360: Nu Yorica! Culture Clash in New York City, by Various Artists

Various Artists (Puerto Rico/USA)
Nu Yorica! Culture Clash in New York City (1996)
16 tracks, 109 minutes (2 CDs)
Spotify ∙ iTunes (Weirdly, the digital edition has a different tracklisting than the CD, so both versions contain some unique tracks. But they’re close enough for the purposes of this blog, at least.)

This is one of those compilations that paints such a vivid picture of a specific time and place that it just makes you want to jump into that world, smell its smells, meet its characters, behold their fashions and listen to as much music as you possibly can. And it does it all with 16 impeccably chosen tracks.

The album presents the music of the Latin Caribbean played in a way that could only have come together in a city such as New York, and only in the 1970s. It’s the result of Latinx people from all over the Americas living together, sharing their differences and revelling in their similarities, all the while making music inspired by every sound bouncing around the city at that time. Each track is grounded in Latin styles, whether that’s son, rumba, charanga, bachata, guarancha, the old Afro-Latin rhythms, or, more often than not, a combination of many together, and that is then taken off into flights of everything that was around at the time. There is lots and lots of funk and jazz in there, a few really strong disco elements and even some classical music in Eddie Palmieri’s piano playing on ‘Un Dia Bonita’.

And all of it has a complete lack of that cheesiness that I find inherent in so many Latin styles. The musicians here filter out all of that over-the-top dramatics with a sincerity that leaves only mean skill and pure energy – and without taking themselves too seriously to have fun, either. The outcome of this equation is just liquid coolness.

What a wonderful collection. When I’m listening to this album, there’s really nowhere else I’d rather be than in the late-night clubs of Nu Yorica with a whole load of dancing ahead of me. And if you turn up the music loud enough, close your eyes and let your body move its way, maybe that world doesn’t have to feel quite so far away.

325: Resiliencia, by Taína Asili

Taína Asili (Puerto Rico/USA)
Resiliencia (2019)
12 tracks, 54 minutes
Spotify ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

The word that comes to mind to describe Taína Asili and Resiliencia is badass.

My first contact with both album and artist came at work, where I was supposed to give it a listen through and make sure it was suitable for inclusion in the magazine. I only actually listened to a few seconds. Not only could I immediately tell that we needed to feature it (it ended up getting a top review, so I felt pretty validated) , but I also knew that I didn’t want to listen to this album at work, it deserved a proper non-office-based rocking debut to my ears. Turns out: perfect music for a barbecue.

The music is punk in its outlook and a mix of everything danceable in its sound. It reflects Asili's upbringing as a cosmopolitan Puerto Rican in New York, and your limbs are just as likely to be moving to ska, reggae, hip-hop and rock here as they are to salsa, cumbia and reggaetón – there are even Indian moments and, on the track ‘Plant the Seed,’ a definite African swing that seems in the mid-point between Senegalese and Congolese flavours of rumba.

So it’s already fire just on the sound of it alone, but the lyrics are incredible. According to the album’s blurb, it is ‘inspired by stories of resilience Taína witnessed in interviews she conducted with women of color in various parts of the United States, Puerto Rico, and Canada over the course of several years.’ Along with Asili’s own experiences, the songs on this album are those women’s lives, their struggle, their power. She explores themes of solidarity, self-identity, empowerment, justice and that all-pervading resilience of women around the world. As well as bringing these women’s voices to her songs, she also allows them to speak for themselves – Asili is also a documentary film-maker, and is in the process of making a series of ‘music video documentaries,’ which are just what you’d expect, a cross between the both. Here’s the first, talking to farmer and food justice campaigner Leah Penniman alongside Asili’s song ‘Plant the Seed’:

To feature such incisive lyrics with important subjects, and to use her platform to advocate for others at the same time as making super-cool music that compels the body to get up and dance is a formidable set of skills. Taína Asili is an incredible force for good in music and beyond – keep an eye on that name. So badass.

277: Hamilton: An American Musical, Original Broadway Cast Recording

Original Broadway Cast Recording (USA/Puerto Rico)
Hamilton: An American Musical (2015)
46 tracks, 142 minutes (2CD)
Spotify ∙ iTunes

For those that have never heard of Hamilton, it’s a hard sell. A sung-through hip-hop musical based on the life of a US Founding Father – Alexander Hamilton. It sounds ridiculous, and even typing that sentence I can hear in my mind the sort of dross that it would make me expect. Lucky for me, then, that I actually heard a couple of tracks from the show before it was explained to me.

Because – if you didn’t know by now – Hamilton is a revelation in the world of music theatre. It has won buckets of Tony Awards and Olivier Awards (including Best Musical and Best Actor in both) and many other theatre awards, the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theatre Album (for today’s Good Album) and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda. It’s broken box office grossing records and tickets – on both Broadway and the West End – routinely go for silly money. Perhaps most impressive of all, it turned me, an avowed anti-musical-theatrist, not only into a huge fan of Hamilton itself, but has opened my ears to a world of art I had previously considered far removed from my own brainspace.

How did Miranda manage to turn such a corny premise into probably the hugest (small-m) musical phenomenon of the past decade? First off is the obvious quality of the music on offer. To hear the words ‘hip-hop musical’ is surely to cringe; a bunch of ‘theatre kids’ with their flamboyant overacting and cod New York Jewish accents, making semi-ironic and wholly-awful attempts at old school hip-hip-hippety-hop – argh, I get angry just thinking about it. But Lin-Manuel ain’t like that. He’s dyed in the wool, growing up immersed in the sounds of hip-hop of all styles, as well as musical theatre cast recordings, competing in ciphers as a kid and compulsively writing raps. Add that together with a genius brain for lyricism, drama and storytelling, and you get a musical based around hip-hop in an authentic and sympathetic way, with incredibly intelligent verses that convey huge amounts of narrative, emotion and personality in very limited space and absolutely dripping with witty wordplay and virtuosic rhetorical turn-arounds. The musical isn’t limited to hip-hop either, as listeners are taken on a journey through R’n’B, jazz, classical and standard showtune-type music as well.

Another thing that really helps the whole conceit is that the casting was made in a very conscious way – in the original Broadway cast that you hear on this album, all actors except one (the ridiculous figure of King George III, e.g. the oppressor) are played by people of colour. This allows the show to be approached in a different frame-of-mind than otherwise, bringing to the fore different themes and connections to the present day – and manages to disguise the fact that, at its core, it is a story about the entangled lives of a million mostly-rich white men, as history typically focuses on at the expense of basically anyone else. It also allows for the casting of actors with very different skill sets than might normally be found in a story such as this.

Even divorced from the play itself, this original cast recording stands up as a Good Album and a rewarding listen in and of itself. The cast is made up, as you can expect, of amazing performers, from Miranda himself as Alexander Hamilton, Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr, Renée Elise Goldsberry as Angelica Schuyler and, for me the stand-out voice of the whole thing, Daveed Diggs as the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson. Diggs is a well-known alternative hip-hop artist in his own right, and he brings that to his roles with amazing results – his rapid-fire verse in the song ‘Guns and Ships’ is the fastest in Broadway history, averaging at 6.3 words a second, and each of them clear as a bell. Add in the fact that the whole album was produced by ?uestlove and Black Thought from The Roots, and the musical pedigree is outstanding. The story is just as affecting as on stage, too. The first time I listened through to this album, I was completely hooked in a way that, paradoxically, made me stop listening to it. I was so engaged in the story and enthralled by the music that at the end of the first act, I had to put it down – I wanted to make sure I could listen to the second half of the performance in a way that I could devote to it my full attention…and also, I didn’t want it to be over so soon. After I had finished that first listen through, on a sunny bumble around Brighton, with my heart having been wrenched several times by the multiple tragedies of the piece, I had to just sit down and reflect in silence. It was incredibly moving. Just how Miranda could read an epic-length and very dry biography of Hamilton and pull from that this intensely emotional, funny and downright badass hip-hop musical is simply astounding.

I’ve extolled Hamilton a lot here (can you tell I’ve been waiting a long time for this one to come up on this blog?), and I think it would be remiss to not at least mentions its faults. Some are understandable, such as a few fairly major historical inaccuracies that are bound to occur in the context of making a neat and compelling two-act story. Some are less so: the criticisms of slave-owning Founding Fathers are a little too subtle – or perhaps, too gentle; the construction of an ‘immigrant’ narrative around Hamilton as an analogue to today’s immigrant experience when he was actually just a white guy who moved from one British colony to another when he was a teenager; and the co-opting of an art-form of the oppressed to sing the songs of the oppressors are a little less excusable. It is important that we don’t allow the impressiveness and wokeness of some aspects of the show to blind us to some of its more problematic elements.

Nevertheless, I remain in awe of Hamilton. Since discovering this album, I’ve not only gone on to see the show at the West End twice (simply amazing, of course, see it asap!), but I’ve also been to see several others that I don’t think I would have if I hadn’t had my eyes and ears opened by this one. Yes, ‘a sung-through hip-hop musical based on the life of a US Founding Father – Alexander Hamilton’ sounds rubbish. But if you’re at all a fan of good music and you’ve not given it a go yet, at least take a listen to the opening song and let it blow away your expectations and keep you listening for the rest of the show.