Bossa Cubana. Los Zafiros. 1999. Nonesuch.

 Our will to generate fantasy is like a tireless bureaucrat of the imagination, plotting the dissolution of reality with a despotic sense of self and office. Fantasy operates in the dream world’s shadows; it is dreams repaired and ordered by consciousness, and, in the same way that dreams feed subconsciously from the detritus of memory, fantasy owes its efficacy to the unstable storehouse of our aggressions and pique. Los Zafiros, based in Caya Huesa, a ward in the municipality of Central Habana, Havana, were a vocal quartet, with Manuel Galbán on guitar, who released the fantastically delirious Bossa Cubana in 1962 amid the chaos of the Cuban Project and the ensuing missile crisis. Bossa Cubana’s restless tempo is near frenzied; it suggests the attempt to outrun annihilation, but it also centers around an elegant spirit of world capital sophistication, a boldly and timely stated pop endorsement of human sensuality from the inside of a Communist Revolution only three years old. Bossa Cubana bridges both halves of the twentieth century; its music authoritatively amplifies attitudes and styles from both past and present. By 1962 global conflict was so commonplace that only an act of will could allow you to separate the modern age sexiness of Bossa Cubana from its origins at the edge of nuclear conflagration; smoke still issues from its carnal tensions. It was the song’s sense of play, its subtleties and nuances—qualities of a romantically inclined imagination—that enjoined it to our world; today’s consumer might readily dismiss it as the stuff of nostalgia. Contemporary culture has lost patience with artistic verisimilitude, preferring instead the blunt “realness” of online content to the wilderness of rules observed chasing after subjective, representational truths.  Western romanticism is now gone, and even the role of the pop audience has been radically altered from its previous stature in the exchange of musical ideas; in this digital age we are mere consumers, united solely by the zeal to curate the playlists for the coming mass extinction. 

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