Hay Que Venir al Sur | Cu-Cu-Cu Cumbia!
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“Hay Que Venir al Sur” is a column from music journalist and Songmess podcast host Richard Villegas. Winking to the campy classic from Italian disco diva Raffaella Carrà, the column, like the song, is an invitation to explore the kaleidoscopic music scenes blossoming south of the border. Today, a crash course in cumbia, Latin America’s rhythmic lingua franca.
It’s not lost on me that a healthy portion of the people reading these nerdy music rants are not fluent Spanish speakers. Hell, you’re likely not even Latinos. So if you’re feeling like a stranger in a strange land, let me clue you in on a crucial trait most Latin American folk share: we are deeply competitive. I’m serious. Crusades over flan and fútbol supremacy have raged with equal fervor in stadiums and our abuelitas’ living rooms. Peru and Chile literally went to war over who mixes the best pisco sour. Ok, there might have been more to that . . . But if there’s one area where we all find common ground—beyond horrifying colonial trauma and pervasive Catholicism—it’s cumbia. The popular musical genre is a universal soundtrack for weddings, quinceañeras, Sunday afternoon block parties, farmers’ markets, political rallies, and an oddly specific phenomenon of neon-lit public buses. Cumbia is the sound of daily Latin American life, a constant percussive pulse that varies from country to country but promotes mutual celebration rather than silly rivalries. After all, everyone loves dancing.
In less romantic terms, cumbia is based on a 2/4 rhythm that can be accelerated to produce rapturous anthems like La Sonora Dinamita’s ubiquitous “Que Nadie Sepa Mi Sufrir,” or slowed down to a hypnotic lurch in cumbia rebajada or cumbia ambient. Follow its roots back to Colombia’s Caribbean coast, where a melting pot of Indigenous and African percussion (güiro, congas) bled into European melodic traditions from piano and guitar. Its etymology stems from the Bantu concept of kumbé, meaning “dance” or “party,” understood as a social experience, and underscoring its diasporic legs. Cumbia is a pillar of Mexico’s sound-system culture (sonidero), influencing psychedelic movements in Peru (chicha), and providing an essential mouthpiece for low-income communities in Argentina (cumbia villera). It was hybridized with rock to launch the storied careers of Caifanes and Son Rompe Pera, and created inroads for reggaeton through the influential cumbiatón bootlegs of DJ Pablito Mix in Mexico, and Argentine RKT superstar L-Gante. Even in the United States, cumbia rings with familiarity, thanks to the transcendence of Tex-Mex queen, Selena.
Cumbia is pliable and ever-adapting, becoming a sort of Latin American lingua franca. The trailblazing electronic experiments of Polibio Mayorga in 1960s Ecuador share little with the tropi-goth hybrids of Colombia’s La MiniTK Del Miedo, but the nostalgia and bouncy güiro scratches that run through both are universal. For a more robust cumbia deep dive, I recommend watching the 2019 Netflix original film Ya No Estoy Aquí, which puts a beautiful spotlight on Monterrey’s Cholombiano scene, and the recently published Cumbia Somos, which compiles essays breaking down the many branches of this lush sonic world tree.
For our own little adventure, I figured we could traipse through cumbia’s most notable enclaves, throwing in some sociohistorical context and plenty of tunes to keep you grooving. Brace for sequined orchestras, hand-painted roadside “espectaculares,” and a surprising amount of memes ahead, but that’s just the tip of the guacharaca.
Listen while you read:
Colombia
Where better to begin than at the beginning? Both Colombia’s Caribbean and Pacific coasts are among the most rhythmically diverse on the continent, in no small part due to African traditions of music, dance, language, and food woven into the fabric of contemporary society. In 1619, the northern town of San Basilio de Palenque became the first haven for free and escaped slaves in the Americas, a spirit of resilience that still lives through guardians of tradition Sexteto Tabalá and Totó la Momposina, and futurists Kombilesa Mí and Lido Pimienta. Meanwhile, along the Pacific, spiritual songs of worship called arrullos and alabados are passed down through generations and accompanied by tambor alegre (or happy drum) and marimba. Currulao and chirimía melodies linger in the air of cities like Chocó, Cali, and Tumaco, and the most notable ambassadors—including Canalón de Timbiquí, Ruca y El Quinde de Barbacoas, and Alexis Play—gather annually at the world-famous Petronio Álvarez Festival. Tracing Colombia’s rhythmic roots can make for its own rabbit hole. Go deeper with this story I wrote a few months back, and for extra credit, spend some very rewarding time with the catalogs of Palenque Records, Discos Pacífico, and Llorona Records.
Now, if you’re already familiar with the sound of cumbia, it’s likely because Andrés Landero, Lucho Bermúdez, and Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto popularized the genre’s modern composition style. Bermúdez is one of the most influential Latin American big band arrangers of the XX Century, while Landero and Los Gaiteros adapted folk songs of the Colombian countryside into catchy, radio-friendly tunes. Colombian cumbia prominently features the accordion, often performed by frontmen such as Landero and later his son Yeison, as well as Carmelo Torres. Accordion is also the heartbeat of vallenato—cumbia’s even peppier sister—which empowered performers Lisandro Meza, Diomedes Diaz, and even pop superstar Carlos Vives to dance across genre lines.
Though the coast is still home to the purest expressions of cumbia, metropolises like Medellín and Bogotá fostered necessary evolution, polishing tropical music into one of the country’s top exports. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Medellín label Discos Fuentes was the foremost hub of tropical orchestras, boasting standard-bearers Fruko y Sus Tesos and Michi Sarmiento y Sus Bravos. In the new millennium, Bogotá drew the international gaze with militant intellectuals Meridian Brothers, Frente Cumbiero, and Romperayo, who ushered in an age of transgressive, independent cumbia projects. Today, an even younger generation of tropi-scientists imbues tradition with experimental textures and humor, stirring deafening buzz around Felipe Orjuela, La Perla, Conjunto Media Luna, Los Cotopla Boyz, Mau Gatiyo, La Sonora Mazurén, Rizomagic, and many more.
Mexico
In my personal experience, Mexican cumbia is more a matter of “where” than “when,” with the country’s two most notable movements flourishing in Mexico City and Monterrey over the past fifty years. The sprawling, densely populated capital is home to iconic orchestras Grupo Kual?, Alberto Pedraza’s Super Grupo Colombia, and the legitimately world famous Los Ángeles Azules. The latter’s playful tagline, “De Iztapalapa para el mundo” (or “From Iztapalapa to the world”), is synonymous with Chilango cumbia and grounds the music in its own corner of the world. Most Ángeles Azules fans likely have no idea what Iztapalapa looks like, but they certainly know how it sounds.
Location is especially important when discussing cumbia sonidera. In the simplest terms, this is music performed with electronic amplification that facilitates deeper bass lines, quirky synthesizers, and even digital sampling. It’s usually studio-made rather than stage-honed, and closely associated with inner-city iconography. Global anthems like Raymix’s “Oye Mujer” and Grupo Soñador’s “El Paso del Gigante” are shorthand for the shimmering subgenre, but an element of barrio is also needed to achieve the secret sauce. Cumbia sonidera’s lo-fi irreverence extends to sonideros: neighborhood sound systems where local DJs chop and screw classics in real time while shouting out friends, family, and next week’s calendar of christenings and quinceañeras. Sonideros are emblematic of rough-and-tumble districts like Tepito and Tacubaya, although Sonido Confirmación and Sonido La Changa have taken the party around the globe. Nostalgia for this kitschy, folksy style has also influenced contemporary indie darlings Sonido Gallo Negro, Amantes del Futuro, Camilo Lara’s Mexican Institute of Sound, and Ali Gua Gua.
Where Mexico City’s tightly quartered neighborhoods coated cumbia in streetwise urban grime, the North’s more laid-back vibe was informed by música mexicana’s downhome earnestness. You might remember the twangy realm of corridos and banda sinaloense from the previous edition of this column, but in short: cowboys dance too. In Sonora, tubas and clarinets put a Bavarian polka twist on barn burners from Grupo La Kaña and Los Pikadientes de Caborca. Back in the ’90s, Tamaulipas’s Grupo Mojado delivered one of cumbia’s all-time heartbreakers with “Piensa en Mí,” while a decade later, a scene of Tijuana nihilists melded tropical music with punk and noise and called it Ruidosón. And just across the border, Texas icons Bobby Pulido and Intocable brought Southwestern bravado to hits “Desvelado” and “Soñador Eterno,” respectively.
The most cohesive cumbia scene in Northern Mexico can be found in Monterrey, Nuevo León, where accordion master Celso Piña y Su Ronda Bogotá, alongside trailblazing rap group Control Machete, harnessed the sonic melange booming in the city’s barrios. They were gods to a subculture known as Cholombianos, known for gravity-defying hairstyles, flamboyant dance moves, and a predilection for vintage cumbia and vallenato records. Monterrey is also the birthplace of cumbia rebajada, a slimy, warped sound discovered/invented by Gabriel Dueñez aka Sonido Dueñez when a malfunctioning turntable slowed his records and added fascinating new dimension. La Tropa Vallenata’s “Satanás” and Sabor Kolombia’s aptly titled “Cumbia Rebajada” defined these unique reinterpretations, later expanded by Toy Selectah and Nurrydog.
Andean Cumbia
As I mentioned earlier, cumbia is a melting pot of sounds where communities each bring their own flavor, and nowhere is this recipe more evident than in the Andean region. Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, Peruvian farmers migrating from the mountains into metropolitan Lima melded harp strings and regional folk songs from Quechua Huayno with the percussive cumbia of records pouring in from neighboring Colombia. Additionally influenced by the rise of psychedelic rock in the United States, Mexico, and Argentina, Peru quickly became the capital of guitar-driven, reverb-heavy cumbia, later dubbed as chicha, with a woozy neon-art style to match. Los Mirlos, Los Shapis, Chacalón, and Los Wembler’s de Iquitos epitomized this mind-expanding sound. In subsequent decades, synthesizers sparked the age of techno-cumbia and its eventual pop crossover through campy soloists Rossy War, Wendy Sulca, and La Tigresa del Oriente. The advent of the Internet would later rekindle and recontextualize these legends as crate digger’s delight, and electronic producers Dengue Dengue Dengue, Deltratrón, and Tribilin Sound gleefully sampled and evolved these tunes for the global dance floor.
Over in Ecuador, cumbia’s popularity is also indebted to Colombia’s booming tropical music industry, which shaped the repertoires of party bands everywhere. Tired of performing covers, composer and accordionist Polibio Mayorga released “Cumbia Triste” in 1967, widely recognized as Ecuador’s first original entry in the genre. The song was an instant smash and is one of the most widely recognized pieces in the cumbia canon. But he wasn’t done yet. Before the decade was out, Mayorga traveled to New York City, where he purchased a cutting-edge Moog synthesizer, a Mellotron, and a Vocoder that gave later hits “Ponchito de Colores” and “Bien Bailadito” a Kubrickian, space-age bent. Today, his experiments are traceable everywhere from techno-cumbia stars Delfín Quishpe and Nelly Janeth, to indie weirdos Lolabúm and Letelefono.
Hip psychedelia and futurism manifested in Bolivia as well, where Grupo Maroyu and America Pop dominated techno-cumbia, while Los Ronisch and Grupo Iberia injected their many hits with a jagged rock edge. Also nodding to the countryside folk that fueled chicha in Peru, Los Brothers De Bolivia made Andean charangos and pan flutes the melodic centerpieces of their catalog, later referenced by popular Mexican cumbia andina group Los Askis. Further South, in Chile, Sonora Palacios and Amparito Jiménez made cumbia a 1970s ballroom fixture, a far cry from its many post-Y2K iterations in Chico Trujillo’s barrio anthems, Américo’s chart-topping cumbia ballads, and Kali Mutsa’s confounding mystical collages.
Argentina
The further away we get from cumbia’s Caribbean roots, the more variations begin to appear. Argentine cumbia is rife with exciting subgenres and mutations, first making a splash in the mid-1950s with Los Wawancó, and gradually cross-pollinating with tango, chamamé, and the boozy upbeat melodies of cuarteto cordobés. Formed in La Plata, Los Wawancó were composed of immigrant musicians from Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, and Chile, highlighting cumbia’s inherent wanderlust and diplomatic prowess. With the tropical music boom of the ’60s and ’70s, regional interpretations emerged across the country, giving way to Santa Fe’s big band icons Los Palmeras, and Jujuy’s Grupo Sombras, who incorporated Bolivian keys and bass drum (the latter known as bombo legüero). As in Peru and Mexico, the ’90s saw a massive pop crossover for theatrical soloists Gilda, Alcides, and Lía Crucet, as well as the rise of cumbia sonidera ensembles Ráfaga and Santamarta, blueprints for later favorites La Delio Valdez and Orquesta Popular Barrilete.
The next decisive chapter in Argentine cumbia came in 2001, following a devastating economic collapse that left shanties called villas miseria scattered throughout metropolitan areas. Cumbia’s long history as music of the disenfranchised made it a natural canvas for gritty new stories loaded with double entendre. The resulting cumbia villera explosion made folk heroes out of Damas Gratis, Pibes Chorros, Yerba Brava, and Mala Fama, who amplified their sound with Brazilian batucada drums popular at protests and fútbol games and in the process becoming the preferred soundtrack of both. Over the following years, a growing bootleg culture and the mainstreaming of reggaeton propelled cumbia villera into a youthful new subgenre dubbed cumbia turra, epitomized by countless viral videos starring Las Culisueltas and Los Wachiturros. And as Argentina’s ebullient trap movement defined the final years of the 2010s, L-Gante and La Joaqui dipped in the cumbia pool to craft the hyper-stylized amalgamations of RKT (Reggaeton-Kumbia-Trap).
Argentina also played a leading role in the last scene we’ll be exploring today . . .
The Internet
You might ask yourself, “Does the Internet actually count as a place or scene?” I don’t know about you, but ever since I first held a smartphone, I’ve spent about half my time immersed in what’s happening on the other side of the screen. Of course, the Internet revolutionized how we access and promote music as well as how it’s created. Today’s musicians are seldom influenced by the bands playing on radio and in local bars, rather by new releases populated into their algorithmic Spotify playlists every Friday. And in many cases, artists who are neglected at home now have the ability to interface with scenes across continents and oceans, even managing to make a living off streaming, licensing, Bandcamp sales, and providing multiple other online services. All of this has affected cumbia.
One of the genre’s most notable modern expressions is digital cumbia, which posits that music is not anchored to any one location, or even instruments, and instead can be synthesized through well-researched references, clever production, and honoring dance as a top priority. In 2008, Grant C. Dull, an American expat living in Buenos Aires, began DJing and promoting parties that he puzzlingly called Zizek. Yes, like the philosopher. The parties attracted an international crowd and scraggly local spin doctors who injected cumbia with thumping electronic beats. Chancha via Circuito, Frikstailers, Tremor, and El Remolón were among the first signees of his eventual label, ZZK, which fifteen years later is among the most revered electronic music imprints on the continent. They now boast an international roster that includes Nicola Cruz and Cruzloma in Ecuador, Indus and Ghetto Kumbé in Colombia, and Bolivian folk icon Luzmila Carpio.
The conjunction of cumbia and the Internet also launched Texas’s Grupo Frontera, whose ultra viral cover of “No Se Va” by Colombian tropi-pop heartthrobs Morat caught the ear of reggaeton superstar Bad Bunny, who later enlisted them for smartphone tearjerker “un x100to”. These meta layers of music industry jargon powered by the TikTok industrial complex also jump-started the careers of Cuco, Estevie, and ARIEL. The playful nature of cumbia also makes it a reliable vehicle for memes, producing the apocalyptic parody “La Cumbia del Coronavirus” and leading to nerdy anime crossovers like “La Cumbia de Goku,” “La Cumbia del Otaku,” and an especially mind-blowing remix of the Evangelion theme song.
If you’ve made it to the end of this particular adventure, congratulations, you now have the tools—and hopefully the curiosity—to continue digging on your own. Cumbia has the capacity to be fun, silly, experimental, ecstatic, and solemn, sometimes all at once. Cumbia is us: complex as life itself and simple enough for all to understand.
Richard Villegas is a music journalist, podcaster, and professional chismoso with bylines in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Bandcamp, and Remezcla. When not raging behind his desk in the Dominican Republic, you can find him traipsing through Latin America in search of fresh underground music and a cheap local beer.
Illustration: Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo
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