Jorge Duany’s article “Popular Music in Puerto Rico: Toward
an Anthropology of “Salsa” attempts to do precisely what is described in that
it provides a coherent discussion of “Salsa” as an anthropological enterprise,
looked at from a standpoint that takes into account divergent factors. In order
to describe “salsa” Duany lays out in parallel fashion the many musical
traditions that make genre, which while a more or less “hodgepodge” label at
its inception, becomes due to the way it develops musically alongside certain
historical conditions, namely the socio-economic demographics (working-class),
disparate cultures, and migrations the people that produce it. Subsequently
Duany explains the reasons why music is both culturally esteemed and the
mechanisms by which “salsa” depicts and, in turn, informs Puerto Rican culture.
On this note, Duany writes about how “Salsa” is used by Puerto Ricans, from New
York to San Juan, as a means of coping with the harsh realities of an often
economically marginalized existence.
A
brief question that merits being asked is whether there is soundness in the
implicit assumption of Duany that the very music itself, in its musicality,
mimics the social conditions it is produced in. Duany treats the proposition
that the violent brass and fast-paced rhythm of Salsa is a direct byproduct, or
at least a conscious homage, to the conditions of quotidian existence in
working class barrios as axiomatic.
Is this reasonable?
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