Taking back the music: the aesthetic proposition of the Puerto Rican New Song

Abstract

The paper examines political meanings and practices in the music of the Puerto Rican New Song Movement, in the context of the crisis of the modernizing project of the 1970‘s. It argues that the New Song practices could have signaled the beginnings of a process of reappropriating music making as a creative process and as creator of social relations of solidarity, against the current of the continuous cooptation of emergent musics by the recording industry. It also examines political meanings and practices of music by the new generations, which emerge in the midst of an increasing corporative control of the sonic landscape by the music industry.