Close to the Edge Read Free Page B

to the recording studios. If most of Cuba ran on old Soviet equipment, how did Cubans acquire the samplers and mixers and other expensive equipment required to make beats? A beat was the prerecorded background music that accompanied rappers as they performed. It had replaced the records played by DJs in early live rap performances.
    I caught a cab to the modest two-story corner house that Pablo shared with his mother. There was a rich aroma of tomatoes. Pablo was cooking pasta. A sauce simmered on one burner, noodles on the other, and eggs boiled in another pan. After draining the noodles and dishing them into bowls with the sauce, he peeled the boiled eggs and crumbled them on top. Pablo saw the look on my face.
    â€œI know, it's weird,” he admitted, in his disarmingly impeccable English. “It's just another habit from the Special Period. Cheese was so hard to come by, and we Cubans are always inventando , so we just substituted it with crumbled up eggs. Try it, it actually tastes pretty good!”
    I sampled the local cuisine. The pasta sauce was tasty. I figured if I ever got caught in a special period, I'd just do without the cheese.
    After we ate and cleaned up the dishes, we went into Pablo's studio. It was a tiny room next to the kitchen. There was a Roland keyboard sampler, a Behringer mixing board, a micro-phone shielded by a homemade pop screen made of panty hose, a set of turntables, and—he showed me proudly—an Akai MPC digital sampler that had been sent by a US label that August. Pablo read the manual in English. In only ten days of working with the equipment, he had produced the first-ever Cuban hip hop album. It was called Cuban Hip Hop All-Stars, Vol. 1 .
    â€œWe're lucky to have equipment like this, because of our connections with record labels,” Pablo said, gesturing toward the sampler. “But we always have to make it clear that we reject the kind of consumerist ethic and materialism that drives hip hop as an industry. Like a few weeks ago, a photographer from Vibe magazine wanted to do a shoot of Cuban rappers wearing Tommy Hilfiger. We refused, because we knew that it was just an attempt by labels to get their products into Cuba.”
    I nodded. Rappers were wary of being accused of “capitalist consumerism,” a desire for material goods that was at odds with being a revolutionary. Foreign labels—even underground ones—were capitalist corporations that tempted the rappers with record deals and expensive, hard-to-acquire equipment. Cuban rappers and foreign labels were engaged in a rumba guaguancó. They flirted with one another, each enticing the other while protecting themselves. The courtship worked only if both parties thought that they were using the other for their own ends.
    The sampler was a godsend for Cuban hip hoppers. Until that moment they had just made do with whatever materials were available to them. For improvised backgrounds Cubans made “pause tapes.” They would record the break beat on a cassette and then manually loop it over and over until they had a complete song.
    Cuba's first hip hop DJ, Ariel Fernández, improvised a set of turntables with Walkmans as the decks. His cassettes contained music recorded from CDs and FM stations. At bonches , the block parties, or local gatherings in the barrio, Ariel would set up two Walkmans. He would play a cassette in one Walkman while searching for the song he wanted on the other. Then he would flip to the other song. He didn't have a mixer that would allow a seamless transition from one song to the next, but he made do with volume controls. The important thing was, as he said, to preserve the principle of the turntables. 1 It was yet another example of the creative spirit of inventando.
    The MPC in the hands of Pablo meant that rappers who worked with him could now actually have beats that used Cuban rhythms and samples. I pulled out the lyrics for my rap song “You're My