Atrevete-te

Calle 13 released “Calle 13,” their first album, when I was wearing a white uniform to high school, which means that it must have been somewhere between freshman and junior year. Seventh to eighth grade boys (affectionately called "mojones" or "little turds" by the older guys) wore blue uniforms, the ninth to eleventh grade boys wore white, and the seniors had their own thing going on, varying each year—one time it was turqouise, another red, etc.

            The staple song that got everybody shaking their asses was “Atrevete-te” which won awards and used the Cumbia rhythm, a classic Colombian rhythm, an evokation of Latin American history. And that was so strange for a reggaetón album (reggaetón has nothing to do with reggae—it’s Puerto Rican hip hop). And “Atrevete-te” means “Dare-are” in Spanish. And there’s a line about Coldplay and Green Day, bands also popular in the time among the English-speaking students who always hung out by the stairs beside the library. 

             On the other side of the social spectrum, language-wise (and hang-out-wise), were the scholarship kids, who knew how to speak English, yes, but were proud of how broken they spoke it, and in turn knew all the corners of slang Spanish and most importantly Puerto Rican slang, who flaunted their rolled R's and their mastery of the slang to their English-speaking fellow students who slurred through their R's, both in English and in Spanish:

Mera mamau

(Look, you sucked cock)--Mamau comes from mamabicho, which means "cocksucker." Mama means "to suck," and it has a maternal, breast-association (mammogram, etc); bicho means "bug" in all the Spanish-speaking countries in the world, but in Puerto Rico it means "dick" or "wang" or "cock" or "penis" (think of "fag" in England vs. America). To say you are a "mamau" is to say that you are a "sucked one," or a dick after it has been sucked. And what is a dick after it has been sucked? It's a flaccid little thing, and to these guys, it was a Puerto Rican who spoke English better than they spoke Spanish.

And there was nothing like getting told that by a scholarship kid who had been raised in the hood and who wielded biceps that could break bones as well as hearts. It was the way they threw Puerto Rican at the English-speaking students. 

The scholarship kids. The ones from the projects, the ones completely different from everybody, the ones who played basketball or baseball or were Protestants—hung out on the other side of the school and looked down on the English speaking kids who liked to talk about Green Day and Coldplay and Rihanna and South Park and Bush, even though they couldn't vote for Bush or Gore or Kerry, because, you know, Puerto Ricans don't vote for the president. That's why they say we're a colony.

Anyway, here's the Atrevete-te refrain:

atrevete-te

salte

del closet

destapate

quitate

el esmalte

 deja de tapalte

que nadie va a retratalte

levantate

ponte hyper

...
Qué importa si te gusta Green-Day?
Qué importa si te gusta Col-play?

And so in English it would say something more like this:

Dare dare

Get out of the closet

Take the cap out of the bottle

Take off the lipstick

Stop covering yourself

Nobody’s going to take a picture

Stand up, get hyper.

…
Who cares if you like Green Day?
Who cares if you like Coldplay?

(Looks like a hooligan, right? Well, guess what, he got a degree from SCAD.)


The point is, it wasn't just women jiggling their stuff. It was men and all kinds of men, too. The scholarship kids, the rich kids--even though with them (the white ones, the rich ones) there had to be an "irony phase," where one liked Calle 13 with irony, as a joke, before one could say that, hey, this stuff is actually enjoyable.

Rhapsody in Blue

SCENE: INT. THE NEEDLE INSIDE A RECORD PLAYER, CIRCA 1924-2011—NIGHT, URBAN PREFERRED

GLISSANDO

The clarinet-wail beginning of the rhapsody may evoke, today, a morning siren headed towards a crime scene (a gunshot to the torso, head; wrinkled shell casings on the blue concrete). Tomorrow the clarinet-song beginning may be nostalgic (the horn of a ship announcing the arrival of a long-lost mother, brother, etc.). Yet another day the clarinet-chirp beginning may be the call of a morning bird (and what’s the feeling then? Oriental mysticism? Or should we stay in America?). It is in all ways still a beginning, the thirty clarinet seconds. It bodes instability, announces the coming of emotional stampedes in colors orange, jazz, and blue.

THE ORCHESTRA: 

"We are the pianos and the are horns.  We would like Gene Kelly to dance to us, we are 1950s Hollywood or 1920s Jazz or both. We could be Woody Allen drafting his new screenplay (it will be black and white, it will be set in George Gershwin, New York: zip code Lush), a jazz player drawn in zig zag lines, a Jewish artist, a SNL comedian walking to NBC studios in 1972, Wallace Shawn walking down a decayed street to see André in 1981. We are the hustle-bustle that lasts its way into the twentieth-century, United Airlines commercials. We belong to New York, and our Rhapsody is New York: morninglike grumpy and night-grungy, U. N. and Ground Zero. Sincerely yours," 

HISTORICAL MEMORY ADDENDUM:

The lessons learned from the Rhapsody in Blue Andante (otherwise known as the last minute of Manhattan [see below]), the lesson learned from a song, what is its name? 

THE CLARINET, CONT'D: can also evoke the smell of a Subway sandwich on a gutter being licked by a dirty dog that belongs to a homeless man who sings outside of the Met. His voice is blue like the year 1924, the year the clarinet sings from.

ETYMOLOGY (accompanied by piano, clarinet, trumpets)

Rhapsody, n. : a miscellany or medley

In Spanish it's rapsodia, and in Spanish one would use the female article la (as opposed to the male article el) before rapsodia, which means that it's am la rapsodia, la femenina rhapsody. In English, simpleton tongue, we have the neutral the, and the the does not have a sex attached. But la rapsodia. O, la rapsodia. Now that recalls a woman dressed in gypsy skirt and CEO shoes, or a woman dancing waltz with the upper half and salsa with the lower half, with a flare of tango in the eyes. A woman that is a woodwind voice, a rasp of brass, percussion fingers (her little finger a timpani, her thumb the drum set), piano black-and-white eyes, string-set lips (could you call that upper lip anything else than a violin?). The woman is the rhapsody, as much as the rhapsody is a medley, a fiesta of emotions and of the senses. The woman is the whore in the concert hall, the jazz in the concert hall. She is reconciliation, the whirlwind of a life lived in 16-minute frenzy, a train-ride, a walk to work, a Woody Allen monologue, a dinner with Andre, a rhapsody located in George Gershwin, New York.