Dr Jane Pettegree, a lecturer at the Laidlaw Music Centre, shares a reflection on a talk given by Cuban music producer and St Andrews alumnus Pablo Herrera Veitia (PhD 2022) this year. She discusses hip hop as a prophetic voice for different kinds of imagined futures.
Speak to anyone, or read anything, about hip hop in Cuba, and you find that the music producer Pablo Herrera Veitia is a famous name. In Geoffrey Baker’s book Buena Vista in the Club, for example, the index alone has a paragraph of listings to Pablo as a producer, intermediary, and academic thinker about this topic. His doctorate was taken in the School of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, graduating in 2022. He also found time during this period to be a research fellow for the Harvard archive of hip hop.
Pablo Herrera Veitia
Hip hop is commonly found as a counter-cultural form of musical expression. However, in the Cuban context, it was also recognised by the government as a powerful means of communicating messages about social policy. Today, many different cultures have experienced this: Stormzy, for example, is strong on positive social messaging in modern Britain. However, there is understandably going to be tension between state-authorised forms of hip hop, and artists who continue to value their independence.
In Cuba, the creation of an official Agency of Rap was not welcomed by all artists. While the rest of the world just hears in Cuban music a music of ‘fun’, Cubans, with their complex history of race, social, and political tension, hear with very different ears: hip hop becomes a kind of prophetic voice for different kinds of imagined futures. Pablo’s work has helped me to understand this, and it contributes to a first-year module we run at the University of St Andrews on ethnomusicology.
Academics studying music have the urge to try to create neat, ordered archives of source material. What Dr Herrera Veitia understands as a practitioner and an academic is that the world of Cuban hip hop is resistant to such ordering. Modern hip hop is a fluid creation, born on personal computers and distributed digitally on audio files, rather than straightforwardly curated on stable platforms. Moreover, any such platforms should be seen as ideologically positioned, not neutral. In his current work at the University of Toronto, this is what Dr Herrera Veitia is grappling with, and this formed the substance of his remote lecture in the Laidlaw Music Centre series of public talks last semester: Rap Cubano in the Archive: The Immaterial Paradox.
You can listen to Dr Pablo Herrera Veitia’s talk here.
Further information
Pablo D. Herrera Veitia,https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/acm/pablo-d-herrera-veitia (with information about written outputs)
Geoffrey Baker, Buena Vista in the Club: Rap, Reggaetòn, and Revolution in Havana (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011)
Robin Moore, Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba (2006)
Ivan de la Nuez, Cubananthropy: Two Futures that Happened While You Were Busy Thinking (2023)
Vincenzo Perna, Timba: the Sound of the Cuban Crisis (2016)