I had occasion, this evening, to intoduce a dear friend of mine to In the Heights. She's a fan of the Beastie Boys, and there's a line from Shake Your Rump that always reminds me of 96,000. I played it in her car, hoping it would thrill her as it had me. Her reaction was...disconcerting. She laughed at some lines that jumped out to her as funny, and she seemed to enjoy it overall, but she had nothing like the reaction that I had when I first heard it. The first time I listened to In the Heights, I liked it. The first time she listened to In the Heights, she judged it. And I find it disturbing.
I can't recall if I actually asked for her opinion, or the break in the music due to my phone being evil prompted her to fill the silence, but when it came, her comment was that, although she liked it, she didn't understand why it sounded so "big band" when it was supposed to be about this particular group of people. Mind you, a clearly urban group is rapping, underscored by drumbeats and base more than anything else for the majority of the song. I certainly don't recall anything fitting that description being played as part of the Big Band Era. Seeing my confusion, she tried to explain to me that the music in the song is more reminiscent of Glen Miller and Bing Crosby than the blues or jazz that she expected to hear in "that kind" of musical. In brief, she felt that the music lacked authenticity.
Now, the first problem with her impression of what she should be hearing was that she was running off of misinformation. Whoever talked to her about In the Heights apparently led her to believe that it centers around a predominantly black community, rather than a Hispanic one. Although she accepted my correction immediately, she came back with the insistance that the music still sounds more Big Band than Spanish. She maintained that it didn't seem to be an accurate portrayal of the community the show was supposed to represent because of this "big band" sound that she kept hearing, even after finding out that the lyricist is Hispanic. It wasn't until after she finally registered that the composer, who is also the lyricist, is Hispanic that she conceded. Long after her concession (to what, I'm not entirely sure), however, I'm still disturbed.
Our exchange had started while the song was paused, which happened to be right before a climax in the music where, according to my friend, the composer must have realized that he "needed" to include more of the Latin flavor that it had been lacking so far. The idea that the change in the music had come, not because of the progress in the action and atmosphere, but out of a need to appease some ambiguous notion of what music should sound like in the street of a Latin neighborhood, seemed to be incredibly shortsighted and ungenerous to the writers. I recalled complaints about Will Smith's rapping not being black enough in reaction to his less grammatically atrocious lyrics and clean content.
It was time for me to get out of the car and I didn't want to pick a fight after she had conceded, so I didn't ask any of the questions that had come to mind, but they persisted when I got out of the car. Principal among them was, What did you expect to hear? What do you say a Latin musical should sound like, and what gives you the authority to say so? These questions aren't meant to be digs. I genuinely don't understand where she was coming from. Her initial opinion that the music sounded too "big band" to be about the ghetto, meaning a black neighborhood, clashes pretty harshly with the history behind the big bands. If the style of the big bands is somehow incompatible with black culture, that's bad news for fans of Cab Calloway or Louis Armstrong. It's also rather sad for lovers of jazz, the root of the popular forties music. Surprise at a group of black people's association with swing is a lot like confusion over a black person's affinity for rock n' roll. We are talking about a major piece of American culture, and nothing says America like a major cultural staple taken from black people and made to look like something else.
Speaking of staples, it bears acknowledging that ITH is an American musical. Musical theatre happens to be one of the few cultural exports that can be called uniquely American. Like America itself, American musical theatre is constantly influenced by the variety of cultures that contribute to it. It doesn't completely become something else based on what kind of music is popular. Rather, it encorprates various aspects of music from different moments in America as they help to contribute to the story. Rent is a contemporary musical that features rock songs. Memphis is a musical about rock and roll that features the blues tune that rock music evolved from. The suggestion that In the Heights doesn't sound Latin enough implies that the American aspect of Hispanic American culture should be discarded for the sake of communicating that this is a musical about Latinos, not suburban middle America (because the Spanish, the rapping, the horns, and the title don't do that already). It's funny that this subject came up over a musical that has themes of how Americans cope with their immigrant heritage. Usnavi decides in the end that he new world he was brought to is his true home. I wonder how welvome a notion that is.
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