Phone booth, Barranquilla style
It’s so hard to write about interesting things like carnival! I’d rather describe for you the music that comes through my window all hours of the day, which is so exciting for me that I sometimes can’t sleep at night, even with my little green ear-plugs in. What happens is that the ear plugs block out the singer’s voice, and the horns, and the accordion, and the various percussion, and even the boys exclaiming over their mid-night football game outside my window. But they just don’t do the trick for the bass line. And a Vallenato bass line can really drive you crazy. As a complete package, the music is slow and romantic. But if you take all away but the bass, ooof...it’s a dotted quarter note and then 5 sixteenth notes, exploring a fifth. And then it jumps down or up, around the circle, and it drives me mad trying to figure out where it will go next (which, as you can see, is actually pretty predictable). I get used to it and start to fall asleep, and then suddenly may heart starts racing when the song changes. It’s very strange.
The music is coming from somewhere over there.
I am sleeping enough, though. Don’t worry.
Foam attack. Has it happened to me? Yes.
Carnival was really fun, I got caught up in it and it was everything I hoped it would be. Now it’s over, though, and I can’t rummage up that enthusiasm, so I don’t think that there’s any point in writing about carnival right now if I can’t remember how it felt. A little moment that I can bring myself to remember for you is one of the last nights, when we went to an event called Carnavalada to see a wonderful singer called Totó la Momposina. She is really worth hearing...it’s “River Music”, folkloric music from the coast and around the Magdalena River. After we listened to her, we headed down the block to where the Super Banda de Colomboy were playing up on a raised stage in the middle of the street. And I was delighted to see that instead of just standing in the street dancing, the crowd was marching around the stage! Around and around, like the Gazebo on fireworks night in OB. But with a lot more style, I must admit. Marimonda masks and the black and tan costeño hats. I didn’t know it, but if there’s one thing I like to do to accompany a night of music and Aguardiente, it’s dance/walk around and around a marching band. There was foam, there were new friends, and every once in a while the crowd would roar and we’d all switch directions.
Cake Walk!
Another musical discovery for me, perhaps not for you, my hip cool friends, was Bomba Estereo. The singer is from Santa Marta, the dude is from Bogotá, and they mix local music, Champeta and Cumbia, with electronic. They sounded reaaaly good at a free concert one night, for which we stood in a line in front of some underground hip-hop Barranquilleros and in back of a group of people from Detroit. Suddenly (I might have had something to do with it), we were all rapping “It was all a dream, I used to read Word Up magazine...!” I know all of the words (thanks to dorm-room dance parties with Merealere), and so did one of the Barranquilleros, who was slowly learning English through a careful study of Biggie lyrics. I like things like that. Phonetic rapping, there’s nothing like it. It reminds me of a group of boys in Cuba who knew the...sounds...of every Eminem song. Not the words, though, just the ways that vowels and consonants mix with the rhythm. After hearing them, my friend Sarah and I briefly thought about putting together a compilation of phonetic rap covers from around the world. It might not be so cool out of context, though...
Ahhh, the music just started up again. Whatever happens to me here, you can blame it on the Vallenato!
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