Critial Review: Waxer

"Of Mambo Kings and Songs of Love" is a great introduction to Cuban musical styles and the influence it had on the American construction of the "Latin" sound. Waxer does a great job proving that there are too many similarities between the New York and Cuban jazz styles for them to have developed independently.

Waxer talks in detail about performing identities and the relationship between the performer and the audience. I thought the discussion on White-Black integration in Cuba and the subsequent change in mainstream Cuban musical tastes was fascinating and once again brings up racial essentialism as a major theme in music. I think it is interesting then how much influence what earlier generations thought of as African American music now dominates as the American pop sound, because though African Americans now have the same legal rights as other Americans, you could not say that they have become economically integrated.

And this touches on something I often forget: the economics of the musician-audience relationship. So much of what musicians do, despite what many of them might say, caters to the tastes and desires of their audiences because music is their job. I have the image of the independent musician who creates music based on what their soul tells them, but most musicians are more like Haydn--court musicians who write what their King wants. Musicians are mostly servants to the tastes of their audience, because in the end it is their audience that feeds them.

Waxer then addresses a consequence of this economic asymmetry: performers playing a part in the misrepresentation of their music. We discussed how Peruvian musicians play this one song in Cusco because it is a song tourists know and will respond to. Should performers have an obligation to be faithful to their musical roots if they've been transplanted somewhere else?

The article also begged to ask a larger question about transnational musical scenes and cultural, economic, and political communities. Waxer says "...the stage was set for the creation of a pan-Latin cultural identity that has paralleled the emergence of other macro-regional alliances..." I wonder if it was the music that created this cultural identity or if the music was merely a byproduct of other forms of integration.