SO! Reads: Marisol Negrón’s Made in NuYoRico: Fania Records, Latin Music, and Salsa’s Nuyorican Meanings
I began reading Marisol Negrón’s Made in NuYoRico: Fania Records, Latin Music, and Salsa’s Nuyorican Meanings (Duke University Press, 2024) in earnest this summer, as Bad Bunny’s “NUEVAYol” flooded New York City streets. Whole generations of people had never heard El Gran Combo’s “Un Verano en Nueva York” (1975), perhaps not-coincidentally celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year. The song is a staple in this city, particularly in the weeks leading up to the National Puerto Rican Day Parade. Instagram and TikTok were inundated with videos of Bad Bunny fans, many of whom were millennials and Gen Z, dancing with their grandparents to “NUEVAYoL” and “BAILE INoLVIDABLE.” Bad Bunny had successfully ushered in a resurgence of interest in salsa, a genre that has remained vibrant since its founding. The archipelago’s superstar celebrated the city that was, beginning in the early 1890s, a major site of Puerto Rican migration for decades; in several of the videos for songs from DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (2025), he honored the Nuyorican community and all they had contributed to the culture.
In that vein, Negrón has written a book that is, shockingly to me, one of the very few books that center salsa in general and the role of New York in its creation specifically. In this, she joins Juan Flores, Frances Aparicio, and Christopher Washburne to produce book-length studies that examine this genre. She also depends on the magazine articles of long-gone local publications such as Latin N.Y., which ran from 1973-1985, and journalists such as Aurora Flores, Adela López, and Nayda Román, women who recorded what at times feels like an incredibly-male environment. Here, she is focusing on the record label that is synonymous with salsa, Fania Records, which, at one point had signed such singers and musicians as Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, La Lupe, Hector Lavoe, Ruben Blades, Ray Baretto, and Eddie Palmieri, whose passing this summer marked the end of an era, in many ways. Founded by Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci in 1964, Fania reached its heights in the 1970s, securing a distribution center in Panama in 1974, establishing its own recording studio in 1976 – the first “Latin” label to do so – and purchasing a manufacturing plant in 1977. Yet by the end of the decade, many of the original artists had moved on, as had Masucci, who sold the catalog and created several other businesses that continued to do business using the name “Fania” (20). Nevertheless, the music that emerged from that critical historical moment in New York City continues to impact subsequent generations.
Citing Caridad de la Luz, La Bruja, a Nuyorican legend of the spoken word scene who currently serves as the executive director of Nuyorican Poets Café, Negrón defines NuYoRico as “that place somewhere between the Empire State and El Morro” (9), the latter being the fortress originally built in the sixteenth century that is recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Made in NuYoRico is divided into two parts featuring three chapters each; the first part, “Anatomy of a Salsa Boom, 1964-1979” marks the cultural history of salsa for those fifteen years, while the second part, “After the Boom Is Gone, 1980s-2000s,” charts a fascinating examination of the salsa boom in various contexts, including a futile attempt by insular government officials to attract foreign investment by citing salsa as an impactful cultural artifact. In doing so, they offended a faction of the archipelago’s elites who distanced themselves due to the genre being created in the diaspora.
Negrón reviews the 1972 documentary classic Our Latin Thing (Nuestra Cosa Latina) in her first chapter. This movie served for many as the introduction to the Fania All-Stars. Featuring footage from a 1971 concert at New York’s Cheetah Lounge, it features Barretto, Larry Harlow, Willie Colón, Ismael Miranda, “Cheo” Feliciano, Pete “El Conde” Rodríguez, and LaVoe (whose name appears in this way throughout the book recalling his nickname as “La Voz”). In chapter two, “‘Los Malotes de la Salsa’: Salsa Dons and the Performance of Subjecthood,” Negrón looks at the imagery Colón and LaVoe create in their lyrics and the cover art of their albums, while the following chapter, “Salsa’s Dirty Secret: Liberated Women, Hairy Hippies, and the End of the World,” focuses on their performance, together and individually, of a virile masculinity dependent as much on the portraits of insubordinate women, unruly yearnings, and queerness. It is this chapter that speaks fleetingly of Celia Cruz and La Lupe, the two Afro-Cuban women who were the only women signed to Fania. In a study that examines how very much a masculinist world this was, I was looking for the counterpoint that both Cruz and La Lupe offered, only to be met with two pages of reference to them. A deeper discussion centering these women remains opportune.
The fourth chapter “Puerto Rico’s (Un)Freedom: The Soundscape of Nation Branding,” charts the moment in 1992 when, ahead of the celebrations within the Spanish-speaking world of Columbus’s voyage, Puerto Rican governor Rafael Hernández Colón sought to brand Puerto Rico using salsa as the premier Puerto Rican cultural export, only to be met with opposition from elites on the island. With the last two chapters, “Entre la Letra y la Nota: Becoming ‘El Cantante de los Cantantes,’” and “(Copy)Rights and Wrongs: ‘El Cantante’ and the Legislation of Creative Labor,” Negrón examines the last years of LaVoe, his improvisational contributions to what many consider to be his signature song, “El Cantante,” and the legal struggle between Rubén Blades, the writer of the song, and Masucci, for recognition of Blades as sole author of the song.
Made in NuYoRico is a fascinating book, one that encourages the reader to have their streaming service within reach. With the conversation of every album, one can pause and listen to the songs accompanying the album and the art under discussion. In this she joins countless scholars of music, but I was especially reminded of Mark Anthony Neal’s most recent book, Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive (NYU, 2022), which was fundamentally dependent on the reader listen to the songs he was referencing in real time. It is a theoretical book published by an academic press, and so discussions about abjection and subjecthood may not reach the general reader; nevertheless it is a worthwhile addition to the library of any salsa aficionado, who will undoubtedly learn something new while revisiting the past.
On August 23, 1973, only two years after their sets at the Cheetah Lounge, the Fania All-Stars played Yankee Stadium. Having attained a certain level of success with the release of Our Latin Thing, the concert at the celebrated ballpark secured legendary status for these singers as they played before more than 40,000 spectators. Four months later they reprised the concert in San Juan’s newly-built Coliseo Roberto Clemente. In September 1974 they played in the Zaire 74 music festival in Kinshasa, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the country’s premier stadium, the Stade du 20 Mai: the Fania All-Stars were global.
Fifty-one years later, in September 2025, the National Football League announced its selection of Bad Bunny as the performer of the Super Bowl LX halftime show, taking place in February 2026. The championship game is set to air exactly a week after the Grammy Awards, where Bad Bunny is nominated in six categories, including Best Record, Best Song, and Best Album of the Year for Debí Tirar Más Fotos. With an expected viewership of more than one hundred million people, he and his repertoire of reggaetón, dembow, Latin trap, boleros, and yes, decidedly Puerto Rican bomba, plena, and salsa, will be at the center of yet another international cultural moment. Debemos tirar más fotos.
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Featured Image” “Jibaros Con Salsa” by Flickr User Lorenzo, Taken on July 27, 2011, CC BY-NC 2.0
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Vanessa K. Valdés is a writer and an independent scholar whose work focuses on the literatures, visual arts, and histories of Black peoples throughout the Western hemisphere. She is the author of three books, Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (SUNY Press, 2014); Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Schomburg (SUNY Press, 2017); and with David Pullins, Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter in the Age of Velázquez (Yale UP, 2024). You can learn more about her at https://drvkv23.com/.
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As Loud As I Want To Be: Gender, Loudness, and Respectability Politics–Liana Silva
Spaces of Sounds: The Peoples of the African Diaspora and Protest in the United States–Vanessa Valdes
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Press Play and Lean Back: Passive Listening and Platform Power on Nintendo’s Music Streaming Service
I remember long car rides as a kid in the early 2000s, headphones on, gazing out the window at the passing scenery while looping background music from The Legend of Zelda and Pokémon games on my Game Boy. After school, I’d occasionally throw the Super Smash Bros. Melee soundtrack on my Discman CD player, keeping me motivated while doing homework. Like many others, I found Nintendo’s music to be an effective accompaniment to everyday activities, a kind of functional listening long before streaming platforms like Spotify and YouTube made it trendy. Which raises the question: how has Nintendo adapted to the streaming age?
Unlike many other game publishers, Nintendo has conspicuously kept its music off streaming services—despite having some of the most recognizable soundtracks in video game history, such as Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, and Metroid. Instead, the company took a different direction by unveiling its own music streaming service in October 2024, aptly titled Nintendo Music. The platform, available to Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, showcases soundtracks spanning the company’s history, from 1980s NES titles to recent Nintendo Switch 2 releases.
In a listening landscape dominated by Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music, Nintendo’s decision to launch its own proprietary streaming service makes it unique among video game companies. This move is idiosyncratic in a way that feels characteristically Nintendo, but it is also a bold bid to compete in the broader attention economy. By situating itself alongside, rather than within, the major music streaming services, Nintendo signals that its soundtracks are valuable cultural content worth curating and controlling directly.
Nintendo Music caters specifically to video game fans by including screenshots with each track, having a “Spoiler” filter that lets users block music from games they haven’t played, and making personalized recommendations based on each user’s play history. But perhaps most notable is its emphasis on background listening: through features like mood playlists and an “Extend” tool, video game music is explicitly framed as a companion for contexts like relaxing, working out, or doing household chores.
By repurposing game soundtracks as tools for everyday routines, Nintendo Music capitalizes on nostalgia and contemporary listening habits to deepen fan engagement and retain control over its brand—a strategic move from a company that is famously (over)protective of its intellectual property. More generally, it also reflects neoliberal logics in which music is woven into daily life to regulate mood and productivity, revealing the increasing reach of digital platforms over how we work, listen, and live.
Listening in Loops: Video Game Music in the Background
In advertisements for Nintendo Music, actors hum and sing along to famous video game tunes while carrying out their daily activities. “Whether you’re grocery shopping, straightening up at home, or getting some studying done, Nintendo Music can be the background sound to your everyday life,” the description to one video reads.
This marketing is strikingly similar to strategies by streaming services such as Spotify, which encourage listening to music in any and every context. Playlists based around specific moods or activities—like Spotify’s “Gym Hits,” “Intense Studying,” and “sad girl starter pack”—use music as a tool to manage listeners’ energy levels, focus, and emotions as they go about their lives. Anahid Kassabian’s concept of “ubiquitous listening” helps describe this phenomenon, showing how even passive, background engagement can shape listeners’ affects and experiences.
In many ways, video game music is ideal for the ubiquitous listening that streaming services promote. Game soundtracks are generally (though not always) designed for the background and are usually instrumental, setting the emotional tone of on-screen action, from serene soundscapes to intense boss battles. Unlike other multimedia soundtracks, such as film scores, much video game music is also composed to loop indefinitely, making it especially effective for sustained listening.
As Michiel Kamp demonstrates in Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music, “background listening” is one of the main ways users experience video game soundtracks. He writes that “background music both in games and elsewhere requires us to be so attuned to it that it offers no experiential friction in need of interpreting, and through this it has the capacity to attune us to our environment, be it a mythical underworld full of dangers or a convenience store full of groceries” (2024, 175).
While Kamp primarily focuses on background listening while playing games, game music can attune listeners to moods, activities, or environments even when heard outside of gameplay. In fact, video games train us to listen in this way, using music to establish the appropriate affect for narrative events, settings, and characters. These immersive qualities have made video game music immensely popular on streaming services: soundtracks from games and franchises like Halo, Final Fantasy, The Elder Scrolls, Undertale, and Minecraft have collectively garnered over a billion streams on Spotify alone.
But Nintendo, by launching its own proprietary platform, trades streaming royalties and wider exposure for something arguably more valuable: the ability to control how and where fans experience its content.
Features in Focus: Nintendo Music’s Approach to Passive Listening
Nintendo Music’s features illustrate how the service adapts soundtracks for continuous, everyday listening. Perhaps most notable is the service’s unique Extend feature, which allows users to stretch the runtime of tracks up to 60 minutes. Described in the app as “the perfect accompaniment to studying or working,” this feature facilitates seamless background listening without the distraction of frequent track changes. So if you’ve ever wanted to loop the Wii Shop music for a full hour—and let’s be honest, who hasn’t—now you can.
Alongside complete soundtracks, Nintendo Music also foregrounds curated playlists, including those based around specific video game characters, themes, and moods. The “Powering Up” playlist features “up-tempo tracks to fill you with energy,” for example, while “Good Night” has “down-tempo tracks to help you drift into dreamland.” Screenshots for each track further immerse listeners, visually reinforcing the moods and environments the music is designed to evoke. On these playlists, Nintendo’s music is presented less as individual compositions and more as “vibes.”
Packaging music around moods or vibes is not a neutral act. In Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, Liz Pelly asserts that “organizing music by mood is a way to transform it into a new type of media product. It is about selling users not just on moods, but on the promise of the very concept that mood stabilization is something within their control. It’s a tactic for luring users to double click and start streaming” (2025, 40). Pelly’s observation underscores that mood-based playlists do more than entertain: they are a way for platforms to influence how listeners organize their time and attention.
Furthermore, Nintendo Music’s approach positions music not only as a creative or cultural artifact, but also as a commodified resource for self-regulation. This aligns with Eric Drott’s claim that streaming services often employ music as a “technology of social reproduction,” used to structure and maintain day-to-day existence. For Drott, this is “part of a broader tendency under neoliberal capitalism that prizes music, the arts, and culture not on account of their aesthetic worth but on account of their ‘expediency’ for other social, political, and economic ends” (2024, 197).
Many users still actively listen to their favourite Nintendo soundtracks on the platform, and there’s also nothing inherently wrong with background listening—it’s how much of this music was originally designed to be heard. However, presenting music as an aid to concentration, productivity, or mood regulation also risks repurposing soundtracks as a form of “neo-Muzak,” a vehicle for continuous consumption designed to keep listeners plugged into Nintendo’s broader product ecosystem.
Background Benefits: Nintendo’s Platform Power
Beyond guiding listening habits, Nintendo Music reinforces the company’s brand image of nostalgia, innovation, and family-friendly fun while increasing engagement with its intellectual property on its own terms. As a Nintendo spokesperson said in an interview with Nippon TV News, “To increase the number of people who have access to Nintendo IP, we believe that game music is an important and valuable form of content. Nintendo Music is a service that allows us to deliver this game music in a way that is uniquely Nintendo. . . . We hope that Nintendo Music will help you recall some of your favorite gaming experiences and think that it will also encourage people to play the games again” (translation by Nicholas Anderson).
Nintendo’s efforts to centralize its music are also likely, at least in part, a response to fans unofficially circulating soundtracks online. As part of a broader trend of functional music compilations (think lofi beats to study/relax to), YouTube hosts countless user-generated Nintendo music playlists designed for activities such as studying and sleeping. Despite Nintendo’s notoriety for issuing takedown notices over copyright infringement—including shutting down the massively popular YouTube video game music channel GilvaSunner in 2022—many of these unofficial videos and reuploads continue to accrue millions of views.
By providing an official home for soundtracks and its own contextual playlists, Nintendo Music is a subtle exercise in platform power, gating access to subscribers. It redirects listeners from other platforms, letting Nintendo control its content without diluting its brand on third-party services. Although Nintendo Music’s catalogue is currently slim—as of writing it has roughly 100 soundtracks—the company continues to trickle out new music most weeks, incentivizing listeners to keep coming back.
Nintendo Music promotes ongoing background listening not only to attract users who are already accustomed to mood and activity playlists, then, but also to keep them on the platform and connected to the company’s games and services. After all, every minute a listener spends on Nintendo Music looping David Wise’s “Aquatic Ambiance” from Donkey Kong Country is a minute they aren’t spending on YouTube, Spotify, or any other entertainment platform.
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Video game music is, in many respects, perfectly suited for the streaming age. From the popularity of playlists to the ascent in ambient music, streaming services’ focus on passive listening aligns with the background function of video game soundtracks. As we’ve seen, Nintendo Music takes full advantage of this, using its marketing and features to bolster branding, solidify control over IP, and encourage engagement.
For many, Nintendo Music offers an enjoyable experience and a convenient way to stream nostalgic soundtracks. But the service also exposes how proprietary platforms concentrate power and leverage passive listening for ongoing consumption, reinforcing broader patterns where work and leisure become intertwined with corporate interests. By prompting users to integrate Nintendo’s music into their activities, the platform extends the reach of its games beyond the screen and into daily life.
Whether you’re listening to famed composer Koji Kondo or everyone’s favourite troubadour dog K.K. Slider, Nintendo’s message is clear: press play and lean back.
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Featured Image: “Mario Kart” by MIKI Yoshihito (#mikiyoshihito), CC BY 2.0
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Ryan Blakeley is Visiting Assistant Professor at Northeastern University and holds a PhD in Musicology from the Eastman School of Music. His research investigates how digital platforms like music streaming services are shaping creative practices, listening habits, and music industry power dynamics.
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