Reggaeton Revolutionaries

Following up on the previous post, with a special tip of the fitted to Wayne Marshall...

Wayne left a comment on the previous post linking to another Reuters piece entitled "Cuba's Fidel Castro honored with a reggaeton song." Cubaton artist Baby Lores wrote a song about Castro after rumors circulated that the reggaetonero had defected during his last trip to Europe. In the video for the song, while taking "traitors" to task, he is seen getting a tattoo of "El Jefe" on his shoulder.

In the last post I mentioned that to me it seemed like a lot of the rhetoric about reggaeton's "neoliberal" properties had to do with how Cuban revolutionary authorities perceive reggaeton as a product produced by Puerto Rico's neocolonial relationship with the United States. Baby Lores makes that point extremely clear at one point towards the end of the song when he says (roughly translated) "Let me see how I explain, don't confuse Cuba with Puerto Rico, excuse me for saying it this way, but instead of two I prefer only one flag." I thought it was pretty interesting that Lores takes Puerto Ricans and Cuban exiles to task in nearly the same breath, for effectively being gusanos. I don't really know what to make of it yet, but there is something interesting happening here around ownership claims and authenticity -- distancing Puerto Rico (and simultaneously the U.S.) in order to make reggaeton acceptable for consumption within Cuba.

I'll leave you with a YouTube response by Frankoraz:

He says: "Sentí la necesidad de representar al pueblo cubano que vive dentro y fuera de la isla. Esta es la respuesta indignada al irracional tema de Baby Lores "Creo", dedicado a la Revolución Cubana." [I felt the need to represent Cubans who live in and outside of the island. This is an angry response to Baby Lores' irrational song "Creo"].

Neoliberalism and Reggaeton

Reuters recently published a pieced entitled "Reggaeton fever shakes up Cuba's culture" the article cites an now infamous (in reggaeton circles anyway) quote by Juventud Rebelde that calls reggaeton a "reflection of 'neoliberal thinking'."

I think the development and growth of reggaeton in Cuba has been fascinating (if you are interested check out Geoff Baker's work) and illuminates much about the ways in which different musical forms/genres circulate as cultural and ideological commodities.

The idea of reggaeton being a product of neoliberalism is intriguing. Clearly the flows of neoliberal capital and its circuits facilitated the spread of technologies and people that enabled the different permutations of reggaeton within the Caribbean, the Americas, and globally.

More than anything else, I wonder what seeing reggaeton as a neoliberal commidity says about how Cuban authorities think about the neocolonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico and the forces of diaspora (not only between Puerto Rico and the U.S., but broadly speaking) in forging reggaeton, essentially outside of the Cuban nation (and well any nation really). Reggaeton is largely positioned as outside of the Cuban nation, seen as an import from the yanquis via Puerto Rico, which is why Cuban Culture Minister Abel Prieto is quoted in the Reuters piece as saying that reggaeton needs to be "pushed away." Reggaeton is agringado, a corrupting influence on Cuba's revolutionary ideals.

While reggaeton is (often mis)understood as a Puerto Rican, or even an American phenomenon, the more authorities and cultural brokers attempt to place reggaeton within some kind of national frame the more obvious it becomes that reggaeton exist in between and outside of national boundaries.

Maybe that is what makes reggaeton so threatening, what incites all these national panics? Well, besides sex and race, but of course those things are tied up within the nation too...

Now I'm just ranting though....thoughts?