let me take a quick moment to explain. i think anyone who reads this knows me, and therefore knows my major obsessions: Comics, Books, Music, Philosophy/Religion, The Ladies, Video Games, Pop Culture, and suffering (kidding on that last one... or am i?) that said, many people who know me and quite well at that are unaware of some of my smaller, possibly more bizarre obsessions, from now on to be referred to as minor obsessions. hey, why not?
when i say "bizarre" or "strange", i don't mean something like "i love drilling holes in cats", or anything of that nature. i just mean stuff one might go "really? huh. i wouldn't've figured." the stuff that doesn't get as much coverage as the biggies, named above. so there's that. who knows? as Bill Cosby once said "you might just learn something".
La Bamba
many of you are probably familiar with the song "La Bamba", the 1950s hit single from Richie Valenz, he of the ill fated plane crash that also killed off Buddy Holly (and that weird Big Bopper guy; no huge loss for my money). you may really only be acquainted with it through the 1987 film starring the ethnically ambiguous Lou Diamond Phillips (is he Latin? Native American? what???). well, i'm here to tell you, for whatever strange reason: i am obsessed with La Bamba (henceforth i mean the song). partly due to a resurgence in popularity around the time of the film. in 1987, i was 11. that shit was everywhere. there was even an MTV video, featured clips from the movie (the song itself was performed by Los Lobos, with LDP miming the actions). i knew the song of course from the oldies station, which my mom was a frequent listener of. being that it's in Spanish, a language i do not speak, i had no idea what was being said, and was obsessed with finding out. at the time, i was living in Southern California, which is heavily populated by Mexicans (and lest there be any nonsense, they were kinda there first. California was ostensibly part of Mexico. look it up, jerks!). i was constantly asking friends of mine who knew Spanish to please, please for the love of god tell me what it means.
not a single person would. to my young mind, it was as it some great secret was being kept from me. the truth is, no doubt, probably much more prosaic. i'm sure i ran into a problem faced by most amateur anthropologists. the people who knew the language and traditions were fucking with the outsider. and really, i don't blame them. when you're a kid, any bit of power over another kid is worth its weight in gold.
cut to the internet era, probably the early-mid 90s. i went digging for trillions of lyrics for songs and bands i had not previously known. i even used to print them out and keep them in folders. how hilariously quaint. anyway, i discovered many things, and i'm going to hep you to them.
for one thing, La Bamba is not a rock song from the 50s. it's an old folk song from Veracruz, Mexico, and it goes back a long time. that in and of itself was mindblowing to me. it's from a long tradition of such songs that involve a signature dance, in this case "La Bamba". from what i gathered via the web, folklorists believe that "bamba" is a sort of a slang version of the Spanish word for "stomp", bambolea. so there's that part of it.
what of the lyrics? well, contrary to what most white people (myself included for many years), there not saying "lalalalalala La Bamba", etc. the song is in Spanish, duh. so for years as a kid, i was way off bass, no doubt singing "lalalala La Bamba" at the top of my lungs. so you don't have to suffer through what i did as a child, here are the lyrics to La Bamba:
Para bailar La Bamba
Se necessita una poca de gracia
Una poca de gracia
Para mi, para ti, ay arriba, ay arriba
Ay, arriba arriba
Por ti sere, por ti sere, por ti sere
Yo no soy marinero
Yo no soy marinero, soy capitan
Soy capitan, soy capitan
Bamba, bamba
Bamba, bamba
Bamba, bamba, bam
Para bailar La Bamba
Para bailar La Bamba
Se necessita una poca de gracia
Una poca de gracia
Para mi, para ti, ay arriba, ay arriba
"ah-ha", many of you may (or may not) be saying, "they're not saying 'lalalala la bamba' after all!"
and many of you may not be saying that. you may be saying, that's fucking obvious, Einstein. to some extent it is, but when you're a a little kid, or in some cases a lazy white person, you may not be able to pick up on this.
so what does it all mean? despite the fact that it's not particularly hard to translate Spanish into English (and vice versa), the translations are often highly disputed. why that is, i couldn't tell you. perhaps some idiomatic meaning is lost. this is highly possible. it's not completely unheard of within the same language. if you were American, let's say, and you wrote a book, and it was published in England, from what i understand, they would change all the "colors" to "colours", and so forth. i may be wrong, but that's something i've seen here and there. nevertheless, as close as we are able to get, it goes a little something like:
In order to dance La Bamba (2x)
it's necessary to have a little bit of grace(2x)
for me, for you, higher and higher
oh, higher and higher
by you i will be (3x)
(the next verse is my favorite, and i have actually been known to say this at times)
I'm not a Sailor (2x)
I'm the captain!(3x)
then it repeats and fades out. and now you know. and in knowing, you have grown stronger.
so yeah, i'm obsessed with La Bamba. there it is, in case you were unaware.
how about an old school version?
word.
be sure to come back for more Minor Obsession. i'm just writing them as i think of them.
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