Buena Vista Social Club – Buena Vista Social Club
This is one of those albums that everyone seems to have.
Back in precommunist Cuba, young men would meet in Havanan bars, play music and sing about all sorts of fruity stuff as they drank. Then Mr Castro came along and told them that such gatherings were forbidden on account that they could cause dissent. Sometime in the 90s, at the height of the first wave World Music movement, guitarist Ry Cooder took a film crew over to Cuba to find some of these old timers to reunite them one last time before they all kicked the bucket.
The film was a bomb. The music though? Well, the music was not a bomb. Thanks to Guardian readers and hipsters everywhere, Buena Vista Social Club became the coffee table album of the 1990s. Nice middle class “executive” types would pop this onto their shiny CD systems and force their guests to listen, much in the same way that guests at Guantanamo are forced to take a bath. Every student from the University of Falmouth all the way to the University of Inverness had copies of the music too. And the film….the film….to see the film and experience it…well you just couldn’t understand it. Not with your non-hipster mind. It’s too weak to comprehend the majesty and importance of this soundtrack and accompanying film.
Of course being a self proclaimed hipster, all I had to do in such situations was state that I’d heard the music many years before they had. This would then cause my hosts to have a slight brain spaz and quickly try to find something more obscure to torture me with.
I really like this album. I’m not going to let poncey people tell me what I should feel when I hear it. Nor am I going to let uncultured people serve me badly made tapas with this album on in the background. No. This is for lazy summers sat under the shade of an olive tree, sipping cool beers, smoking cigars and talking toot with some old timers.
Stegzy's Music Project 
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