Cav Wins

I have never met this young fella, but I have been listening to his songs for a while. Smeekies made me a cd of his music and sent it with love all the way to Colombia, where I was in Cali, listening to the same hip-hop songs over and again, missing the hardness of the R, the deliberateness of the D, F, or T, the obnoxiousness of the long AAAAAAAAA, etc. I had come to realize that I was much more gringa/nyc/sf than salsera, obviously, and while I loved the beauty and sing-song nature of the Spanish language, I craved the jokes and the meaning and the references and the couplets that I grew up listening to...and me, much much much less than many...I remember feeling proud singing in my hammock in barrio toño, even if I was not born and raised in BK. This man on stage is a chief, a capitan, a boxer, a commander, a samurai, whatever...his words are equally spoken and woven, his movements equally graceful and forced. It's like there are a hundred more men inside of him when he performs. Anyway, he made this one song called "Dionne" that I fell in love with. It never gets old. Not sure why. It has something to do with the fact that it never crests, and something to do with the way he ends/doesn't end his sentences/thoughts...it's like the song was torn out of a paragraph in an unfinished chapter of an unpublished diary of incomplete thoughts that he was writing in throughout his high school years...and so, it never peaks...we are suspended.

Here he is performing with a feather in his hair, last Saturday in Brooklyn.