How a financial institution topped the salsa charts
“Qué bueno es vivir así (how sweet it is to live like this),” goes the refrain, “comiendo y sin trabajar (getting fed without having to work).” Thus lilts Jerry Rivas on El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico’s 1983 hit “Y No Hago Mas Na,” which translates roughly to “And I Ain’t Doing Nothin’ Else.” The song gleefully celebrates the stereotype of the shiftless Boricua musician who spends his whole day reading the papers, drinking coffee, playing dominos, and eating rice and beans (cooked by his wife, of course)—anything, in short, except working.
The dreamy lifestyle described is a product, in part, of Puerto Rico’s quasi-colonial relationship to the United States. As citizens of the US since 1917, Boriqueños have the same access to federal benefits as continental Americans. So whether you think it fair or not, the country has come to be known as a welfare island—and “Y No Hago Mas Na” is in many ways a toast to all of the moochers out there who are successfully gaming the system.
Fast-forward to 2011, when the island’s economic troubles began to reach a fever pitch, with a 12.5 percent unemployment rate and one of the world’s lowest labor force participation rates (40.5 percent). Banco Popular, one of la isla’s largest financial institutions, decided they’d try to stimulate the workforce a bit with a little PR for PR, hiring the global advertising agency J. Walter Thompson for their new incentivizing campaign.
“With 60 percent of the population receiving government handouts, living off welfare has become a common way of life,” the agency notes on its own homepage. “It’s so customary that it’s celebrated in one of the greatest salsa hits of all time.” Hoping to change the cultural norm, JWT rewrote the lyrics to “Y No Hago Mas Na,” then contracted El Gran Combo, a salsa institution on and off the island, to record a new version. The song that resulted is called “Echar Pa’lante (Moving Forward)” and while the infectious melody remains, the message of the song has been completely reversed.
The attendant music video for “Echar Pa’lante” opens with PSA-style cuts between talking heads as members of the band recount their history. The trick of the video is that it splices shots of El Gran Combo’s studio recording session with scenes of Puerto Rican industriousness. A mango picker wipes his brow, mimicking one of the vocalists mid-song doing the same. A fashion designer spreads out plans that turn into the sheet music for “Echar Pa’lante.” A white-collar woman tapping away at her desk on a late night at the office becomes the keyboardist tickling the ivories.
It culminates in a wide-angle shot as the assembled group, looking like a bunch of sloganeering candidates on the campaign trail, shouts at the camera, “Hagamos que Puerto Rico eche pa’lante (Let’s make Puerto Rico move forward).” And as the video comes to a close the camera lingers on a beauty salon closing up shop, where a metal garage grate falls over the storefront, revealing a Wild Style font reading “echarpalante.com”—an economic development website.
From heavy industry to the creative economy, urban professionals to rural laborers, high-tech pharmaceuticals to tourism, it’s a convincing portrait befitting a chamber of commerce promotional video, or in this case a leading bank that could see the proverbial writing on the wall. If Boricuas didn’t get back to work in an age of austerity, two years before federal sequestration would hit the highly dependent island territory far worse than the rest of the Union, deposits were going to suffer.
Thus, while the backstory of “Echar Pa’lante” reads like a neoliberal fantasy run amok as a bank hires an ad agency to rewrite a storied salsa tune and give it an ideological 180-degree turn—then actually gets the original artists to perform it—perhaps there is more than meets the eye than an easy cry of “sell out.”
“The message is the opposite of the original,” says Rafael Ithier, El Gran Combo’s bandleader. Still, he reasons, “The economic situation is not very good, so we wanted to introduce something for the benefit of Puerto Rico, to get people to dedicate themselves more to work, to helping Puerto Rico move forward and progress culturally and economically.”
To that end, “Echar Pa’lante” was a hit, manipulative backstory and all, and Ithier affirms that they still play the new version often. “People like either one of the two, because musically they are identical—it’s only the lyrics that differ,” he tells me. Marangeli Mejia-Rabel, a Puerto Rico-born, Philadelphia-based event organizer for Latin music, is adamant: “El Gran Combo could never sell out. They’re part of our core as Boricuas. I see the remake as an ingenious strategy to get folks engaged and hooked since echar pa’lante is a defining Boricua attitude.”
Against this backdrop, both “Y No Hago Mas Na’” and El Gran Combo’s decision to record JWT’s rewrite take on several meanings. For starters, the original sounds less like a paean to laziness and more like a clever response to Puerto Rico’s peculiar state of political limbo, neither fully American nor fully Latin Caribbean—currently occupying a curious position as “estado asociado libre (free associated state).” While the statehood vs. independence question remains unresolved, then, the musician’s response is to take advantage of Yankee largess, to treat welfare as financial support in lieu of state grants or philanthropic donations.
It is the quasi-colonized version of French sociologist Michel de Certeau’s concept of tactics—“the ingenious ways the weak make use of the strong,” or la perruque (the wig), whereby the employee borrows company time for personal projects. In his formulation, de Certeau triumphs the “tactical” underdog over the “strategic” authority figure, for example celebrating the urban flaneur whose pedestrian wanderings slag off the carefully laid street grid of the city planner. These tactics of “making do” with the circumstances one is given when not in a position of power correspond remarkably well to the Puerto Rican reality.
Indeed, you could think of this arrangement as indirect government sponsorship of the arts, the production of culture with the accumulated leisure time afforded by a social safety net, low cost of living, and a supportive local environment. Given salsa’s global success and commercial potential, the salsero has done quite a bit even as he purports to be doing very little—an art in and of itself. Such a feat, meanwhile, is predicated on a society where families have often built their own homes. 72 percent of Puerto Ricans are homeowners according to the 2010 Census, more than the US average of 66 percent. Time that could be spent working to pay rent or a mortgage becomes time for cultural activities—this is the particular genius of the Caribbean. But while Puerto Rico purports to participate in this same tradition, typical from Jamaica to Cuba to the Dominican Republic to New Orleans (a Caribbean city at heart), its version has been predicated on Uncle Sam’s support.
And while the ideological thrust of this get-to-work campaign has raised a few eyebrows, the news from Puerto Rico is, quite bluntly, not good—and something’s got to give. Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s downgraded the commonwealth’s bonds to junk status in early February—though the government got a break in March, when it was able to sell off $3 billion of those as it attempts to stave off default—and the island is drawing unflattering comparisons to Greece and Detroit. The New York Times recently reported on a new Puerto Rican exodus caused by the economic situation, a possible second wave of the mid-century Gran Migración (Great Migration) that created the Nuyorican culture, which gave birth to salsa in the first place.
But by all accounts, the 2011 advertising campaign appeared to be a spectacular success. Banco Popular sponsored an outdoor Gran Combo concert that attracted 60,000 viewers to San Juan’s Parque del Nuevo Milenio in January 2012. Later that year, JWT won a coveted top prize at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the Oscars of the advertising world. Perhaps victims of their own success, however, the banking top dog and ad gurus ended up getting themselves sued. In 2013, the music publisher Cartagena Enterprises and affiliated recording company Rico Records, which hold the rights to “Y No Hago Mas Na,’” filed a lawsuit in the Federal District Court of New York for copyright infringement (Spanish only), arguing that Banco Popular and JWT continued using the original song melody beyond the agreed upon six-month duration, for which they paid $90,000. In addition, they used lyrics from the original and broadcast the song in “unauthorized” media, such as movie theaters, which were never part of the licensing arrangement.
Cartagena Enterprises did not return calls or emails for comment, leaving their motives unanswered. Was it purely a financial decision based on cut-and-dry breach of contract? Or as custodians of El Gran Combo’s 50-year back catalogue, were they offended by JWT’s tweaks to a classic in the salsa canon? The idea of a global ad agency writing lyrics for local music heroes certainly raises eyebrows, but then salsa has been heavily commercialized at least since the 1990s, when the Big Five record companies and their Latin music subsidiaries snatched up major artists. After all, record companies make demands on artistic content too, after all.
Seen one way “Ec’har Palante” looks like pure propaganda, an attempt to convert Caribbeans to the colonial gospel of the Protestant work ethic. Yet the remake itself is also a form of resistance to finger-wagging against Puerto Rican laziness. The message conveyed through constant reinforcement in every image splice of the video is that salsa music is a form of labor, and likewise a major contributor to the vitality of the Puerto Rican economy. The bandleader may look out of place with his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest as he climbs aboard the morning commuter bus, but he looks just as in command in the recording studio as the metallurgist, the desk jockey, or the construction worker.
So perhaps El Gran Combo is not so much repenting for the message of “Y No Hago Mas Na’” as they are walking the walk while they talk (or rather sing) the talk. After so many years used to haciendo na’, has it come time for Puerto Rico to echar pa’lante?
This feature appears in issue 5, the Islands Issue. Download here.
The post And I Aint Doing Nothin’ Else appeared first on The Cluster Mag.