Just as automotive designs evolved dramatically from the 1940s to the 1950s, so did popular music. is a car culture, and whether you’re white or Chicano, your car is an expression of yourself.” In white culture, they like their cars jacked up in the back and fast we have to be different so we have them low. Here, we do it in our cars, on the boulevard, checking out the girls. “Cruising in Mexico was done walking around the plaza, flirting with the girls. “That was the beginning of low and slow,” says Victor Vega, an advertising agent for Lowrider Magazine. Long before organizing migrant farmworkers, Cesar Chavez wore a zoot suit. With their flamboyant costume and its automotive counterpart, Pachucos were easy targets for the Anglo police force. Whether you call them “lowrider oldies,” “Chicano oldies,” or just plain “oldies,” this musical tradition is inseparable from the Chicano culture and specifically its lowrider subculture.īut before there were Chicanos riding around in classic lowriders to the sweet sound of Chicano oldies, zoot suit-wearing Pachucos cruised the street in bombs–customized and lowered 1930s and 1940s sedans.
LOW RIDER SONG WINDOWS
There’s nothing wrong with enjoying oldies over computer speakers, the hi-fi, or a crackly radio connection, but oldies ideally should be experienced from the comfort of a classic lowrider with the windows down. As Chicano collectors have infiltrated eBay and established a beachhead on YouTube and Facebook with video clips of their rare soul records, they are expanding the canon of classic oldies while exposing collectors and general soul music fans to the delicate beauty of these B-sides. Just in the last few years, this sweet-soul secret has leaked out to the broader world of music collectors, musicians, and the general public. For generations, oldies remained a well-kept secret within the Chicano community. Today, both Siqueiro and Molina are considered veteranos of the Chicano oldies scene, one in Northern California and the other in the south, and each playing a critical role in supporting and influencing the next generation of Chicano record collectors. I knew right there, that was the sound for me.” He pulled up in front of the school, and as we piled in, the oldies streaming from his eight-track tape player filled my head. He was a laid-back vato from East Side Clover who drove a 1954 Bel Air dropped to the ground. “I remember being picked up from junior high school by a friend’s uncle. More than 300 miles to the south, Ruben Molina had his oldies epiphany at about the same time: “Ever since I heard that sound, I wanted to collect anything that had those oohs and aahs in it,” says Tommy Siqueiro, Soulero Sal’s mentor and a San Jose local. “If you’re a Chicano, you’re supposed to listen to oldies, have a lowrider, just dress like I’m dressed right now with the Pendleton, your brim hat, your Winos with your pantelon all creased up,” says Soulero Sal, the youngest, at 18, of the informal Northern California network of Chicano soul music collectors. These classic lowriders, along with neighborhood record collectors and local DJs, have cataloged an unfathomably deep canon of R&B, doo-wop, and harmony soul, collectively known as oldies. What Chicanos refer to as lowrider oldies is a loose category that describes a certain sound and tempo characteristic of songs found across half a dozen decades and about as many genres, but most particularly doo-wop and harmony soul.įor more than 50 years, California Chicano lowriders in search of the perfect musical mood to enhance their slow procession have looked to the past for a certain sound and feel: desperate and delicate harmonies proclaiming love, hate, or reconciliation set to dramatic arrangements and a tough R&B rhythm track.
0 kommentar(er)
