I have attempted to contribute to debates about the body and music through a discussion of how the performance of salsa constructs a particular sense of Latin identity through the bodies of musicians. The embodiment of salsa is proposed as a way of theorising about how body and music are articulated to communicate a particular Latin cultural identity. In considering the relationship between body and music, I have stressed the cultural construction of bodies in the sense in which bodies are not neutral biological essences.

Salsa clubs in London have provided a focus for studying the construction of Latin identities as embodied and communicated by performing salsa musicians and how this is informed by specific codes of gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Throughout this essay I have argued that the embodiment of salsa develops through specific practices whereby instruments, performance techniques, vocal sounds, bodily movements and ways of dressing are encoded and experienced as part of a particular Latin identity.

I also explained how the existence of essentialist beliefs about a natural Latin body and musical abilities, although a constraint, were challenged by musicians who are making ‘Latin’ music. First, by the involvement of non-Latin musicians in playing salsa, whose practices challenged assumptions about a ‘natural’ relationship between bodies, places and music. Second, through the participation of Latin American musicians and the new styles developing from the interaction between musicians and from having to adapt to different local circumstances. Finally, I mentioned how technological devices, sometimes used to solve practical economic problems, were contributing to the re-making of a Latin music performance and identity in London. I also indicated how the use of both Spanish and English language and the involvement of women in salsa music making were also contributing to a type of salsa and Latin performance.

However, whilst musicians have been challenging the idea of essential links between ethnicity, bodies and instruments, the practices through which salsa is embodied have continued to present limitations and expectations for women according to their sexed bodies. Particular expectations about the practices of gender and sexuality became an issue for women in relation to body movements, the use of the voice and instrumental performance. In this paper, focusing on the performance and participation of musicians in the micro setting of a club, I have suggested that women's place in salsa clubs has to be negotiated in relation to what is expected from sexed bodies. This leads me to conclude that unequal relations of power are directly experienced and embodied through gender relations and practices of sexuality and in turn operate as a micro politics of the body.

Since 1993, popular music magazines in the USA such as Rolling Stone have reported the outbreak of an alternative music ‘revolution’, as bands such as Green Day (who trace their musical roots to late-1970s punk groups such as the Sex Pistols) achieve large-scale popular success. In September 1994 the Boston Globe newspaper devoted significant coverage to the free Green Day concert in Boston that was cancelled midway through as the crowd of 70,000 (comprised mostly of teenagers) threatened to overwhelm the security guards. The news media have focused their attention on the dancing known as ‘slamdancing’, or ‘moshing’, which is associated with this newly popular music. Slamdancing and moshing are two different, albeit similar, styles of dance in which participants (mostly men) violently hurl their bodies at one another in a dance area called a ‘pit’. The media attention paid to this music and its associated violent audience-behaviour paint them as emerging threats to public safety. On 10 September 1994, the Globe reported that ‘there have been severe injuries in mosh pits, where fans act out the hostile lyrics of groups such as Green Day’.

Few popular songs released over the past thirty years start so memorably: that bass riff, ominous, music for Jaws before there was Jaws, so insistent and unforgiving that in GoodFellas (1990), Scorsese has de Niro do nothing but smoke a ‘square’ and look – icily – off screen while the riff sounds its ten-note pattern. And you know what the combination of de Niro's look, those sounds and that smoke mean: somebody is going to get ‘whacked’. Cream's 1968 hit, ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, has been part of the shared culture of the world in which it has sounded for thirty years. In both Europe and America, ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ (SYL) continues to receive airplay today. At high school and college sporting events across the US, pep bands continue to play it (Dan Farris, Assistant Director of Bands, Illinois State University, personal communication, 5 March 1997). A band played it, too, in a 5 April 1997 episode of the NBC television network series, Profiler.

The analysis presented in this paper is one result of my interest in embodiment, and its potential role in the semiotic analysis of popular music. In cultural studies and symbolic anthropology, theorists often read the body as a carrier of codes, a surface for the inscription and negotiation of meaning. In popular music studies, this viewpoint often appears in fairly simple ways, and it also sometimes appears in a more subtle fashion. Richard Middleton, for example, considers the body both as a code-bearing surface, and as the ground for musical feeling, exploring how embodied experiences generate and interact with other levels of code (Middleton 1990, 1993). Similar things are done by Frith (1996), Walser (1993), Brackett 1995), and others.