EVERY GENRE PROJECT - February 11 - Guaracha
Genre of the Day - Guaracha
Album of the Day - Son con guaguancó by Celia Cruz (1966)
Big weekend for the Cuban community here on this column. While strange and coincidental, it’s by no means shocking: Cuba is a highly musically diverse nation with so many homegrown genres that it’s a bit proportionately astounding. Cuba’s musical reach on the international stage is immense, from jazz and pop contributions in the US, tango in South America, to highlife in Africa, to nuevo flamenco in Europe. It’s both a virtue of the intermixing of African rhythms and the widespread practices of replicating traditional instruments adeptly in enslaved communities with European and native melodies that is common across other musically diverse regions of the Americas, but it’s also easy to forget just how long Cuba has been settled and colonized. After all, it was the first place Columbus came across and decimated the native Taino population nearly completely, exacerbated by Cuba’s insular nature, leading to a high dependence on slave labor, although not as large as in neighboring Haiti and the Dominican. But the fact that Cuba has been stably settled for over 500 years has allowed for ample opportunity for musical traditions to mix and pursue different developmental paths.
In this column, I’ve been able to explore a lot of dimensions of music and what it can provide to us, and although levity has been one of them, humor isn’t something I’ve come across as much. A lot of our popular music retains humorous slants, though: an outrageous, laugh-out-loud bar can send a verse’s value sky-high simply by virtue of making us laugh. I also think humor is apparent the incorporation of meme culture into popular music, such as Skrillex’s sample of a girl’s cup stacking personal-record induced exclamations of joy on his breakout 2010 track “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites.” I argue that Drake has maintained immense popularity simply because of his willingness to throw in nonsensical throwaway bars (“Say that you a lesbian, girl, me too”). In genres more explicitly aimed towards performance rather than simply recording studio-leading genres, though, humor is definitely often a larger facet of music.
Such is the case with guaracha, which is a genre that dates all the way back to the 18th century! Like yesterday’s boogaloo, guaracha is also a sonic precursor to salsa, but what makes it more distinctive is its lyrics. Guarachas tend to have playful, humorous, and sometimes vulgar lyrics. As much as YouTube comments just love to lament the days where the most popular songs supposedly didn’t talk about sex and vulgarities and weren’t so crass, these things are perpetually a part of most culture’s lyrical music whether as subtext or more explicitly, and guaracha helps demonstrate this.
Celia Cruz was one of the biggest torchbearers of guaracha in the 20th century, but is obviously also a musical and cultural icon whose influence is much larger than a single genre. Nonetheless, she is considered synonymous with the genre in Cuba, being known as La Guarachera de Cuba. Her voice is incredible, and she can oscillate on a dime between a sweet, velvety tone to a richer, resounding no-holds-barred belt in the same sentence such as on “Es La Humanidad.” When it comes to examining this album as a facet of guaracha’s lyrical uniqueness, though, I can’t lie and say I’m not at a loss, because some of the songs don’t have lyrics posted online that I could find. For the ones that do, though, I can see how they might be funny, especially a handful of generations ago, although they don’t seem particularly vulgar and more whimsical. Such is the case on “Se Me Perdío La Cartera”, with lyrics that roughly translate to “They say they saw him on 110 / Eating a cod / Go walk / Juan fish walks / Go walk / Don't be cheeky.” There’s clearly some context I’m missing, but it feels like a riddle I can’t necessarily solve on my own. However, even if I’m not laughing at the right thing, the translation was amusing in its own right, so guaracha’s appeal permeates through even a haze of confusion.