Upon hearing Marvin Santiago’s El Sonero del Pueblo for the first time, I really didn’t know what to make out of it. Marvin’s vocal style is raw, probably too raw for most casual Salsa listeners. But his ability to improvise and to cram every word and syllable in between a choro is hard for anyone to match. Ruben Blades put it best when describing Marvin Santiago’s style: "Marvin is capable of fitting a Mack truck into a parking space where a Volkswagen Beetle won't fit." His raspy voice and lyrical improvisational skills are closer to Reggaeton star Tego Calderon than to someone like Eddie Santiago.

El Sonero Del Pueblo (The People’s Sonero, which was also his moniker), originally released in 1985, is a collection of Marvin’s best material that he recorded for the TH Rodven label. His voice, rough from years of improper vocal training, sounds, as Neil Young once put it, “As real as the day was long.” The recordings that he made for TH Roven sound like the meters on the recording console are peaking deep in the red. The slightly overdriven sound of the band matches the intensity of Santiago’s voice, which is a good thing. It’s like the Salsa version of Black Flag’s The First Four Years. Like that release, El Sonero Del Pueblo is filled with fast songs full of intensity, often layered with humor.

Songs Such as "El Pasajero" (The Passenger) and "Caro Viejo Y Mujer Fea" (Old Car And An Ugly Women) were Salsa Dura classics before there was a term for it. On top of that, try to keep up with Marvin’s thick improvised Puerto Rican colloquialisms. This is one for the dance floor as much as for the people that like to sit and enjoy great musicianship and vocal ability.

39 years ago today, light ceased radiating; the World stopped spinning, coughed up a hairball, then turned on its side and attempted to shake loose all the other furry dust berries clinging to its nipple-ly peaks. Fearful of this new creepy darkness, the World tried to catch the tail of a passing comet only to stagger badly and get singed by the fiery interloper.

But seconds before collapsing gloomily into one last catatonic stupor, the World accidentally stepped on the remote control, triggering a channel change and so discovered that there was in fact something worthwhile to watch on television.

October 5^th 1969, Monty Python’s Flying Circus was unleashed onto the airwaves of the BBC … six rather handsome young gents (Terry Jones and Michael Palin from Oxford, Eric Idle, John Cleese and Graham Chapman from Cambridge and American born Terry Gilliam from a little school in Los Angeles called Occidental College) changed history itself by saving the World, and us, from sheer utter boredom.

Anyway, there is something about the secret language and technical diatribes on the back of these albums I absolutely love. All the numbers and graphs and arrows point you, the listener, in the direction of an aural climax.

And in fact from an early 20^th century Dadaist or Surrealist perspective, the complex narratives on these back covers could be viewed as truly modern poetry: polemic critiques of technology, ready to bugger all of our puny, inconsequential romantic rhymes. Reason and precision annihilates passion and unprotected sex. Nonsense belittles the hollow logic of bourgeois capitalist society, producing nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective slaughter … Eat your heart out André Breton … eureka, I have found you!