Word: english
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...like music generally, is tightly stratified, and Blades has brought off a singular aesthetic victory. But who will hear it? Who will play it? Previously, albums by the Panama-born Blades were recorded in Spanish and aimed at a Spanish-speaking audience. By making Nothing But the Truth in English, he has risked losing his core audience while still seeming perhaps too ethnic to a wider, whiter one. The record has not hatched a hit, and up till now has sold a modest 100,000 copies. It has also created a tactical problem: "How do we work...
Such are the frustrations -- indeed, perils -- of panculturism. Blades is particularly articulate about them not only because of his fluent English and a rather startling academic background (he has a 1974 law degree from the University of Panama and a 1985 master's in international law from Harvard), but also because the problem weighs heavily on a heart that looks to a "society that will be more integrated and fair, where character will be the most important thing, where hearts don't require visas." He says his record wasn't an attempted crossover, but "more like a 'meet halfway.' People...
Weaned on Anglophonic rock 'n' roll, Americans have long been resistant to foreign pop-musical imports whose accents are other than English. ABBA, the Europop megagroup of the '70s, sang in English, not Swedish; Japan's Pink Lady was a bomb in any language. But the Latin sound could be different...
...culture's roots; one player's progressivism is another's sellout. "The Latin market is our bread and butter, and we can't ignore them," says Raul Alfonso of Hansel y Raul, a straight-ahead salsa band that is trying to broaden its appeal with an upcoming record in English. But pop music has always been an indiscriminate buccaneer, hijacking European, American and African treasure alike, mutating it and selling it around the world. Now it may be the Hispanics' turn. In the global village called the U.S., Latin pop's opportunity is as equal as anybody...
This free-form blend of Spanish and English, known as Spanglish, is common linguistic currency wherever concentrations of Hispanic Americans are found in the U.S. In Los Angeles, where 55% of the city's 3 million inhabitants speak Spanish, Spanglish is as much a part of daily life as sunglasses. Unlike the broken-English efforts of earlier immigrants from Europe, Asia and other regions, Spanglish has become a widely accepted conversational mode used casually -- even playfully -- by Spanish-speaking immigrants and native-born Americans alike...