abstract: The abundant references to place in Cuban music are symptomatic of the “obsession” with... more abstract: The abundant references to place in Cuban music are symptomatic of the “obsession” with constructing and defining a national identity that many writers have noted. In the rhetoric of constructing and defining Cubanness that occupies so much of Cuban culture, place, identity, and music intertwine. Musical genres, as well as the great musicians that play them, are not just found in “authentic places” on the Cuban map; they are born there, even defined by geographical place. This narrative allows for a mutually authenticating feedback loop in which musician authenticates place and place is used to authenticate musician. However, this trialectic of music, place, and identity is increasingly being problematized by certain “alternative” musicians who find themselves positioned “outside the Revolution.” Their places question these somewhat essentialized notions of a placed identity while simultaneously attempting to draw themselves into the musical cartography of Cubanness. resumen: Las abundantes referencias a lugares de origen en la música cubana son sintomáticas de la “obsesión” por construir y definir una identidad nacional, lo que ha sido notado por muchos escritores. En la retórica de construir y definir lo que es “cubanía”, algo que ocupa tanto a la cultura cubana, las nociones de lugar, identidad y música se entremezclan. Los géneros musicales, así como los iconos musicales que los popularizan, no se ubican en los llamados “lugares auténticos” del mapa de Cuba, pero sí nacieron allí, y por tanto se definen a partir de esa geografía. Esta narrativa hace posible un círculo de retroalimentación que valida la autenticidad de ambas partes; o sea, el músico valida el lugar de origen y este sirve a su vez para autenticar al músico. Sin embargo, esta relación entre música, lugar e identidad se problematiza crecientemente si tenemos en cuenta a ciertos tipos de músicos “alternativos” que se hayan posicionados “fuera de la Revolución”. Sus posiciones llevan a cuestionar las nociones simplificadas de identidad a partir de lugar de origen, e invitan a re-examinar la cartografía musical cubana.
What is the place of punk in ‘punk studies’? How can we write punk, rather than just write about ... more What is the place of punk in ‘punk studies’? How can we write punk, rather than just write about punk? Can we do this in a way that is more than performative affectation? More than just a(nother) punk cliché? Do we owe a sense of authenticity to our subjects in academic writing on punk? This paper offers a critical reflection on a conference paper ‘performed’ as an attempt to address (rather than answer) these questions. I discuss the processes of writing, editing and presenting this paper in a way that attempted to ‘show’ punk, not just ‘explain’ it. In so doing, I hope that I can open up a discussion about performance in academia more generally.
When I began work on these short, fragmentary moments of identity (mis)appropriation, they seemed... more When I began work on these short, fragmentary moments of identity (mis)appropriation, they seemed a little more benign. They lived in three separate word documents as slightly awkward, slightly humorous, vignettes where a call to placed identity construction either missed the mark or made the mark a little too specific for the audience to appreciate. However, in light of some of the distressingly essentialised notions of placed identity – especially national identity – and the concomitant need to ‘choose’ the geographical scale to which one grounds one’s identity that has recently unfolded in a British context, perhaps these moments take on a little more serious, and pertinent, tone. Each of these moments confuses the different ‘layers’ of place-based identity – regional, national and global – that we might be familiar with on a conceptual basis. They represent collective identity as multifaceted and multifarious, perhaps even as a constellation of separate, more specifically ‘local’ identities. They reveal national, and even continental, identity as an uneasy patchwork. Nevertheless, in their symbolic representations – in the hats, the costumes, the dialects and song – that connects each vignette is a recognition that these geographical layers of identity – local, national, continental – still matter, still connect performer to audience, still need to be asserted and claimed. Identity is still placed. Identityand place-based identity affiliations tend to operate in a series of concentric circles, where one ‘locates’ oneself at different geographical ‘levels’ in a given moment, depending on audience, context, intention, performance, etc. So, one might ‘be from’ a particular street or post code, or from a particular neighbourhood, or from a city, or from a county, or nation, or collection of nations, or continent at any given moment. Whilst one might be ‘from’ all of these identity places simultaneously, one might emphasise, or perform, one of these places more specifically in a given context. What each of these moments exemplifies, perhaps, is the kinds of cognitive dissonances that can occur, in music and performance, when audience and performer are operating from within different rings of these concentric circles: that is, when the performance is either too broad – too ‘world’ – or too narrow – too ‘local’. The following short essay recounts three brief moments, remembrances of performances where a sense of placed identity was offered, and yet didn’t quite ‘land’ with its audience. Each maps some of the paradoxical problems with, and necessity
As Punk and Post-Punk have pointed out in previous issues (2.2 and 2.3), humour might be said to ... more As Punk and Post-Punk have pointed out in previous issues (2.2 and 2.3), humour might be said to be at the heart of a variety of punk aesthetics, incorporating elements of satire, parody, shock and subversion as weapons against host cultures (and yet, paradoxically, often cementing those punk manifestations within and as constituent part of those same cultures). Rather than reassert the place (and types) of humour in punk, this article examines one of its symptoms, laughter, outlining the 'dual face' of laughter and its role in delineating both exclusionary and inclusionary identity spaces. By offering a close reading of several recorded bouts of laughtersome performed, manic and distinctly humourless, others apparently natural and spontaneous (though nonetheless deliberate parts of the recording)-in the work of controversial Cuban punk band Porno Para Ricardo, this article examines specifically the role laughter plays in the band's work, but also suggests, more broadly, that laughter might constitute not only a telling identity marker for its audiences but also an important facet of the punk soundworld.
Astley provides an ethnographic account of the use of USB devices in contemporary Cuba as tools t... more Astley provides an ethnographic account of the use of USB devices in contemporary Cuba as tools to disseminate ‘problematic’—ideologically and logistically—foreign cultural texts. Albums, songs, music videos, films, television series, books and pictures, all largely unavailable through official media, are swapped among friends in private spaces, forming a complex network of cultural dissemination dubbed by Vincente Morin Aguado ‘the people’s Internet’. By tracing the socio-technological lineage through burned CDs, cassettes and foreign radio, Astley connects this latest practice to a longer history, arguing that these cultural texts are woven into, and made sense of through, a distinctly Cuban cultural lens. He suggests that, because of this selective, interpersonal nature, a more apt term for this peer-to-peer file sharing might be ‘the people’s mixtape’.
Rock music in its broadest definition, though still potentially problematic, has grown exponentia... more Rock music in its broadest definition, though still potentially problematic, has grown exponentially in contemporary Cuba, particularly since the economic and social crises of the 1990s. However, the subgenre distinctions that make sense of rock music in an Anglo-American context are not quite so apposite in defining a rock culture in Cuba that is happy to meld subgenres together with elements of Cuban traditional music, in a continuation of the process of 'transculturaltion', which many interpret as a founding element of Cuban cultural identity. This article, then, begins with a comment on the ways in which Cuba has made sense of a culturally loaded term such as punk. For the small but significant punk population on the island, many of the aesthetic elements of punk they utilize may serve to ostracize them from both the state and other subcultural groups. However, because of this process of 'transculturation', many of these punk traits are used to reflect a sense of contemporary Cuban cultural identity. This article examines the use of 'classical' punk cultural motifs of appropriation of cultural symbols, DIY aesthetic, destruction and bricolage in the work of Cuban punk band Porno Para Ricardo, to address the ways in which punk might be used to make sense of Cuba.
The desire to construct and define a sense of national identity has often been regarded as someth... more The desire to construct and define a sense of national identity has often been regarded as something of an ‘obsession’ in Cuban political and cultural discourse. Throughout the Revolution, rock music has consistently played some part in the making of a Cuban soundscape. Yet rock has often been seen as something of a threat to an ‘autochthonous’ construction of Cuban culture, and has often been denied legitimacy as part of the Cuban soundworld. Despite the rather liminal position it occupied throughout the revolutionary period, rock music in contemporary Cuba is as ‘obsessed’ with constructing, defining and reflecting a sense of Cubanness as more ‘recognisably Cuban’ musical forms. In this paper I explore some of the negotiations and conflicts in the music of the controversial rock band, Porno Para Ricardo: negotiations between traditional musics, the state and rock music in the perennial quest to define Cubanía.
This paper takes several examples from the work of one Cuban punk band – Porno Para Ricardo – to ... more This paper takes several examples from the work of one Cuban punk band – Porno Para Ricardo – to assess the use of memory as a tool for reflecting fragments of a national identity which is both quotidian and contemporary. This singular case study is chosen not for their pertinence within Cuban culture, or even within Cuban alternative music, but rather as an exemplar of the assertion that popular music, rather than changing identities, often reflects aspects of identity and how they manifest in the everyday. Porno Para Ricardo are one such point of reflection. However, their remembrances often stray into areas too traumatic or politically admonished to be ‘remembered’ as part of a more rigid revolutionary history. By remembering the cultural (and thus, vicariously, the political) legacy of the Soviet Union within Cuba, and by re-personalising (or personifying) the traumas of mass generational exodus experiences in the early 90s, Porno Para Ricardo both augment the space of collective Cuban memory, and thus identity, but also attempt to reconnect the slabs of Cuban history often cleaved into evental epochs after which a ‘new way of being’ is constructed, as a means to better make sense of, and better reflect, contemporary Cuban identity.
abstract: The abundant references to place in Cuban music are symptomatic of the “obsession” with... more abstract: The abundant references to place in Cuban music are symptomatic of the “obsession” with constructing and defining a national identity that many writers have noted. In the rhetoric of constructing and defining Cubanness that occupies so much of Cuban culture, place, identity, and music intertwine. Musical genres, as well as the great musicians that play them, are not just found in “authentic places” on the Cuban map; they are born there, even defined by geographical place. This narrative allows for a mutually authenticating feedback loop in which musician authenticates place and place is used to authenticate musician. However, this trialectic of music, place, and identity is increasingly being problematized by certain “alternative” musicians who find themselves positioned “outside the Revolution.” Their places question these somewhat essentialized notions of a placed identity while simultaneously attempting to draw themselves into the musical cartography of Cubanness. resumen: Las abundantes referencias a lugares de origen en la música cubana son sintomáticas de la “obsesión” por construir y definir una identidad nacional, lo que ha sido notado por muchos escritores. En la retórica de construir y definir lo que es “cubanía”, algo que ocupa tanto a la cultura cubana, las nociones de lugar, identidad y música se entremezclan. Los géneros musicales, así como los iconos musicales que los popularizan, no se ubican en los llamados “lugares auténticos” del mapa de Cuba, pero sí nacieron allí, y por tanto se definen a partir de esa geografía. Esta narrativa hace posible un círculo de retroalimentación que valida la autenticidad de ambas partes; o sea, el músico valida el lugar de origen y este sirve a su vez para autenticar al músico. Sin embargo, esta relación entre música, lugar e identidad se problematiza crecientemente si tenemos en cuenta a ciertos tipos de músicos “alternativos” que se hayan posicionados “fuera de la Revolución”. Sus posiciones llevan a cuestionar las nociones simplificadas de identidad a partir de lugar de origen, e invitan a re-examinar la cartografía musical cubana.
What is the place of punk in ‘punk studies’? How can we write punk, rather than just write about ... more What is the place of punk in ‘punk studies’? How can we write punk, rather than just write about punk? Can we do this in a way that is more than performative affectation? More than just a(nother) punk cliché? Do we owe a sense of authenticity to our subjects in academic writing on punk? This paper offers a critical reflection on a conference paper ‘performed’ as an attempt to address (rather than answer) these questions. I discuss the processes of writing, editing and presenting this paper in a way that attempted to ‘show’ punk, not just ‘explain’ it. In so doing, I hope that I can open up a discussion about performance in academia more generally.
When I began work on these short, fragmentary moments of identity (mis)appropriation, they seemed... more When I began work on these short, fragmentary moments of identity (mis)appropriation, they seemed a little more benign. They lived in three separate word documents as slightly awkward, slightly humorous, vignettes where a call to placed identity construction either missed the mark or made the mark a little too specific for the audience to appreciate. However, in light of some of the distressingly essentialised notions of placed identity – especially national identity – and the concomitant need to ‘choose’ the geographical scale to which one grounds one’s identity that has recently unfolded in a British context, perhaps these moments take on a little more serious, and pertinent, tone. Each of these moments confuses the different ‘layers’ of place-based identity – regional, national and global – that we might be familiar with on a conceptual basis. They represent collective identity as multifaceted and multifarious, perhaps even as a constellation of separate, more specifically ‘local’ identities. They reveal national, and even continental, identity as an uneasy patchwork. Nevertheless, in their symbolic representations – in the hats, the costumes, the dialects and song – that connects each vignette is a recognition that these geographical layers of identity – local, national, continental – still matter, still connect performer to audience, still need to be asserted and claimed. Identity is still placed. Identityand place-based identity affiliations tend to operate in a series of concentric circles, where one ‘locates’ oneself at different geographical ‘levels’ in a given moment, depending on audience, context, intention, performance, etc. So, one might ‘be from’ a particular street or post code, or from a particular neighbourhood, or from a city, or from a county, or nation, or collection of nations, or continent at any given moment. Whilst one might be ‘from’ all of these identity places simultaneously, one might emphasise, or perform, one of these places more specifically in a given context. What each of these moments exemplifies, perhaps, is the kinds of cognitive dissonances that can occur, in music and performance, when audience and performer are operating from within different rings of these concentric circles: that is, when the performance is either too broad – too ‘world’ – or too narrow – too ‘local’. The following short essay recounts three brief moments, remembrances of performances where a sense of placed identity was offered, and yet didn’t quite ‘land’ with its audience. Each maps some of the paradoxical problems with, and necessity
As Punk and Post-Punk have pointed out in previous issues (2.2 and 2.3), humour might be said to ... more As Punk and Post-Punk have pointed out in previous issues (2.2 and 2.3), humour might be said to be at the heart of a variety of punk aesthetics, incorporating elements of satire, parody, shock and subversion as weapons against host cultures (and yet, paradoxically, often cementing those punk manifestations within and as constituent part of those same cultures). Rather than reassert the place (and types) of humour in punk, this article examines one of its symptoms, laughter, outlining the 'dual face' of laughter and its role in delineating both exclusionary and inclusionary identity spaces. By offering a close reading of several recorded bouts of laughtersome performed, manic and distinctly humourless, others apparently natural and spontaneous (though nonetheless deliberate parts of the recording)-in the work of controversial Cuban punk band Porno Para Ricardo, this article examines specifically the role laughter plays in the band's work, but also suggests, more broadly, that laughter might constitute not only a telling identity marker for its audiences but also an important facet of the punk soundworld.
Astley provides an ethnographic account of the use of USB devices in contemporary Cuba as tools t... more Astley provides an ethnographic account of the use of USB devices in contemporary Cuba as tools to disseminate ‘problematic’—ideologically and logistically—foreign cultural texts. Albums, songs, music videos, films, television series, books and pictures, all largely unavailable through official media, are swapped among friends in private spaces, forming a complex network of cultural dissemination dubbed by Vincente Morin Aguado ‘the people’s Internet’. By tracing the socio-technological lineage through burned CDs, cassettes and foreign radio, Astley connects this latest practice to a longer history, arguing that these cultural texts are woven into, and made sense of through, a distinctly Cuban cultural lens. He suggests that, because of this selective, interpersonal nature, a more apt term for this peer-to-peer file sharing might be ‘the people’s mixtape’.
Rock music in its broadest definition, though still potentially problematic, has grown exponentia... more Rock music in its broadest definition, though still potentially problematic, has grown exponentially in contemporary Cuba, particularly since the economic and social crises of the 1990s. However, the subgenre distinctions that make sense of rock music in an Anglo-American context are not quite so apposite in defining a rock culture in Cuba that is happy to meld subgenres together with elements of Cuban traditional music, in a continuation of the process of 'transculturaltion', which many interpret as a founding element of Cuban cultural identity. This article, then, begins with a comment on the ways in which Cuba has made sense of a culturally loaded term such as punk. For the small but significant punk population on the island, many of the aesthetic elements of punk they utilize may serve to ostracize them from both the state and other subcultural groups. However, because of this process of 'transculturation', many of these punk traits are used to reflect a sense of contemporary Cuban cultural identity. This article examines the use of 'classical' punk cultural motifs of appropriation of cultural symbols, DIY aesthetic, destruction and bricolage in the work of Cuban punk band Porno Para Ricardo, to address the ways in which punk might be used to make sense of Cuba.
The desire to construct and define a sense of national identity has often been regarded as someth... more The desire to construct and define a sense of national identity has often been regarded as something of an ‘obsession’ in Cuban political and cultural discourse. Throughout the Revolution, rock music has consistently played some part in the making of a Cuban soundscape. Yet rock has often been seen as something of a threat to an ‘autochthonous’ construction of Cuban culture, and has often been denied legitimacy as part of the Cuban soundworld. Despite the rather liminal position it occupied throughout the revolutionary period, rock music in contemporary Cuba is as ‘obsessed’ with constructing, defining and reflecting a sense of Cubanness as more ‘recognisably Cuban’ musical forms. In this paper I explore some of the negotiations and conflicts in the music of the controversial rock band, Porno Para Ricardo: negotiations between traditional musics, the state and rock music in the perennial quest to define Cubanía.
This paper takes several examples from the work of one Cuban punk band – Porno Para Ricardo – to ... more This paper takes several examples from the work of one Cuban punk band – Porno Para Ricardo – to assess the use of memory as a tool for reflecting fragments of a national identity which is both quotidian and contemporary. This singular case study is chosen not for their pertinence within Cuban culture, or even within Cuban alternative music, but rather as an exemplar of the assertion that popular music, rather than changing identities, often reflects aspects of identity and how they manifest in the everyday. Porno Para Ricardo are one such point of reflection. However, their remembrances often stray into areas too traumatic or politically admonished to be ‘remembered’ as part of a more rigid revolutionary history. By remembering the cultural (and thus, vicariously, the political) legacy of the Soviet Union within Cuba, and by re-personalising (or personifying) the traumas of mass generational exodus experiences in the early 90s, Porno Para Ricardo both augment the space of collective Cuban memory, and thus identity, but also attempt to reconnect the slabs of Cuban history often cleaved into evental epochs after which a ‘new way of being’ is constructed, as a means to better make sense of, and better reflect, contemporary Cuban identity.
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