I keep going past the corner of Eighth and Chew streets in Allentown every morning. And I keep seeing the ever-changing parade of Latino music performers featured there, showcased on posters on the wall of a neighborhood grocery.
(I wrote about this earlier this year in a post that you might want to go read, just ’cause it’s better than this one.)
I’d mentioned in the first post that the artists featured on the concert posters always seem to be male.
Well, a bold trailblazer has broken the pattern:
She’s called La Materialista, which seems curious, as she does not have a whole lot of material covering her ista.
I said in my prior post that I like to imagine the individual performers’ styles just from looking at their pictures, and the same goes for La Materialista.
Do you think she sings about nothing but gold-digging, or does she slip a few heartfelt ballads into the party-and-bling rotation?
Is she unashamedly all about the good times, or does she have a well-hidden (by what I’m not sure) heart of gold?
And what about Chimbala? Is he an equal partner onstage — portraying the sugar daddy, perhaps — or does he just stand in the back and work the turntables? (He gets top billing without having to burst out of his clothes, so he must do something fantastic.)
Are they someday going to end up in a relationship reminiscent of the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me?,” with Chimbala insisting he made La Materialista a star, and La Materialista insisting she would have made it without him?
If I wanted to go to Allentown’s Maingate nightclub on Oct. 3, I suppose I could find out most of this stuff for real.
But it is more fun to fill in the blanks myself.
Because even a poster that leaves little to the imagination can get my creative juices flowing.
Neck Pickup 