Wandering through a street fair near Canal Street years ago, I stumbled upon a stall brimming with bootleg CDs spanning hip-hop, rock, and various genres. These weren’t just blatant album copies, but unique mixes. Having previously encountered similar finds in Manhattan – a budget-friendly Beck album on Varick Street and fascinating bossa nova and Americana collections near St. Mark’s Place – I thought I knew what to expect. However, this particular vendor held a surprise.
One CD, labeled Best of Freestyle, caught my eye. The artist names – Nice N Wild, Sa Fire, Freeze – were unfamiliar. I assumed they were obscure old-school rappers from hip-hop’s golden era, lost to mainstream history. Eager to discover hidden gems, I gladly paid $10 for several CDs and continued my stroll. Back home, the Best of Freestyle disc revealed an unexpected soundscape: an album pulsating with dance beats and powerful diva vocals, far removed from my hip-hop associations with the term “freestyle.” The disco-infused, techno-tinged rhythms and catchy pop choruses sounded anything but spontaneous or improvisational.
It turned out I had stumbled upon Freestyle, a vibrant subgenre of Dance Music 80s that thrived in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While its initial flame faded, occasional nostalgic revivals have kept its embers glowing. Freestyle’s influence was primarily concentrated within the Latin music scenes of New York, Miami, and Los Angeles, though a handful of hits managed to cross over into the broader American popular music landscape. Despite its cultural significance, scholarly attention to the genre has been minimal, with a notable exception being music scholar Alexandra Vazquez’s insightful piece in Social Text (2010). Vazquez’s work illuminates Freestyle’s profound meaning within the social lives of Latinas growing up in the 1980s, extending beyond Miami to resonate with young women in “Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, and especially Long Island and the Bay Area.” (113)
To the untrained ear, Freestyle music is undeniably dance music 80s through and through. Yet, unlike many genres from that decade, it hasn’t experienced a widespread revival by contemporary musicians in the 21st century. While indie rockers have embraced the quirky charm of New Wave synth-pop and old school hip-hop maintains a dedicated following, Freestyle remains largely in the shadows. Even Stephen Alex Vasquez’s documentary Electro Wars, highlighting the resurgence of electro and house dance music 80s subgenres, overlooks Freestyle. Similar to go-go, a genre intensely popular in Washington D.C. but lacking mainstream crossover, Freestyle has been often bypassed in music history recollections.
Like Bruce Springsteen’s anthemic “Born to Run,” Freestyle’s unrestrained and joyful spirit evokes pure, unadulterated pleasure. Imagine a giant, juicy cheeseburger, piled high with all the fixings. Or envision the emotional intensity of classics like “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” or “Pride (In the Name of Love).” Freestyle tracks possess that same explosive energy, perfect for a high-octane mixtape fueled by coffee, Adderall, or a shot of espresso. They occupy a similar space for semi-ironic enthusiasm and passionate expression that “Don’t Stop Believing” has carved out for a new generation of hipster 80s enthusiasts and Glee devotees.
Classic Freestyle tracks, exemplified by Brenda K. Starr’s “Picking Up the Pieces,” layer sharp, almost staccato beats over lush synth arrangements and repetitive, melodic choruses. These songs often exude an exuberant femininity, oscillating between lighthearted bubblegum pop and melodramatic confessions reminiscent of traditional flamenco. Both male and female Freestyle vocalists typically deliver unabashedly emotional performances. One critic dismissively labeled the style “synth-heavy bubble-salsa of Lisa Lisa and her big-haired descendants.” While “bubble-salsa” sounds intriguing, the “big-hair” jab likely reflects either a general aversion to 80s stylistic excess or a disdain for female performers with bold personas, common in dance music 80s culture.
(Brenda K. Starr, interestingly, was born Brenda Kaplan, with a Puerto Rican and Catholic mother and a Jewish father who played organ in the 1960s one-hit wonder Spiral Starecase. Could she be a missing link connecting 60s pop, dance music 80s, and 90s indie rock?)
Backing vocals in Freestyle often alternate between harmonious blends and trembling counterpoints. Jon Pareles aptly described “a chirpy, girlish vocal dispensing come-ons or back-offs. Those voices . . . are a little flat, a little raw, and they might have a tinge of a Bronx or Spanish accent; they sound like streetwise city teenagers.” (116) Many female Freestyle vocalists employed a raw, untrained vocal style similar to Madonna’s pre-Evita sound, leading critics like Pareles to dub them “Clones of Madonna” in a 1987 article examining dance music 80s trends. Corina’s biggest hit, 1991’s “Temptation,” even features a musical sequence reminiscent of the funky breakdown in Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” released two years prior. Madonna’s track expanded her sacrilegious power ballad into an ecumenical celebration of multiculturalism and sexuality, a common theme in dance music 80s.
However, Corina might have found more kinship with a different female iconoclast. Intriguingly, she portrayed Frida Kahlo in Tim Robbins’s 1999 Depression-era film Cradle Will Rock. This role is telling, as it reflects Corina’s position as a passionate artist often subject to male egos within the music industry. As Alexandra Vazquez emphasizes, artists like Nayobe Gomez navigated a music business that often objectified them as sex symbols, mere pawns for predominantly male producers – even influential figures like Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin. The 1985 film Krush Groove, a fictionalized account of Def Jam Records’ early days, depicts Simmons and Rubin treating Gomez with blatant disregard during her audition in their NYU dorm. Despite auditioning Gomez in a seemingly informal setting, Simmons and Rubin wielded significant cultural, economic, and gender power, ultimately dictating Gomez’s fate. Ultimately, despite achieving some mainstream success and a dedicated Freestyle fanbase, Corina’s broader impact remains understated. She lacks an Allmusic.com entry and receives only a brief mention on Wikipedia. Adding insult to injury, Allmusic gives one of her albums a mere two stars and no review, a fate undeserved for a contributor to dance music 80s.
Freestyle’s fleeting mainstream success and appeal to a somewhat geographically confined and often overlooked audience makes it a prime example of music that finds enduring life through bootleg formats. Vazquez observes that “so many of its recordings circulate in the informal channels of cultural economy (bootlegs, mix tapes, and used-record stores),” echoing my encounter with the street vendor in New York. Numerous artists and genres, deemed commercially unviable by the very industry that initially released their work, are left to rely on fans and collectors to reconstruct their shared musical past from fragmented copies. Even if a genre resonates with thousands nationwide, the dispersed nature of its dedicated listeners may not warrant shelf space in major retailers across the country. The rise of iTunes and the “long tail” phenomenon offers new avenues for niche tastes to be bought and sold digitally. However, artists with smaller but passionate followings may still lack the resources to navigate the legal and logistical complexities of making their music officially accessible. As Vazquez concludes:
The consumption of freestyle by its broader fan base is far from what Will Straw once called the “cultivation of connoisseurship in rock culture.” Freestyle’s aficionado is not one who necessarily owns or thrills in the fetish of the rare record, undiscovered track, or drunkenly signed- over instrument. It is an unapologetically greatest-hits-based fandom, less persnickety about its trivia and systems of knowledge. This greatest-hits culture allows for the recognition of authorship, the retention of those voices that would otherwise be quickly dismissed. In urban music scholar- ship, it is the genre’s producers who are named, remembered, and given work. Freestyle’s fandom, on the other hand, has generated an ex post facto authorship that places the vocalists center stage. (112)
