Latin Rhythms from Mambo to Hip Hop

Rock

The music we know as rock and roll emerged in the mid 1950s, although its advent had been on the horizon for at least a decade. A quarter of the American population moved during World War II, and that brought southern, rural, sacred and secular traditions into new contact with urban based music and audiences. The product of many regional musical scenes and independent record labels, rock and roll emerged in Memphis, Los Angeles, Shreveport, New York, Detroit, Baltimore, and dozens of other cities. It was, in historian Charlie Gillett's words, the Sound of the City.

Rock and roll drew on many different styles. Combining the boogie woogie rhythms of R&B, the hillbilly twang of country, the fervor of gospel and the moans of the blues, the new mongrel music excited a worldwide generation of young listeners, while upsetting established social, cultural and musical authorities. The charisma and musical bravado of early rock and roll heroes such as Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard inspired fans and young musicians alike. With the maturing of an unprecedentedly vast and affluent teenage audience, rock and roll music became the sound of young America and soon spread around the world.

It is difficult today to understand the bitter criticism the new music generated. The popular music establishment, anchored in the lucrative venues of Hollywood and Broadway, saw the challenge as both aesthetic and economic. Their spokesmen dismissed the music for its supposed simplicity and crudity; eventually they went so far as to charge, falsely, that rock and roll dominated their airwaves because promoters bribed disc jockeys. Radio stations in turn often refused to play the new music, claiming that its lyrics promoted sex and delinquency. Pallid “cover” versions by mainstream artists copied rock and roll hit songs, while draining them of their musical vitality, energy, and above all, their overt indebtedness to black musical traditions. Moral authorities, black and white, were quick to condemn the music for its supposed sexual references, and they targeted key performers from Elvis Presley to Fats Domino for censorship or ridicule. Finally, columnists, critics, educators and police all feared the overt racial mixing of not only the music, but its audiences. At a time when American race relations were severely tested by massive white Southern resistance to integration, and northern dismissal of black rights, rock and roll remade integration in a cultural form. Sexual, working class and multi-racial, rock and roll transgressed the most fiercely guarded social boundaries of the time.

Within weeks of the national debuts of Bill Haley, Little Richard and Elvis Presley in the 1950s, rock and roll was traveling around the world's airwaves. By the early 1960s, the world had brought its musical response back to the US The Beatles, working class Britons reared on American rock and roll, conquered US and world audiences with their own innovations on rock and a distinctive sense of visual style. Mixing rock and roll, country and R&B in with their own English roots, The Beatles opened the doors to an international migration of bands from the UK and elsewhere. They rekindled an appreciation for the music in the US that in turn inspired musicians and listeners in this country.

Among these were folk musicians who had previously shunned commercially driven “pop” music like rock and roll in favor of more 'authentic' traditional songs that emanated from American rural life. The folk revival had brought thousands of young people, most of them educated and middle-class, to seek out the sounds of an earlier America that had flourished before the affluent postwar years. Folk music hero Bob Dylan, already a composer as well as troubadour, but also an acolyte of rock and roll, appeared at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival sporting an electric guitar and a loud back-up band. Many declared him a traitor to folk music's dedication to tradition, history and authenticity. But millions more understood that rock and roll had a new sound that was here to stay.

Inspired by both Dylan and the Beatles, sounds of the city became sounds of the suburbs, as thousands of musical groups plugged in and began writing their own songs. Plugging in gave these musicians the means to communicate easily and powerfully, and guitar driven sounds would dominate American pop for the next two decades. Just as importantly, writing their own material enabled groups to address a range of subjects that had largely been taboo, including politics, social inequality, alienation from American life, personal identity, and the Viet Nam war. In the 1950s, rock and roll sound and style had challenged cultural authority. The rock music of the 1960s often challenged political authority directly and unambiguously.

By the late 1960s, rock music was the accepted musical vocabulary of young people world wide. Rock accompanied and often gave shape to the dissenting and counter-cultural movements that engulfed the world. In the United States, rock music could no longer ignore social conditions, and even musicians who had largely steered clear of commentary were compelled at the least to consider politics as a subject for their work. At the same time the counter-cultural embrace of rock music screened over the deep fissures that were becoming clear in American life. The riots of 1968 revealed a society fundamentally divided over war, race, and equality, and music both engaged and reflected those conflicts. Rock music was forever linked to the ferment of social change and widespread dissent of all generations against American actions and social conditions that violated the nation's professed beliefs.

Rock musicians not only addressed contemporary events, they pushed the conventional musical boundaries. Led by the Beatles and the Beach Boys, artists experimented with complex instrumentations, elaborate arrangements, and ambitious compositions. By 1969 rock music often featured symphonic orchestras along with electric guitars and tambourines. Multi-track recording meant that musicians could develop densely layered performances unlikely to be duplicated live. Recording and performance became separate styles of rock music.

At the decade's end, rock music was no longer confined to top 40 radio and short performances. Extended songs, high decibel distortion and spectacular interactions between performers and large crowds were the norm. Beginning with Monterey Pop in 1967, music festivals that featured numerous acts drew thousands to partake as much in the communal atmosphere as the music. The Woodstock International Festival in 1969 drew over 100,000 for three days, featuring acts from folk rockers Crosby Stills and Nash to pyrotechnic guitarist Jimi Hendrix, whose searing version of the “Star Spangled Banner” was branded into national consciousness.

Since 1970 rock music has spawned numerous styles and spin off genres: punk, metal, new wave, and grunge are only the most widely known. While rock no longer dominates popular music, the styles of the late 1960s still attract the ears of listeners born long after that time. The sheer range of talent, the experimental exuberance and the utopian excitement of rock defines the music of that period, and to this day its sensibility shapes the music we call rock and roll.

Rock and roll, folk and authenticity. The debates among folk and rock and roll artists and audiences centered on artistic authenticity. Folk revivalists fought the modern sounds of the electric guitar because they associated that instrument with pop music that was too commercial to be traditional, and too contemporary to be historic.

Artistic freedom and new technologies. For those musicians who did plug in, the electric granted them liberation from playing only in one prescribed manner and allowed them a much wider array of sounds and tonal possibilities than traditional acoustic instruments. It also enabled them to pursue their own compositions instead of simply interpreting the heritage of the past.

Rock and roll and diversity. Rock and roll offered outlets for a wide array of performers from vastly different and disparate social backgrounds. More than even jazz or blues, rock and roll offered men AND women, black, white and Latino members of the working class, stardom without modifying their identities.

Rock and roll and social hopes. One strong strain of rock and roll music emphasizes social mobility, consumer and material pleasure, and community democracy.

Rock and roll as a site of racial and social interaction. he make up of rock and roll audiences and conditions of package tours of rock and performers, and the listening among radio audiences all promoted racial and social integration.

Rock and roll as challenge to cultural authority. The emphasis on unrestrained expression, dance, the relative simplicity of the music and its emphasis on sexuality all made rock and roll a threat to standards of musical respectability and cultural decorum.

In the latter half of the 20th century, with immigration from South America and the Caribbean increasing every decade, Latin sounds influenced American popular music: jazz, rock, rhythm and blues, and even country music. In the 1930s and 40s, dance halls often had a Latin orchestra alternate with a big band. Latin music had Americans dancing -- the samba, paso doble, and rumba -- and, in three distinct waves of immense popularity, the mambo, cha-cha and salsa. The “Spanish tinge” made its way also into the popular music of the 50s and beyond, as artists from The Diamonds (“Little Darling”) to the Beatles (“And I Love Her”) used a distinctive Latin beat in their hit songs.

The growing appeal of Latin music was evident in the late 1940s and 50s, when mambo was all the rage, attracting dance audiences of all backgrounds throughout the United States, and giving Latinos unprecedented cultural visibility. Mambo, an elaboration on traditional Cuban dance forms like el danzón, la charanga and el son, took strongest root in New York City, where it reached the peak of its artistic expression in the performances and recordings of bandleader Machito (Frank Grillo) and his big-band orchestra, Machito and His Afro-Cubans.

Machito's band is often considered the greatest in the history of Latin music. Along with rival bandleaders Tito Rodríguez and Tito Puente, Machito was part of what came to be called the Big Three. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, they offered up memorable mambo performances at the legendary Palladium Ballroom in mid-town Manhattan and other upscale venues. While New York became the hub of Latin music in the US, another famous Cuban bandleader, Dámaso Pérez Prado, based in Mexico City and Los Angeles, brought mambo international visibility.

Mambo's popularity was furthered by its frequent use in movie soundtracks and with the emergence of television as household entertainment. The “I Love Lucy Show” brought a Latino into American living rooms for the first time, introducing Cuban American musician Desi Arnaz. While Arnaz's most characteristic musical form was la conga, he has been identified with the mambo era, especially after Cuban-American author Oscar Hijuelos structured his Pulitzer-Prize winning novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love around an imaginary episode of the “I Love Lucy Show.”

The mambo was but one genre in a string of dance and music crazes that characterized the fascination of American culture with things “Latin” throughout the 20th century. In the early decades of the century, the tango swept through Paris and New York. Originating in the underworld of turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires, the tango was based on the ubiquitous “habanero” rhythm from 19th-century Havana, transported through port cities such as Veracruz, San Juan and New Orleans. The rhythmic features of this music were the basis for early jazz, especially ragtime. When Jelly Roll Morton famously spoke of the “Spanish tinge” as a necessary ingredient of jazz composition, he was primarily referring to “la habanera.”

The tango craze was followed in the 1930s and 40s by the “rhumba craze.” In fact, the misspelled “rhumba” was not the authentic Afro-Cuban 'rumba', but a simplified version of the Cuban son made seductive for use in American middle-class lounges and ballrooms. The rhumba craze in the United States began with the immense popularity of the standard “El Manisero,” also called “The Peanut Vendor,” first performed in 1930 on Broadway by the visiting Cuban orchestra of Don Azpiazu. That tune, an early best-selling recording, became familiar to a broad audience through many interpretations; most notably, Louis Armstrong and Stan Kenton's variation set the tone for what has remained the exotic-erotic romance of American mass culture with the stereotyped image of the care-free, sexualized Latino.

The early 1940s saw Americans doing the conga, the carnival line-dance form accompanied by the conical drum toted by Desi Arnaz/Ricky Ricardo as “Mr.Babalu.” In the 1950s and early 60s came the cha cha cha, whose simplicity of steps allowed for even greater public participation and enjoyment. The 1970s brought salsa, the commercial rubric and musical-cultural modality that became the most widely recognized marker of Latino identity at a nation-wide and international level. Perhaps reggaeton, with its Spanish-language inflected version of hip hop and dancehall, signals the latest Latin soundtrack, co-existing with the new-watered-down version of “salsa” and rap of recent decades.

The glitter and hype of these waves of popularized commercial entertainment provide a version of Latino culture often at odds with the reality of Latino social experience. From the 1940s on, the Puerto Rican community more than Cuban New Yorkers constituted the primary social base of Latin music in New York. After Puerto Ricans were declared US citizens in 1917, working-class families from the Island began filing into New York City. The mass migration starting after 1945 brought the city's Puerto Rican population to nearly a million, altering the nature of New York's Latino neighborhoods.

This overwhelmingly poor and working-class community had been reared musically less on mambo or Cubop and more typically on traditional Puerto Rican country music (música jíbara) and on bolero-singing guitar trios. Rather than the Palladium and other mid-town venues, its' music-making and dancing favored house parties and more humble local nightclubs “uptown” in East Harlem and the Bronx. The uptown-downtown distinction was fluid, however, with overlap between them, and the foremost musicians of the day were equally at home delighting audiences in both worlds. And while the downtown version tends towards commercialization of Cuban-based genres, and the uptown version is a more grass roots, “authentic” expression of ethnic musical traditions, the difference can not be reduced to one of artistic quality. For sheer musicality, no one could beat the great orchestras of the “Big Three” (Machito and the Titos) and other headliners at the Palladium and mainstream venues.

The idea of two divergent currents in New York Latin music is useful in understanding the many dimensions of the history of Latin music in America. Both had different relations to the music industry, with the more mainstream styles finding readier access to big commercial labels, and the more grassroots styles being released on small but important independent labels like Tico, the Spanish Music Company (SMC), and later Alegre. Fania, the founding home of salsa in the late 1960s, began as a homegrown label and devolved into a would-be major by the mid-70s. Interestingly, while record sales of even the premier musical groups remained modest at best, the crossover genres of boogaloo and Latin soul had huge-selling hits like Mongo Santamaría's “Watermelon Man,” Ray Barretto's “El Watusi” and Joe Cuba's “Bang Bang,” among the first Latin tunes to make it onto the Billboard charts.

By the time post-mambo styles evolved in the mid-to-late 1960s, issues of generational change, race and class, and political-cultural affirmation overshadowed those of geographic distinction or artistic virtuosity. The music of second-generation New York Latinos, the “Nuyorican” children of the mass migration growing up on the “mean streets” of the inner city, were bound to create new musical forms expressive of altered social and cultural conditions.

Despite the oft-held notion of how distinct the Latin American and African American communities and cultures are, the story of music in the South Bronx in the late 20th century illuminates the intersections between them. Starting with the pahcanga craze of the 1960s and proceeding through that decade until all of the music was labeled “salsa” around 1971, the music of New York Latinos became ever more deeply intertwined with African American and Caribbean styles. The largely untutored “young Turks” whose sudden stardom drew the ire of established masters like Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri, embraced and emulated African American culture by playing songs in English and resting more on the backbeat than on the usual clave-based trappings of typical Latin bands.

In the emergence of hip hop, Latin music's ties with inner-city African American expression are even more pronounced. The historical relationship between the rebelliousness of the late 60s and that of the 80s is expressed in the statement that while the earlier era turned to revolution, the latter, for lack of access to political influence, created the elements of hip hop. The differences are obvious, musically and politically, but the similarities are found in the common social base of the styles' original musicians and audiences. Both alternative musical forms in the 1960s and 80s were vulnerable to the ravenous appetite of the mainstream music industry. The avid sacking of the music's commercial opportunities and the attendant dilution and trivialization of the music are evident in both narratives. So quickly was early hip hop dislodged from its founding social and ethno-racial context that little acknowledgment has gone to the influence of Puerto Rican artists in that dynamic and consequential cultural movement called Hip-Hop. That its origins are even “Latin” at all is placed in continual question, including among many Latinos themselves.

The historic arc from mambo to hip hop describes a diaspora cultural dynamic that shows remarkable resilience in the face of multiple pressures to abandon native and historical traditions and go American mainstream, At the same time, the intricate and vastly creative interaction between Cuban, Puerto Rican and other “Latin” traditions with African American music in its many stylistic expressions, a fusion that shows no sign of abating in the new millenium, has graced contemporary listeners with decade after decade of inspired musical invention. The film From Mambo to Hip Hop, is subtitled “a Bronx Tale” so as to locate its subject geographically and socially, but the impact of the musical forms it explores radiates confidently outward, resounding in multiple incarnations everywhere in the world.

Popular Music and Identity. Popular music is pertinent in understanding the circulation of social ideas about race, gender, social class, geographical location, and historical moment. Ethnicity and notions of how to identify oneself as 'white' or 'black or 'Latino' are also powerfully represented in popular music. For music like the mambo, and later for the evolution of hip hop, we can examine what these identities meant to generations coming of age in the 20th century.

Popular Music and Social Stereotyping. The combination of aural and visual stimuli presented in popular music creates the perfect storm for communicating and circulating important ideas about society. It can be an arena where social stereotypes are forged, from the image of country singer as 'redneck' to that of young African American men as gangsters to caricatures of Asian and Latin people in novelty songs from the 1920's - 60's. But stereotypes can be broken in popular music as well, when musicians defy or comment on such categories. Popular music allows the examination of a wider cultural process about how ideas about social groups are created, formed, reformed and negotiated.

Migration and Immigration. The immigration, migration, and urbanization of various minority groups in America throughout the twentieth-century have provided an environment that fostered numerous styles of pop cultural forms that have had a global impact. With popular music, we can examine how traditions and innovations created within one community are shared and interact with those of another to create new cultural styles, and new art forms.

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