What kind of music did I overhear? I'd like to hear more of it.
May 9, 2019 8:59 PM   Subscribe

Briefly: single male vocalist, syllabic, lyrics maybe in Spanish? accompanied by a deep percussion instrument, in New York, at absolutely deafening volume from a passing car. What genre of music could this have been?

- Single bass vocalist, singing with a relatively staccato delivery and one pitch per syllable (i.e., not sliding a single syllable through multiple pitches like Gregorian chant). I think the melody was kind of monotonic, or at least had a very constrained range.

- I couldn't make out the words but it didn't sound like English. Maybe Spanish or Italian? Something where lots of syllables end in vowels.

- It was accompanied by an extremely deep percussion (I could feel it in my chest), playing mostly not on the strong beats of the melody. Like, imagine banging a bass drum on 3 of 4/4 time (thought probably not literally that because I'm no musicologist).

- This was in New York.

- I'm guessing from the way it faded in and then out that it was coming from a car that got stuck at a light on the street downstairs. So, (1) my description is probably omitting a lot of the higher frequencies, and (2) it must have been absolutely deafening in the car, because I was listening to this through a closed window five stories up.

It'd be great if you could link to a clip on Youtube or something, so I can compare with what I remember.
posted by meaty shoe puppet to Media & Arts (3 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Shot in the dark, J Balvan’s Mi Gente?
posted by msali at 10:02 PM on May 9, 2019


Was it pop? Did it sound like an actual percussion instrument, or a drum machine?
posted by umbú at 7:23 AM on May 10, 2019


Soca tends to go hard in the percussive range (often with drum machines or similar) -- maybe a reggaeton artist with soca influence? (searching for videos with either of those genres should get you a sampling to help trigger your memory)
posted by halation at 12:17 PM on May 10, 2019


« Older My neighbor has no boundaries   |   Is there a reference for checking whether a given... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.