The Roots of Chicha II

I imagine a lot of Peruvian women have enjoyed dancing on the dance floor to the female singer of Manzanita y su Conjunto singing ‘Pay the bill you rascal… you have money for bars but not for the electricity!’ Its just one example of the pithy lyrics you'll hear on this batch of rattling dance music which, in Manzanita's case, involves Farfisa organ playing counter-melodies and harmonies alongside fabulous electric guitars delivering high-pitched melodies and surf-style riffs. Cumbia swept the Latin American continent in the 60s and it continues to be one of the most popular of Latin American dances, due to topical texts and its sexy yet uncomplicated sliding side-to-side foot-to-foot moves. Different sub-genres have emerged like the risqué cumbia villera in Argentina.

Peruvian hybrids called chicha, named after a home-brewed beer, fused cumbia with Andean and Amazonian sounds. While the first volume compiled by Olivier Conan, Chicha I (reviewed in #53), spurred only a minor cumbia boom outside Latin America, it encouraged more people to listen to the music. Back in Peru local journalists and academics were already vindicating this catchy working-class music as the voice of migrants fleeing to city shanty-towns in the wake of violence around the army's engagement with the Shining Path guerrilla movement. Conan's interest, plus the fact he leads his own New York-based band Chicha Libre, has raised its profile higher. The cosmopolitan bands heard here explode the eliehéd image of Peru as a country of folkish peasants with one of inventive professional groups creating unique music that also playfully parodies a host of international styles, whether Cuban or Californian.