What They Wrote...About La Lupe
A Carnegie Hall show and a media storm.
In 1969, the year that she recorded La Lupe…Es la Reina/La Lupe the Queen for Tico Records, members of the American media compared the Cuban singer to Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, Edith Piaf, Eartha Kitt, Gypsy Rose Lee and the Wicked Witch of the West in the movie The Wizard of Oz. Writers noted her accent: “She fractures English like a fox.” And her smell: “Her scent is a mixture of French perfume and Juicy Fruit.” And they reported with awe her spellbinding onstage behavior that notoriously included removing her shoes and pulling off any restricting clothing, laughing with abandon, orgasmically shouting “ay ay” and riffing on whatever entered her mind.
“She then began to rap about life, her breasts, Oriente Province where she was born, and skin color,” the critic and composer Carman Moore wrote in New York’s Village Voice. “She said, holding up her ample bosom, ‘in this life if you ain’t got quality, you gotta have quantity…One minute she would be singing of passionate tropical love, the next moment she was talking like your neighbor about the world, then suddenly she was singing some wild African-inflected up-tempo, flinging herself about the stage, pulling at her clothes, waving and tying her rainbow of silk scarves, and crossing herself as if ritually against the Devil.”
Perhaps it was Fred Weinberg, listed on the credits of that album as La Lupe’s favorite engineer, who would later say it most succinctly: “She was like a hurricane coming through the door.”