Though I didn’t mention it in my 2006 music of the year post (I hadn’t yet heard it), an album from last year that I currently can’t get enough of is Ry Cooder’s Chavez Ravine. A concept album of sorts, it tells the story of the eponymous neighbourhood, a thriving latino community in 1940’s and 1950’s Los Angeles. Plans for a large social housing project in the area crashed on the rocks of McCarthyism, when social housing became a politically untouchable idea – it did not help that Chavez Ravine was a hotbed of unionism and left-wing activism. LA’s solution to the problem of Chavez Ravine was, in the end, to bulldoze it away to make way for a stadium for the LA Dodgers baseball team – themselves a less-than-romantic construct, the franchise having been bought by the city and lifted from it’s original home in Brooklyn. The album tells the story beautifully, with songs in Spanish and English, some of them new compositions with narrative lyrics, some versions of contemporary latino and mainstream pop of the time.
So it was a nice moment of serendipity when I turned on my radio this evening and came upon a documentary dealing with precisely this point in Cooder’s career. (It was one of those excellent music documentaries that RTE, since the demise of the Mystery Train, occasionally slings at us, unannounced, before reverting to tedium as usual for another month or two. More please). One of the many things I learned from the documentary was that Cooder, in making the Buena Vista Social Club album, breached the US Trading With The Enemy Act. He was prosecuted and fined $25,000 for this crime. Forget politics, forget Castro; simply as a music fan, I was actually offended to hear that. In making recordings that became less an album than a cultural phenomenon, a great musician was made a criminal. I am not naïve enough to think that there is some kind of international republic of art that allows artists to ignore politics, but making a crime of an act of creation in this way smacks of the sort of thing you’d expect to happen in…well, in Cuba actually. It also shows up the idea of a cultural boycott of Israel (most recently canvassed here in an organisation that has reason to be, er, sheepish on the topic) for the philistinism that it is.