Few Of Us Get Exposed To Different Sorts Of Music As We Used To When Tunes Were Not Sliced, Diced And Aimed At Particular Market Segments.
CHICAGO As I scrolled thru my Twitter timeline last Sun. night, the MTV Video Music Awards-related tweets gave me that gloomy twinge a few individuals get when they realize they are getting older and are out of touch with young peoples passions.
I haven’t studied a music award show in many years and, though Lady Gaga, Beyonce and Katy Perry are familiar from the magazine covers I see at the food shop checkout, their music hasn’t reached, not to mention touched, me.
I miss how music used to be more of a communal experience. Today electronic jukeboxes like iTunes, niche of list of radio stations, satellite and streaming Web radio let everyone listen only to whatever music they prefer. Few of us get exposed to differing types of music as we used to when tunes were not chopped, cubed and targeted to particular market segments.
Remember when it seemed as if everybody listened to Casey Kasem’s Top 40? Today Poster advertisement has so many chartsradio songs, digital songs and ring tones, plus 29 different genres such as rock, classical, “Latin,” and “kids”I do not know where to begin.
This is not necessarily a unpleasant thing, but I’m a sap for a time when “popular” music, aka pop, suggested delicate societal shifts.
For example, cast your mind back to 1984 when giant audiences tuned into the two yearly music award shows and Michael Jackson was winning one or two VMAs and Grammys for “Thriller.” His blockbuster performances at those shows exposed millions to a recent advance by a successful and gifted black artist. It was the start of a fledgling aim for black parity in main line entertainment that started picking up steam later that year when “The Cosby Show” began its eight-season run on NBC.
For me, 1985 was the important musical year. I used to be a world-weary 10-year-old who pushed the car’s radio dial to alternative stations that played punk, attempted my best to dress like Madonna, and was completely intolerant of my parents’ Spanish-language music.
Their salsa, cumbia, merengue and mariachi corridos consistently filled up the house and accompanied each large family get-together. It was music that I felt needed complex dance moves that I would not have dreamed about attempting, was certainly not “cool” and, to my adolescent mind, actually not American.
And then in October the Miami Sound Machine zoomed up the Poster advertisement Hot 100 with “Conga,” which became the first single to be at the same time included on Billboard’s pop, Latin, soul, and dance charts.
Epiphany time : the trumpet-cowbell-hot-piano-timbale combo was stimulating, not solely to me but to other folks, most critically my classmates and the people listening to English-language radio.
I’ll always remember the look on my parents’ faces the 1st time they heard me grating “Conga” on my boombox. “What are you listening to?” my mom asked, shocked. She called my pop over to witness the miracle of my embrace of a musical style I Had formerly refused. They really beamed with joy.
I shrugged it off, but mainstream audiences happily doing the “Conga” made me embrace a part of my culture that I’d never actually given any thought to. Back then, at least in Chicago, no one was going around making a fuss about who was Latino or Hispanic. I assumed of myself as simply American.
The popularity of “Conga” was like a Michael Jackson moment for me and other Hispanics. The song’s acclaim prepared the ground for an even broader audience’s embrace of Los Lobos’ version of “La Bamba,” from the film about Ritchie Valens. Many radio stations played the tune, with its folkloric guitar outro, in its totality.
Those were heady days leading in to Ronald Reagan signing the not-particularly-contentious Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Salsa was on its way to becoming as favored a seasoning as ketchup. Who’d have imagined that a quarter of a century later folk would be truly anxious about America losing its actual soul to Latino culture.
Today calls for a new song to remind individuals that Hispanic and main line cultures can come together and be enjoyed equally by folk of all racesafter all, there are no census form race designations on the dance floor. Where are you, crossover star? And are you able to hit the Hot hundred in time for next year’s MTV Video Music Awards? – as reported tagya.com.
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