Popular Music Of The 90s

Merengue visionary comes to town as part of the Latin Alternative Music Conference

At first glance, singer-songwriter Rita Indiana is nothing short of a spectacle.

Nicknamed “La Montra,” or the Monster, she is a 6-foot-tall gender-bending performing dynamo. Part Grace Jones and part k.d. lang, she fronts a troupe of gyrating robotic merengue dancers and a band called Los Misterios. Her latest album, “El Juidero,” is a startlingly original fusion of popular merengue, folkloric genres from the Dominican Republic, punk, techno and reggae.

But there is a surprisingly cerebral back story to the Dominican-born performer, who will perform in New York on Saturday, as part of the Latin Alternative Music Conference (which runs from today to Saturday).

“I never considered myself a musician,” she said via phone from Puerto Rico, where she lives. “I’d been writing (prose) since I was 19, but in 2008 I started to make music for friends and performance art pieces. Music for me is a more spontaneous, rhythmic thing, and sometimes the lyrics don’t make sense because I’m just playing with language.”

“El Juidero” is mesmerizing because of its frenetic, hallucinatory reinvention of merengue, the dominant popular music of the Dominican Republic. The title track, famous for its blaxploitation-inspired video, is emblematic of Indiana’s aesthetic strategy. Merengue rhythms are sped up to breakneck speed, alluding to both the traditional perico ripiao style of merengue, and techno-house dance music.

While you might be tempted to compare Indiana’s flamboyant style with Lady Gaga, it has more to do with gagá, a folkloric dance rhythm from the border between the Dominican and Haiti. “In the song ‘El Blue del Ping Pong,’ there’s gagá in there, there’s blues, there’s punk,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to integrate what I danced to at a gagá festival, which is a magical religious festival, with what I danced to at raves in the late ’90s. You know, deep house.”

Indiana’s primal influences stemmed from being raised by her grandparents, who listened to boleros deep into the night, allowing her to absorb their “dark, almost Gothic character, as well as their theatricality.” She was also very affected by the recently deceased “father of Dominican rock,” Luis Dias, who had a remarkable career making punk-influenced rock while finding the time to write merengue hits for commercial singers such as Sergio Vargas and Fernando Villalona.

It's like textfiles.com for Australian indie music | Infotropism

So I’ve been thinking about this project for a while, and it doesn’t have a name, but I wanted to tell you about it anyway. At least I have my startup-style it’s X for Y pitch: it’s like textfiles.com for Australian indie music.

Yeah, well, let me explain.

For background, I’d better start by saying I was pretty terminally uncool, music-wise, in the 80s and early 90s. My family weren’t big on following popular music, I lived somewhere with no decent record stores, records were priced out of my range, and even at school the kids I hung with weren’t hip enough to make mix tapes of anything much but Top 40 stuff. Despite this, I somehow got exposed to a certain amount of Australian indie and alternative music. I say “somehow” because I honestly don’t know where I heard most of this stuff. I guess 3XY and EON-FM, early on. Later, I listened to a lot of Triple J, and watched Rage.

These days, of course, I get most of my musical knowledge and exposure from the Interwebs, and the availability of digital downloads and information about musicians is really helping me backfill a lot of the older Australian music I wish I’d known better at the time.

So why did this happen? Well, obscure music is always hard to find. That’s what makes it obscure. But in Australia even a bunch of pretty well known stuff, stuff I grew up on in my no-hipster-cred-whatsoever suburban youth, is rare as hen’s teeth now. For some reason, music that was released on the Mushroom and Festival labels was particularly likely to have this problem. So I asked around, and learnt that those labels, which had released some of the best music of my adolescence, had been consumed first by News Corp and then by Warner, who didn’t care enough to keep the back-catalogs available. I don’t even know how many smaller labels were caught up in this, but I’m guessing plenty.

(The good news is that this seems to be clearing up a little now. More stuff seems to be available in iTunes since last time I checked, and I hear that Warner recently sold back Flying Nun Records (NZ) to the original owners. So there is hope.)

So here’s what I want to do. I’d like to start a project for people — techies, music nerds, archivists, whoever — to come together and work on projects to preserve and disseminate (information about) Australian music, in as free and open a manner as possible: open source code, creative commons licenses, non-commercial and optimised for maximum sharing and reuse.

Jet

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Music of the 1990s

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