When speaking of globalization, colonization and culture of hegemony, history is always written on the side of those who tell it because, in addition, they have the printing press to make it credible. When I refer to this, all the amalgam of media resources available today are added to the books and written literature of the cultures of domination, which, for centuries, have manipulated every emancipatory work from the multinational or endogenous point of view.
The so-called mass media stands as the executioner of these times to, in no figurative sense, cut down glimpses of cultural resistance. However, does it present itself to us in music in a visible way? Obviously yes, from the moment certain trends are positioned on the promotional airplays that induce or shepherd an emotionally seductive public. To do so, the platforms dedicated to placing content have had to cut, in an effective way, the sensorial ties of those audiences with those expressions that at some point were part of their experiences and, logically, they have had to achieve what we are going to call musical orphanhood.
However, these were practices that contemplated an already distant scenario and that, due to changes in the flow of information, were evidently decipherable for large audiences. It was then necessary to rethink strategies based on the incorporation of those previously discarded codes, but without being too enthusiastic, otherwise, the cultural conqueror's manual would go to pieces.
Then the industry -the dominant one, of course- developed a work of tenuous approximation, of millimetric doses of musical liberation of some aesthetics that, well thought out, would work. There were precedents where I think that the market did not go beyond its merely accompanying frontier and let talent flow, without imposing visible canons, such as the romantic song in the 1950's with Nat King Cole approaching Cuban themes in Spanish, which he recorded here, (always remember the maestro Armando Romeu for those extraordinary arrangements) as well as in jazz with the orchestral formats of Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman or Glenn Miller.
Substantial changes would come when in the 1960s and 1970s, even the great British rock laboratory was doing its thing from the creative point of view; but undoubtedly the great coupling and its final packaging were the lucrative American industry and its commercial legitimization, without which there would be no "game," sportively speaking.
Understanding that musical alienation is a weapon as powerful as projectiles in a war, certain sectors of the local right-wing began an almost perfect dismemberment of cultural eradication with the persecution, censorship or assassination of singer-songwriters of socialist or communist ideas imbued by the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and its impact on the continent. Víctor Jara, Alí Primera, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Mercedes Sosa and more, were on those lists and while the "not convenient" songs of these were left on pause, others were filling those spaces.
From those and other ways of extortion, many Latin American musical expressions were giving way to some that came from ultra-right sectors or that had a high load of de-ideologization, purposely unconnected with the previous struggles and popular trends and that began early to impose an idiotizing banality that, by dint of talent, has cost a lot to unseat our peoples of America.
Translated by ESTI
