Buena Vista in the club : rap, reggaetón, and revolution in Havana
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Buena Vista in the club : rap, reggaetón, and revolution in Havana
(Refiguring American music)
Duke University Press, 2011
- : pbk
Available at / 2 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [383]-399) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In Buena Vista in the Club, Geoffrey Baker traces the trajectory of the Havana hip hop scene from the late 1980s to the present and analyzes its partial eclipse by reggaeton. While Cuban officials initially rejected rap as "the music of the enemy," leading figures in the hip hop scene soon convinced certain cultural institutions to accept and then promote rap as part of Cuba's national culture. Culminating in the creation of the state-run Cuban Rap Agency, this process of "nationalization" drew on the shared ideological roots of hip hop and the Cuban nation and the historical connections between Cubans and African Americans. At the same time, young Havana rappers used hip hop, the music of urban inequality par excellence, to critique the rapid changes occurring in Havana since the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union fell, its subsidy of Cuba ceased, and a tourism-based economy emerged. Baker considers the explosion of reggaeton in the early 2000s as a reflection of the "new materialism" that accompanied the influx of foreign consumer goods and cultural priorities into "sociocapitalist" Havana. Exploring the transnational dimensions of Cuba's urban music, he examines how foreigners supported and documented Havana's growing hip hop scene starting in the late 1990s and represented it in print and on film and CD. He argues that the discursive framing of Cuban rap played a crucial part in its success.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. !Hip Hop, Revolucion!: Nationalizing Rap in Cuba 33
2. The Revolution of the Body: Reggaeton and the Politics of Dancing 108
3. The Havana You Don't Know: Urban Music and the Late Socialist City 178
4. Cuban Hip Hop All Stars: Transnationalism and the Politics of Representation 244
Conclusion. The Rise and Fall of Havana Hip Hop 334
Notes 365
Bibliography 383
Index 401
by "Nielsen BookData"