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On my album launch it was the wickedest night. I wasn't sure how people were going to react but Son Veneno played their own set - their own original sounds and some covers, and I stayed out of it and then they played most of the songs form my album live with different arrangements - putting horn lines in, and it was just amazing.
Maya's first music video, 'Ordinary Night', which contains extra lyrics by Venezuelan-Australian salsa DJ Dwight 'Chocolate ' Escobar of the Spanish language hip hop group Ila Familia, is set in a salsa club, using Maya's Latin American dancing companions, and she has spoken of the negative response she got to it from the hip hop scene, which gave her added resolve to celebrate her musical 'inbetweenness':
They always say in hip hop 'keep it real' and 'be true to yourself'. So for me that was being true to myself. And I remember back then looking on some chat boards and seeing ' oh Maya she is just a booty shaker blah blah blah' … And I remember consciously trying not to dance around on stage and just rap, so when I read that I got so shook up and so angry and so hurt. I realised you are never going to win with people, you’ve just got to be yourself and feel good, and you find that people who have those confines might shut you out and say 'OK I don’t like that, for me that is not hip hop'. Other people will like the fact that you’re being yourself and letting go.
Maya's dilemma in crossing between the worlds of hip hop, salsa, and R&B, which command a much larger audience than hip hop, but is perceived by many hip hop 'heads' as being a debased commercial type of music which lacks the authenticity of hip hop, expresses a particular inflection of 'in-betweenness' which produces both positive and negative consequences. The situation of Fiona Ta'akimoeaka, one of the backing singers in Son Veneno, who is distantly related to Hau of Koolism, is another distinctive embodiment of 'in-betwenneess' involving cross-ethnic negotiations. Of Tongan extraction, in the early 1990s Fiona launched her career as a singer with Swoop, a hip hop/soul/R&B group who appeared on the first-ever compilation of Australian hip hop, Down Under by Law (1989). She later became the lead singer in Kamara, the resident band in the Sydney Latin American nightlclub La Campana from 1996 to 1998, before taking the stage name Bandida - also the name of the band she sang in, along with her Latin American husband. Fiona became particularly attached to the Cuban salsa genre of timba, which she embodied in a song entitled Mecanica:
At the time I was a mouthpiece for my husband. When I sang that song, I was expressing what he thought about himself. Now the song symbolises my own struggle to assert myself as a female singer in timba, a male-dominated genre. The lyrics express the singer's sense of self-esteem and pride at being the best at everything. Musically brilliant, sexually irresistible, charismatic, street-wise, tough and wise cracking. All the features seen as desirable for the Cuban uberman. Every time I sing it I feel a sense of empowerment. … I love timba for its aggressive male hypersexuality. As an emasculating female, timba appeals to my desire to be dominated by a male as I had been by my father who ruled with an iron fist. Sexuality was severely repressed in my household. The overt sexuality of timba is definitely an integral part of the performance of my music and my identity.
Singing Mecanica enabled her to negotiate the machismo of timba and use it as a vehicle to express powerfully her own gendered identity, as well as negotiating her own displacement and isolation from her Tongan identity, which she found a replacement for in Latin music and Latin American culture:
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As part of the diaspora, I am dislocated from an island that is not my home and yet it is defined as where I come from. In Sydney, my family lived in the eastern suburbs, again dislocated from any sense of 'Tonganness' I could have had if I had grown up with other Tongan families around me. In a sense, the search for identity is the story of my life. Through music I have sought an identity, first as a pop star and later as a salsera. Latin music is part of my identity because it fills the space where a Tongan identitywas lost. I speak better Spanish than I do Tongan and I identify with and feel at home with Latinos. Among Tongans I feel like an anomaly.
The sense of community Fiona gained from salsa, speaking Spanish and mixing with Latin Americans provided her with a public identity which she could assume through both performing songs and mixing in a Latin music environment. Her exchange of her Tongan identity for a Latin identity exemplifies the way that Frith has defined the expression of identity through music not as a direct reflection, but as an active process of imaginative creation and construction, an embodiment of ‘the mobile self’:
identity is not a thing but a process, which is most vividly grasped as music. Music seems to be a key to identity because it offers, so intensely, a sense of both self and others, of the subjective in the collective … The experience of identity describes both a social process, a form of interaction, and an aesthetic process (1996:110).
Below: Maya on stage at ArriveAlive (courtasy of http://www.fasterlouder.com.au/)
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