Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Frances Aparicio's work is a powerful blend of critical analysis of lyrics, styles of performance, and ethnography on the reception of listeners to salsa's meanings. She relies on an obvious and powerful training in literary analysis to consider the history and multiple uses of salsa as a form of expression, communication, and community formation. However, the most important contribution of this work is its concentration on gender and on the ways in which desire, identity and language are negotiatied upon music. It is clear that years of research went into the production of this monograph, especially since it manages to balance historical exploration with critical analysis. The benefit to this multidisciplinary approach is that the book can serve a variety of purposes, from providing basic information, to offering complex textual analyses. This makes the book useful for non-academic readers, as well as the academics for whom it was intended. However, since the book doesn't come with a CD, those not well-versed in the songs discussed might need to do extra research. With the increasing popularity of Latin music, it is imperative that everyone who listens to salsa be involved in analyzing why we like it, and what we do with the music we consume. This book can help lovers of salsa start to frame these questions. Hopefully, it will also encourage other listeners to write their own perceptions on salsa and how it connects with other aspects of daily life and with self-identity. It is time to value popular culture in terms other than dollars and cents, which is what this project begins to do. Now, if only someone wrote a book on West Coast salsa my library would be complete.
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