La expresión musical como vehículo de transformación y cambio socio-político y cómo los nuevos medios han pasado a ser los principales agentes de su difusión: el caso de Calle 13

Abstract

From their origin almost ten years ago, the Puerto Rican urban music group, Calle 13,
composed by Rene Perez Joglar (Residente) and his half-brother, Eduardo Cabra Martinez
(Visitante) has been characterized by a peculiar musical style that is hard to classify into
one genre- for it fuses African, Caribbean, and Latin rhythms all in one. This musical
proposal has led the group to win a total of nineteen Latin Grammy prizes, and two
Grammys- breaking the world record of these awards. However, one more important aspect
that characterizes this group is the message they send across to their public. Calle 13´s
lyrics are well known for their strong tone of social criticism and irreverence that has
caused them to be censored in many Latin American countries, while at the same time their
songs have also provoked positive social changes in other nations. The purpose of this
research is to analyze how this group has used social media to disseminate their message. In
this context, musical expression becomes an agent or vehicle of transformation and social
and political change for the public. Moreover, new media becomes indispensable in the
speeding up of immediate production. “The content of their lyrics holds the purpose of
criticizing and questioning social conditioning, repression against certain subjects, the
affirmation of identity, and the establishment of rebellion as a generating mechanism of
autonomy and resistance of social beings against attempts of domination that stem from
conservative sectors of the population” (Pinedas: 2012).
In this paper we will take into account the theory of cultural studies and aesthetics
formulated by Andrea Huyssen, which supports central ideas regarding modernism, avantgardism,
mass culture and postmodernism. Modernism was originated from a conscious
strategy of exclusion, an anguish to become contaminated by a consumerist and oppressive
mass culture, and in this context, Calle 13 serves as an example of this formulation. Finally,
in this paper we will also analyze the function of media spectacle, the roles assigned by
media, and the demands of immediacy of our times. The virtual world we know is enriched
by socially constructed messages which are disseminated by new media and the socially
charged messages of groups like Calle 13 are nurtured by the immediacy in the
transmission and reception of these messages.