[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live at the WNYC Studios in Soho, thanks for sharing part of your day with us. We have a great week of conversations coming up. On Thursday we'll be joined by Roy Wood Jr. He's a correspondent and guest host on The Daily Show and he's also hosting this year's White House Correspondents Dinner. We'll also speak with author Curtis Sittenfeld about her latest novel Romantic Comedy based on behind-the-scenes shenanigans at an SNL-like show and Fat Ham is now on Broadway. On Friday will speak with two of its cast members. That is in the future, but right now let's get this hour started with La Brega.

[music]

There's a new album out today that has an unusual origin story. It's the result of a critically acclaimed podcast from our colleagues who make La Brega. This season the series dug into the layers of Puerto Rican culture through song. The episodes provide historical context and explore the impact of the music from songs like Elvis Crespo's Merengue record Suavemente to the '80s hit, I Wonder If I Take You Home from Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam. For example, episode one of the podcasts in this series opens with one of Puerto Rico's most celebrated composers Rafael Hernandez who wrote one of the islands unofficial anthems Preciosa in 1937, and you may know Marc Anthony's version which is very popular.

[music]

Yo sé lo que son los encantos

De mi Borinquen hermosa

Por eso la quiero yo tanto

Por siempre la llamaré "Preciosa"

Yo se de sus hembras trigueñas

Se del olor de sus rosas

Alison: All episodes of the podcast are out now and available wherever you listen to podcast and now there's an album featuring six renditions of some of the songs from that podcast, which is a co-production from WNYC and Futuro Studios. The album drops today La Brega co-creator and host Alana Casanova-Burgess joins us to talk about the podcast and the album. Hi, Alana.

Alana Casanova-Burgess: Hi, thanks for having me.

Alison: The origins of the podcast, you go through it in the first episode, but it's such a great story. It involves you being a good radio journalist, and hearing something and recording something special happening in the wild, very, very organically aboard an airplane, would you share that story?

Alana: Of course, well, we knew that this season was going to be all about music, and I was on my way to Puerto Rico for a first reporting trip, I was all set to report actually the last episode first, and I'm just sitting on the plane. I think a lot of people can relate to this. When you're going home, sometimes people on the plane they applaud when the wheels touch down on the tarmac, you know the vibe. We're taxiing and we're waiting to get to the gate, and suddenly out of nowhere, just a couple rows behind me, this guy starts to sing, and he's singing Preciosa, and I recognize it right away. People are standing up and they're craning their necks, and they're trying to see who has this gorgeous voice.

I talked to him a little bit afterwards, and he said, "Oh, I sing Preciosa because it's our unofficial anthem of Puerto Rico." I just thought, "Oh, this is so perfect, we have to start the season this way." Because we're being a little cheeky with our definition of anthem, some of these are just great songs that welove, this are bops, these are great songs. It's really Preciosa that is not the official national anthem that's called La Borinqueña of Puerto Rico, but Preciosa the version that you just played of Marc Anthony's rendition from the '90s is really the one that everybody knows. Now we have a new version of it in our album.

Alison: Obviously, producing a podcast of this caliber takes a lot of effort. When did the idea of producing the album come into the mix?

Alana: Oh, almost immediately. I mean, I think we were thinking about how can we listen to these older songs through fresh years, and give them new context and dig into them? We don't give every song the same treatment. For example, sometimes with the second track, we really dig into El Gran Varón, how it came to be, who wrote this song, why they wrote it in the time and place. Other times, this is a song about the beaches, let's use it as a hook to really dig into what's happening with the beaches in Puerto Rico, so we give different treatments.

The question is always we're listening to the songs through our current ears. Then immediately the next step in that journey is, let's really, really listen to them again. Because obviously, we know that Puerto Rican musical talent is infinite. There's so many amazing artists, vast. We really punch above our weight in that regard. Tiny island, huge musical footprint. Also, everybody knows Bad Bunny, but Bad Bunny is one guy, and there's a lot of modern contemporary artists, a lot of our faves. Luckily, so many of them said yes to working on this album with us. It just felt natural immediately.

Alison: We heard that version of the Marc Anthony version of Preciosa, and on the EP, the rendition, it's really different. It's performed by Xenia Rubinos tell us a little bit about her first.

Alana: Well, she's from Brooklyn. I feel a real kinship with her because she's the daughter of a Puerto Rican woman as I'm, I was born in Manhattan, so it's a little different, and also she can sing. She can really, really sing. I think what you heard in the Marc Anthony version is just this unbridled pride. He's at an 11. He's things almost everything at an 11 which we love, but it's really just pride there. Just singing about my beautiful island, bathed in waves, love it, love it, love it, but Xenia is bringing this yearning, this nostalgia and nostalgia is something that we talk about on the show a lot, because it's really the word that defines a lot of the Puerto Rican experience that we talked about so often.

Xenia also framed her cover to us as this is a home that I've never lived in, and I relate to that as well. I think a lot of children of different diasporas relate to that yearning, that sickness, that wanting that we feel. Also the island Puerto Rico in 2023, there's a lot to be proud of, but there's a lot of crisis going on. You can hear she really has layers in her voice when she's singing, there's a lot of pain there too.

Alison: Well, let's take a listen to singer-songwriter, Xenia Rubinos' rendition of Preciosa.

[music]

Yo sé lo que son los encantos

De mi Borinquen hermosa

Por eso la quiero yo tanto

Que siempre la llamaré "Preciosa"

Isla del caribe Borinquen

Preciosa te llaman las olas

Del mar que te baña

Preciosa por ser un encanto

Por ser un edén

Y tienes la noble hidalguía

De la madre España

Alison: That's so silky. It is so silky. It was great to hear the AB comparison. I'm curious what were the conversations with the various artists about how much artistic liberty to take, how far you wanted them to go, or maybe not how far you want them to go.

Alana: Well, really, we let it up to them, and we know how to make a podcast. I think a few members of our team are frustrated music producers. Actually, the mixing and mastering on four of these tracks is done by one of our team who is a Grammy-nominated musician. Actually, we're not playing too far out of our fields here. We really let it up to Xenia. We let it up to all of the artists how much they wanted to change or not change. We told them a bit about where we were going with each of the podcast episodes because we really think of this album as a companion piece to the podcast like you should listen to these episodes, listen to the music, let them wash over you.

There's one track, in particular, that's a bolero Olas y Arenas that's about the fight for the beaches, which I suspect we'll get to, and that one is very influenced by the actual theme of the episode but no, we just trusted him.

Alison: My guest is Alana Casanova-Burgess, the co-creator, and host of La Brega: The Puerto Rican Experience in Eight Songs also now an album which drops today. All right, you brought up, Olas y Arenas, in this season you examine the fight against an illegal beach wall in the Rincón as part of the historical fight for Puerto Rican beaches. Specifically, what is the issue here, this particular wall which I think there was news about it last week even?

Alana: There keeps being news about this wall, but it's part of a fight all over the island or I should say all over the archipelago because it's also happening in Culebra and Vieques. The beaches in Puerto Rico are public, they're supposed to belong to the people. Therefore, they belong to no one, you can't have private property built there. The definition of what is a beach, what is the public space is all about where the waves hit the sand.

It's this very poetic, lyrical law that dates back to actually when Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony before it is now a US colony, but this is from the Spanish regime. It's a very lyrical law and it just is basically about where the wave hits the sand. There's actually not much different, the tides don't really change much in the Caribbean. They do in some parts of Spain and that's why this law is a little funky for the context. We heard the song Olas y Arenas by Sylvia Rexach from the 1950s and it's a gorgeous bolero, I can frame it for you a little bit.

She is singing as the dry sand looking at her lover, or I guess it's not really her lover because he's touching the same wet sand over and over again, never quite reaching her. There's a lot of unrequited love there, she wants the wave to reach her, it never does. Listening to it, was just thinking this sounds so much like the law that defines the beaches of Puerto Rico. What's happening now is with coastal erosion, and with private development, there's a lot of fighting that's going on with people trying to defend this public space.

Alison: Because some developers are quite literally putting walls up and deciding like, oh, that beach we're claiming it.

Alana: Yes, exactly. Right.

Alison: Let's listen to that original version of Olas y Arenas by Sylvia Rexach.

[music]

Soy la arena

Que en la playa está tendida

Envidiando otras arenas

Que le quedan cerca al mar,

Eres tú la inmensa ola

Que al venir casi me toca,

Pero luego te devuelves

Hacia atrás.

Las veces,

Que te derramas sobre arena humedecida

Ya creyendo que otra vez me tocarás,

Al llegarme tan cerquita

Pero luego te me escondes

Y te pierdes en la inmensidad del mar.

Alison: All right, the band on your album that takes on this song is Balún some people might remember they had a really good Tiny Desk concert back in couple of years ago. How do they interpret the song?

Alana: Well, we told them what our approach to the song was going to be. You'll hear some atmospheric wave sounds in it. You'll hear Angélica Negrón is the lead singer of Balún, you'll hear her reinterpreting Sylvia Rexach's voice. Actually hearing it right after the senior version of Preciosa I see some overlapping their silkiness. Angélica really brings her gorgeous vocals to it. They were really influenced by watching an old documentary about Puerto Rico's beaches, actually, as they were putting this together. Yes, I think they did a beautiful job.

Alison Stewart: This is Balún's rendition of Olas y Arenas.

[music]

Soy la arena

Que en la playa está tendida

Envidiando otras arenas

Que le quedan cerca al mar,

Eres tú la inmensa ola

Que al venir casi me toca,

Pero luego te devuelves

Hacia atrás.

Las veces,

Que te derramas sobre arena humedecida

Ya creyendo que otra vez me tocarás,

Al llegarme tan cerquita

Pero luego te me escondes

Y te pierdes en la inmensidad del mar.

Alison: We are talking about La Brega the album with Alana Casanova-Burgess, co-creator and host of the podcast La Brega. We'll have more music and more with Alana after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

Alison: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. My guest this hour is Alana Casanova-Burgess, she is the co-creator and host of the podcast La Brega: The Puerto Rican Experience in Eight Songs and now she and her team have a new album out featuring six songs that were featured on the podcast Reimagined. We've come to the song El Gran Varon, which has a complex legacy with the LGBTQIA+ community. Would you explain why that is?

Alana: Yes, well, it's a song that came out in 1989. It was written by Omar Alfanno who's Panamanian but the version everyone knows is Willie Colon's version so we count it as a Puerto Rican classic. It's a salsa. You really can't go to a big party without hearing it. A lot of people love dancing to it. It's also a karaoke standard, but it's about a father who rejects his child for being-- and the song doesn't make it explicitly clear, but one reading is for being trans. Rejects his child, goes to visit his child one day, the door opens and his child says, it's me, but it's a woman.

The song really castigates the father for that rejection. It says don't do this, that's sort of the moral of the story. The chorus is a tree trunk that grows up crooked can never be straightened. That's really a very cruel way of thinking about queerness, it has not aged well. At the same time for some people it was a real big moral lesson for a lot of parents like, don't be the Don Andres character of the song, don't reject your child, you will regret this.

It has a very complicated legacy. For some people, it's really closer to hate speech for others it was the song that allowed them to come out to their parents. It's hard to say exactly what we should do with this song but welcome, sorry, I feel like [crosstalk] a little bit.

Alison Stewart: No, I actually want to let people hear the original and then we can take a listen to the track on your album. Let's take a listen to Willie Colon's El Gran Varon.

[music]

En la sala de un hospital, a las 9:43 nació Simón

Es el verano del '56, el orgullo de Don Andrés, por ser varón

Fue criado como los demás

Con mano dura, con severidad, nunca opinó

"Cuando crezcas vas a estudiar la misma vaina que tu papá

Óyelo bien, tendrás que ser un gran varón"

Al extranjero se fue Simón

Lejos de casa se le olvidó aquel sermón

Alison: That is the original. On your album. You have trans pop artists Ana Macho recording this. How did the lyrics change? What choices did she make?

Alana: Well, actually, it was Ana Macho's idea to cover it. We were sitting in our interview for the episode because Ana Macho has another song called Cuerpa which I have come to think of as a bit of an antidote to El Gran Varon. I hadn't even gotten to the point in the interview where I was going to ask could you cover this song for us and Ana Macho is like, I would love to do a cover of this song, I would love to Ana Machofy it and decided ultimately not to change any of the lyrics.

In the episode, we talk about how the song is actually based on a real person's story. Ana Macho just decided that she wanted to really honor that story and not change the pronouns and not change the words but said that it would be a really different song coming out of a trans queer body. I agree, I think that listening to this new version, you'll also hear that the vibe that Ana Macho was going for which I really love is that this would be a song that someone queer would have been dancing to in the late '80s in a club and so appropriating the song taking it back for herself. I love that.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen.

[music]

Al extranjero se fue Simón

Lejos de casa se le olvidó aquel sermón Cambió la forma de caminar

Usaba falda, lapiz labial, y un carterón

Cuenta la gente que un día el papá

Fue a visitarlo sin avisar, ¡vaya qué error!

Y una mujer le habló al pasar

Le dijo: "Hola, ¿qué tal, papá? ¿cómo te va?

¿No me conoces? Yo soy Simón

Simón, tu hijo, el gran varón"

No se puede corregir a la naturaleza

Palo que nace dobla'o, jamás su tronco endereza

No se puede corregir a la naturaleza

Palo que nace--

Alison: That's Ana Macho's version of El Gran Varón. You brought up '80s dance music, which means we're going to get to hear Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam: I wonder if I can take you home. I think we should just hear it first, and then we can talk about it.

[music]

(Take me home)

Baby, I know you're wondering

Why I won't go over to your place

'Cause I'm not too sure 'bout how you feel

So I'd rather go at my own pace

And I know and you know that if we get together

Emotions will go to work

And I may do something I might regret the next day

And end up hurt

Oh, I don't know

That's the way that I feel (way that I feel)

I'm so afraid of a one night deal (I need you, so)

I wonder if I take you home

Would you still be in love, baby?

Because I need you tonight

Alison: Alana, there was a period of time that you could not walk down the streets of New York without that blasting out of some car.

Alana: Yes.

Alison: It's just one of those songs.

Alana: Did you know Lisa Lisa was Puerto Rican?

Alison: I think at the time I might have known it, just given my previous placement before me.

Alana: Right, previously.

Alison: When you think about what was exciting about that song, and exciting about her at that time, what was it?

Alana: Well, we have a whole episode about it, which is just the sort of sexual liberation, in the sense that she looked like a curvy Puerto Rican woman with great hair, and neon, and just a big belt. Just the whole look, the whole vibe. It was very sexy, and in that song you could hear her grappling really honestly, right? "If I go home with this man, is he going to lose interest?" In the episode we build it out all around that experience. That sexual liberation, freestyle being very freeing as a genre of music for generations of women who were coming to terms with what it meant to have consent, sexually.

We frame that in terms of Puerto Rican history as well. The birth control pill was developed in Puerto Rico as well. It's a really deep episode by Raquel Reichard from Refinery29. We're really proud to have it in there, and also proud to have on the album RaiNao who's a really amazing reggaeton artist, collaborated with IFE, another wonderful artist who actually did our theme song as well. They really bring it back to some very traditional Puerto Rican rhythms.

Alison: Let's take a listen to the version that is on the La Brega's new album, which drops today.

[music]

Alison: My guest is Alana Casanova-Burgess, we were talking about the new La Brega album. It is a companion to the podcast, La Brega: The Puerto Rican Experience in Eight Songs. I want to make sure we mention that you're partnering with The Whitney for the closing of the exhibition, no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria. That's going to happen next Thursday on April 20th, what can we expect?

Alana: Well, DJ Bembona is going to be there, and also Ana Macho is coming, direct from Puerto Rico, to do the first live performance ever of of El Gran Varón, her version of that as well as her other music. Also there's going to be a Q&A with Ana Macho about Puerto Rican music, and just this big celebration of this wonderful show at The Whitney, that I know has meant so much to us. I know you had some artists on your show when it first opened. It's just a really great moment to celebrate the podcast, celebrate the album, celebrate the show coming to a close, April 20th. You can get tickets on The Whitney website.

Alison: Alana Casanova-Burgess is the co-creator, and host of La Brega. The album drops today. The podcast, you can listen to the second season, and the first season as well. Alana, thanks for being with us.

Alana: Thank you so much, Alison.

Alison: Let's go out on No Tienes Corazón by Mireya and Velcro MC, featuring DJ Adam. It's the third track on the album. I hope I got that right.

[music]

 

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