and Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures, among other books, and coeditor of various critical anthologies.
Aparicio applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Replaying Marc Anthony: Sonic, Political, and Cultural Resonances, and shared the following:
If one reads page 99 in Replaying Marc Anthony, its discussion around singing in English, crossover, and the Latin music industry serves as a window to the rest of the book. Fueled by my curiosity regarding how Marc Anthony's arrangements and songs allow him to resonate with specific communities and identities, Chapter 3 delves into his engagements with Anglo rock and roll, freestyle and R&B in the song "I need to know."Learn more about Replaying Marc Anthony at the Ohio State University Press website.
Page 99 describes the ways in which Marc Anthony was discursively framed as a “crossover” act around 1999, when he first performed “I need to know” on Good Morning, America on July 23. Yet his musical history evinces the opposite, as he started his singing career in the 1980s singing freestyle in English in local New York clubs, to later sing salsa in Spanish in 1993. Refuting these mainstream notions of “crossover,” Marc Anthony reaffirms his bicultural and bilingual upbringing as the foundation for these linguistic dilemmas. I document the ways in which his arrangements deploy forms of translanguaging or Spanglish, as in his unexpected version of Bread’s “Make it with you.” This chapter analyzes Marc’s multiracial arrangements in “I need to know” as a sonic text and performance that rewrites so-called “American music,” and specifically rock and roll, as sounds that also belong to racial minorities in the United States.
Known as the King of Salsa and as a global celebrity, Marc Anthony is also, as I propose in the Introduction, a “listener” himself who has brilliantly curated songs that resonate with multiple audiences and listeners. By highlighting the rich diversity of voices, singers, songs, and musical traditions with which he has been in dialogue, we can better understand the sonic, cultural and political meanings and resonances of his repertoire. This framework allows me to argue that some of his most canonical songs have circulated hemispherically and globally, thus hailing multiple identities that include Puerto Rican, Latino, Latin American, American, Black, and Algerian/North African. Rather than just “Latin pop,” Marc Anthony offers us serious sonic incursions that allow us to acknowledge ourselves within the colonial precarity of our lives. The impact of Marc Anthony is profoundly felt by Puerto Ricans, Nuyoricans and so many others in the U.S. Latinx community as we critically listen to our own vulnerabilities through the power of his extraordinary voice.
--Marshal Zeringue
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