Abstract
As national identities and sentiments are being placed and misplaced, defended and crossed over in pan-Caribbean “tropical” musical genres, somewhere in the recesses of a record company’s warehouse, thousands of CDs rest untouched and unplayed. The silence of those CDs mark the unsettling end to the short and footnoted career of Puerto Rican salsa singer Luis Omar, the man who—had it not been for one night in October 2001—would have been anointed as heir to the sexy tropical crooners that populate and copulate the polisexual Caribbean rhythm island.
There’s a hole in my soul/
You can see it in my face/
It’s a real big place.
Robbie Williams, “Feel”
A ambiciones y anhelos
no renunciaré/Seguiré insistiendo/
No me rendiré.
Luis Omar, “Uenceré”
[Ambitions and yearnings
I will not give up/
I will continue to insist/
I will not give in.]
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Notes
The term is Bennett Simpson’s, and is applied mainly to art bands whose musical contraptions acquire an unusually large following, blending the expectations of the band as art and the music as commodified success. See Bennet Simpson, “From Noise to Bueys,” Artforum (February 2004): 59.
Stuart Hall, “Who Needs ‘Identity’?,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 33.
See Frances R. Aparicio, Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music and Puerto Rican Cultures (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998)
also Peter Manuel, “Gender Politics in Caribbean Popular Music: Consumer Perspectives and Academic Interpretation,” Popular Music and Society 22, no. 2 (1998): 11–30.
Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2001): 81.
bell hooks, “Marginality as Site of Resistance,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. R Ferguson et al. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 341.
Juan Otero Garabís, Naciôn y ritmo: “descargas” desde el Caribe (Río Piedras: Ediciones Callejón, 2000), 127.
Wilson Valentín-Escobar, “Nothing Connects Us All But Imagined Sounds: Performing Trans-Boricua Memories, Identities and Nationalisms Through the Death of Héctor Lavoe,” in Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York, ed. Agustín Laó-Montes and Arlene Dâvila (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 212.
Noel Algarín Martínez, “Aceptado el reto de los voleibolistas gay,” Primera Hora, May 30, 2003, 98.
Graham Duggan, The Post Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (New York: Routledge, 2001), 99.
See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993), 227.
Sharyn Obsatz, “Music School Scam Yields 12-Year Term,” Press-Enterprise, December 12, 2003, Riverside Metro Section, 1.
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© 2007 Frances Negrón-Muntaner
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Jiménez, F. (2007). [a. k. a.: The Sex/Salsa/Identity Show]. In: Negrón-Muntaner, F. (eds) None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604360_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604360_19
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