Maybe that explains the new crop of songs by Puerto Rican artists about prison life. First came the beautiful Obie Bermudez song "Cuatro de Julio" ("Fourth of July") last summer about an inmate imagining a reunion with his lover after being released from prison. Co-written by Bermudez with Ruben Blades, "Fourth of July" harks back to the classic salsa era, when being Puerto Rican in New York meant not only being proud but also being politically conscious and recounting the problems faced every day by el pueblo. (Blades -- author of, among other classics, the down-these-mean-streets anthem "Pedro Navaja" -- is Panamanian, but he used to say back in the day that he was Puerto Rican, too, because salsa is a "Puerto Rican emotion.") "As soon as my brother was arrested, I wanted to write a song about it right away," says Bermudez of his inspiration. "I wanted people to know what it's like to have a brother in jail and how he's feeling and what he's going through."
Bermudez says he turned to Blades for help in finishing the song. "He came up with the chorus and put the Ruben stamp on it," the singer says, smiling. Blades also helped the younger songwriter connect his brother's prison experience to the earlier exploitation of young men of color during the Atlantic slave trade. In popular Caribbean history, the rumba -- and specifically the sensual guaguancó -- is believed to be a dance enslaved Africans performed with hips and spine because their feet were shackled together. "Fourth of July" opens with a guaguancó, then builds into an ecstatic burst of West African percussion and gospel-style vocal rapture. "Musically, it's very soothing," Bermudez points out. "It's a story about freedom."
A few months after Bermudez released "Fourth of July" on his album Confesiones, baby-faced hunk Jerry Rivera put out a tribute album, Canto a Mi Idolo, Frankie Ruiz (I Sing to My Idol, Frankie Ruiz). One of the biggest stars of the Eighties' sensual salsa, the sweet-throated Ruiz nevertheless shared a taste for hard drugs with many of his Seventies macho elders, which led to his conviction for crack possession in 1988 and a fourteen-month stint in federal prison in Orlando. "For me it was a big shock to hear that he had been arrested," says Rivera, a high school Frankie fanatic at the time.
The younger salsero chose Ruiz's 1992 postrelease hit "Mi Libertad" ("My Liberty") as the first single from his Ruiz tribute and filmed the video in a federal prison in Puerto Rico. Rivera has been in jail before to visit friends he grew up with, but he was still intimidated when the video shoot took him inside the cells. "When you look out the window, there's absolutely no way to get out," he recalls with a shudder. "Wearing the uniform, with all these enormous guards around; psychologically you're an inmate."
There's nothing in his straight-up remake of "Mi Libertad," though, that conveys the edge that hard living and hard time eventually put in Ruiz's voice. Rivera's crystal-clear sweetness sounds incongruous, coming off as more of a Christmas carol than a jail lament. An effort to rough up the track -- and to appeal to the recently discovered mass audience for Puerto Rican rap and reggaetón -- by inviting veteran island rapper Voltio to lay down a few rhymes doesn't just come off as corny; the pair don't even sound like they're delivering the same song. Voltio raps; Rivera sings. Repeat. Repeat. Track out. It might have been a better idea -- Nat "King" Cole necrophiliac style -- just to have Voltio rap over Ruiz's original track.
"For me, Frankie Ruiz was more believable," observes Vico C, the undisputed pioneer of Puerto Rican rap, about Rivera's remake. "If a person is going to record, it should be someone who's lived the experience, especially something as specific as being in prison. Voltio does know what he's talking about, so the song worked better for him."
Vico C knows what he's talking about too. Like Ruiz, the rapper did time on charges of drug possession. He's also pissed; as in, yeah, I did drugs and so do plenty of other people, so why am I in jail? When he ended up doing six months in Orlando at the beginning of 2003 for breaking parole, he was pissed off enough to write his tenth and best album, En Honor a la Verdad (In Honor of the Truth).
Gone is the preachy, born-again tone with which he announced that he had kicked his heroin habit on the 1998 comeback album Aquel Que Había Muerto (He Who Had Died) and again with last year's Emboscada (Ambush). Verdad opens by making a virtue out of his battle with addiction, as Vico recites the Bible's promise: "If the just man falls 70 times/God will lift him up 70 times," backed by an eerie church organ, frantic violins, police sirens, and an insistent drum track in an intro that ends abruptly with the heavy clank of a prison door.
Vico's conviction (in both senses of the word) fires up his rhymes. He boasts on the title track, "Te confieso/Hasta mi lírica mas linda queda tieso" ("I confess/My lyric sounds even better uptight"). He's out to expose hypocrisy, pointing a finger at everyone from Ricky Martin and Brazilian bombshell Xuxa to Budweiser (Vico: "No matter how much they sponsor sports/It's still alcohol"). He's honest with himself too, especially on the song "September 5," which he supposedly sang over the phone from the pen to his daughter on her thirteenth birthday. Rather than pretend to be perfect and tell her how to live her life, the rapper touchingly offers her his "friendship" and admits that she too will likely make mistakes. "The only thing I can demand," he concludes, "is that she not get into the habit of lying."
On the salsa rap throwback "Para Mi Barrio" with Tony Touch and D'Mingo, Vico claims to offer fans "what's good for you, not what's entertaining." Lucky for us, the album is thoroughly entertaining anyway, thanks to excellent production by the rapper himself with some help from collaborators D'Mingo, Noriega, Lun y Tunes, Menace, and Echo. There's bitter medicine here as Vico rejects bling-bling and declares, "I don't have money" and "There aren't any mansions either" but "I've got flowowow." You can't help but agree, as Vico's rhymes slip and slide around a harsh, repetitive bass beat and a funky, swirling flute that manages to be crunk and spaced-out at the same time. An irresistible rhythm -- synthesized handclaps punctuated by a fat bass boom and sexed up with a dramatic keyboard line and sawing violins -- drives an exercise in braggadocio as Vico C teams up with reggaetón phenom Tego Calderon and rapper Eddie Dee in "El Bueno, El Malo, y el Feo," a tribute to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the classic salsa album by Willie Colon, Ruben Blades, and Hector Lavoe.
"Many of the artists were raised in the barrio and the music represented the culture of the barrio," explains Vico C of the street life and prison themes in classic salsa. "The fact that we are still talking about those things is because we're still living those themes."
