I’m not a huge fan of the ironic appreciation of music. All too often, it serves to elevate Western musical forms that would be better off forgotten (disco, glam, cock rock, hair metal, and so on and so on) whilst simultaneously dismissing entire and typically non-Western genres, either because these genres’ individual traits and stylistic flourishes aren’t quite daggy enough to be considered “cool” or because their sheer ubiquity signals some kind of mass appeal that negates the very idea of worth or quality. I’m talking about genres like cumbia, salsa, samba, bossa nova, and tango; there’s just something about Latin American and South American music that makes the hipster-kids and chin-strokers shy away and instead choose genres that are much easier to mockingly celebrate.
Perhaps this is because genres like cumbia and salsa et al are designed for dancing and are therefore essentially passionate and full of fire. Even if they can be replicated in a plastic manner by any old cover band, the music that lies at their core – the rhythms, the interplay, the momentum and the energy of its super-tight percussion – still feels truly alive, still feels like it has a soul, still feels like it’ll make your arse move. And this kind of fire and life is hard to take the piss out. The repetitive, mechanical and almost artificial rhythms and licks of disco and glam, and the over-the-top falsetto and over-processed production of cock rock and hair metal, these are the kind of soulless and shiny places where mockery lives. It’s no wonder that, aside from disco, these aren’t really genres made for dancing. And disco, with its robotic grooves and synthesised strings and over-processed vocals, really only inspires a certain kind of stiff and controlled dancing, rather than something that is truly wild.
All of this, in a roundabout way, brings us to The Rough Guide to Psychedelic Cumbia. This collection of far out and space age psychedelic cumbia (another fantastic compilation by the fine folk at World Music Network) proves that while Latin American and South American music might be hard to take the piss out of, it sure can make us move, especially when it’s been thoroughly infused with the fuzzed-out sounds and spacey atmospheres of psychedelia. But be warned: those expecting the same kind of combination of epic psychedelic jams and Latin American and South American rhythms pioneered by the likes of Santana should look elsewhere. These are cumbias made psychedelic rather psychedelic interpretations of them.
Opening track ‘Perdido En El Espacio’ by Juaneco Y Su Combo is fairly representative of the rest of the tracks making up The Rough Guide to Psychedelic Cumbia – typical cumbia forms and instrumental line-ups are overlaid with a psychedelic sensibility, attitude and sound palette, so that what might have been considered ‘standard’ instead becomes something dirtier, garage-esque and much more spacey and much more interesting. In the case of ‘Perdido En El Espacio,’ over-distorted organs replace what would have once been pianos and fuzz-guitars replace what would have once been clean and shiny electric guitars and the percussion set-up that is so typical of cumbia also features a western-style drum kit, a kind-of substitution that is also representative of the rest of the album. The overall effect and the lasting impression is one of jamming abandon rather than super-tight polyrhythmic propulsion; it is dance music made for housewarmings and block parties, rather than concert halls or nightclubs.
And it’s just awesome.
