Album: Siembra
Artist: Willie Colòn & Rubén Blades
Born: Oriente, Cuba
Released: April 1978
Genre: Salsa
Influenced: David Byrne, Gloria Estefan, Enrique Iglesias
One thing I enjoyed as an eMusic member were its well-researched guides to music genres, and it was in the salsa section that I came across Siembra. Despite little prior knowledge of salsa, or Latin music generally, I connected with the album instantly and love it more and more each listen. In the UK, salsa has wider resonance as a dance form, but its musical origins stretch back to pre-WWII Cuba (where it was known as "son cubano", a mix of Spanish and African influences). By the 70s, this Cuban musical form absorbed further influences from Puerto Rico (bomba) and North America (jazz) to create the hybrid sounds of salsa (more a marketing term than a precise genre label). Willie Colòn was aware of salsa's potential to become a broad church for various Latin music styles, "an open, ever-evolving musical, cultural, socio-political concept". What I love about this record is that it not just sounds great, but it also expresses Che Guevara and Simón Bolívar's ideals of pan-Americanism. This message was a powerful one for the growing US Hispanic population, and New York-born Puerto Rican Willie Colòn was the perfect man to deliver it, along side Panamanian Rubén Blades. Siembra became a huge success, not just in the US but across Latin America, selling millions of copies.
At the outset, Siembra sounds like a disco record (a hint at the cross-fertilisation of disco and Latin music in the 70s; see also Saturday Night Fever). Plástico then evolves into a mesmerising, shifting salsa arrangement and a devastating critique of the commercialism of American culture and shallow materialism of some Hispanics (see this translation for a flavour of Blades' impassioned songwriting). Buscando Guayaba has a lighter tone, with Blades (who wrote all but one of the songs on Siembra) singing in his inventive high-tenor way of an ongoing search for a guava fruit (metaphor, I think, for a zesty woman). Pedro Navaja is far more ambitious, a salsa version of Mac The Knife that operates as a commentary on the dangers of inner city life and crime ("valiente pescador / al anzuelo que tiraste / en vez de una sardina / un tiburón enganchaste", "daring fisherman / you threw bait / and caught a shark / instead of a sardine"). With its police sirens and evocations of the immigrant experience, it reminds me of Stevie Wonder's Living For The City. The record finishes on a high with a stunning love song, Dime (as in "tell me", not 10 cents), on which Blades sings with tenderness about a heartbreak that won't fade, followed by title track Siembra, the album's highlight for me. The rhythmical drumming and blasting horns are so infectious, with Blades again sowing the seeds (siembra means "to sow or plant") of his political activism.
One thing I enjoyed as an eMusic member were its well-researched guides to music genres, and it was in the salsa section that I came across Siembra. Despite little prior knowledge of salsa, or Latin music generally, I connected with the album instantly and love it more and more each listen. In the UK, salsa has wider resonance as a dance form, but its musical origins stretch back to pre-WWII Cuba (where it was known as "son cubano", a mix of Spanish and African influences). By the 70s, this Cuban musical form absorbed further influences from Puerto Rico (bomba) and North America (jazz) to create the hybrid sounds of salsa (more a marketing term than a precise genre label). Willie Colòn was aware of salsa's potential to become a broad church for various Latin music styles, "an open, ever-evolving musical, cultural, socio-political concept". What I love about this record is that it not just sounds great, but it also expresses Che Guevara and Simón Bolívar's ideals of pan-Americanism. This message was a powerful one for the growing US Hispanic population, and New York-born Puerto Rican Willie Colòn was the perfect man to deliver it, along side Panamanian Rubén Blades. Siembra became a huge success, not just in the US but across Latin America, selling millions of copies.
At the outset, Siembra sounds like a disco record (a hint at the cross-fertilisation of disco and Latin music in the 70s; see also Saturday Night Fever). Plástico then evolves into a mesmerising, shifting salsa arrangement and a devastating critique of the commercialism of American culture and shallow materialism of some Hispanics (see this translation for a flavour of Blades' impassioned songwriting). Buscando Guayaba has a lighter tone, with Blades (who wrote all but one of the songs on Siembra) singing in his inventive high-tenor way of an ongoing search for a guava fruit (metaphor, I think, for a zesty woman). Pedro Navaja is far more ambitious, a salsa version of Mac The Knife that operates as a commentary on the dangers of inner city life and crime ("valiente pescador / al anzuelo que tiraste / en vez de una sardina / un tiburón enganchaste", "daring fisherman / you threw bait / and caught a shark / instead of a sardine"). With its police sirens and evocations of the immigrant experience, it reminds me of Stevie Wonder's Living For The City. The record finishes on a high with a stunning love song, Dime (as in "tell me", not 10 cents), on which Blades sings with tenderness about a heartbreak that won't fade, followed by title track Siembra, the album's highlight for me. The rhythmical drumming and blasting horns are so infectious, with Blades again sowing the seeds (siembra means "to sow or plant") of his political activism.
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