “Fever” and “My Way”, or in her haunting rendition of Santeria chants and traditional African drumming in “Guaguanco Bembe”, the duende manifests itself in her music.

Video links:

El Carbonero and La Salve Plena: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kRIV23LQyI (She may or may not me wearing my grandma’s nightrobe and have Tourette’s in this video)

Que Te Pedí: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urPOByq1Eck

Negrura: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYh-isyT23o

- Miss Cratedigger