![]() ![]() The genre isn’t made to accommodate flashy guitar solos or even spotlight-grabbing vocal turns it’s a music of granular details perpetually being folded back into the mix, and that’s also true of Althea & Donna’s 1977 single “Uptown Top Ranking.” When they recorded their response to Trinity’s 1975 hit “ Three Piece Suit,” Jamaican singers Althea Forrest and Donna Reid used the same Alton Ellis riddim that Trinity had for his song. –Isabelia Herrera Althea & Donna: “Uptown Top Ranking” ![]() It felt like finally getting permission to not “make sense,” to embrace the process of becoming-to know that I could exist both imperfectly and impossibly. That I could love emo as much as I loved bachata. When Ivy spit “No soy de hierro/Yo soy una mujer” (“I’m not made of iron I’m a woman”), it gave me the means to recognize that being vulnerable and being powerful were not disparate ways of being. At 14, I imagined an entire lifetime in the space of this song, a future romance turned sour when I was old enough to understand love. The song is about vengeance: Ivy promises retaliation to an unfaithful lover, in spite of her heartache. Ivy’s coarse baritone, the requinto guitar riffs, and the dembow riddim that hits around the 32-second mark is a potent storm of melancholia. chasing some futile sense of reconnection to the island that shaped me. “Te He Querido, Te He Llorado” (“I Have Loved You, I Have Cried for You”) is a bachatón song, a style of reggaetón that felt like it was made specifically for me, a Dominican kid growing up in the U.S.
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