Entre la Letra y la Nota: Becoming “El Cantante de los Cantantes”

The first of two chapters that examine the social life of Héctor LaVoe’s signature song “El Cantante,” chapter 5 illustrates how the narrative of “El Cantante”—both the song and its musical persona—overdetermined his public persona and a collective memory of LaVoe as a synecdoche for both the salsa boom and the colonial condition of Puerto Ricans. The chapter demonstrates how the narrative of LaVoe as “El Cantante”—of an exceptional sonero beset by life’s tragedies—interpellated him as a failed subject and ignored the very ways in which the artist repudiated the affective economy of pity that enveloped him over time through relajo and the rejection of productive time.