Reggaeton and other Contradictions

One of the most amazing things about my city is the astounding contrasts to be found within it. One of my favorite stores is Caswell Massey on the corner of 48th and Lexington. There since 1752, it exudes quiet elegance and tradition. The music played inside varies by employee shift, but is either ornate baroque or nostalgic 1920s. Either is completely appropriate as you browse the traditionally-packaged fragrances with names like Greenbriar, Tricorn, and Jockey Club. They call up images of elegant gentlemen in French cuffed-shirts and the bejeweled ladies they would wear these for while sipping champagne or martinis or dancing the rhumba.

Across Lexington and a few feet south is a bastion of post-modernism, the club LQ. Like many others it promotes its Friday happy hour with 2 for 1 drinks, free food, and free admissions for ladies. My office held a sendoff for a departing employee there, and it is such a far cry from what is to be found across the street and with the Latin clubs of my previous experience.

Has Latin music – and the dancing that is done to it -- lost all its sense of foreplay and seduction? Is reggaeton the zipless fuck of Latin music? Or is it the refuge of people who aren’t up to the tango? While the dancing followed its own rules it so lacks the playfulness, the subtler seduction, the romance of the dances done to other Latin music forms. There was no leading or following, and a few cases of no touching or real communication between the parties, like in so many other situations in our lives.

And have dance floors become larger since the 70s to make it all the more anonymous? Couples moved to the thumping beat as though they were joining the Mile High Club in an airplane’s facility. There were a few threesomes on the floor as well, and a variety of singletons, something I had hoped died out with the 60s. Like that strange era, this youth-oriented music seemed to have a universal appeal to this after-work crowd of every race and ethnicity, with the difference that youth is now extended to about the age of 35. Was this a music video set in Plato’s Retreat? Finally, is all this yet another symbol of our rushed lives in this postmodern age?

Freud would have needed a stiff drink or three at the sight of these couples humping on the dance floor, most of them not making eye contact. It all so misses the tease that Gypsy Rose Lee would have been shocked. I realized then that since the music started I hadn’t noticed how many of those couples or threesomes had arrived together. If our great x 3 grandparents had railed against the waltz, what would they have made of this?

The Urban Anthropologist isn’t particularly shocked; it doesn’t go with the territory. However, opinions and tastes are permissible; after all, James Bond’s boss misses the Cold War. If anyone develops a time machine, just give me a lifetime supply of condoms, ten pairs of Capezios, and drop me off at the Copacabana in the world of Oscar Hijuelos’ The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. That would contain gentlemen who would deliver smooth lines before asking a lady to dance. They probably drink Scotch or margaritas, but they would definitely patronize Caswell-Massey.