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J Bogart

@jonathanbogart.net

750 followers 210 following 1.8K posts

Library worker, researcher and writer about culture from the first third of the 20th century, depressive. https://jonathanbogart.net

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J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 13d

I'll be participating in this challenge for the next 50 days, mute or follow the hashtag according to your preference. For now my writeups will live only on Bluesky, accompanied by a screenshot of the title card from the music video (or just a regular screenshot if there isn't a title card). Enjoy!

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 13d

#TheTwen2ie5 Day 1

50. Yailin La Mas Viral, “Bing Bong”
(Dominican Republic, Nov 6 2024)
prod. Puyalo Pantera & Yailin La Mas Viral

youtu.be/YpoUzo-CflQ

Music video title card. On a background of an out of focus woman with her hands raised in dark rain are the words:

BING BONG
YAILIN
LA MAS
VIRAL

Parental advisory explicit content

50. Yailin La Mas Viral, “Bing Bong”
(Dominican Republic, Nov 6 2024)
prod. Puyalo Pantera & Yailin La Mas Viral

We begin with a mission statement, or in the Tumblr vernacular, with rent-lowering gunshots, telling those who can’t hang to clear out now. This list is going to be full of songs by, about, and for women of color shaking extravagant amounts of ass, with videos even more monomaniacally focused on the same. Welcome to the post-dancehall world: racialized vulgarity is in, bourgeois auteurism is out. Art is a broad category that has always included sexual titillation, and Puritans, whether of the left or right, are welcome to kick rocks about it. Taxonomically this is a dembow song, although it’s almost post-dembow, a series of giddy sounds in echoey space (is that one break actually just the sound of cheeks clapping?) while Yailin delivers the genre’s usual sexual provocation in a teasing tone. She’s a 23-year-old single mother (her daughter’s coo is one of the sounds in the mix) who has been in in the fast-paced Dominican dembow spotlight since she was eighteen, when I first noticed her among a crowd of young women then entering the field (La Perversa, La Ross Maria, Rosaly Rubio, Arlene MC, Tokischa), but the sproingy, addictive “Bing Bong” has been her biggest pan-American hit yet.

YouTube: 264M views | Spotify: 146M streams | TikTok: 851K vids

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 5h

i should maybe note here that i am not respecting imperial possession in this list, so I'm listing French overseas departments as their own countries (as I will be listing Puerto Rico when it comes up). self-determination for all.

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 5h

#TheTwen2ie5 Day 13

37. Bamby, “Buzz”
(French Guiana, May 20 2022)
prod. DJ Tony 438

youtu.be/8pgMlj_PyG0

Music video title card. A shot of Bamby from behind, from the small of her back to just above her knees. She is wearing neon yellow-green skeeves and booty shorts. She is surrounded by foliage and what appear to be armed men. The environment is dark and reddish. Over top of this, in flaming letters with a pink-to-orange gradient, is the word:

BUZZ

37. Bamby, “Buzz”
(French Guiana, May 20 2022)
prod. DJ Tony 438

Another song that never appeared on one of my year-end lists, even though it could and arguably should have: Bamby made the 2021 (“Haffi Buss”) and 2023 (“Chupa Chups”) editions, but when I reviewed her singles for this list, “Buzz” stood out to me as stronger than both. Almost certainly the current biggest star out of French Guiana, the overseas department of France on the Caribbean coast of South America, Bamby served a five-year apprenticeship as an associate of Guianan dancehall artist Jahyanai King before going solo around the turn of the decade, just as French Antillean dancehall, a.k.a. shatta, was kicking into high gear. Her regal confidence, canny assimilation of a wide variety of trends across Caribbean music, and athletic dancing have made her one of the four or five key figures in shatta this decade. Like most of her peers she sings and toasts in a dense, chewy combination of Antillean Kreyol, Jamaican Patois, French, and English, and the wickedly minimalist electronic throb of shatta riddims provide her with a lot of empty space to fill with personality. “Buzz” pulls off the neat trick of a) being about both attracting attention and feeling good and b) attracting the listener’s attention and making them feel good.

YouTube: 467K views | Spotify: 1.2M streams | TikTok: 168 vids

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 5h

shout it from the rooftops

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 9h

I haven't! It's a bit later than I've tended to go for, but I'm adding him to the research list.

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 10h

but i'll stop before i veer into my Unified Field Theory of Twentieth Century Pop Culture

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 10h

The same thing was happening to the magazine cartoon around the same time: it had to either be bloodless and privileged (a la the New Yorker) or stupid and smutty (a la Playboy), or transform utterly (becoming comic books).

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 10h

Material conditions contributed: the death of the general-interest fiction magazine post-WWII destroyed what was left of the market for comic fiction (book-length work was rarer, and had always been incubated by the magazines), and it couldn't move into the pulps without fundamentally changing.

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 10h

The third reason is that big names like P.G. Wodehouse, because they outlived their own genre, came to be thought of as sui generis rather than as members of a cohort, and so diverted all the attention that might have gone to more minor lights to themselves.

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 10h

Another reason is that certain fans of every other genre (including the so-called literary) have always deprecated a sense of humor, and so the existing corpus has been under a benign neglect, with exceptions for big names like P.G. Wodehouse, for nearly a century.

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 10h

The biggest reason is that the content mills of Hollywood, radio, and television hoovered up the talent that would have gone into writing funny stories in prose, and the audience for the material went with them. But you used to be able to get a wittily-written sitcom episode in a monthly magazine.

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 10h

Comic fiction in English of the late 19th and early 20th century was a cohering genre as formalized, diverse, and inventive as the contemporary mystery, sci-fi, horror, western and romance that were then consolidating into discrete genres, but it petered out post-WWII for a variety of reasons.

Rachel Feder @rachelfeder.bsky.social · 19h

Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 12h

two of my noms in the same group is devastating, especially given the competition. that's what god made bonuses for, i suppose

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 15h

Chico Marx of the Marx Brothers.

Yes, he was Jewish and not Italian, that's the joke.

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 17h

Internet killed the video star, fan votes came and broke your heart, put the blame on TLR

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 17h

as an unadventurous eater there are whole categories of food i've written off; film is not important enough to me to take hard stances on, and rewatching anything is incredibly unlikely anyway; i don't have hatreds in music, just things i don't know how to like yet

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 1d

#TheTwen2ie5 Day 12

38. Rema, “Bounce”
(Nigeria, Feb 25 2021)
prod. Don Jazzy

youtu.be/xxMTgqNjZGo

Music video title card. Rema in Mad Max-style leather gear is in a dune buggy driving through a desert, shot from below. Superimposed are the words

A PRIORGOLD PICTURE

REMA
BOUNCE

DIRECTED BY DK

38. Rema, “Bounce”
(Nigeria, Feb 25 2021)
prod. Don Jazzy

The second example of affirmative action for men on this list. I am certain that no one who doesn’t actively deprioritize male voices would call this the best song a Nigerian man made in the 2020s — I’m not even confident that, on any other day, I would. But 2021 was the last year I spent paying as much attention to new music as I have this year, and the memory of the joy I found in this song then, as single-mindedly focused on a dancehall theme as it is, not to mention the then-novel blending of afrobeats cool with amapiano heat — and the video doing a Mad Max riff, with unconvincing CGI effects adding their own janky charm — was enough to push it past all the more respectable, politically-engaged, or convincingly romantic competition. One of the hazards of engaging primarily with female voices in scenes that are overwhelmingly dominated by men is that auteurism becomes suspicious in itself, since so few women are allowed to be auteurs, so only engaging with men who are performing in exactly the same frothy register that the women are so frequently kept to becomes my default. I’d like to open my ears to more in the future, but in the meantime, songs like this — fun, funny, bouncy, and unapologetically horny — are great too.

YouTube: 20M views | Spotify: 44M streams | TikTok: 3K vids

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 1d

there were plenty of political, pop cultural and world-historical events that took place when i was a child but none of them were as important to me as these were

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 1d

events that defined my childhood

- my father going back to school
- my parents getting into pro-life activism
- the summer my father built a cabin for rich friends and we lived in it as it went up
- my parents throwing out my small comics collection
- my parents becoming missionaries

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 2d

*erratum: Miriam Cruz is the singer in both Chicas del Can clips (and the second one i posted is in fact earlier), Belkis was the bandleader/pianist at this point.

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 2d

#TheTwen2ie5 Day 11

39. La Chocolatosa, “Tu Me Quieres N4”
(Dominican Republic, Aug 28 2023)
prod. View Like Produciendo

youtu.be/o5KSjHt4AxE

Music video title card. A photo of a small convenience shop at night, with La Chocolatosa entering in aneon striped one-piece. The shelves, counters, and walls are stacked with consumable items. A drinks fridge glows on one side of the screen; a wall-mounted TV screen glows on the other. Over top, in hot neon pink, is the words

TU ME
QUIERES
N4

Over which, in white script, is written:

La chocolatosa

$39. La Chocolatosa, “Tu Me Quieres N4” (Dominican Republic, Aug 28 2023) prod. View Like Produciendo The second dembow song on my list has a miniscule fraction of the views of the first, and in fact La Chocolatosa’s total views on YouTube are dwarfed by Yailin’s worst-performing video; which is in part a reflection on the difference between their skin tones in a scene that is still extremely stratified by race (but especially for women), and in part a reflection of the fact that Yailin only sells sex in the normal pop-star way while La Chocolatosa’s primary career is on OnlyFans, with dembow as a side hustle. Her first single I noticed, “Pa Que Me Reporten,” was about being restricted by Instagram, Facebook and TikTok for being a sex worker; on “La Tortillera” she calls herself a lesbian in a familiar male gaze-friendly manner, and here, with the song title “you want me on [all fours],” she speaks directly to the fantasies she makes money off of. What thrilled me most at the time, though, was the production’s perfect interlace of dembow and baile funk rhythms, with a jaunty sax hook that almost tips it into electroswing, all delivered with the exaggerated sultriness of someone giving the customers what they’re paying for. YouTube: 10K views | Spotify: <1K streams | TikTok: 288 vids$

Reposted by J Bogart

Postmambo Studies @postmambo.bsky.social · 2d

And a moment to remember poor Rubby Pérez, who perished on stage in April in the JetSet collapse in Santo Domingo.

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 2d

Finally, Las Chicas' 1984 album ended with this rewrite of the lyrics called "Yo Sé Lo Que Quiere el Negro" (I know what the black man wants), in which Belkis is pursuing him just as much as he is pursuing her.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fvL...

Las Chicas del Can - Yo Sé lo que Quiere el Negro (1984)

YouTube video by Individuo80

www.youtube.com

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 2d

Here's another performance from later in the decade, after Miriam Cruz had replaced Belkis as the group's lead singer:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_T9d...

LAS CHICAS DEL CAN & MIRIAM CRUZ - El Africano (Que Sera Lo Que Quiere El Negro - video 80's)

YouTube video by Elgalan718

www.youtube.com

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 2d

Las Chicas del Can were one of a number of all-girl merengue groups active in the Dominican Republic at the time. I appreciate this performance of their cover because singer Belkis Concepción knows exactly what "el negro" wants and wants it too.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5hg...

LAS CHICAS DEL CAN - El Africano (80's)

YouTube video by Chamakiito93

www.youtube.com

J Bogart @jonathanbogart.net · 2d

(A moment here on the song's lyrics. It's in the voice of a naive girl telling her mother about the attention she's been receiving from a black man, wondering he wants with her. It's directly engaging in racist stereotype of black men as sexual predators, even though all the men involved are black.)