Each Friday I pick a song–new, old, borrowed, blue–that’s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.

This is “Plantación Adentro” by Willie Colón and Ruben Blades:

This week I read Love Goes to Buildings on Fire by Will Hermes. The book is a history of music in New York from 1973 to 1977, and while it covered a lot of stuff that I already knew about, it also (and this is why I read it in the first place) covered a whole lot of stuff I knew either very little or absolutely nothing about. Chief among the “absolutely nothing” (say it again, y’all) was the salsa music scene and its artists. Of the debut performance of this particular song, which comes from the 1977 album Metiendo Mano! and was written by Catalino “Tite” Curet Alonso, Hermes writes: “Addressing the audience as ‘camará’–‘comrade’–Blades sang about shadow people and murder amid ‘la la la’s,’ Afro-Caribbean drums, and chortling trombones in Colón’s shape-shifting arrangement, which included a disco-pop break foreshadowing Michael Jackson’s ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin” and some samba-style rhythms signaled by a Brazilian cuíca.”

Hermes’s book is well worth reading for various reasons. He manages a neat trick of pulling a disparate set of musics and musicians together into a single narrative without forcing connections that aren’t really there. He also brings his own experience of that five-year period into the story with a light, yet illuminating, touch. The book also has 30 pages of notes, bibliography, discography and filmography, which is no small thing, because it offers you the opportunity to use the book not just to find out what Will Hermes has to say, but as a starting point for and map to your own exploration of the music and musical cultures that he writes about both passionately and intelligently.  I, for one, am getting back to the latin rhythms, and seeing where I go from there.