Thread: Latino pop stars record bilingual 'Star Spangled Banner'

http://www.silive.com/newsflash/metro/i ... st=simetro

Latino pop stars record bilingual 'Star Spangled Banner'
4/21/2006, 10:15 p.m. ET
The Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Mexican pop diva Gloria Trevi, Puerto Rican reggaeton star Don Omar and other Latino artists have recorded a bilingual version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" in a show of support for migrants in the United States.

The Latino-oriented record label Urban Box Office (UBO) said Friday it will put the new Spanish-English version of the U.S. national anthem on the market Monday to coincide with the U.S. Senate's restarting debate on immigration legislation.

"We decided to re-record 'The Star-Spangled Banner' to show our solidarity with the undocumented migrants," said UBO President Adam Kidron. "Today we are Americans and 'The-Star Spangled Banner' represents everything to us."

The recording, dubbed "Nuestro Himno" or "Our Anthem," is set to "urban Latino rhythms" but respects the song's traditional structure, UBO said in a news release. Each artist decided whether to sing in Spanish or English.

The record will be sold for $10, with a portion going to Washington-based National Capital Immigration Coalition, UBO said. Other artists on the record are Ivy Queen, Reik, Voz a Voz, Franco De Vita and Kalimba.

Congressional debate over immigration bills proposing everything from toughened border security to the legalization of all 11 million undocumented migrants in America have triggered huge demonstrations across the United States in recent weeks. Activists are also urging work and school boycotts May 1 in what's being called "A Day Without Immigrants."

http://www.geocities.com/jonclark500/trevi.html

Mind control, sex cults, and the teen pop star dream gone bad
by jonathan clark
This story was originally published in the Mexico edition of The Miami Herald on February 19, 2005.

GIRL TROUBLE: The True Saga of Superstar Gloria Trevi and the Teenage Sex Cult That Stunned the World.
Christopher McDougall.
Harper Collins Publishers.
278 pages.


On a Sunday night in December of 1989, a previously obscure 18-year-old pop singer named Glori Trevi burst onto the stage of the popular variety television show “Siempre en Domingo” and began screaming as much as singing the lyrics to “Dr. Psiquiatra,” an angry, auto-biographical tale of a young woman ogled by her middle-aged male therapist. As she sang, the wild-haired teenager rolled spasmodically on the floor, tearing at her stockings and exposing her underwear to the audience. The spectators on hand in-studio reacted with wild applause and shouts for an encore.

Instead of an encore, Trevi was quickly ushered off the stage and summarily banned from ultra-conservative Televisa, the home of “Siempre en Domingo” and at the time the sole television network in Mexico. But the singer had made an indelible impression on Mexico’s popular culture audience during her three breathtaking minutes on stage, and “Dr. Psiquiatra” shot to No. 1 on the pop charts. It stayed there three months, only to be followed at the top spot by two more singles from Trevi’s debut album.

In the words of Christopher McDougall, author of Girl Trouble: The True Saga of Superstar Gloria Trevi and the Teenage Sex Cult That Stunned the World, with her memorable televised debut and subsequent hit album, “she’d become the Mexican Elvis.”

A decade later, however, after one of her 14-year-old backup singers abandoned a newborn baby at a Spanish orphanage, Gloria Trevi had become the Mexican Michael Jackson, charged with running a child sex slavery ring along with her manager, Sergio Andrade.

Despite its sensationalist title, Girl Trouble is no hastily assembled fallen-superstar exposé, and McDougall is no mere gossip-rag hack. Using the “Siempre en Domingo” performance as his launching point, McDougall – who has written for The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and the Associated Press – delves deeply and thoroughly into the bizarre irony that would become Gloria Trevi’s life and career. In the process he seeks – and largely provides – answers and understanding rather than simple exploitation of this stranger-than-fiction tale.

TWO STORIES

Two very detailed stories emerge from Girl Trouble; the first of which is the story of Trevi herself and her meteoric rise to become Mexico’s Madonna.

Singing songs that championed teen sexual liberation and bashed traditional macho attitudes, all the while sporting a carefree thrift-store chic and a metaphorically untamed mane of hair, Trevi was adored by young audiences – especially young female audiences. She even won over members of Mexico’s intellectual community. Social critic Carlos Monsivaís and author Elena Poniatowska wrote about her in glowing praise, and none other than Zapatista guerilla leader Subcomandante Marcos admitted to being a fan.

But at the same time that she was loudly and proudly extolling sexual liberation, freedom and girl power, Trevi herself seemed to be living an entirely monkish existence. She was never spotted out and about town, she seemed to have few friends, and she never dated. When she stepped on stage or when a television camera was turned on her, she burst into her irreverent, unconstrained persona. But when the spotlight was turned off, she immediately turned sulky and introverted.

There was a good explanation for the strange dichotomy in Trevi’s personality, however. She, along with a rotating cast of more than a dozen other young women and girls, had become part of a secret brainwashing sex cult cultivated by producer/manager Sergio Andrade, a quintessential macho control artist.

Here the second and larger story takes over Girl Trouble as McDougall painstakingly reconstructs not only the lurid details of the Andrade cult’s workings, but also the psychology that allowed it to take shape in the first place.

Sergio Andrade, while blessed with at least some knack for penning hum-able pop tunes, is repeatedly characterized in the book as fat, ugly, boorish, slovenly, sullen, and essentially devoid of any sort of endearing personality trait. Yet somehow he managed to convince a rotating cast of young teenage girls – as well as women’s lib champion Glori Trevi herself – to submit to beatings, rape, starvation and ritual humiliation. And they bore it all while remaining completely loyal, obedient, and most importantly, silent.

As McDougall explains it, Andrade’s madness followed a precise scientific logic. He, along with the able help of Trevi, targeted and recruited girls almost exclusively aged 12 and 13 years to join his “talent school;” a cover for what was in effect an indoctrination center.

“But was it pure sexual attraction on his part, or strategy” to choose 12 and 13 year olds, the author ponders. To answer that question, McDougall consults with teen culture analysts as well as the classic developmental psychology theory of Erik Erikson. When the responses assert that the transition age from child to teen is precisely that at which a girl’s mind is most vulnerable to influence, McDougall concludes that Sergio knew exactly what he was doing.

Once the girls had been recruited into joining Andrade’s academy, they were subjected to a seemingly standardized routine of anxiety-provoking performance tests, psychological manipulation, and then later, sexual and physical abuse. McDougall turns to cognitive theory and scientific treatises on brainwashing to show that Andrade’s program was no accident, but rather a regime designed precisely and perfectly to gain the girls’ unquestioning obedience.

McDougall’s analysis certainly helps to answer one question plaguing the reader: why in the world did these girls so willingly accept what was happening to them? But there is, of course, a follow-up question that begs to be answered as well: where in the world were the parents during all of this?

PARENTAL CULPABILITY

Mexican families are generally quite close-knit and protective of children, yet in case after case during this story, parents eagerly turned their 13-year-old daughters over to Andrade, only to see them vanish from contact for long spells and suffer radical personality changes.

“How rotten a mother was she?” McDougall wonders of one woman who encountered irrefutable evidence that Andrade was sleeping with her young daughter – only to send the girl right back to the pop-star academy. Yet in this case, as well as the cases of other parents he interviewed, McDougall does not provide a conclusive, expert-affirmed answer to the question.

As a result, the reader is largely left to draw his or her own conclusions. Perhaps Andrade’s uncanny mind-control powers worked just as well on gullible parents. Or maybe he targeted victims only after he knew they had bad parents. Or perhaps most plausibly, even in a family-oriented culture, the possibility of fame and fortune will trump all other concerns. “What if I had ruined her chance to be a star,” wonders one mom, suggesting that that would have been a worse alternative even to child abuse and rape.

Ultimately, only after a 14-year-old Trevi backup singer abandoned her newborn baby – one of several children fathered by Andrade within the clan – could Mexican authorities persuade a set of parents to press charges. And so finally, in March of 1999, Andrade and Trevi were formally charged with rape, kidnapping and corruption of minors.

Panicked, Andrade took his harem and hid out in Brazil, fathering several more babies with the girls in hopes of protecting the clan against extradition. Eventually, in January of 2000, he and Trevi were arrested and sent to solitary confinement in Brazilian jail, where in the next bizarre plot turn, Gloria announced that she had somehow become pregnant.

McDougall followed it all, from Trevi giving birth in Brazilian prison, to the pair’s extradition back to Mexico, and then, this past September, to Gloria’s surprise acquittal on all charges by a Chihuahua state judge.

As McDougall clues us in, after more than fifteen years of steadfast loyalty, Trevi had finally broke from her mentor and told the judge in private chambers that she, too, had been a victim of Andrade. She had always been opposed to the abuse, she said, but had gone along with it only because of Sergio’s powerful and unrelenting hold on her.

The judge decided to believe her, but in the end, McDougall leaves it to the reader to decide whether or not we want to believe her as well.

First the Illegals were moving in on
Dr Martin Luther King and The Civil Rights Movement,, and now they are relating to the Star Spangled Banner????

If those folks are supporting LEGAL immigrants... power to 'em.

If they support ILLEGAL INVADERS well...... then they are showing how unAMerican they are by placing ethnicity before nationality..... a bias I see amongst the majority of pro-invader American citizens.

Too many Hispanic-type Latino/a-type whatever-type people within our country want to convert the USA into a new Hispanic state.

They may succeed.

Won't it be lovely when American society mirrors those cesspools below our southern border.

http://wilstar.com/holidays/ssbanner.htm

The Star Spangled Banner
By Francis Scott Key



Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?


On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!


And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!


Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Will the bilingual version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" be playing while the American Flag is being raised on the flag pole upside down AND under the Mexican flag?!?!

Are you happy now President Bush?????

This is just ridiculous! No one would sing the French National Anthem in English!?!?! Why would you sing ours in Spanish? These people don't want to be Americans in any sense of the word. I guess they have to translate it into Spanish because they have no idea of what it means in English, because they don't speak it!