Estrategias oblicuas contra la plaga de la conformidad y l@s talibán del "Me gusta"
Ahora, en perfecta contradicción desde www.facebook.com/pages/ElBlogueadorSonado/214893651948236
La receta básica de "Who, What, Where, When, Why (+ How)" no parece haber sobrevivido en el periodismo "instantáneo" del que las redacciones de nuestros actuales periódicos digitales hacen gala.
Esta es la nota sobre el fallecimiento de Billy Strange que se puede leer en el portal de ElMundo:
Billy Strange, cantautor y compositor de muchas de las canciones que cantó Elvis Presley, ha muerto en Nashville, en Estados Unidos, a los 81 años, según ha anunciado ensu cuenta de Twitter Nancy Sinatra.
La hija de 'La Voz' fue otra de las artistas que cantaron las canciones de Strange, cuya lista de 'clientes', según la revista 'New Musical Express' incluía también al propio Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr, Wanda Jackson y los The Beach Boys, que contaron con él para el legendario 'Pet Sounds'.
Por ejemplo: 'These boots are made for walking', la canción más famosa de Nancy Sinatra, es una composición de Strange. 'You only live twice', compuesta y grabada para la película de Bond del mismo título, también. Y 'A little less conversation', grabada por Presley y popularizada por la película 'Ocean's 11', completa su lista de granes éxitos.
Es difícil reunir más despropósitos en tan poco espacio. Así, nos enteramos que John Barry no escribió "You Only Live Twice" para Nancy Sinatra (fue Billy, claro). Tampoco Lee Hazlewood tuvo nada que ver con la gestación de "These Boots Are Made For Walking" (Billy, de nuevo). Y ni siquiera se hace mención de la contribución del difunto como GUITARRISTA (de sonido más que reconocible, por cierto) en las varias sesiones que se le atribuyen, dejando a la interpretación del lector el rol específico de Strange en las sesiones y discos que se citan, "según el New Musical Express". Y dos huevos duros.
En un país en el que el 'fact checking' es un arte a punto de desaparecer, y la prevaricación intelectual se da por supuesta entre los distintos competidores en el juego miserable del agit prop de cada día, estas cosas son notas a pie de página, sí. Pero entre tanto superego de divo "yo lo viví, y os lo cuento", y tanto especialista-en-todo abotargado y ramplón, hasta recurrir a la (justamente) denostada Wikipedia parece que es demasiado esfuerzo.¡Un aplauso bien fuerte para todos ellos...!
Despampanante "Shameless" - Louise Fletcher, encarnando a Peggy Gallagher, hace bueno (?) a su hijo. Un antológico festín actoral para engrandecer -aún más- al personaje deWilliam H.Macy y sus tribulaciones sin fin. Lo de Joan Cusack con su espasmódica, peripatética y rematadamente bipolar Sheila, lo comentaremos a fondo en otro momento...
Bonus track: Fiona consolando a su padre, ante la avalancha de locura y desatinos que ha provocado la reaparición de "la abuelita"...
What can we say about this record? Explosive drums? Check! Soulful female vocals soaring through the stratosphere? Check! Lyrics telling a story of lost love and heartache? Double Check! Usually we at Cultures of Soul release records geared towards the dancefloor but the Darling Dears were too damn amazing to pass up. So through our good friend and fellow deep funk and soul aficionado, PJ Gray, we hooked up with Alvin (Lawrence) Lofton and the four amazing voices of the Darling Dears that made this record what it is.
Alvin’s career encompasses years spent as a record promoter for artists such as Barbara Mason, Marva Josie, the Manhattans and Black Ivory and his relationship with the Darling Dears began in the early ’70s in Rochester, New York. At the time he was a budding record promoter as well as the President of the Carla Thomas International Fan Club, which is what led to the group’s manager, Mary Ann Bradford (who is also the sister of band member Kim McFadden), to contact him about her sibling’s rising act. Young and undeniably talented, the foursome featured the emotive vocals of McFadden, Beverly Howard, Salena Howard and Helen McGowen. Fellow Rochester band Funky Heavy, who was already well-known in the area, often rehearsed with the girls and served as backup for many of their live performances.
It wasn’t long before the Darling Dears began tearing it up around town, starting off each show with Billy Preston’s “Outa-Space.” Inspired by the likes of Al Green, Marvin Gaye, the Jackson 5 and James Brown, the girls also proved to be quite the dancers. The most notable mover of the bunch was undoubtedly Kim, who was able to work her gospel dance moves into almost every gig.
The story of how “And I Love You” came to be is certainly an interesting one. One day Alvin and the Darling Dears were rehearsing at a local church with Funky Heavy, and Funky Heavy came up with the melody. After penning the lyrics, Alvin hooked up with local music impresario and owner of Fine Recording Studio, Vince Jam, and scheduled some studio time. Two 4-hour sessions and a measly $200 later, with a local friend from high school playing the flute and Kim taking care of the spoken word at the end, the track was completed.
The idea for the A side came about when Alvin was completing some freelance promotional work with Cap City Records out of Washington D.C., where he met Joe Tate. Alvin mentioned to Joe that he was looking for a song to put on the single with “And I Love You” and Joe suggested a song he wrote for the group Rock Candy, which was “I Don’t Think I’ll Ever Love Another.” The track was recorded with the band performing behind Beverly’s lead vocals in one room and the other girls singing backup in another.
The recording was pressed up in a quantity of 1,000 and received airplay on local Rochester radio stations such as WCFM and WRUR. It was also sold on consignment to stores locally such as House of Guitars, Record Theater, and Record Archive. Unfortunately, the single didn’t sell too well, so it wasn’t long before the group broke up and each of the members gave up their dreams of becoming famous singers to start raising families. Little did they know that decades later, both songs would go on to become sought-after collectible records and undisputed hot tracks in revered soul music circles.
Cultures of Soul is proud to present a special limited edition issue of this 45 licensed courtesy of Alvin Lofton and the Darling Dears. Limited to 500 copies and fully remastered with a special replica label of the original issue. The first 50 pre-orders will also receive a reprinted photo of the group. Order here at our Bigcartel.com store for $9.99.
Salena and Beverly Howard of the Darling Dears with Funky Heavy
"HARPO IS, FOR ME, THE ONE. Not even the trinity—the One. That’s what biographers, or anyone in love, must feel—a lunatic absorption in this other person, this One, who contains everything. The Harpo project did not begin with love; as with all obsessions, only repeated visitations allow a subject or object to accrue aura." (Wayne Koestenbaum)
¿No creés que las situaciones de Argentina y España se invirtieron en el último tiempo? Sobre todo en el campo cultural, España parece aletargada...
–“Aletargada” es un adjetivo muy generoso para la actividad cultural española de hoy en día. No está aletargada: está muerta, congelada, suspendida, se pudre, se va llenando de gusanitos blancos asquerosos –se ensaña Casciari–. El contraste actual con Buenos Aires es extremo. Cuando voy para allá, siempre por diez días o quince, mi mujer me tiene que levantar con espátula para que vuelva a casa. Me dan unas ganas de estar ahí que no se pueden soportar. Dos cosas me mantienen en Barcelona: que tengo mujer e hija catalanas, y que estoy a media hora en tren del mejor fútbol que se jugó en la historia del universo.
A new musical movement turns Mexican drug violence into catchy sing-alongs
GerardoOrtiz.net
Gerardo Ortiz, whose latest CD both celebrates andquestionsthe culture of drug violence
In 2010, the collective of Mexican musicians known as Movimiento Alterado released a rousing carousel blitz of tubas, accordions, and snare rolls it called “Sanguinarios del M1.” The song’s title roughly translates as “The Bloodthirsty Killers of El M1”—M1 is the nickname for Manuel Torres Félix, an infamous member of the Sinaloa drug cartel. (He also goes by El Ondeado, “The Off One” or “The Crazy One.”) His long rap sheet includes a 2008 “message murder” in which he left three decapitated bodies with severed legs in the trunk of a car with a signed note and a decapitated snake.
“Sanguinarios” begins with the sound of semiautomatic gunfire, and then a rotating cast of singers role-plays as AK-47- and bazooka-toting M1 mercenaries. “We are crazy bloodthirsty guys,” the singers declare. “We like to kill.” They brag about their kidnapping, beheading, and torture skills and declare themselves architects of a reign of gunfire that, they promise, will never end. When the singers deliver these lines in the video, some carrying guns, others wearing ski masks and bulletproof vests, they stare into the camera, its lens splattered with blood.
The sing-alongs of Movimiento Alterado could only have been born during this blood-soaked moment of the U.S.–Mexico drug war. The statistics are now an unwelcome media mantra: More than 40,000 people have died, and more than 9,000 have gone missing since President Felipe Calderón began his campaign against Mexico’s cartels in 2006. Reports of mass graves, torched casinos, and mutilated bodies have become so commonplace that there are days when the Google Mexico news feed is nothing but a death scroll.
A groundswell of populist outrage has emerged, peaking last April when marches and vigils were held in 38 cities across Mexico. The protests were spearheaded by the poet Javier Sicilia, who founded the Movement for Peace With Justice and Dignity after his own son was killed (along with five others) by members of the Gulf cartel for allegedly reporting drug activity to a government hotline. The demonstrations have voiced opposition not only to cartel and military violence but also to the government’s response, demanding everything from changes in anti-trafficking strategy to the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “There they come / the beheaded, / the handless, / the dismembered,” the poet María Rivera recently wrote in “Los Muertos” (“The Dead”), a piece she read aloud at last year’s National March for Peace in Mexico City. “So lonely, so silent, so ours.”
In a recent essay in the Mexican newspaper Milenio, the Tijuana writer Heriberto Yépez claims that Mexico’s cartels have gone from being an economy to becoming an ideology that saturates society. The term narco can refer to both “drug trafficker” (el narco) and “drug life” in general (lo narco). For Yépez, narco was once a prefix, an adjective that described an aspect of Mexican culture. Now it is Mexican culture; “narco and culture are synonyms.”
Movimiento Alterado is the first major musical effort to exploit this cultural shift. In Spanish, alterado means “altered,” but it can refer to being agitated, angry, violent, or even, more colloquially, to being high. These are all states of mind associated with the hyper-violent culture of the Mexican narco, and they’ve been turned into a popular brand by Movimiento Alterado’s creators, Burbank-based producers and musicians Adolfo and Omar Valenzuela (also known as “Los Twiins”).
The newest Movimiento compilation, Desvelada Party Loquera (Crazy All-Night Party), is the sixth in less than two years, and with songs like “Mi Vida Es Una Fiesta” (“My Life Is a Party”) and “Let’s Go to the Fiesta!,” it might be the first narco album to be overtly, and perversely, packaged as a nonstop Saturday-night dance party. On “La Fiesta del Cartel” (“The Cartel’s Party”), one of the collective’s most prominent acts, Los BuKnas de Culiacan, takes us into a fictional private bash for the Sinaloa cartel at which the band is playing. “Cheers for another year,” the performers sing as shots ring out and a champagne cork pops. “The cartel celebrates its good deeds.”
( via Jace Clayton & Negrophonic.com)
For as long as the U.S.–Mexico border has existed, there have been songs about the contraband that crosses it. In the 19th century, it was cashmere and corduroy. Once Prohibition hit, it was tequila and bootleg liquor. The first recorded song about drug smuggling, “Por Morfina y Cocaína” (“Because of Morphine and Cocaine”), didn’t arrive until 1934, and like so many early contraband tunes, it concludes with a moralizing warning: The smugglers sing the blues on a chain gang in Leavenworth prison.
The contemporary drug ballads known as narcocorridos—enormously popular songs heard across the U.S. and Mexico that take their inspiration from the headlines of the cross-border drug economy—tend to be anything but moralizing. If mafiosos die, they die in a blaze of Scarface glory. If traffickers end up in prison, they are serenaded as underground heroes and scrappy capitalist hustlers who go from rancho rags to Escalade riches. If cartels live by impunity, they are only following the example of corrupt politicians, soldiers, and CEOs.
The first narcocorrido hit, 1973’s “Contrabando y Traición” (“Contraband and Treason”) from the California-based band Los Tigres del Norte, is a fictional Bonnie and Clyde epic that begins with tires full of pot in Tijuana and ends with a shootout in a Hollywood alley. It established a dominant narcocorrido trend that would continue into the next century: Reporting on drug violence and sensationalizing it are two sides of the same musical coin. As the U.S.–Mexico drug economy blossomed in the 1980s and 1990s, so did narcocorridos that detailed the exploits of murdered DEA agents and cartel-connected attorneys general and painted rising drug lords like Sinaloa’s Rafael Caro Quintero and Tijuana’s Arellano Felix brothers as border Robin Hoods.
The group’s songs are not about drug cartels; they are told from the perspective of drug cartels.
But the narcocorridos of Movimiento Alterado make those of its predecessors look quaint. The songs, which the members often refer to as corridos enfermos, or sick corridos, are more like necrocorridos, songs that normalize a culture of death and violence. The group’s songs are not about drug cartels; they are told from the perspective of drug cartels. The singers don’t sing in the third-person style of mostnarcocorridos about the dirty work of a cartel sicario (assassin); they sing from the sicario’s point of view. They often compare their super group—a merger of different singers and bands—to the recent merger of four drug cartels (Jalisco, Pacífico, La Resistencia, La Familia). During Movimiento Alterado’s live shows, men have appeared onstage in ski masks next to the bands, and in some of the concert publicity, blood drips from the letters of the group’s name.
The Valenzuela brothers were born in Sinaloa but have lived most of their lives in Southern California, where they have been both omnipresent producers and sharp entrepreneurs, at the center of shaping Mexican musical tastes from within the United States. They originally worked in straight-ahead banda, or brass-band, music (their father was a member of one of the biggest bands back in Sinaloa), helped pioneer “banda hood,” or the banda hip-hop craze, of the early 2000s, and last year launched a reality show on NBC’s Mun2 channel that followed them everywhere from a spa day in Phoenix to a meeting with Snoop Dogg. It’s hard not to see Movimiento Alterado as anything but a shrewd business decision, a carefully plotted attempt to cash in on Mexican drug violence as if it were a new dance craze and to do so at a distance—from within the relative safety of the United States. As Adolfo Valenzuela recently told a reporter, “It’s a market, and I’m in the music industry. If I don’t do it, someone else is doing it.”
The ethics of sensationalizing mass murder may not bother Movimiento Alterado, but it does seem to have had an impact on at least one artist formerly affiliated with the group. On 2010’s Movimiento Alterado Vol. 2, Gerardo Ortiz—a popular banda and norteño singer born in Southern California, raised in Sinaloa, and by most accounts now back living in Southern California—appears on “El Comando del Diablo” (“The Devil’s Commando”) as a vicious cartel henchman proud of his grenade launchers and torture methods. That same year, Ortiz played a member of the Sinaloa cartel on his hit album Ni Hoy Ni Mañana (Neither Today nor Tomorrow), which includes “Líder del Genocidio” (“The Leader of the Genocide”), a song that presents him as a member of El Antrax, the vicious security team of Sinaloa cartel boss El Mayo Zambada (in press photos, Ortiz appears with men in ski masks and camouflage pants).
In March 2011, Ortiz was leaving a concert in the Mexican state of Colima when attackers opened fire on his Suburban, killing the driver and his business manager Ramiro Caro. Although the motivation for the attack on Ortiz remains unknown, many believe it had something to do with his music’s identification with the Sinaloa cartel. The attack has left its mark on Ortiz. His first album since the shooting, Entre Dios y el Diablo, or Between God and the Devil, sounds like nothing else in the world of contemporary narcocorridos. It is a meditation on death and violence. True, it opens with the popular single “Aquiles Afirmo” (“El Aquiles Affirms”), depicting Ortiz in character as the Sinaloa trafficker known as El Aquiles, but otherwise it is surprisingly introspective. Ortiz does a wistful Spanish-language version of Bob Marley’s “Is This Love?” and memorializes his manager on “Ramiro Caro,” in which he portrays his lost friend from the grave, giving him a final chance to say goodbye. On “Cara A La Muerte” (“In the Face of Death”), Ortiz makes his biggest, and most important, alteration of the altered movement. He switches from one side of the AK-47 to the other; narrating from inside a coffin, he laments the damages and wounds of his life. “Good friends, loving children, I failed them on my journey,” he sings with reflection and regret. “I’d love to escape my body, be reborn, have a new life.”
As a rejoinder to violence, “Cara A La Muerte” is only one song—a meek offering considering the scope of Mexico’s social crisis—but it’s closer than any narcocorrido has come to joining the protesters and the poets and the bereaved thousands in saying ya basta, enough already, no más sangre, no more blood. It holds out a sliver of hope that as Mexico’s body count continues to grow, there might be a new song to sing.
