Latin American music is dangerously underrepresented in the media…unless Bad Bunny drops an album. As such, people in Canada do not know enough about how this area of music has helped shape jazz since the 1940s and was in dialogue with Motown and Columbia Records in the 1970s. These interactions in particular happened under the banner of salsa, a label created to blend Afro-Caribbean rhythms and sell them to a more general audience. The name of salsa is still in use today to describe the work of multiple artists and musicians (such as the aforementioned Bad Bunny). However, musicologists have described salsa as a particular cultural movement that happened in New York in the 1970s and died out as the genre’s main company started to collapse after releasing a movie that did not sell. As such, the genre evolved towards what is usually called ‘romantic salsa’ (salsa romántica or salsa monga in Spanish). In reality it lost itself, particularly as the musicians from the ‘70s retired, died, or drifted into Latin jazz. Still, coming from a Latin American country, the people around me (even those who considered themselves ‘cultured’ in music) said this ‘romantic salsa’ was the truest and most enjoyable version of the genre. Their top singers were a list of white men that all studied under the same vocal school who found a blueprint to produce hit after hit without being particularly creative. I made it my task to show them real salsa, which helped them explore maybe one or two additional artists, but they still confidently stayed within their romantic box when talking about favorites. I did give them the benefit of the doubt, assuming that my perception of their songs, which mainly came from listening to the radio with my father when I was a child, may have been skewed towards popular hits that did not reflect the profundity of the artists’ main work. Then they showed me what they considered one of the best songs of all time and it was bland and repetitive, not standing out from the radio hits I disliked. Ever since that day, this entire “subgenre” of salsa has pissed me off. 

Let me do a comparative analysis to show why the original cultural phenomenon of salsa was stronger. First off, it was a genre that used to be much more fleshed out: having come from music that started to gain popularity in the ‘40s, it interacted with music from the United States and the Caribbean all the way to its decline in the ‘80s. Looking only at salsa’s heyday in the ‘70s, a trombone-heavy style was the most popular outcropping of the boogaloo craze of the ‘60s, with instruments not being perfectly tuned to reflect the rougher life of Latin Americans in the United States (though social commentary was already gaining traction in 1969). As artists tried experimenting in 1970 and ‘71 with organs and flugelhorns, a more refined sound came to the forefront of the genre through critiquing the socioeconomic condition of discriminated people. Now, what’s going on today in romantic salsa? The genre is not noticeably different from how it was when it started, other than having different singers. Rather than having songs that could vary from three to 15 minutes, the ‘80s generation of romantic songwriters found a formula of three to four minute songs following the sequence of verse, chorus, instrumental break, chorus, and reprise to finish the song. As the style started to sell records, musicians from new markets that were not previously involved in salsa leaned on this formula, and thus have not changed it even to this day. In terms of inclusion, salsa itself came from Afro-Caribbean music, with its main cultural influence being Santería, a folk religion in Cuba which mixes popular Christianity with West African faiths forcefully sent to the island through the Atlantic slave trade. The vast majority of musicians of the time were immigrants from the Caribbean, with a few of them being second-generation ones born in New York and a small number of jazz players being brought over. Most of the Latin Americans were themselves not white, talking in songs during the ‘50s about the discriminatory stereotype of having big lips as readily as they expressed their nostalgia towards the Cuban countryside. Meanwhile, romantic salsa wanted to be more palatable to an American audience, so most of the artists that retained their popularity from the ‘70s and early ‘80s and the newcomers to the scene were white. Singers were portrayed in album covers as young, with slick hair and sensual clothing. In fact, precisely as the name of the subgenre suggests, most of the songs produced at the time centered around the topic of romance—this is fine in itself, if not for the fact that these songs were all from the point of view of men who saw women as objects, either viewing their own love as enough of a reason for them to be together or thinking that their breakups could only be the woman’s fault. Earlier salsa was also at times guilty of this, though not being creatively limited to a single topic meant that these issues were much rarer, with less problematic themes including festivities, food, social critique, and nostalgia towards Puerto Rico.

Still, as much as I would like to only be negative about this subgenre, there are exceptions to the rule that I can share as recommendations. As much as romantic salsa caused a general lapse in creativity, it also created small booms for salsa outside of the United States and Cuba. In particular, certain Colombian bands like Grupo Niche or Fruko y sus Tesos became some of the best-selling acts in the country, with other artists like Oscar D’León from Venezuela or Alfredo Linares from Peru having an artistic renaissance at the time. Even though I see the lack of innovation of the period as a negative, this also means that these artists are easy to listen to for an audience that thinks that salsa is a thing you get at Chipotle, and as such are my go-to when trying to initiate people into this hyperfixation of mine. There is also the Colombian band La-33, whose debut self-titled album returned to the roots of the genre that existed in the ‘70s and kickstarted a wave of what could be described as nu-salsa in the 2000s. After this they took their subgenre into an entirely new evolution which nowadays include a heavier emphasis on music theory and harmonization from their three singers. There are also certain acts that continued with some decent content into the ‘80s and ‘90s such as Willie Colón and Eddie Palmieri, though their earlier work is better. And that is about as much as I can recommend in that subgenre. If instead of that mass produced junk you want to listen to some real salsa, then you should look for the top hits of Colón, Palmieri, Héctor Lavoe, Rubén Blades, Ismael Rivera, the Fania All-Stars, and other artists and groups that were active between the ‘40s and ‘70s. If you want the best-selling record of the time, which was the main drive behind salsa turning into social commentary, then listen to Siembra by Rubén Blades and Willie Colón. As much as the people from Latin America wanted to think otherwise, romantic salsa is not as much a genre of music as it is a strategy to mass produce slop for the sake of selling. Unlike those recommendations I just made, those songs that sound exactly like each other are not worth listening to beyond a surface level entrance to the genre, and its recent attempt to use generative AI to release songs faster means it has truly lost any humanity it has and should be avoided at all costs.