records so sexually explicit they still carry parental advisory warnings

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In the United States, the excluded, underestimated, marginalized music included all but the most schooled music made by African Americans, virtually all music of rural and small-town white Southerners, and while there had already been, in Jelly Roll Morton’s description, a “Spanish tinge” in American popular music for many years, Latino music wasn’t going to cross the border into American parlors or stages, either. And then Ralph Peer came along. He saw as much potential in passed-over, professionally neglected music, and did as much to make something of it, as any one person ever has. In the initial breakthrough idea Peer had defined and worked on at Okeh, they had looked for homespun performers, in blues, hillbilly, gospel, regional jazz, and began to record them, specifically for the same populations from which they had emerged.

jazz was a great thing but the rhythm was very monotonous

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Bo Diddley's Latinisms may have been picked up in the air, or "on the street." But 1950s rhythm-and-blues developed an even more direct black-Latin link. Not only did small record company producers like George Goldner and Teddy Reig record both black and Latin music, and musicians like conga-player Ray Barretto play on many r&b dates, but in Harlem and the Bronx young blacks and Latins were making common musical cause. Several mid-1950s New York rhythm-and-blues groups combined black and Latin members, among them the Harptones and the Vocaleers, both locally successful at the time. More important was a quintet called the Teenagers which suddenly came into the limelight in 1956. Its home base was West 164th Street, and its five black and Latin singers were all in their early teens—except the lead singer, Frankie Lymon, who was only twelve.

In Havana everything was eroticized, and everything was musical

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The music that played at ear-splitting volume in the whore houses of Mexico in Jack Kerouac's On the Road may have been enhanced for the characters of Sal and Neal by the joints they smoked and the mescal they chugged, but that wild, jungle-crazy mambo music was the real thing. Although never as popular in Cuba as elsewhere, mambo is one of the most universally recognizable Cuban styles in the world, largely due to Perez Prado. The short Prado was known by the nickname Cara de Foca, seal face. His pompadour hair and white tuxedo suits would come later. In "Locas por el mambo" Perez Prado has Benny make a joke about mambo's origins by asking, "¿Quien invento el mambo que me sofoca? ¡Un chap arrito con la cara de foca!" (Who invented this mambo that knocks me out? A sawed-off little dude with a seal's face!). One proof of mambo's success could be seen in its official denunciation by the Catholic Church. In Peru, the cardinal of Lima refused absolution to anyone who dared dance the mambo; given the enormous sales of Perez Prado records, this would have sent most of his flock to hell. One Colombian bishop called the music "devilish inventions brought from hell to upset an already morally rotten society."

fiery Afro-Cuban incantations that pulsed with sex and sin

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The three songwriters began to develop an intricate cover story. The Strangeloves were three brothers—Niles, Miles, and Giles Strange—from Armstrong, Australia, on the edge of the outback. They were born to one mother, but have three different fathers, which accounts for the almost total lack of family resemblance. They were wealthy sheep farmers who made a fortune on a crossbreed called the Gottehrer sheep, registered with the Feldman-Goldstein Company. The band members adopted a severely exotic look with zebra-skin vests and matching African hair drums—not very Australian—carrying spears and brandishing boomerangs. They met with Berns. He loved the track, but suggested writing a new set of lyrics and he thought they should stick with the outrageous. Inspired by the X-rated novel and literary scandal du jour, Candy by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, that Berns had been reading, the four of them cooked up “I Want Candy.” Berns also brought veteran session guitarist Everett Barksdale to drop some licks on the explosive existing track. Barksdale, who played for years in the Art Tatum Trio, used a jazzy arch-top electric and his playing has a crumbling, fleeting feel that skitters superbly across the bold, bashing beat of the drum-heavy track.

a flowering of musical creativity to rival that of old New Orleans

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a hip new club just off Avenue Kasavubu in the former whites-only ville established itself as youth central. 'The Perruche Bleue [Blue Parakeet] has become the temple, the meeting-place for all the gals and guys of the capital,' Etoile du Congo told its readers. They meet there 'to dance the jerk ... to James Brown's latest creations which the Mustangs interpret sensationally and with fantastic excitement.' 'Over a book, a glass, or a guitar, the son of a bourgeois and the son of a laborer can make contact with less difficulty than before,' wrote a Kinshasa 'hippie' in response to older critics. 'Finished with arbitrary classifications, all of youth is living to the rhythm of its time ... At the Perruche, at the Show Boat, the Saint Hilaire, a jerk bursts out over the humming of conversations. They all go to it without distinctions of creed or color. '

These records are scorchers. They don’t sound like anything else

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Cuba and its Music has already been acknowledged worldwide as a classic, easily the best book on the subject in English. The subject itself is a field nearly as wide as, say-- jazz, for despite the small size of the island, Cuba has produced some of the most influential music and musicians in the hemisphere. Cuba and its Music, the first of two volumes (the second yet to be published will pick up the story in the late 1940's) really does begin with the first drums heard in Spain-- Almoravides war drums which arrived in Spain with an invading African army in 1086. Sublette follows the story from traveling troubadours of the middle ages (the first singer-songwriters), through the Inquisition, the discovery of the New World, the music of slaves, the diaspora that followed the slave uprising in Santa Domingo (now Haiti) through the various forms of music that developed around the island of Cuba from the earliest Spanish inhabitants to the mafia sponsored Havana of the mid-20th century, when the town was jumping. It's a mind boggling piece of research, but if my description makes it sound dry or academic, this book is anything but, it's a real page turner and Sublette's passion for the subject (and his sense of humor) shine through on every page. Sublette's thesis is that Cuban music is the lost link, one that has been suppressed since the earliest days of the embargo (1959), in the chain that makes up American popular music, he calls it "The Other Great Tradition". He also explains the music and its rhythms and beats in way that even a non-musician can easily understand. For myself, it's nice to finally know what the clave is, and how it differs from what we call swing. – The Hound