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Global Hit
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The World, Global Hit >>
For our Global Hit today, we go to Puerto Rico. It's part of America, but it's not. It's kind of a state, but not really. The music of Aib Gomez, as The World's Marco Werman explains, is filled with similar contradictions.
MARCO WERMAN: Aib Gomez calls his band Zemog, El Gallo Bueno. El Gallo Bueno, the good rooster. Zemog is Gomez backwards. Zemog's music is often a topsy-turvy view of modern sounds and rhythms. And, behind it, says the Puerto Rican native, is a visceral, animal-like memory of the rawness of life.
AIB GOMEZ: In Puerto Rico I used to spend the weekends with my grandparents on their farm in the rural part of Puerto Rico. And the first time I ever saw death was my grandfather lopping off the neck of a rooster to give to my grandmother to cook up, and then my grandmother cut it open and the guts came out and then I got deathly ill from seeing it.
MARCO WERMAN: Roosters are never far from his thoughts. On the composition "Animate," Aib Gomez samples roosters recorded in Puerto Rico last summer. The birds appear as a chorus to the human singers who are crowing on the mikes. Zemog further layers the whole sonic picture with free jazz horns and electric rock guitars.
Aib Gomez has heard a lot of music in his life. He's listened to Mozambican piano rhythms popularized by the likes of Eddie Palmieri. When he moved to America as a youth, he'd listen to hard rock by Motley Crue. His dad was meanwhile playing recordings of Bach and Mozart. Aib Gomez doesn't view his current music that's come out of that funnel as either a marriage of styles, or a clash.
AIB GOMEZ: It's both. I like to, uh, like kids take their trucks and smash them together, their toy trucks, that's kind of what I like to do is bring things together and battle it out, have 'em have their way, and if it works great, and if it has a lot of tension that's good because I like to have the tension and resolution in my music.
MARCO WERMAN: The song "Lares Vegas" is a prime example of the eclectic styles Aib Gomez references in his work. It begins with a brassy New Orleans second-line street band. Then it segues into a wild palette of Caribbean rhythms and Mexican guitars.
And beneath it all is a political message for Puerto Ricans and their rebellion against Spain at the end of the 19th century.
AIB GOMEZ: It's basically saying let's not forget about all these struggles, let's not forget about our revolution.
MARCO WERMAN: "Lares Vegas," says Aib Gomez, refers to the town of Lares where that revolution started but did not succeed.
AIB GOMEZ: The town of Lares was called Agrito Lares, and it was the scream of revolution, and it got squashed. And Puerto Ricans have a very strange sense of belonging in the world because it's never been its own country. So I'm coming to a place where I'm from another place that has a very strong identity, but it's not its own country, it's not its own thing.
MARCO WERMAN: Aib Gomez believes that his cacophony does represent a strong, albeit somewhat confused, Puerto Rican identity. But a lot of musicians, he says, feel that the way he welds fundamental Latin rhythm, or clave, to hard rock and jazz is irreverant and even wrong.
AIB GOMEZ: You know of course there's exceptions, but (((for the most part there's a lot of romantic salsa, and))) people don't like it when you're messing with the clave, and you're messing with all these things. so on both hands, I'm looking at both sides here, they're coming at me like Oh, this is not right, and I'm like no it is right because I'm a product of what Puerto Rico and the United States and this whole world is coming to I guess is this mixing, this tension, this resolution.
MARCO WERMAN: It's curious that Aib Gomez should say that about his music. There's a lot of mixing, there is a lot of tension. But there isn't always resolution, and that's what makes Zemog, El Gallo Bueno so compelling. 02/12/03 >> go there
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