The Roots of Digital Cumbia in Sound System Culture: Sonideros, Villeros, and the Transformation of Colombian Cumbia
Issue: Vol 8 No. 1 (2021) Special Issue: Sounds in the City: Street Technology and Public Space
Journal: Journal of World Popular Music
Subject Areas:
DOI: 10.1558/jwpm.43089
Abstract:
Digital cumbia was celebrated globally in the late 2000s as a new form of Latin American electronic dance music mixed with the Colombian folk music of cumbia. Celebrated by the media as a new phenomenon due to new computer software and internet access, this article instead establishes how cumbia had already become digital in the sonidera (“sound system”) culture of Mexican barrios (“ghettos”). The author is a DJ/producer with more than fifteen years of practice linked to cumbia, global electronic popular music, and sound system culture. The implications of this double-background as practitioner and researcher are reflected in a DJ-as-researcher approach to multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and musical analysis. The theoretical framework is based on “sounding”, a model for understanding the interaction of corporeal, material and sociocultural elements in sound system culture. This reveals how Mexican sonideros (“sound system operators”) created cumbia sonidera (“sound system cumbia”) by slowing the tempo of the original Colombian recordings in response to the dancing public. To hear this transformation of cumbia, several examples of the seminal cumbia track ‘Cumbia Sampuesana’ are presented, from its origins in 1940s Colombia, to cumbia sonidera in 1990s Mexico, and cumbia villera (“ghetto cumbia”) in early 2000s Argentina.
Author: Moses Iten
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Interviews
Caribali, Sonido aka Willie, aka Jose Vicente Margarit Rodriguez Perez, i/v, Tepito (Mexico City), Mexico, 21 August 2019.
Dueñez, Sonido aka Gabriel Dueñez, La Independencia (Monterrey), Mexico, 16 August 2019.
Pato, Sonido aka Oscar Solorzano, i/v, Tepito (Mexico City), Mexico, 21 August 2019.
Pedraza, Angel, of Grupo Kual?, i/v, San Juan de Aragon (Mexico City), Mexico, 25 August 2019.
Tlahuetl, Alberto aka Beto, of Grupo Soñador, i/v, Puebla, Mexico, 19 August 2019.
Yankee DJ aka Gabriel Alza, Belen de Escobar (Greater Buenos Aires), Argentina, 16 December 2019.
Zurita aka Martiniano Zurita, San Telmo (Buenos Aires), Argentina, 14 December 2019.
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