Cartagena and the sound of cumbia

I am yet to meet anyone who is impervious to this music. I remember it finding its course all the way to our flat on the fifth floor, in Barranquilla, sneaking through any little crack on the wall and taking over slowly until it was impossible not to move or (at least) to hum.

Some are oblivious to its origin: Argentinians have somehow appropriated it in the form of “Cumbia Villera”, which is a very sad imitation that seems to exist for the only purpose of making the point that the original is great precisely because it is an affair of mestizos, of half breeds.  The Argentinean version and all of those copycats that are produced far away from the Caribbean have the most horrendously monotonous beat of maracas that the human species has conceived: It’s basically a very obvious chucu-chucu made so that white people are able to follow the beat.  In contrast, the one I grew up very portentously combines the European brass, the language of Cervantes, the spanish flowing skirts, the african rhythms and drums, the black movement of the hips,  the hypnotising gaita flutes of the Native American Kogis and Zenús.   It is an unfathomably catchy and complex blend of European, african and Native American musical artefacts.  It is one amazing way in which the three cultures found each other by the sea of the new world.