Buena Vista in the Club: Rap, Reggaetón, and Revolution in Havana

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 reggaetón. While Cuban officials initially rejected rap as "the music of the enemy," leading figures in the hip hop scene soon...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Baker, Geoffrey (Author)
Other Authors: Kun, Josh (Editor), Radano, Ronald (Editor)
Format: Electronic eBook
Language:English
Published: Durham Duke University Press [2011]
Series:Refiguring American Music
Subjects:
Online Access:DE-1043
DE-1046
DE-859
DE-860
DE-473
DE-703
DE-739
DE-858
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Summary: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 reggaetón. 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 reggaetón 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
Item Description:Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 28. Okt 2020)
Physical Description:1 online resource (424 pages) 25 photographs
ISBN:9780822393931
DOI:10.1515/9780822393931

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