1987: Miami Sound Machine, Let It Loose

By Brian Oliu

A MACHINE STORY

I was scared that the rhythm was going to get me.

As a five-year-old in 1987, I suffered from horrible night terrors—moments where I was both sleeping, yet awake. Dreams where the room I was in would start falling apart—chunks of the ceiling falling in Tetris-shaped blocks crushing whomever was in there with me trying to calm my feverish screaming.

But the thing that haunted me most was the rhythm.

To me, this was the worst betrayal of them all—“Rhythm Is Gonna Get You,” was my favorite song in the whole world. My exposure to music was typically on car rides in my Mom’s Sunbird fire-trap or my dad’s brand-new Buick Regal—the one with the super plush grey interior. Both had AM/FM radios and barely-working tape-decks, where my mom would listen to Van Halen’s 5150, my dad would listen to pop country radio, and when we were all together, we would listen to The Big Chill soundtrack. There were a couple of instances where I would get to choose the music, which meant we would listen to 95.5 WPLJ, a New York City based Contemporary Hit Radio station. In my later years, I would graduate to the stations in the 97s, namely 97.5, which was an alternative hits station, and 97.1, New York’s infamous HOT97.

But I never forgot my first true love, further cemented during music video blocks on VH1 when the video for “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You,” would miraculously appear, as if I had somehow summoned it with my wishes. The video itself represented the night in a way that I had never witnessed before—the hues purple and pink, undoubtedly filmed in a sound studio during a bright Miami day, but made to look sinister; an hour that I had never even dreamed of seeing. There were men and women in tribal makeup—Gloria herself alternating between singing into a microphone in what at the time I thought was the most beautiful dress I had ever seen, and ferociously and tribally clawing at the camera, a streak of teal across her cheeks. The music video was certainly meant to be sexy—Gloria’s open mouth and head tilted back, the crowd gyrating wildly. Sexy to a young child can mean scary; perhaps this is what caused me to fear the rhythm—I had watched many music videos, and felt that type of way about many of them, but nothing seemed so persistent; the immediacy of the rhythm getting me tonight, a promise and a threat. The song seemed inhuman in a way that only 80s synth can achieve—despite its incorporation of bongo drums and traditional pop backing vocals, it seemed otherworldly, especially the guttural orchestral WOOOF hit that occurs a few times throughout the song—easily the least rhythmic part of the song, but somehow the part that is supposed to signify the rhythm; this Cuban leviathan that was going to catch me while under the covers of my bed, no matter how still I tried to make my body.

A LATIN BOY STORY

The original name for Miami Sound Machine was the Miami Latin Boys—Gloria Fajardo and her cousin Merci Navarro joined Emilio Estefan’s wedding band for a few songs during a reception, and the name was changed.

In 2019, the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite gained traction on Twitter, pointing out that for what seemed like the hundredth consecutive year, there was an overwhelmingly large percentage of nominees who were white. People who pointed this out mentioned that out of all of the nominees, only two were persons of color: Cynthia Erivo, a Black woman, and Antonio Banderas.

Except that Antonio Banderas is not a person of color—he is White, from Malaga. In an interview with Univision, he claimed, “I don’t know what I am. When I go to the United States, I consider myself Latino, because those are the people I’ve connected with most.”

I am Catalan—my father’s side of the family is from Barcelona. I am technically Hispanic the same way that Catalunya is technically Spain—though this seems like I am implying that I am something that I am not. The definition, as provided by the United States, is “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race,” and, to go further, origin “can be viewed as the heritage, nationality group, lineage, or country of birth of the person or the person's ancestors before their arrival in the United States.” There is a statement by the Department of Labor that essentially says that if one believes that they are Hispanic, they should self-identify as Hispanic.

Banderas, like me, is not Latinx either; claiming the term Latinx is not only inaccurate, it continues the long history of the colonization by White European Spaniards.

This issue is made even more apparent in music. The music industry decides to label any song where the vocals are in Spanish as “Latin Music,” leading to charts and awards dominated by light-skinned Spanish-born singers. The best-selling male Latin artist of all-time is Julio Iglesias—from Madrid. The artist with the most Latin Grammy Albums of the Year, Alejandro Sanz, is Andalusian. Justin Bieber was declared a “Latin King,” by Spotify after has a Latin Grammy for Despacito—a song that he remixed after hearing Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s original in a Colombian night club, and recorded by singing his Spanish parts phonetically. Recently, my fellow Catalan, Rosalía, won Latin album of the year, and has been criticized for taking the spotlight away from Latinx singers when she hops on tracks with J. Balvin and Bad Bunny, especially as her music leans away from traditional flamenco and towards reggaeton and trap.

Here is the part where I could try to claim oppression too: I could bring up Franco, and how he tried to eradicate Catalan culture in an attempt to unify Spain. How the Catalan resistance movement sees itself in line with the diaspora, to the point where the official flag of a Free Catalunya is modeled after the flag of Puerto Rico, which in turn was modeled after the Cuban flag: a blue triangle with a white star over the traditional red and yellow Senyera. How like Estefan, I can trace my grandmother’s side of the family back to Cuba—her maiden name meaning “a fountain”. But that doesn’t change the fact that Junípero Serra was born Juníper Serra i Ferrer, or that Columbus’s co-conspirators were Catalan, or that I’ve directly benefitted from origins that I continue to claim and claim again.

A SOUND STORY

My grandparents spoke Catalan with one another—when talking about the weather that day before my grandfather was about to go running, or about what pizza toppings to get from JoJo’s Tavern on those occasional Friday nights where we’d have to rush down Route 31 a day earlier. To me, all language blended together and sounded the same—I was always told that I was Spanish; in the second grade, I was told by a substitute teacher that my last name was French, of which I quickly corrected her. She told me I wasn’t “brown enough,” to be Spanish, and continued on guessing the backgrounds of other children’s last names. Upon telling my mother, she told me that just because someone is older than you, doesn’t mean that they’re always right—something I held onto when my grandfather’s Alzheimer’s worsened and he would act child-like, or stopped speaking English, or get angry and pour water on the heads of me and my cousin for having VH1 on too loud.

I didn’t recognize the intricacies of the overthrowing of the Second Spanish Republic, or how our loyalties were to FC Barcelona and never to Madrid, or how my uncle would tell stories about the entire family going outside and banging pots and pans when Franco died in 1975. In the same way, I didn’t recognize that many of the things that I perceived to be Catalan or Iberian, were actually Hispanic or Latin in nature. There is not a large Spanish diaspora in this country, and so the culture that I absorbed on those weekends was primarily Hispanic and Latin. There were a few flourishes that were distinctly Catalan—the copper paella pan, the rectangle sleeves of turron that would be brought over when family would visit from Barcelona, the presence of Tió de Nadal during Christmas time. But my grandmother collected stacks upon stacks of Spanish-language tabloids: ¡Hola! and People en Español. Every Sunday, Don Francisco hosted Sábado Gigante in the morning, as I ate cold cuts for breakfast, with El Chacal blowing his trumpet when singers plucked from the audience got a little too pitchy as they tried to win $1,000. I’d try to sneak peeks during the swimsuit competitions—a much different type of sexy than what I saw over at VH1—at  which point someone would find it an opportune time to check the score of the Jet game. Don Francisco, of course, is too perfect of a name to be real—he was born Mario Luis Kreutzberger, to German parents who fled the rise of Hitler in the 1940s, and settled in Chile. “I used to work in a Jewish club doing an impression of a Jewish guy that couldn't speak well the language in Spanish. The name of this guy was Don Francisco.” Don Francisco became one of the icons of Spanish-language television—all based on a bit.

After dinner, we ate flan and rice pudding out of small plastic cups. My grandmother loved the over-the-top telenovelas, but the show she watched most was El Show de Cristina, a live-studio audience talk show hosted by Cristina Saralegui, a Cuban-American journalist who would interview hundreds of Spanish-speaking stars that I never recognized, smiling and giving a double-thumbs up as the show went off the air. I knew nothing of Selena, or Fernando Colunga, but I recognized Gloria Estefan—a moment of familiarity in a world that I found deeply unfamiliar; those brief moments where I could pick out something and hold onto it, if only for a moment.

A SHORT MIAMI STORY

In 2013, I found myself in Miami at Telemundo Studios during a live-taping of La Voz Kids, a Spanish-language spin-off of the singing competition show The Voice. My cousin Sean had made it to the finals of the show—a surreal experience in itself, to have a family member sing traditional mariachi ballads while everyone (including my grandmother, who started a Facebook account for this exact purpose) voted on whether or not he would continue onto the next round. I got to see my pre-teen crush, Daisy Fuentes say my family name as if she knew it in her heart. I got to see Ricky Martin perform not once, but twice, so that they could splice together the best possible take. Paulina Rubio winked at me. The reality, of course, is most of my time I did a lot of smiling and nodding as production assistants ushered my family around with clipboards, pretending that I understood what was happening around me. At one point, I was invited down into the crowd alongside the stage—to stand amongst the paid extras who were promised a box lunch and a small bit of camera time. After about ten minutes, I was told to go back and sit in the bleachers, as if I was not enough to be seen in the background.

A LONG MIAMI STORY

It is 4:35am on a January morning in South Florida, and I am swinging my arms across my chest, slapping my shoulder blades in an attempt to stay warm. My wife and I have flown to Miami to run in the 2018 Miami Marathon—a race that I have been training for in the form of short runs around my town in the hopes that somehow they would build upon each other to deliver me the 26.2 miles around the city; up and over the Bay of Biscayne, past the cruise ships and yachts circling Watson Island, through the freshly closed and hosed down night clubs of South Beach, before shuffling over a series of bridges on the Venetian Way, doing a few laps around downtown before heading down Bayshore, a quick out-and-back alongside Hobie Beach, and ending, as always, where I began, in front of American Airlines Arena, with its laser lights bouncing off a self-propelled fountain created by two fire trucks, and clips of first-round draft picks looking menacing, as they are projected on the glass façade of the arena. This is my third marathon—we chose Miami because the other two marathons were within driving distance of our home in Alabama, and my ultimate goal in running was to run the Barcelona Marathon, a race that my grandfather founded in 1978. This was meant to be a trial run—to see how smoothly it is to run a race when you can’t pack a case of water in the hatchback of the Honda Fit, or when the full-sized foam roller doesn’t fit in the suitcase. Instead, multiple trips to the Downtown Miami Whole Foods—nine-dollar Styrofoam containers of rice to carb-load the night before, a box of brownies to eat in the blistered afterglow.

My wife does not make it to the starting line. She started to feel sick the morning we flew to Miami, and by the morning of the race it had blown up into something monstrous. Running 26 miles in peak physical condition is difficult enough, but when your body is actively rebelling against you, it is simply asking too much of ourselves. We stay up the night before the race crying—I feel fine, I tell myself—I tell myself that I am ready come what may, even though the race temperature is supposed to creep up into the low 90s, the humidity its typical South Florida layer cake self. I am ready, I say, despite a terrible training round: canceled long runs, less than stellar short runs, and painful ankle impingement; tendons literally grinding against each other rather than gliding. I have gained weight this training cycle, and I am fully aware of it—my body squeezing into my Nike compression gear, which rides up ever-so-slightly to the point where you can see my pale stomach hanging out from underneath the speed gray.

As I set and reset my GPS watch, I hear “1, 2, 3,” blaring from a decal-wrapped radio van parked behind a concrete barrier. I hate how it reminds me of numbers—how during a race you force yourself to count up, one mile, two mile, three mile, come on baby say you love me, so that you don’t have to think about how much further you have to go until you are there, at the end of the race and the end of the world—how it seems like you will forever be counting up, that the end will never come.

The tagline for the race is “Miami Famous,”—and that it is “Not Miami Without You,” though I feel simultaneously famous and infamous; that I am forever noticed on these streets because I stick out like a sore thumb, a fat runner—a feeling of a lack of belonging. In every long race I feel as if I am lost—that I had the audacity to try to push through the Dade County humidity, to cross bridges, to shuffle past old men reading the newspapers on South Beach patios as the day breaks over the Atlantic.

Large races have different starting waves, so that there is not a mass of humanity all trying to start their run at the same time. In shorter races: Community 5Ks, small-town half-marathons, I make my way to the back of the pack, knowing that I am both a slow-starter, and that I do not want to get in the way of anyone who is taking this more seriously than I am. This is a lie: I am taking this deadly seriously, but slow and overweight athletes are not afforded the benefit of the doubt: if I were really taking this seriously, I would’ve lost the weight, I would wear shorter shorts, I’d correct my running form. Here, in Miami, I am in Corral I, the last of the last, fenced in on all sides.

Minutes before I embark on a massive athletic feat, I feel brutally unglamorous. I hate Justice Winslow’s hologrammed face glitching through the morning haze. I hate the excited women in matching MIAMI FAMOUS t-shirts in their bright orange race bibs—signifying that they are only in this for 13.1 miles, meaning that our paths will eventually diverge and I will continue onto Coconut Grove and residential areas with green and orange University of Miami flags, and they will go get brunch somewhere—pastelitos de Guayaba, maybe, mimosas, definitely. I hate Jimmy Johnson, Butch Davis, Dennis Erickson. I hate what I decide to put my body through, the way that in the starting corral, alone, there is a billboard above me with Florida’s anti-drunk driving campaign message blaring above my head: ARRIVE ALIVE, and I have to entertain the thought of not making it; that someone will find my body on Brickell Avenue, dehydrated despite all of the water in the air, gotten by the sun.

But I want to let Gloria know, step by step, I kept on counting. I want her to know that I ran strong past Star Island. That I made a left-hand turn just past the Cardozo Hotel, a property owned by her and her husband that was under an extensive remodel—the pink accent lights not yet installed, the scaffolding blocking the Art Deco accents. There comes a time in every race where you know you are going to actually make it. For me, it was at mile 24, as I reached the end of a barrier island on the Rickenbacker Causeway. I stop for a moment to take a picture—my body a part of the skyline in the background. I can’t tell you that I am gutted and rebuilt, especially as my calf muscle cramps and my skin chafes. But for a moment I am streamlined and modern—I am buttressed by the belief that times would get better.

A GLORIA STORY

It never occurred to me that what I perceived as growing up in a multi-lingual household was actually growing up in the midst of homesickness—my grandmother talked often of a time where a friend of a friend came to visit the States from Barcelona and, after about two weeks, wept openly when she made a tortilla de patatas. But there was her own loneliness too; from my grandfather working long hours, to his Alzheimer’s diagnosis—my grandmother singing as she worked, Don Francisco denying the advances of La Cuatro in the background. When asked about her favorite place she ever lived, my grandmother spoke fondly of her time in Colombia, that despite her extreme fear of snakes and bugs of all kinds, she loved her time there because she had a group of friends. I find myself missing friends too; those that have moved far away, or those that I am simply unable to see as much as I would like to at this moment. Instead, I have found myself listening to the albums of my youth in hopes of capturing something I’ve lost forever, or to find some small part I can identify with—how the synth roar of the Beast of the Rhythm unlocked something inside of me that I thought was long dormant. Or, for just a moment, I am there, at my grandmother’s kitchen table. I am there, trying to convince my parents that this was my second slice of tortilla when we all knew it was my third. I am there, while we go to commercial: Coca-Cola siempre in the background. I am there, listening to you through the voices.

Brian Oliu teaches, writes, and fights out of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His publications include three chapbooks and five full-length collections of nonfiction, ranging on topics from Craigslist Missed Connections, to computer viruses, to the Rocky film series, to the arcade game NBA Jam. His newest book of essays, What The World Has Come To: On The Spectacle of Professional Wrestling is forthcoming in 2021 by The University of North Carolina Press. Follow him on Twitter @BrianOliu.