2009 Pop Conference Bios/Abstracts

Rod Hernandez

Rod Hernandez is Assistant Professor of English at California State University, Dominguez Hills. His areas of interest are twentieth-century American literature, ethnic and gender studies, Latina/o studies, and transnationalism. His essays have appeared in The Américas Review, Callaloo, XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, and New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement.Panel(s):
Midcentury Moderns
Friday, April 17, 2009, 9:00 - 10:45Abstract:

"Love Songs in Other Tongues: Nat King Cole's Latin Music—from Hollywood to Hong Kong"
In 1958 Nat King Cole released Cole Español, his first album of Spanish language love songs. Recorded at the Capitol Tower in Hollywood, with Cole singing over tracks previously recorded by Cuban musicians in Havana, it was an immediate hit in Latin America—succeeded by two more albums of love songs in Spanish. Forty years later, in the internationally acclaimed film In the Mood For Love (2000), writer/director Wong Kar-Wai included three songs from these albums to depict Hong Kong during the early 1960s and the romance that unfolds there between the main characters once they confirm their spouses have been having an affair with each other. How do love songs in Spanish—covered by a performer whose native language was English—dramatize the conflicting emotions of characters that speak Cantonese? What do these love songs reveal that might not have been as apparent if all were monolingual? How do they show us the impossibility of duplicating a performance? I'll be addressing these questions in my talk but also calling attention to other linguistic and cultural intersections taking place within Hong Kong and the United States at the time of the film's setting. That Filipino musicians deserve the credit for popularizing Latin music in Hong Kong during the early 1960s is one more cross-cultural aspect of this production; another one is the curious fact that the music business in this period unwittingly led Cole and his contemporaries to seek international audiences—whether in Latin America or elsewhere in the world.