Guajiro & Johnny Dread are in today's paper
The kids are allright!
Today's Miami Herald has a few words on the newest music scene from Miami, we have featured both Guajiro and Johnny Dread on KillCastro, and well, here they come again!
In case the link disappears, this is what they said:
Guajiro:
Love of classic English punk band the Clash binds the three main members of Guajiro. Guajiro's incendiary merchandising, with its guerrilla lettering and red stars, is lifted straight from such albums as Combat Rock. ''I think they were trying to do great things, in their politics, in the things they said, in the risks they took in the music they made,'' says bassist Jorge Gonzalez.
The Clash sang frequently about Latin American political movements; they named an album Sandinista!, after Nicaraguan rebel forces. Singing in both Spanish and English, Guajiro similarly go where few Latin or punk bands have gone before. Mantanzero is about an immigrant who, disappointed in ''the land of opportunity,'' heads to his ''homeland'' to liberate it. Los Dos Principes puts an old Jose Martí poem to a 4/4 beat, and provides timely discussion of the merits of regime change.
The band, which is in the final stages of negotiating a deal with a major label, gets its name from the Cuban term for peasant or farm worker. The moniker captures both the members' connection with their heritage and their punk-rock affinity for the underclass.
Lopez's parents fled Cuba in 1961 and are staunch Republicans. Gonzalez left the island at age 8, in 1980; he says he has fond childhood memories and does not connect to the ''reactionary stuff'' that happens in Miami. Drummer Doug MacKinnon is an Irish-American from Boston (and a veteran of punk bands Slapshot and the Vandals) who has studied Afro-Cuban drumming in Cuba.
Guajiro's songs are portraits rather than manifestos. Still, they depict a more complicated view of Cuban experience than is presented by the traditionally vocal members of the exile community. They realize that could get them in trouble. ''The irony is that ambiguous to me means ambiguous, and ambiguous in some fronts might mean not really taking a stand,'' says Lopez.
The band members say their politics vary, but their lyrical concerns and conversation frequently veer left of center. Still, they're no fans of Fidel Castro, and they get offended when they see uneducated punk fans wearing Che Guevara shirts. ''If he's wearing it because it's kind of a cool-looking shirt, or he thinks that by wearing a Che shirt he's liberal, then I have a problem with that,'' says Lopez.
So far, Guajiro has been embraced by both the punk-rock community and some right-wing websites. When a friend tried to bring their CDs and apparel into Cuba, an official took one look at the packaging and banned it as ''Material Subversivo.''
Guajiro promptly decided that would be the name of their first album.
The Dreadman:
Johnny Dread says his consciousness was raised slowly, gradually: the more he heard the music of Bob Marley and studied the reggae singer's beliefs, the more he grew away from his suburban roots. Now the 42-year-old man born Juan Carlos Guardiola wears long dreadlocks and preaches Rastafarianism. He seems a son of Jamaica.
But it's Cuba from which his parents and six older siblings immigrated, landing first in Philadelphia and then in South Miami. Guardiola was a basketball player. Then he heard Marley's Rastaman Vibration. 'Bob said, 'Stand up for your rights,' so I started to stand up for my rights as a human being on earth. I said, 'Let me emancipate myself from this mental slavery Europe has inflicted on me.' ''
It was a shocking transformation, from star athlete to counterculture musician, for his family. ''My parents are very old-fashioned,'' he says.
On his two albums, Dread sings mostly about religion, not politics -- but in the tradition of Marley, the two realms are never far apart. ''For we come to teach the youths/ About the truths and rights,'' he sings on When the Work Is Done, from his '03 album Magnificent People.
''Marley was a prophet,'' Dread says. ''We're in Armageddon and we're not doing anything about it.''
Music has helped take Dread around the world. In Europe and Latin America, he has gotten a different view of Cuba than the one he was shown in Miami.
''The Cuba story's a small story,'' he says. ''It's happening everywhere. Miami is very close-minded. I love my Cuban people, but we have a lot to learn. We're stuck with this Castro thing, it's not helping us move on.''
Dread realizes those are controversial things to say in South Florida. He stopped performing locally for a while, but he hopes now that the growing number of immigrants from Central and South America are changing the social and political climate. Like all Miami musicians, he curses the lack of venues.
''There's no place for music to get loose, nowhere to espouse liberal ideas,'' says Dread. ''And only liberal ideas liberate the soul, people and world.''
Today's Miami Herald has a few words on the newest music scene from Miami, we have featured both Guajiro and Johnny Dread on KillCastro, and well, here they come again!
In case the link disappears, this is what they said:
Guajiro:
Love of classic English punk band the Clash binds the three main members of Guajiro. Guajiro's incendiary merchandising, with its guerrilla lettering and red stars, is lifted straight from such albums as Combat Rock. ''I think they were trying to do great things, in their politics, in the things they said, in the risks they took in the music they made,'' says bassist Jorge Gonzalez.
The Clash sang frequently about Latin American political movements; they named an album Sandinista!, after Nicaraguan rebel forces. Singing in both Spanish and English, Guajiro similarly go where few Latin or punk bands have gone before. Mantanzero is about an immigrant who, disappointed in ''the land of opportunity,'' heads to his ''homeland'' to liberate it. Los Dos Principes puts an old Jose Martí poem to a 4/4 beat, and provides timely discussion of the merits of regime change.
The band, which is in the final stages of negotiating a deal with a major label, gets its name from the Cuban term for peasant or farm worker. The moniker captures both the members' connection with their heritage and their punk-rock affinity for the underclass.
Lopez's parents fled Cuba in 1961 and are staunch Republicans. Gonzalez left the island at age 8, in 1980; he says he has fond childhood memories and does not connect to the ''reactionary stuff'' that happens in Miami. Drummer Doug MacKinnon is an Irish-American from Boston (and a veteran of punk bands Slapshot and the Vandals) who has studied Afro-Cuban drumming in Cuba.
Guajiro's songs are portraits rather than manifestos. Still, they depict a more complicated view of Cuban experience than is presented by the traditionally vocal members of the exile community. They realize that could get them in trouble. ''The irony is that ambiguous to me means ambiguous, and ambiguous in some fronts might mean not really taking a stand,'' says Lopez.
The band members say their politics vary, but their lyrical concerns and conversation frequently veer left of center. Still, they're no fans of Fidel Castro, and they get offended when they see uneducated punk fans wearing Che Guevara shirts. ''If he's wearing it because it's kind of a cool-looking shirt, or he thinks that by wearing a Che shirt he's liberal, then I have a problem with that,'' says Lopez.
So far, Guajiro has been embraced by both the punk-rock community and some right-wing websites. When a friend tried to bring their CDs and apparel into Cuba, an official took one look at the packaging and banned it as ''Material Subversivo.''
Guajiro promptly decided that would be the name of their first album.
The Dreadman:
Johnny Dread says his consciousness was raised slowly, gradually: the more he heard the music of Bob Marley and studied the reggae singer's beliefs, the more he grew away from his suburban roots. Now the 42-year-old man born Juan Carlos Guardiola wears long dreadlocks and preaches Rastafarianism. He seems a son of Jamaica.
But it's Cuba from which his parents and six older siblings immigrated, landing first in Philadelphia and then in South Miami. Guardiola was a basketball player. Then he heard Marley's Rastaman Vibration. 'Bob said, 'Stand up for your rights,' so I started to stand up for my rights as a human being on earth. I said, 'Let me emancipate myself from this mental slavery Europe has inflicted on me.' ''
It was a shocking transformation, from star athlete to counterculture musician, for his family. ''My parents are very old-fashioned,'' he says.
On his two albums, Dread sings mostly about religion, not politics -- but in the tradition of Marley, the two realms are never far apart. ''For we come to teach the youths/ About the truths and rights,'' he sings on When the Work Is Done, from his '03 album Magnificent People.
''Marley was a prophet,'' Dread says. ''We're in Armageddon and we're not doing anything about it.''
Music has helped take Dread around the world. In Europe and Latin America, he has gotten a different view of Cuba than the one he was shown in Miami.
''The Cuba story's a small story,'' he says. ''It's happening everywhere. Miami is very close-minded. I love my Cuban people, but we have a lot to learn. We're stuck with this Castro thing, it's not helping us move on.''
Dread realizes those are controversial things to say in South Florida. He stopped performing locally for a while, but he hopes now that the growing number of immigrants from Central and South America are changing the social and political climate. Like all Miami musicians, he curses the lack of venues.
''There's no place for music to get loose, nowhere to espouse liberal ideas,'' says Dread. ''And only liberal ideas liberate the soul, people and world.''
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