bands after this point, recordings still constitute a central source of musical sound in Cali’s scene. (In chapter 1 I discuss early musical activity in Cali and also describe regional genres in the rest of Colombia.) At the same time that local orquestas, or salsa bands, began to flower, so did salsotecas and tabernas, small specialty bars where people went to listen to records of classic salsa and música antillana; I discuss these at length in chapter 2. When the live scene collapsed in 1996 (owing in part to the fall of the Cali cocaine cartel), the early record-centered dance scene was revived, in the viejoteca phenomenon that I analyze in chapter 2. The rise of the viejotecas, which was paralleled by a resurgence of activity by salsoteca owners and record collectors, represents a surprising recuperation and reaffirmation of Cali’s record-centered popular culture.
Although recordings and other media have contributed to new musical hybrids and identities around the globe (Lipsitz 1994; Taylor 1997), recent research suggests that the appropriation of such technology to local musical practice and creativity is an area in need of more attention than it has conventionally received. Studies of Japanese karaoke (Keil 1984; Mitsui and Hosokawa 1998) and cassette cultures in India (Manuel 1993) demonstrate that the appropriation of media technology to local musical practice and creativity calls for a more thorough analysis of this complex development. The predominance until recently of records over local musicians in Cali is an unusual social phenomenon that requires a different perspective. Jeremy Wallach suggests that records should be treated as actual music and not just a document (in the way notation is), since recordings generate a “sonic presence” that provides a basis for musical sound and meaning just as live performance does (1997). Although the experiences created through recorded music are often different from those of live music (for one, face-to-face interaction between performers and audiences is absent), they can be equally powerful.
Recordings, as sound vehicles, serve as powerful tools for fostering new, hitherto unimagined sources of memory. Through their capacity to reproduce past moments, recordings also become potent triggers for memory in the present. George Lipsitz observes that “[i]nstead of relating to a past through a shared sense of place or ancestry, consumers of electronic mass media can experience a common heritage with people they have never seen, they can acquire memories of a past to which they have no geographic or biological connection” (1990: 5). This schizophonic (Schaeffer 1977) displacement of time and space has particularly strong ramifications for considering the consumption of recorded music in Cali. In his study of the links between phonographs and popular memory in the United States from 1890 to 1945, William Howland Kenney (1999) analyzes the role of recorded music in generating constructions of group identity, mediating social and cultural differences in multiethnic and multiclass environments. In a lengthy and detailed analysis, Kenney traces the complex processes through which recordings influenced, but also reflected, the sensibilities of various U.S. listeners during the first four and half decades of phonograph technology. Key among these processes was the success of recordings in creating new audiences for certain types of music by breaking through barriers of socioeconomic class, ethnicity, or geographical distance that had previously prevented such links. This process also occurred in Cali, where the entry of recordings of música antillana, and later salsa, established a fervent local audience for a musical style created thousands of miles away.
Notably, the “stopped-clock” technology of recordings virtually captures musical performances and freezes those moments for perpetuity, serving (much as photographs and films do) as the basis for constructing a selective memory of the past. This memory, though legitimated by an appearance of reality, derives meaning and emotional impact from its usefulness in the present. Kenney, for instance, observes that for people in the United States, phonograph music served as a basis for the construction of a romanticized, tranquil past between 1890 and 1945, a time of turbulent social changes. Certain songs and genres “helped to generate collective aural memories through which various groups of Americans were able to locate and identify themselves” in the tumult of new influences inundating the cultural landscape (1999: xvii). Similarly, for three generations of Caleños, recordings have provided a cultural terrain that has helped people to maintain and situate themselves during continued struggles over urban spaces.
Joseph Roach’s theory of surrogation as a vital element in the process of memory (1996) suggests further ways to understand how music and memory are linked through sound recordings. According to Roach, memory is a process that operates through selective remembering and forgetting, in which certain objects, images, or personae are substituted for some imagined original located in the past. In this process, cultural performances of all kinds become vehicles for the embodiment and enactment of memory. Roach uses the term “effigy” to explain how objects and images become surrogates in this act of substitution: “The effigy is a contrivance that enables the processes regulating performance—kinesthetic imagination, vortices of behavior, and displaced transmission—to produce memory through surrogation. . . . [I]t fills by means of surrogation a vacancy created by the absence of an original.” Although effigies usually refer to a sculpted or pictured likeness, an effigy can also be an indirect likeness that consists of “a set of actions that hold open a place in memory” (1996: 36). Roach uses his theory to analyze circum-Atlantic urban performances such as theater and Carnival, particularly as they historically informed each other to produce the New Orleans Mardi Gras. His theory, however, also offers a potent model for understanding the impact sound recordings had in Cali—particularly the way performative practices such as dance and public listening shaped Cali’s position as a city of musical memory. Recordings became surrogate effigies of Cali’s cultural roots, used in the imaginative construction of origin myths in local popular life. (See Wade 2000 for a comparative account of origin myths about Colombian popular forms.) The circulation of salsa and música antillana recordings as rare, cosmopolitan commodities in Cali further complicates this process, as the meaning of effigy becomes elided with that of a fetish—another characteristic that Roach identifies in circum-Atlantic performance (1996: 41). As I discuss in chapter 3, the positioning of salsa and música antillana recordings as cultural fetishes in Cali is particularly prominent in the activities of record collectors and salsoteca DJs and audiences, but this fetishization is deeply interwoven with other spaces in local popular culture. In particular, the similarity of Cali’s annual Feria to other circum-Atlantic Carnivals points to the vivid way in which the fetishization of recordings in Caleño life maps onto citywide public enactments of surrogation and creative memory. During the Feria, discussed in chapter 6, Caleños literally re-member themselves in a week of kinesthetic merrymaking that directly and indirectly evokes the record-centered practices that consolidated música antillana and salsa as local cultural emblems in the first place.
My use of the term “popular” follows that established in British and North American cultural studies. I understand popular music as a set of genres and styles that are produced and largely consumed in urban environments, disseminated through the mass media, marketed as a commodity, and often subject to a great deal of ideological negotiation over issues of authenticity, control, and representation (Middleton 1990). This usage contrasts strongly with common Latin American usage of the term, where “popular” is understood in primarily in oppositional, populist terms—that is, “of the people”—without consideration of the ways in which popular culture often also plays into dominant capitalist structures and modes of production. This latter view has framed Latin American musicology throughout the twentieth century (e.g., Abadía Morales 1973; Aretz 1991; Ramón y Rivera 1977), leading to essentialist categories of folklor (indigenous, Afro-American, and rural mestizo forms), art music, and “popular” styles that are grassroots, semiurban, and largely uncontaminated by mass media. Only recently have Latin American scholars begun turning their attention to the tensions and contradictions that arise in urban popular musical practices and to the ways in which politics, money, race, and gender articulate with these sounds (see Torres 1998; Ochoa 200110).
In their engaging volume Music Grooves
