Latin American New Song: An Enduring Legacy

Abstract

‘Alí Primera es el alma nacional’ (‘Alí Primera is the national soul’), answered President Hugo Chávez when, after an official speech he gave in London in May 2006, I had the opportunity to ask him what Alí Primera represented for Venezuela. To explore the significance of Alí Primera’s Canción Necesaria for Chávez in the twenty-first century, in this book I started by examining how the Nueva Canción movement within which Alí Primera operated was invested with political meaning in Latin America in the 1960s–1980s. Influenced by the Cuban revolution and the leftist struggles of the 1960s, Latin American Nueva Canción cantautores approached the composition, performance and dissemination of music and song in new ways. Rejecting the label ‘protest song’, they sought not only to denounce injustices but also to convey hopes for a better future and to represent and value the daily reality of marginalised peoples in their countries. In their songs they primarily used historically repressed native musical forms and socially engaged lyrics to express their dream of a unified continent, free from US imperialist intervention, in which the cultural worth of the urban and rural masses would be recognised and greater social and economic equality would be achieved. They sought to create a non-commercial popular music, based on local traditions and realities, which would counteract foreign cultural influence and function as an ‘authentic’ representation of ordinary people’s daily struggles and experiences in their countries.