The City of Musical Memory by Lise A. Waxer

Author:Lise A. Waxer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2002-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Vinyl Museums, Tradition, and the Performance of Musical Memory

As self-appointed guardians of Cali’s musical memory, record collectors and salsotecas DJs clearly see themselves as culture brokers in the preservation and maintenance of local popular tradition. Their discourses and self-representations are grounded in origin myths that situate the birth of Caleño popular culture in the arrival of música antillana recordings in the 1930s and 1940s. The tradition that collectors and DJs such as Gary Domínguez, Kike Escobar, Pablo Solano and countless others refer to has very little to do with the Sunday afternoon town band concerts in Parque Caicedo in the early years of the century or other musical activities that predate the appearance of Cuban and Puerto Rican sounds in Cali. Rather, to borrow Christopher Waterman’s characterization of Nigerian jùjú (1990), Caleño tradition is a “very modern tradition.” The local encounter with forces of modernity—economic expansion, industrialization, links to world markets, and rapid urbanization—produced the experiences and cultural practices that Caleños now understand to be part of what makes their city unique. These practices, centered around música antillana and salsa recordings, have not only been valorized as an authentic local tradition. As we have seen with the rise of record collecting and the salsotecas and tabernas, they have in turn provided the basis for the continued development of new cultural practices using these same material objects.

Kike Escobar’s characterization of salsotecas and record collections as “vinyl museums” raises important issues concerning the cultural project of preservation and memory. Museums in the European and North American mold typically remove material objects from their original contexts and place them on display for aesthetic contemplation, often under glass, usually with labels that arbitrarily frame and guide viewer reception. As social theorists and museumologists have argued, this mode of isolation and display flows from ideologies of difference held by dominant groups in the maintenance and exercise of their own social distinction (Bourdieu 1984; Karp and Levine 1991). Cali has its own modest museums in this vein, such as the modern art gallery of the Museo de la Tertulia, and various minor colonial collections housed in historic sites such as La Merced, a downtown church. Although salsotecas and record collectors certainly isolate material objects—recordings—the practices of accumulation and display are far different from those of conventional museums. Here Joseph Roach’s theory of surrogation and effigies, discussed in the introduction, provides a suggestive tool for understanding what goes on in Cali’s vinyl museums.

Key to Roach’s thesis about memory as an act of substitution is the element of performance (1996: 3, 36). That is, memory is not simply a virtual page in history that is held open by certain markers; rather, it is a deliberate and performed act that selectively draws upon past experiences in order to negotiate present circumstances (see also Bal 1999: vii). The cumulative and sedimented usage (Lipsitz 1990) of salsa and música antillana recordings as effigies in Caleño popular memory is clear. As we have seen, recordings have become potent symbolic objects that fill a “vacancy created by the absence of the original” (Roach 1996: 36).

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