LEARNED ELDERS: Gabriel Duenez

Gabriel Duenez has achieved fame in recent years as a guy who, according to urban legend, spearheaded a musical movement called cumbia rebajada, which is basically cumbia music slowed down to a slower pace, so that the bass bumps higher from the pitch shifts in sound, and the snares and high ends pop a little more, with vocals turning ghostly. The story of how he discovered this sound, like anything, is murky at best, and with word-of-mouth being involved, who knows if he was actually even the guy to do it, to first have batteries die in a radio pumping at a dance, but loving the warbled sound so much that he purposely recorded from 7-inch records in that manner to create mixtapes he sold at the Monterrey flea market in Mexico of nothing but slowed down warbled cumbia music. The sound, when combined with mind-altering substances, is really pleasing.
But in the context of Learned Elders, the lesson with Duenez is not fame, because he does not have that, except for in tiny corners of the internet (this part included now, I guess) where guys who have nothing better to do with their time than dig through all sorts of music that has no cultural relation to their immediate life can prop this guy up as The Creator of a Sound. In real life, you know where Gabriel Duenez is? Fixing air conditioners as an old ass Mexican man somewhere in or around Houston, Texas, turning screwdrivers with old hands that used to hold vinyl records with obsessive love. Being the cumbia rebajada guy has meant very little in the way of propping his life up on a pedestal, beyond the adulation of those not present in his life. Like, he will never probably know about this Learned Elder thing, nor will his death be broadcast in major newspapers, so the old guy may pass on to the next world and I'll never know.
But he loved music, and not playing it but listening to it and sharing what he loved with others, and sat in a Mexican flea market selling tapes to anyone who would want one. Life was life, and he ended up working on air conditioners in Texas as an old man, those high life days of playing music for shaking asses back in the '60s faded memories, replacing thermostats and cleaning filters and smelling the dusty muck of stagnant water at the bottom of an AC tray.
The Learned Elders Hall is for the students of my Rojonekku school, and I know a lot of this Gabriel Duenez write-up sounds like internet pretentiousness, but for the Rojonekku kids, the lesson is a man who loved something, shared something, and ultimately got nothing material out of the arrangement. Yet his life started something in motion that has spread beyond him, and he probably doesn't even realize it. That's the beauty of what you can do as a person. You may never be rewarded financially for what you take on as your life's passion, and to expect to have that happen is naive, and often times actually compromises that passion in the process. But there's something noble and beautiful and perfectly pure about shooting those passions out to the world, and the ripples reverberate, whether you see them or not. Ultimately, with the transplanting of Rojonekku kids in other states, that's my goal as well. It moves beyond you, into other worlds, and just spirals on its own. You start something and let it spiral. It is probably better a lot of times not to turn it into money, because then you start to feel ownership of what it is that is spiraling out, and you want to control it, so as to maximize the profit factor. But you can't control the spirals and ripples you create; and by trying to, you destroy them.