Nevertheless, as one can see from Afro Cuban All Stars' latest disc, Distinto, Diferente, Juan de Marcos is between a rock and a hard place. Whereas the award he received sealed his reputation in the rest of the world, a great part of the Hispanic intellectual community eyes him with a certain degree of suspicion, a man who took the root of his land's music and turned it into something the rest of the world could consume – with neither the cultural baggage nor the political content that so encumbered it when it first came about. As good and successful as the Grammy award-winning Buena Vista Social Club has proven to be – its greatest feature was that it reminded people where salsa came from – the cognoscenti derided it as a pre-revolutionary throwback, a record of Cuban music for those who don't speak Spanish.
"Buena Vista Social Club was a disc for non-Castellano speakers," agreed a sharp-as-a-tack Juan De Marcos, one of the most knowledgeable Cuban musicologists imaginable. "I love those records, I love acoustic music, and I love son tradicional. I've lived it and have it inside me. But the way Ry [Cooder] mixed it was to look for an agreeable sound for Anglo-Saxons; he was searching out a First World record-buying public. Additionally, the boom was based on three discs which were exceptionally well promoted by World Circuit, who did an extremely good job of marketing them, and which were equally well received by the press. Let's not forget that the difference between good and bad coffee is the quality, but the difference between good and great coffee is the marketing."
Conversely, the success of those records has also been a double-edged sword because most of the record-buying public ends up equating authenticity with the past and not the present. It has forced Cuban music into the secondary role of nostalgia. "All the records were exceptionally well done, but all were based on Cuban musical innovations from previous generations," added De Marcos passionately. "What there is now is based solely on the fashion of the old timers. Now that I've modernized the orchestra's sound, it's much harder for me to sell it. Now [that] I'm using both old timers and young blood, they are accusing me of changing the music."
This is an excerpt. Read the full article in Dirty Linen #88 (June/July 2000).
