Music

My new song “Custody” might strike some as political. I don’t dispute this idea so much as wish to shift attention to what matters more. I believe the song does what songs have been trying to do for as long as they’ve been sung: it tries to say what a particular life is like as it is being lived in particular circumstances. “Custody” tells the story of a young woman detained on the Texas border. It may differ from some songs that touch on similar narratives in that it tries to envision her having agency in the midst of a situation meant to rob her of it, it resists the inclination of the listener to see the character one dimensionally as an object of pity.

This is a new one, written last summer a couple of weeks before I moved away from New York—I suppose a case of pre-homesickness. Guaranteed: this is not your usual New York song.

This is my new song, “Debutantes and Casanovas.” After I wrote this song I started wondering if I wasn’t unconsciously channeling the kind of stories Robert Stone used to write about desert shootouts and plans gone wrong.

I also wondered if the story wasn’t being told backwards. Then again I’m not sure what the story is in the first place. Any ideas?

Please like the video or follow my YouTube channel, if you’re so inclined!

The Twitter person @Arturo_Ulises (interesting name) who splits his time between between Tlön, Uqbar, and Brooklyn (interesting choice of domiciles) twitterated a link to a Radio Ambulante story about a run-in between the infamous Columbian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar and a well-known salsa musician. It’s a wonderful story, and so I’ve done a quick and very loose translation. Here it is:

Musicians always have peculiar stories. For example it is said that the Puerto Rican salsa musician Héctor Lavoe had an altercation with the Colombian narcotraficante Pablo Escobar during a musical performance at a party organized by Escobar.

According to the story, Escobar wanted the musicians to keep playing the same song, the hit, El cantate, again and again. The musicians refused, were locked in a room, and only managed to escape barefooted and without their instruments through the Colombian jungle. Finally arriving at a highway, they were able to hail a taxi for their hotel. But based on how the musicians looked, the taxi driver worried they wouldn’t be able to pay him. Lavoe assured him that he was indeed the famous Héctor Lavoe. The taxi driver asked suspiciously: “To confirm that you are who you say you are, you’re going to have to sing El cantate for me if you want me to take you to your hotel.”

“Listen dude,” Lavoe responded, “it’s because of crap like this that we have this problem. Somebody wanted me to repeat this song ten times, threatening me with a pistol. I was a little drunk and said to the orchestra no more songs. Pack up your instruments.”

***

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But also the story says a great deal about power, and especially about the peculiar power music exercises over us. It’s like one of those tales from antiquity about a despot (Dionysius of Syracuse, anyone?) that teaches the futility of the dictator’s way of life. Here is Pablo Escobar, who at the time was one of the most powerful, wealthy, and feared criminals in the world, powerless before art. Just like all of us, who when we like a certain song, a certain melody (or Vinteuil’s Sonata, for that matter) want to hear it again and again, so too the great Pablo Escobar. Most of us however do not pull out pistols to hear the song repeated, no matter how much we might want to. But perhaps that is just our timidity.

***

Original text from Radio Ambulante is found here.

This story apparently was first told by the journalist and writer Juan José Hoyos in the pages of the newspaper El Colombiano de Medellín.

It’s a bit strange to find yourself mugged by a record album. At a certain age, that is. Young, it’s normal. But that obsessive, slightly sweaty, adolescent quality that goes along with getting a song stuck in the cerebral cortex in a way that feels like infatuation—that’s unexpected. And yet here I am under the sway of one Polly Jean Harvey and the record she released earlier this year: Let England Shake. My embarrassment doesn’t end there: I’ve been vaguely aware of P.J. for a couple of decades without ever really listening, so not only am I a sudden fan, I’m a late fan. It could hardly get worse. (Though in my own defense, Let England Shake hasn’t made that big a splash in the US market—nothing like Adele. I can’t imagine why.)

Faced with the incomprehensible—on so many levels—I turned to old behavior. Yes, just as I did ‘back in the day’ when I fell in love with a record, I went to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, the place where teens can let the nation know what they’re thinking about ‘pop’ music. It was good to be back in old Studio B. Dick must have remembered me from way back when, because I was hustled right up on the bandstand, where, preliminaries over, Dick took me through the paces of the old ritual:

Dick: What makes this record special?
Me: Lyrics and beats, Dick!
Dick: Can you dance to it?
Me: Absolutely!
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Me: So many, Dick. How about: ‘Goddamn Europeans/Take me back to beautiful England/And the gray damp filthiness/Of ages and battered books/And fog rolling down behind mountains/On the graveyards and dead sea captains.’
Dick: [puzzlement increasing] Yeah. Okay. Overall thoughts?
Me: An examination limning the role of violence in producing culture, nationhood, the self in the tradition of Macbeth—a work almost entirely unique in the history of pop culture rich in reference that ranges from Gallipoli and the Great War to Iraq, from Pound to Eddie Cochran.
Dick: [frozen smile, suddenly brightening into something genuine] Time for a commercial break!

The rules: two songs from roughly the same era whose relationship says something suggestive about the time, the place. Here’s Louis Armstrong, Sweethearts on Parade, 1930, and Jimmy Rodgers, Gambling Barroom Blues, 1932:

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