It’s midnight on a Wednesday and the neighborhood club right outside my window is blasting Beyonce. What am I doing home at midnight on a Wednesday, which happens to be salsa night at El Agujon? I’ve just had a week full of papers and exams and although it’s already the weekend for me (minus the Kichwa tutorials that have a growing tendency to occur over coffee) I’m exhausted and just want to go to sleep. I suppose Beyonce is better than the group of guys who play volleyball with a soccer ball on the basketball court also right outside my window, though the endless chorus of ‘¡chucha!’ never fails to entertain. Or the marching orders that will wake me up at 7:00 AM, blasted through a loudspeaker for students of Colegio Nacional Mixto Manuel Cordova Galarza which is also, thanks to the unique geometry of Quito, right outside my window. This in mind, I settle back and hum the chorus of “If I Were a Boy.” Except for the fact that it’s not “If I Were a Boy.” This version, popular for obvious reasons here in Ecuador, is “Si yo fuera un chico.”

Ecuadorians are intensely proud of their Latino rhythms. Just about every club, as if by some national mandate, has a salsa hour – including La Casa de Cerveza and Beertropolis – and I have yet to meet a man (with the notable exceptions of my host-brother Wilson, and his friends Esteban and Pinky, all of whom I love for this very reason) who can’t shake his hips just as well as Shakira. More often than not bus drivers will blast a laundry list of traditional cumbia songs, and don’t seem to mind it when gringos are inspired to do a little dirty dancing in the aisles. Marco, La Universidad Politécnica Salesiana’s Danza Tropical instructor, flat-out refuses to choreograph to reggaeton. “Reggaeton es el Diablo,” he once insisted and gave us gringos in the class a mini-lecture on the many reasons why these rhythms are not REAL Latino rhythms. This being said, Ecuadorians also love the English-language music scene (ALL of it – from Guns and Roses to Korn) and it is a rare day when I’m not serenaded with Pitbull’s “I Know You Want Me” regardless of whether I’m on the streets of Quito or camping in the Amazon.

Spanish translations of English lyrics, including Beyonce’s “Si yo fuera un chico” and Jason Mraz’s “Suerte” get a lot of air time on Ecuadorian radio. Perhaps still not as much as Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA,” but more than they might otherwise. And yet, these songs bother me more than Miley ever could (which is a lot). While some might suggest that the purpose of such translation is to make the music accessible to a wider audience, or in the case of Mraz, to facilitate partnerships with other artists, I have a hard time buying this line. Translation seems less to me like cultural accommodation and more like an effort to move CDs.

I’m not sure if Beyonce and Jason Mraz even speak Spanish.

Maybe it’s the idea of them mouthing lyrics they don’t understand that just makes the songs sound so hollow.

Having taken an ethnomusicology class, I’m somewhat familiar with debates about cultural appropriation. And I’m not sure if I’d rather hear Beyonce and Jason Mraz making money off of a salsa rhythm or the Spanish language. But at least a salsa rhythm would be a nod to the rich variety of music produced in Latino America, rather than an attempt to push the exact same homogenous pop that already dominates the airwaves by dressing it up in Spanish. I’m not saying that Latino America doesn’t produce bad music. It does – and that’s why it doesn’t need any help from the US.

Perhaps my misguided notions of ‘authenticity’ (a word that anthropology has taught me to be wary of) are part of the reason I remain so dedicated to Juanes. The obsession, prompt by Señor Ramsey in my freshman year of high school, has continued at such a level of intensity that any mention of his name, even by one of the many guys for whom I happen to be head-over-heels and thus would like to impress, prompts an immediate and at this point instinctual response: “I LOVE JUANES.” It earns me plenty of eye-rolling; Juanes is the Latino-American equivalent of the Beatles and the Jonas Brothers and pretty much any big-name British or American band that has drawn a cult of young female followers from around the world. But that’s exactly what I love about him – he’s developed a fan-base that rivals any English-speaking artist even though he refuses to sing in English. In interviews, he insists that Spanish is the only language he understands inside and out, that he would feel disingenuous singing in anything else. Although he’s a straight-up pop-rocker, he’s also intensely loyal to the rhythms that Marco would classify as ‘real’ Latino rhythms and pens lyrics that address the current socio-political situation in Colombia. For this reason, even when I’m totally ‘fregada’ (more or less ‘screwed’) – running late for class, having left my house without my cell phone and only a twenty-dollar bill (which are impossible to use here as no one ever has change) – hearing “Un día normal” in an internet café immediately puts me in a good mood.

This isn’t to say that I don’t support polyglots like Manu Chao (I LOVE Manu Chao) or the idea of cross-cultural collaboration in general. It’s just to say that I support cross-cultural collaboration when it’s truly cross-cultural, that is to say that it embraces the unique and important musical contributions of whatever cultures happen to be crossing. Of course, I recognize that there are not necessarily clear lines between ‘cultures’ (my anthropology background kicking in again) but for me it’s pretty clear-cut that Beyonce and Jason Mraz creating Spanish versions of their popular English songs isn’t so much cultural ANYTHING as it is a form of musical prostitution. But if they were to translate their English songs into Kichwa, I suppose that would be another story….

This entry was posted on Friday, April 16th, 2010 at 12:46 PM and is filed under Aphera's Adventures, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.