Troubled Men

This essay intervenes in recent scholarly discussions of gender and masculinity in Dominican literary and cultural studies through an analysis of the music of Luis “Terror” Días (1952–2009), a composer recognized today as the most innovative in Dominican musical history. Días pioneered the transformation of bachata, vernacular rock, and fusion music into new genres whose form and content reflect the social changes taking place during the last quarter of the twentieth century in the Dominican Republic. Following the theorist Kaiama L. Glover’s notion of the “disorderly,” the author argues that Días’s music “disordered” community expectations of authenticity and fiercely denounced political corruption and repression, as well as social, racial, and gender injustices. As the first male composer to take on the cause of women and to write songs from their perspective, Días also addressed the condition of what the author calls “troubled men,” marginalized figures deeply affected by brutal socioeconomic dispossession who appear either broken or as devising strategies to “live the good life.” This essay also redresses the invisibility of Días, who was more than a composer; he was a researcher and a thinker with enormous influence on his generation and the ones that followed, and his aesthetic impact remains largely unexplored in Caribbean cultural studies.