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CD Review
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Perceptive Travel, CD Review >>
Watch music video shows in Central America and it's easy to see that American hip-hop has had a huge influence on the Latino music coming out of that part of the world. At the same time, it's seldom a straight imitation and the musical soup known as reggaeton has become a genre unto itself. You hear it blasting out of radios from the top of Mexico on down to Colombia and over to the Caribbean, with Spanish and English trading places in the spotlight.
Santero fits right into this new world order of Latino music. Hailing from Guatemala, but spending much of his childhood in the U.S., he took in everything that came into his ears and spit it back out as a DJ and then artist. El Hijo de Obatala can't be put into any kind of neat box. It's a hip-hop album, an R&B album, a reggaeton album, and many times with a salsa cherry on top. This schizophrenic 'Hood-meets-Havana journey across the continents can make for some jarring transitions, but after a few listens it seems as natural as the melting pot of cultures so prevalent in Miami or L.A.
The unifier here, referenced in the title, is the Lukumí "speaking to the spirits" tradition of Cuba, where Santero studied dance and learned more than he bargained for from the Santeria. Each song, even the straight-ahead R&B songs with an English chorus, make use of batá drumming. Heavy-hitter producers Greg Landau and One Drop Scott took to the mixing boards to give it all a contemporary urban sound. If you hate rap and reggaeton you probably won't dig this, but if you like urban music that's not the same ole same old, this is a refreshing new voice on the scene.
- Tim Leffel 06/01/09 >> go there
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