#415: Xenia Rubinos, "Mexican Chef" (2016)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u1VAa1HBpM

Where disco music encourages athletic, flashy, gracefully stylized dancing --  y'all's Facebook suggestions from my Gloria Gaynor post have been much appreciated, and even caused three small transfers of money from me to iTunes -- I personally feel more comfortable moving to beats that encourage a bit more stomping, a bit more herky-jerkiness, or just some more straightforward swagger. "Mexican Chef" is from the second album by Xenia Rubinos. While she generally suggests to me what Bjork might have been like as a rowdy young NYC Latina whose Dad for some reason collected Emerson Lake & Palmer records [example]), this marks her first direct foray into just that kind of dance energy.

Rubinos's voice -- one that in other contexts has captivated by picking its way scales like Little Engine up a big hill, or trilled like a mother bird singing her fledglings to sleep -- here mixes a singsong taunt with clipped, assertive rapping. The guitar line is staccato and leaves lots of empty space. Marco Buccelli, who in her two albums has become one of my favorite drummers in the world, fills that space with everything from syncopation, to drumrolls, to incidental clatter, to resonant low-frequency tuned percussion, to crushing tsumanis of booming sound in which you can still see the outlines of every individual droplet that sweeps you off the shore and into the maw of a waiting slug. (What? No, I don't know a lot about beaches. I grew up in Iowa, and never fully recovered.)

The directness is appropriate to the lyrics. Countdown-wise, I've segued the theme from "I will survive" to "You will survive, as you currently do, at our mercy. Probably". "French bistro: Domincan chef. Italian restaurant: Boricua chef. Chinese takeout: Mexican chef. Nouveau America: bachata in the back". I didn't know without Google that "boricua" is a term for Puerto Rican-American, or that "bachata" is a form of music centered in the Dominican Republic, but then, I'm a pale white dude. These lyrics aren't here to speak up for me, they're to call me out.

Most of the verses lay out other sorts of labor that in the United States, 152 years after the formal abilition of slavery, is still kept out of white sight and performed (at low pay) by those of other shades -- like when posh-voiced attorney Lawrence Otis Graham, in his memoir Member of the Club, experimentally applied over the phone for a waiter job, then showed up for his interview in his customary dark skin and found himself being offered a busboy position. If he'd been Hispanic, a quick look around made evident, they'd have offered him cook. As witnessed here.

"Mexican Chef" also gives us that "party in America" refrain; it's a cheerful listen. "I want it, want it all now" is jaunty; "We build the ghettos, we tear them down" is sung as a statement of pride. That they are also statements of possibility, of growth and change; that this growth and change might not be equally comfortable for everyone? So be it: no imbalance lasts forever. Which is good, because if you're too imbalanced while dancing, you'll fall down and people will trip over you. Not that I would know anything about *that*.