20. Plástico

Willie Colón & Rubén Blades: Siembra (Fania, 1978);
composed by Rubén Blades

I live for moments when music goes from “This may be an educational example of a style with which I am unfamiliar in a language I do not speak” to “Oh, goody – this one again!” If I knew more about salsa, I might think that being turned onto it via the best-selling album in that genre is like having your entire notion of what rock & roll is delineated by Sgt. Pepper – which is to say, probably misleading but why resist? What I can tell you is that I have never heard a bad Blades album in Spanish, and although he has written even sharper lyrics on some of his subsequent albums with Seis del Solar, the humor and verve of this album is unmistakable. The theme of this lead track – keep it real, Latino unity – is no revelation by itself, but the way Blades’s conversational cadence skips and jibes around Willie Colon’s trombone-heavy groove is like having the Rosetta Stone dig you up. Colon’s earlier albums with Hector Lavoe were plenty epochal – you can hear that, too – but Siembra is even farther from those than they were from El Malo (1967). No wonder both these guys went into politics.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day during Advent (approximately).