Devendra Banhart and Greivis Vasquez: helped along by the Venezuelan social underbrush

I had heard about Venezuelan basketball player at the University of Maryland, Greivis Vasquez, and had seen him in action on TV. I had never heard of U.S. singer Devendra Banhart, who spent his childhood and early adolescence in Venezuela. Today, Sunday November 8, I read stories on them, Barnhart’s in the NYT (“Stirring Ska, Rock, R&B and hip-hop into a Freak Folk Stew”, by John Caramanca) and Vasquez’s in the Washington Post (“Court Drama”, by Steve Yanda). Although these two young people are in very different walks of life the stories suggest similar unorthodox personalities that could be, at least partly, due to their Venezuelan upbringing.
Banhart was born in Houston and, as a child, was taken to Caracas, Venezuela, by his mother as a child, returning to the U.S. as an adolescent. Although he has a rather fragile memory of local music (he mentions samba as Venezuelan typical music) he does remember the Venezuelan Christmas songs, the “aguinaldos” and, specially, the “tonadas”, which he calls, more or less correctly, the “indigenous Venezuelan song”. He says that the man who put these songs in vogue, Simon Diaz, influenced him greatly, not only musically but as a man who inspired his fellow Venezuelans by singing to the beauty of the country instead of being, as is often the case in Venezuela, politically oriented. He could be “subversive”, Banhart says, “He was a hero, a legend”. In the story Banhart also lists Mariah Carey as an early influence, herself the daughter of a Venezuelan father.
Today Banhart is quite a musical success in the U.S. I heard him singing Gershwin’s “Summertime” and I thought he stank, although a musical critic called this rendition “magnifique”. Banhart’s musical style has been called psych folk and is associated with the genre defined as “new weird America”. Other singers in the same style carry the poetic names of Megapuss, Vetiver and CocoRosie. Banhart is no traditional personality. His voice quivers in an unpleasant manner for my taste. He is seen “as a fellow too strange to fit into the regular. parameters of rock'n'roll”. His lack of self-consciousness and inhibitions could be, at least, partly due to his growing up in the carefree Caracas of the 1990’s.
Vasquez is more typically Venezuelan than Banhart, who has strong U.S. and Hindu cultural influences. He is also more politically oriented, as he seems to like “his president” (Hugo Chavez) and finds in his pride of country and people a powerful motivation for his athletic excellence. The similarities with Banhart include the type of role models he picked up along the way, three men of the Venezuelan lower middle-class who have inspired him to excel: Gonzalez, whom he calls uncle although he is not a relative, his basketball idol, Colina and his father, Gregorio, who always kept him on the right side of the law, a side hard to maintain in the poor “barrios” of Caracas. Gonzalez managed to arrange for Vasquez to travel to the U.S. and helped him to find his way to the University of Maryland. There basketball coach Gary Williams “bore the same white-knuckled drive and immense passion that he saw in his new point guard. They would occasionally clash, as those types of personalities often do, but their devotion to each other strengthened exponentially as Vasquez's career unfolded”.
As Houston’s Banhart found a strong inspiration in Venezuelan ballad composer Simon Diaz, Caracas’ Vasquez has found it in Maryland, under Coach Williams, whom he respects and loves. Much of his drive to success is based on his sense of identification with his family, on his desire to do well for his country and his people. He is a young man with a mission. As he inches closer to the NBA he feels all Venezuelans are watching him, hoping that he succeeds.
Both Banhart and Vasquez seem to have had another thing in common: a strong mother at their sides. In the case of Banhart she was the one who made the major decisions during his childhood and adolescence. In the case of Vasquez she was consistently supportive. Vasquez’s father preferred baseball to basketball and tried to recruit his son for that sport. But Vasquez jr. says: “I went for basketball because in baseball it takes too long to get the ball”.
Banhart and Vasquez are two young men of these times, both in a hurry and supremely self-confident. Yet their tense personalities could prove surprisingly vulnerable to the dangers of failure that lurk in their chosen careers.