SalsaSteph's Dirty Ghetto Salsa Posts

Keep revisiting this page for constant updates of songs found on youtube !

Welcome to SalsaSteph's Dirty Ghetto Salsa Posts. This is an outlet for me to express how much I live for a particular genre of salsa music, called vintage, salsa dura, which comes out of NYC 1960-1980, and mostly from the 70's. Many songs are revisited and some artists just know how to put a much dirtier spin on it than others.

Some broad definitions are in order. All articles will attempt to describe how dirty a song is, and get into more details as we go along.

Mirror , mirror, on the wall, who is the dirtiest of them all?

What does 'dirty' mean? Dirty in my musical language, means a song that makes you charged, excited, because it's just so damn good. It means  you scrunch u p your face when you hear it, and can't even dance to it, it's so distracting, and the dance just wouldn't be enough to satisfy how much you love it. There will be varying degrees of dirtiness of course, but I will tell you what I think each song merits on the dirty scale from 1 - 10. There are also bands who happen to make a dirty song, and  bands who pretty much make all their songs dirty.

Dirty more specifically means the arranger of the song really knows how to play with sounds. Music is based on harmony and expectation of harmony. When the vocals or pianist sings/plays a chord (triad or 3 notes mathematically spaced to sound harmonious whether happy or sad sounding), we expect the triads to always follow the rules. Dirty arrangers play with the last note to twang the sound and surprise the ear. It creates dishamony or tension called dissonance. This is actually a good thing! It's very, very exciting!

More on that later.

What does Ghetto mean?

Ghetto means 'from the hood', or from the barrio. The struggle of life is expressed in the happy or sad chords. And when people struggle, they tend to turn to their faith for guidance. Salsa has its roots in Africa and the lukumi religion. Salsa often pays tribute to saints of this religion, which is why salsa can sound very heavy, charged, and emotional. If you truly want to understand salsa, learn about lukumi and... get to know the clave which is the African instrument that defines the genre 'salsa'.

What does 'salsa' mean? Salsa is a generic term or umbrella name for descarga, guaracha, guaguanco, son, cha cha, guajira, bolero, rumba and all its hybrids. The tempo and instrumentation determines what style of the salsa genre it is. When we dance, we generally say everyting is either salsa, mambo or cha cha at the clubs, so there is often confusion around what salsa actually is. The word was created as a marketing tool meaning 'sauce'. It's so cool when you pick up an album, and see exactly what style it is.

Ok, so here we go with my favourite dirty bands. I can say right now, that for me, the Lebron brothers, Ray Perez y los Dementes and Ray Rodirguez stand above the rest. Ah, but there are others! Let's find out who they are.

The links below are organized like this: link, artist, title, genre, and sometimes a comment.

These are in no particular order of preference...

April 19, 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtzAokQRlx8&NR=1 cesar nicolas- lana-salsa

April 20, 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hWreK5KqqU&feature=related el combo de pepe-descarga en menor

More on Definition of Dirty

This is not for the beginner nor the intermediate ear, however, if you read this, and become interested in exploring, you could train your ear to understand and appreciate salsa more deeply. Your musicality will definitely unfold and your dancing will take on new dimension, new texture. It's interesting how sometimes, dancers have no clue what the music is all about, and they could be dancing their whole life without ever knowing how it's organized, etc. You don't know what you don't know, right!

In music, there are 3 sounds: happy (major key), sad (minor key), and adding dominant 5ths and dominant 7th notes to a chord: I personally like sad with dominant twangs.Twangs are when something sounds 'off' not to be confused with a voice or note that really is off, as opposed to pretending it's off!

Other characteristics of dirty ghetto salsa:

*The sound quality is usually poor because of the technologically challenged recordings.

*The vocals have a certain African voice tonality-low and nasal. There is usually a lamenting, unsettled characteristic to their singing. The voices don't sound particularly trained or clear, but the harmony is still on. *

*Lots of bass, trombones, saxes and piano montuno is prominent.  

*There is an emotional response or charged feeling from hearing  or experiencing the sound relationships.

*The lead vocalist has an attitude, like being unapologetic, sarcastic, or bitter, and is singing with utter conviction.