- Series: Refiguring American Music
- Paperback: 424 pages
- Publisher: Duke University Press Books (April 14, 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0822349590
- ISBN-13: 978-0822349594
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.
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