The City of Musical Memory. Lise A. Waxer
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analyzes the role of recorded music in generating constructions of group identity, mediating social and cultural differences in multiethnic and multiclass environments. In a lengthy and detailed analysis, Kenney traces the complex processes through which recordings influenced, but also reflected, the sensibilities of various U.S. listeners during the first four and half decades of phonograph technology. Key among these processes was the success of recordings in creating new audiences for certain types of music by breaking through barriers of socioeconomic class, ethnicity, or geographical distance that had previously prevented such links. This process also occurred in Cali, where the entry of recordings of música antillana, and later salsa, established a fervent local audience for a musical style created thousands of miles away.
Notably, the “stopped-clock” technology of recordings virtually captures musical performances and freezes those moments for perpetuity, serving (much as photographs and films do) as the basis for constructing a selective memory of the past. This memory, though legitimated by an appearance of reality, derives meaning and emotional impact from its usefulness in the present. Kenney, for instance, observes that for people in the United States, phonograph music served as a basis for the construction of a romanticized, tranquil past between 1890 and 1945, a time of turbulent social changes. Certain songs and genres “helped to generate collective aural memories through which various groups of Americans were able to locate and identify themselves” in the tumult of new influences inundating the cultural landscape (1999: xvii). Similarly, for three generations of Caleños, recordings have provided a cultural terrain that has helped people to maintain and situate themselves during continued struggles over urban spaces.
Joseph Roach’s theory of surrogation as a vital element in the process of memory (1996) suggests further ways to understand how music and memory are linked through sound recordings. According to Roach, memory is a process that operates through selective remembering and forgetting, in which certain objects, images, or personae are substituted for some imagined original located in the past. In this process, cultural performances of all kinds become vehicles for the embodiment and enactment of memory. Roach uses the term “effigy” to explain how objects and images become surrogates in this act of substitution: “The effigy is a contrivance that enables the processes regulating performance—kinesthetic imagination, vortices of behavior, and displaced transmission—to produce memory through surrogation. . . . [I]t fills by means of surrogation a vacancy created by the absence of an original.” Although effigies usually refer to a sculpted or pictured likeness, an effigy can also be an indirect likeness that consists of “a set of actions that hold open a place in memory” (1996: 36). Roach uses his theory to analyze circum-Atlantic urban performances such as theater and Carnival, particularly as they historically informed each other to produce the New Orleans Mardi Gras. His theory, however, also offers a potent model for understanding the impact sound recordings had in Cali—particularly the way performative practices such as dance and public listening shaped Cali’s position as a city of musical memory. Recordings became surrogate effigies of Cali’s cultural roots, used in the imaginative construction of origin myths in local popular life. (See Wade 2000 for a comparative account of origin myths about Colombian popular forms.) The circulation of salsa and música antillana recordings as rare, cosmopolitan commodities in Cali further complicates this process, as the meaning of effigy becomes elided with that of a fetish—another characteristic that Roach identifies in circum-Atlantic performance (1996: 41). As I discuss in chapter 3, the positioning of salsa and música antillana recordings as cultural fetishes in Cali is particularly prominent in the activities of record collectors and salsoteca DJs and audiences, but this fetishization is deeply interwoven with other spaces in local popular culture. In particular, the similarity of Cali’s annual Feria to other circum-Atlantic Carnivals points to the vivid way in which the fetishization of recordings in Caleño life maps onto citywide public enactments of surrogation and creative memory. During the Feria, discussed in chapter 6, Caleños literally re-member themselves in a week of kinesthetic merrymaking that directly and indirectly evokes the record-centered practices that consolidated música antillana and salsa as local cultural emblems in the first place.
My use of the term “popular” follows that established in British and North American cultural studies. I understand popular music as a set of genres and styles that are produced and largely consumed in urban environments, disseminated through the mass media, marketed as a commodity, and often subject to a great deal of ideological negotiation over issues of authenticity, control, and representation (Middleton 1990). This usage contrasts strongly with common Latin American usage of the term, where “popular” is understood in primarily in oppositional, populist terms—that is, “of the people”—without consideration of the ways in which popular culture often also plays into dominant capitalist structures and modes of production. This latter view has framed Latin American musicology throughout the twentieth century (e.g., Abadía Morales 1973; Aretz 1991; Ramón y Rivera 1977), leading to essentialist categories of folklor (indigenous, Afro-American, and rural mestizo forms), art music, and “popular” styles that are grassroots, semiurban, and largely uncontaminated by mass media. Only recently have Latin American scholars begun turning their attention to the tensions and contradictions that arise in urban popular musical practices and to the ways in which politics, money, race, and gender articulate with these sounds (see Torres 1998; Ochoa 200110).
In their engaging volume Music Grooves (1994), Charles Keil and Steven Feld explore the complex relationship between physical, participatory grooves and their commodification in the vinyl furrows of record discs. Cali’s case embodies the theoretical links mapped out by Keil and Feld in a particularly vivid fashion that I am not sure even they could have imagined when they coauthored this book. The strong role of recordings in Caleño popular life cannot be read merely as an instance of cultural massification through media technologies—an argument often raised in debates about cultural imperialism or global homogenization. Expressive record-centered practices (dancing, collecting, listening, and talking) have provided the basis for collective social activities, reaffirming community bonds and values that could be called upon in times of need. The fetishization of recordings in local popular culture—probably the most striking feature of salsa’s localization—is far too complicated to explain by a simple equation of cultural homogenization. The actual uses that Caleños have made of mass media technology over the past three generations indicate a highly original and creative approach in which transnational sounds and objects are adapted to local expressive practices.
These developments, while in many ways unique to Cali, are also markers of contemporary dynamics in Latin American culture and urban experience. Rowe and Schelling observe that the massive migration and urban development in Latin America have blurred the boundary between rural and urban cultures and moved cities to the fore of regional and national cultures.
Almost all cultures in Latin America are now mediated to some extent by the city, both in the sense of its massification of social phenomenon and of the communication technologies which it makes available. To see the city as a corrupting and contaminating force, in opposition to a pure and authentic culture rooted in the rural areas, is to indulge in nostalgia. On the other hand, the city is the place of entry of transnational culture, of TV programmes, comic-strip heroes and advertisements, whose references are to a different environment, that of the advanced capitalist countries. Is it possible, given the configuration sketched out here, to continue using the term “popular culture” as designating a distinctive area? The answer given in actual usage is yes: the term popular culture, according to common usage in Latin America, evokes the possibility of alternatives to currently dominant cultural patterns. (1991: 97)
The rise of a salsa-centered popular culture and record-centered cultural practices in Cali is part and parcel of that city’s urbanization, a means Caleños found for “negotiating the transitions” (Rowe and Schelling 1991: 98) from a small provincial town to a major urban center. Record-centered cultural practices became the modality through which Caleños first experienced and made sense of the city’s rapid urbanization, and they continued to serve to rekindle and reaffirm Caleños’ subjective experiences through successive waves of urban development. These experiences, in turn, became the basis for the development of popular culture and identity in Cali, upheld by