New York Musician Interview

How has the immigration affect the schools, in terms of music?

For us, we weren’t abled to speak Spanish in class, the teachers use to reprimand us. And then my mother use to tell me you’re Puerto Rican so you speak Spanish, and one time I got into it with a teacher because of that, and she said “you can’t speak Spanish, speak English” and I said “my mother said I can speak Spanish because I’m Puerto Rican” and uh, you know, I got sent to the principal’s office.

How has music influenced your childhood?

In the seventies we grew up with a wide variety of music; we had funk, we had salsa, we had disco, we had rock, so we had a fusion of different music. Not only that but music was also on the street, people would walk around with boom boxes and people would blast their speakers form their apartment windows, before the whole Giuliani thing came in the nineties and the quality of life act. We use to go to the beach and bring our congas and bongos and people use to play the percussion instruments when you went to orchard beach or any type of beach there’s always somebody playing drums, percussion and people would gather around and people would do sonali which is like freestyling. Yeah it was very like on the streets in your face all the time. I mean it was all the time, everywhere. Even walk around with boom boxes on the train, so.

How did the change in demographics change the music scene?

The music was in the club, you had disco, which I listened to as a kid, my mother use to always listen to Donna Summer and she would listen to James Brown which was funk and then she would listen to Parliament, and then she would listen to the Robbers, you know allot of song, Highjack, I mean it was allot of music in the house, but we also listened to allot of salsa, so it was a mixture of music

So where the clubs strictly Spanish music, or strictly disco?

Well in the Seventies I wasn’t in the clubs yet because I was still a kid, but my parents were always clubbing, mom would rock the high heels and my paps would wear his suits with the big collars and I remember the babysitters would take care of us and bunch of my cousins would come to the house and that was like “yeah, party night” parents were going out for the whole night. But yeah, that happened all the time, and we would have house parties, and at the house parties they would make roast pig , the whole family would come over and it was just party party, and they would play records, and if you didn’t know how to dance they would say “ayy don’t be a square” like you had no style they use to always make you dance, even if you don’t wonna dance they use to make you dance.

Did people come to the Bronx from other boroughs?

People emerged from all over. People looked at it as a Bronx thing but it was everywhere pretty much, cause the music scene was vibrant all over. The Bronx was a Mecca for music. But there was people from Brooklyn doing it, from lower East Side, music is universal, it has no boundaries, so allot of people try to say “you know I was born in the Bronx” and I grew up in Fordham Road and Kingsbridge and all those areas, and my mother lived on Brook Ave, Jackson those areas near St. Mary’s park. Even though Bronx was the Mecca for music, it was everywhere, again, there is no boundaries. People try to make it a boundaries thing but there is no boundaries, there isn’t.

As a kid I use to sing the records, the Spanish records, and even though I didn’t speak good Spanish, I was always trying to sing Spanish songs, and I learned Spanish by singing the records. I didn’t know what the hell I was singing because some of the words were like you know for adults, but I was singing the records and uh there was always that beat dum dummm dum dum dum dum dummm dum dum dum dummmm *clap *clap *clap dum dumm dummm dummm that was the beat. Which is baaa baa ba baa *clap *clap baaa baaa baa *clap that was it, that was how I got into singing. And then the eighties everybody was breaking, everyone started doing break you know the b-boying. Before that if you go to seventy-eight seventy-nine, we were doing what we saw was locking, we didn’t know what the hell we were doing but it was pretty much what was happening. People use to drop down, there was this guy who use to wear his suspenders, his baggy and the little hat and he use to come out and do that move. And he had the mime too. The robot also in the seventies, like late seventies. We use to watch American Band Stand, Soul Train, souuuuuulllll trainnn, late seventies soul train was the thing, right through the eighties too. But that was it, then you had a show in the nineteen eighties called dance fever, with Deney Terrio, and you had Solid Gold, which was another dance show. Well, solid gold had professional dancers.

Dancing changed, because if you look at after eighty-four, eighty-five, it wasn’t about the dancing, it was about what people was listening, hip hop was more about the rap, so eighty-five was the cut off point. The first movie I went to see which I thought there were going to have breaking in it was called Rappin with Mario Van Peebles and I saw that eightyfive think that it was going to have breaking and popping, I was so mad, all they had was the rap. From that point on there was no more breaking, breaking died out.

Wasn’t commercialized, they were good rappers, they can rap, but it was a different era it was more about the rapping and the lyrics.

Then for the Puerto Ricans, Hip Hop became more of an African American thing, even though you had Latinos listening to Hip Hop, they gotta do free style. Its called Latin free style, which they took the beats, Latin free style is like the techno beats.