Lagu dona dona full#
The song itself, of course, is another simple pleasure, especially the frenzied breakdown at the end: just drums and voices, Afro-Caribbean fundamentals, doubling down on the chorus: “ La vida me cuesta/¿quién me la paga?” Under the pressure of repetition, the lyric phrase releases its full range of meanings. She wrote “Quién Me La Paga” jamming with old friends, Camilo Landau and Ayla Dávila, commiserating over the city’s impossible rents and invoking the simple pleasures that sweeten the hustle: steaming coffee, cold beer, a fresh set of acrylics. Her songwriting first emerged through the call and response that generates invention within traditional Latin forms even her recorded music, despite its electronic flourishes, fizzes with embodied, improvisational energy. La Doña has been a live performer since she took up trumpet in her family’s conjunto, playing regional Mexican music, at age 7. To her great relief, she was still making money as a Latin-music analyst for Pandora and as a teacher with SF Jazz on Zoom, putting her home training in music theory to work.īut as an artist, she felt frozen - with anger, with fear and with the disoriented grief of losing the human context for her creativity.
La Doña’s management urged her to take on each and every virtual gig - for “exposure,” that dreaded euphemism for exploitation. She went from playing to crowds of 7,000 to livestreaming for a couple of hundred dollars and handling all the tech herself: sound, video, production, editing. La Doña’s national tour - which was set to begin with South by Southwest - was canceled. Her face appeared on a billboard in Times Square then, suddenly, Midtown was deserted. The previous year, La Doña was one of 14 artists from around the world selected for the Foundry, the YouTube incubator that jump-started the careers of Rosalía, Dua Lipa and CHLOE x HALLE. The apocalyptic fantasy of “Cuando Se Van” yielded to the quotidian desperation of “Quién Me La Paga.” And La Doña’s careful plans for her triumphant debut blew away like a castle in the sky, “ un barrio compuesto de nubes.” cities by the rich - I witnessed it in Manhattan, too - was not the harbinger of a new era of equitable distribution. She felt almost guilty, “like oh, no, evil prophetic me” (her middle name is Cassandra, after all). On the phone this February, La Doña told me how, in the early weeks of the pandemic, “we saw all the tech offices shut down, people leaving in droves.” The exodus seemed to play out the vision of cosmic justice she had articulated in another song from “Algo Nuevo,” “Cuando Se Van”: “ Sueño con terremotos/la ciudad pa’ nosotros.” Maybe the disaster would chase out the opportunists, las ratas que quieren comer nuestro pan. The venue hadn’t canceled yet, but the call she had to make was clear, and in the hollow solitude that followed, she hung the roses from her ceiling to dry. Her kitchen was filled with buckets of pink roses. Her release party was scheduled for that night she had already paid out the deposits, sold out the tickets. La Doña’s first EP, “Algo Nuevo,” dropped on March 12, 2020, the same day Disneyland announced it would shut down. “Quién Me La Paga” alchemized the pressure of those conditions, La Doña’s voice ringing with lucid power: “ La vida, sí amor, me cuesta.” Life - yes, my love - costs me. Privatization, accelerated by the tech industry, had left the city’s social safety net in tatters and pushed generations of Black and Latinx residents to the outskirts, where many worked three jobs to maintain a toehold. But even before the pandemic, her community of working musicians, public-school teachers, graffiti writers and activists was in crisis. The lost, forbidden pleasures are all immortalized onscreen. No one knew it would be the last time they’d gather like that - passing spliffs, breathing in each other’s humid music - for a year and counting. Not long after, off-camera, the whole scene came to life again to celebrate her father’s retirement from 35 years in the city’s Department of Public Works - service sustained always by a parallel practice of virtuosic play. This is the lifelong party that incubated her versatile, confident musicianship as the artist known as La Doña.
We follow her fluent swerve between stove and living-room dance floor as the first scratch of the güira sets the rhythm - cumbia! - then, when the chorus hits, the distinctive dembow of reggaeton, a decidedly millennial mash-up. We’re in her childhood home in Bernal Heights, San Francisco, where the floral carpet forgives festive spills and her father and sister crowd the couch on accordions. The video for “Quién Me La Paga” begins with Cecilia Peña-Govea testing the broth from a simmering pot of pinto beans, careful not to smudge her dark lipstick.