by
Ernest Hogan
I
was impressed with a couple of videos by Canción Cannibal Cabaret back in 2019.
I put them on Facebook and Twitter. Then I forgot about them. The world blew up,
you know, 2020.
Therefore, I was happy to hear about the book The Canción Cannibal Cabaret & Other Songs by Amalia L. Ortiz. According to the back cover it’s “Set in a not-so-distant dystopian future . . . a Xicana punk rock musical—part concept album, part radio play.” Sounded like just the sort of thing for me to review here. And it seemed like a good thing to follow my José Torres-Tama trilogy.
Talk
about a strange little book! There’s a lot going on between its covers.
Here’s
what I said on Goodreads: “A helluvalot
more than meets the eye here. The guerrilla woman with guitar, lace-gloves, and
guitar is more than a mere cover girl. What we have here aren't just poems,
song lyrics, performance texts . . . There's some world building that ain't just
a backdrop for commercial melodrama. I see the influences of Guillermo
Gómez-Peña/La Poca Nostra, José Torre-Tama, Gloria Anzaladúa, and believe it or
not, Weird Al Yankovic. And the now ancient tradition of punk, with footnotes
to keep track of the cultural references in a post-apocalyptic scenario that
holds up a shattered mirror to our current reality and evokes a goddess while
declaring the death of gender. Plus cannibalism, cabaret, canciónes . ..”
Along with other things. A lot of
other things.
There’s science/speculative fiction, some futuristic world
building centered around La Madre Valiente, an iconic goddess-figure, a new
Virgin of Guadalupe (who was an updating of older goddesses) has emerged from
the wreckage of the world to bring about a feminist revolution against the repressive
State and lead the Fugees (the refugees, including all of the downtrodden,
similar to Oscar Zeta Acosta’s cockroach people.) to a utopia that not only
defeats the patriarchy, but declares that “Gender is Dead.”
It’s told in a series of narratives
that provide the origin story for La Madre Valiente, and songs that act as manifestos.
At this point, I must remind you
that the book was published back in 2019 (seems like at least a decade ago,
doesn’t it?), before the protests that have El Presidente sending unmarked,
unidentified, undocumented troops into our cities in name of “law and order.”
Could we see a real-life Madre
Valiente soon? Is Portland’s Naked Athena a manifestation?
The sensibility is postmodern and
punk. But then punk was postmodern, and now it seems to have become a
venerable tradition—a “Punkera Scholar” with a Phd is quoted on the cover. The
author/bandleader Amalia L. Ortiz sounds like an academic in her introduction.
Would this make it postpostmodern? Postpostpostmodern?
Maybe it’s just cultural
cannibalization.
I remember the original punk movement back in the last Seventies. How just about everybody—especially the academics and intellectuals were offended. My own generation, who just a few years earlier were offending their parents with long hair and acid rock, were disgusted by someone else’s rebellion.
Now punk, like the songs/poems
printed in the book, has cultural references up the yingyang. I remember a lot
of the original songs when they were first played on KROQ in L.A. If you're just
reading the book without the music, you miss something.
I recommend seeing the music videos
on YouTube; there’s also an hour-long concert that was livestreamed as a book
launch event. While watching it, I found myself opening the book and following
along, as if it were the prayer book for the mass of a new religion.
And who knows? That just may be what
all this cultural cannibalization is leading to.
Ernest Hogan has always been proud of his cannibal heritage.
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