WAYNE MARSHALL

Cuban gold

WAYNE MARSHALL — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 17:20:50 GMT

Pitbull takes the boat to the bank
Since riding a crunked-up reggae riddim to popular acclaim with the 2004 single “Culo,” Miami rapper Pitbull has been angling for club dominance.

LA VIDA LOCA: El Mariel spans crack-rap crime noir, hypersexed club bangers, and reflections on Pitbull’s life as a hustler.

Since riding a crunked-up reggae riddim to popular acclaim with the 2004 single “Culo,” Miami rapper Pitbull has been angling for club dominance. The parallel rise of reggaetón in the American mainstream has no doubt opened doors for the multi-lingual MC, who nevertheless prefers Lil Jon to Luny Tunes. On his latest, El Mariel (TVT), the Dade County native attempts to represent himself and his city with an ambitious set spanning crack-rap crime noir, hypersexed club bangers, and alternately humble and boastful reflections on his life as a hustler.

Although the album’s title promises to talk politics by invoking the infamous boatlift that brought 125,000 refugees from Cuba to Miami in 1980, Pitbull’s program rarely gets beyond standard get-yours, hustle-hustle hedonism, with a little bit of “minority” (his term) solidarity thrown in. He seems more interested in using El Mariel as a metaphor for the almighty hustle — “coming hard like those Cubans in the ’80s, dog” — than in exploring actual Cuban-American relations, though elsewhere he’s shown little restraint in criticizing Castro (he made a song celebrating the dictator’s supposedly imminent demise last summer) or in proclaiming Cuba to be “la opresión más grande del mundo” (“the greatest oppression in the world” — see this video).

El Mariel is most successful when it pairs the rapper’s sense of humor and swagger and impeccable, flexible flows — switching from a syncopated Down South drawl to staggering staccato reggaetón riddim riding, sometimes in a single verse — with some of the best beats money can buy. The rubber-band-meets-marching-band funk of “Ay Chico” shows Atlanta’s Mr. Collipark at a creative apex, employing tonal drums, stereo effects, sirens, and samba squeaks to create at least three refrains (including an allusion to a salsa hit by Cuban duo Hansel y Raul, long-time staples of the Miami music scene). And though some listeners might be put off by Pitbull’s various macho exhortations — i.e., “Move over, girl, show me what you workin’ with” — those looking for a little more balance in their booty music will be pleased to know that going down on El Mariel about as often as shoot-outs and coke deals is Pitbull himself, who repeats on several occasions his desire to please orally the objects of his gaze.

The roots of rock

WAYNE MARSHALL — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 20:49:57 GMT

Concord unearths the Specialty catalog
In 1939 Arthur Goldberg went to Hollywood and crowned himself Art Rupe, a suitably slick moniker for an entrepreneur in the booming post-war culture industry.

CHARISMA Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” defined Specialty’s niche between roots and mainstream.

In 1939 Arthur Goldberg went to Hollywood and crowned himself Art Rupe, a suitably slick moniker for an entrepreneur in the booming post-war culture industry. Not finding much room for newcomers in the movie biz, Rupe turned to music, where he could more easily locate a niche. The apt appellation he eventually gave his label, Specialty Records, described the “special” market he sought: a space for the sounds of diverse but related racial signatures, the so-called “race records” that, over the course of Specialty’s run, crossed over into the mainstream, recast as rock and roll.

Rupe’s great skill was in finding charismatic performers with catchy, crafty tunes and producing compact singles for the jukebox and home markets. Best known for Little Richard’s earth-shaking novelty, “Tutti Frutti,” Specialty found itself pushing the edges into the center from the late-’40s through the late-’50s, interweaving the resonant strains of gospel, blues, jump blues, R&B, boogie-woogie, and dance-circuit jazz just in time to reach a baby boomer, teenybopper audience thirsty for a little transgressive pop. Now, some 50 years after Specialty ruled the airwaves and dancehalls, Concord Music Group has issued a series of compilations to showcase the catalog. The label’s Specialty Profiles series offers up familiar favorites as well as delightful oddities, presenting in the process a detailed picture of a formative moment in American popular music.

The reissues run the gamut from stark to lush as they span the various genres that worked their way into what became known as rock and roll. In the label’s early years, Rupe focused on West Coast boogie and the sort of souled-up gospel — the Lord’s words animated by the Devil’s music — that would later be further secularized by the likes of Ray Charles (who himself hired Specialty’s Percy Mayfield as a chief songwriter in the ’60s). Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers were a flagship group for Rupe, despite his failure to grasp Cooke’s pop potential, afraid that embracing the singer’s secular leanings would alienate the label’s faithful. (Ironically, Rupe lost Little Richard to the church around the same time he lost Cooke to the charts.) Cooke’s and the Stirrers’ profile reveals a well-supported lead singer already mining his distinctive vocal swoops — all in the name of Jesus, of course, even as they give chills of a more down-to-earth tinge.

Seminal ska

WAYNE MARSHALL — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 23:27:53 GMT

More gems from the Studio One vaults
Heartbeat Records’ Studio One reissue series continues not only to shore up the legacy of Studio One honcho Coxsone Dodd but to present an expansive, rich portrait of Jamaican popular music.

Motown, Memphis, and the sounds of black America serve as crucial symbols on these songs about Jamaican aspirations.

Heartbeat Records’ Studio One reissue series continues not only to shore up the legacy of Studio One honcho Coxsone Dodd but to present an expansive, rich portrait of Jamaican popular music. Ska Bonanza, a two-CD set collecting 44 songs, offers listeners a wide-lens perspective on the pre-reggae sound of 1960s Jamaican pop. Gaining prominence just as Jamaica gained independence from England in 1962, ska emerged as jazz, R&B, and Latin dance styles were defining cosmopolitan cool from Chicago to Cape Town. Swing was king, even in Jamaica, and many of the island’s jazzmen played in big bands and on cruise ships, cutting their teeth on Lester Young solos over romps borrowed from Basie. As they were spurred by Dodd to record for the local market, ska gave Jamaica’s best musicians a chance to play to home-town tastes, blowing soul-jazz style over hopped-up, localized R&B songs, mambo numbers, and movie themes. The music features more elaborate chord changes and 12/8 shuffles than most subsequent Jamaican pop, but the players sway as much as they swing, adding a characteristically Caribbean lilt to that ol’ American push-pull.

For all their localization, many tracks on Ska Bonanza demonstrate a sustained engagement with American and international pop, sometimes in the form of awkward imitations but often in a delightful, distinctive funhouse-mirror manner. The many covers of familiar pop songs on Ska Bonanza are fine examples of the cherished tradition of “versioning” in Jamaican music: Smokey Robinson gets interpolated, to use the contemporary legalese, as his “Choosy Beggar” becomes Rita Marley’s “A De Pon Dem”; the Four Tops’ well-worn “Same Old Song” gets a new set of lyrics and an otherwise remarkably reverent treatment on the Gaylads’ “Stop Making Love.” On the more local side, the young Lee Perry’s charmingly bawdy booty tune “Sugar Bag” sounds downright demure next to the non-nuendo of Jackie Opel’s “Push Wood.” The instrumental numbers are as numerous as the vocal cuts, fine vehicles for the sinuous solos of trombonist Don Drummond and saxophonists Roland Alphonso and Tommy McCook and their woodsheddin’ brethren. There are lots of songs about broken hearts and rude boys; there’s plenty of proto-beatboxing. The collection runs the gamut from inspired anthems to treacly ballads. Some numbers are transcendent in form and content, lovingly touched up, brilliantly and warmly recorded. Others sound more dated. All are valuable in offering a good sense of ska style.

Número uno

WAYNE MARSHALL — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 14:18:23 GMT

Tego Calderón hits a reggaetón peak
Tego Calderón’s debut album, 2003’s El abayarde , caught the ears of both the reggaetón street and the critical elite. The rise of reggaeton: From Daddy Yankee to Tego Calderón, and beyond. By Wayne Marshall

¿COMPRENDE?: With his smoky baritone, Tego is more indebted to Tupac Shakur than Shabba Ranks.

Tego Calderón’s debut album, 2003’s El abayarde (White Lion/BMG), caught the ears of both the reggaetón street and the critical elite. Its diverse stylistic palette, politically charged rhymes, and easy swagger offered an alternative to the assembly-line, in-your-face reggaetón flooding the market. It also set the bar high. On Tego’s new The Underdog/El subestimado (Jiggiri/Atlantic), the Afro-sporting, gap-toothed grinning rapero returns with another genre-busting effort, and this time he’s got Atlantic records, the label that gave Sean Paul the right push, to help him project his distinctive, deserving voice.

Those who find reggaetón grooves monotonous would have a hard time lodging that complaint with Tego. Despite all the dem bows — reggaetón’s prevailing rhythm — he offers a greater variety of styles than do most of his contemporaries, and not just his fellow reggaetoneros. Although it’s commonplace to describe reggaetón as a mix of hip-hop, reggae, salsa, and even such traditional Afro–Puerto Rican genres as bomba and plena, few reggaetón productions live up to this motley model. Tego is the exception: though it incorporates these influences, The Underdog breaks new ground.

Warning his challengers that he will return to “kill” them again and again, the lead single, “Los maté,” gestures to contemporary hip-hop and farther across the Latin musical spectrum by giving a classic Mexican ballad, “El preso número 9,” the chipmunk soul treatment. The track resolves its far-flung connotations with a solid reggaetón groove, layering chopped and filtered loops from dem bow and bam-bam riddims and adding subtle synths to fill out the texture. A fitting opening shot on his first album in three years, “Los maté” returns Tego to the vanguard of the genre, with an expansive, diasporic vision and a musical talent unconstrained by genre.

Sound Lab

WAYNE MARSHALL — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 16:56:10 GMT

Clement “Coxsone” Dodd’s Studio One genius
When people think reggae, the first name that comes to mind is Bob Marley.

When people think reggae, the first name that comes to mind is Bob Marley. Far fewer know the name of the man who not only gave Marley and the Wailers their start but who was perhaps more instrumental in laying reggae’s solid foundation than any other individual: Clement “Coxsone” Dodd. A sound-system innovator, record producer, and the first black studio owner in Jamaica, Dodd parlayed entrepreneurial acumen and impeccable taste into one of the largest legacies in recorded music at Studio One, his studio and label. Studio One played a central role in the Jamaican ska, rocksteady, and reggae booms of the ’60s. And much of that music is now being reissued by the Rounder imprint Heartbeat.

In addition to issuing hundreds of albums and countless hit singles, Studio One boasted a house band featuring the island’s finest players. Having cut their teeth in Kingston jazz bands and on the hotel and cruise-ship circuit, they were versatile virtuosos. Under the guidance of Dodd and his team of crack engineers — among them, Sylvan Morris and a young Lee “Scratch” Perry — Studio One’s band produced a corpus of backing tracks, or riddims, that would outpace even the original songs recorded on them, providing what has amounted to a Jamaican “Real Book,” of sorts. These riddims and recordings (sound quality is crucial to their character) have been versioned, re-licked, and sampled thousands of times over.

It was Dodd’s engagement with American culture — in particular, the music of African-Americans — that would prove his ticket to success. The sound of Studio One — a sound as engaged with contemporary R&B and soul as with Jamaican folk and pop traditions — expressed a new sort of cultural alignment for many Jamaicans. Jamaicans tuned into the sounds of America via radio broadcasts. Dodd himself was inspired by the jive-talk stylings of black radio DJs and began collecting R&B records while working in Florida. He returned to Kingston with big speakers and big plans. Before long, “Sir Coxsone’s Downbeat” was the eminent sound system (the name for mobile discos with stacks of speakerboxes) on the downtown scene.

The rise of reggaeton

WAYNE MARSHALL — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:56:11 GMT

From Daddy Yankee to Tego Calderón, and beyond
That beat you’ve been hearing — the steady boom-ch-boom-chick rattling the trunks of passing cars and moving masses in the club — isn’t just another fleeting hip-hop trend.

That beat you’ve been hearing — the steady boom-ch-boom-chick rattling the trunks of passing cars and moving masses in the club — isn’t just another fleeting hip-hop trend. It’s the new sound of the Americas. Make way for reggaeton, the latest Latin musical style to sweep the world and just maybe the one with the most promise of finding a permanent, prominent place not just in the US, but in global popular culture.

Reggaeton has already accomplished something that other Latin musical forms — son, mambo, salsa, merengue, bachacta — never quite attained: not only has the music ignited the imaginations of young Latinos and Latinas, but it’s found unprecedented favor in mainstream US culture. Just a few years ago the Spanish one heard on non-Latin, commercial radio was limited to “Feliz Navidad” and “La Vida Loca”; now one hears 15 to 30 minute blocks of Spanish-language pop on the same stations that promise nothing but “blazin’ hip-hop and R&B.”

Indeed, reggaeton’s inroads into hip-hop’s media channels may prove crucial in the genre’s ability to transcend, all hype aside, the “craze” status that has marked previous spikes of interest in Latin music. In contrast to the exotic cast that has consistently marked Latin music packaged for non-Latin audiences, reggaeton enjoys a sonic profile that, for all its syncopation and sway, is heard as something more familiar, more modern, more American (in the US-centric sense). Reggaeton artists and producers have not simply piggybacked on the success of their hip-hop brethren, they have exploited and expanded hip-hop’s hustle-hustle business model, especially in such areas as shameless self-promotion, savvy cross-branding, street-team marketing, and grassroots distribution.

Reggaeton lacks much of an exotic veneer precisely because the music has not been marketed to Anglo-American audiences. At least until recently, reggaeton has been music produced by and for the pan-Latino community. On the main, it still is, though many artists and producers now aspire to the platinum plaques that million-sellers such as Daddy Yankee and Luny Tunes have proven are within reach. Reggaeton’s self-sustaining relationship to a sizeable core audience draws our attention to the most obvious underlying reason for the genre’s seemingly sudden ubiquity: simple demographics.

Recommended Reggaeton

WAYNE MARSHALL — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:23:38 GMT

CD Guide
Essential releases by Daddy Yankee, Tego Calderon, Ivy Queen, and more.

•Daddy Yankee | BARRIO FINO | V.I./Universal | Daddy Yankee has demonstrated that reggaeton can work as pop. A virtuoso vocalist who keeps his lyrics grounded in streetwise reportage (when he’s not busy romancing), Yankee’s Barrio Fino is a promising, platinum outing.

• Tego Calderón | EL ABAYARDE | Sony International | With his major label debut (over)due this spring, reggaeton’s hippest hip-hop defector may yet find an audience as big as his talent. His 2003 El Abayarde offers musical diversity, political edge, and an abundance of skill and flair.

• Ivy Queen | FLASHBACK | Univision | A fierce lyricist, Ivy Queen can hang with the best of the reggaetoneros. She may be the first female reggaeton star, but she won’t be the last. A retrospective of recent hits and career standouts, Flashback is a crucial primer on the reigning Queen of reggaeton.

• Don Omar | THE LAST DON | V.I. | Don Omar’s “Reggaeton Latino” may have just popped up on the radio, but he’s no rookie. Omar has been a favorite of the reggaeton massive for years. While The Last Don presents an album-length portrait, check out Reggaeton Latino for remixes of his best and biggest alongside some high-profile guests.