A couple of days I saw a documentary – From Mambo to Hip-Hop: A South Bronx Tale – that tells the story of how mambo which evolved into salsa, and hip hop were born in the melting cultural pot that is Bronx. The movie is cool in many ways: seeing where the similarities between those genres come from and learning about the roots of the cultural movements.
We sing, our music is the cuts that we bleed through – Common in
“Glory”
A point about the movie that stuck with me was how the music, the dancing, and the singing that used to happen there all over the place was a coping mechanism to deal with all the violence and economic deterioration of the neighborhood. I’m certain more art forms have similar origin stories.
The other day I started working on a new project, Good Fucking Austerity Advice. It is sort of a rant on the austerity policy playbook that has been implemented in the past years in European countries that faced sovereign debt issues (specially Portugal and Greece). The medium is different than what people did in the Bronx back in the day, but the project comes from the same place – a feeling of hopelessness and powerlessness to change the outcome of the situation in which one is.