![]() Flor de Piedra released the first cumbia villera album, La Vanda Más Loca, by sending the master to a pirate broadcaster due to lack of interest from major record companies. In his new project, Lescano limited himself to songwriting and managing. He created a new group with a different aesthetic, different lyrics, and a different sound, Flor de Piedra. ![]() His band rejected them, so he began saving money from the royalties he earned from Amar Azul songs in order to buy instruments and equipment for producing an independent record. Pablo Lescano, then keytarist from one of these cumbia bands, Amar Azul, started to pen new songs with more aggressive lyrics. It was in this situation that in 1999, the first cumbia villera band was born in the depths of Villa La Esperanza, a slum in San Fernando, Buenos Aires (in the north of the Buenos Aires metropolitan area). However, through the '90s, Argentine cumbia bands such as Grupo Sombras or Grupo Green didn't touch social issues, and in fact, their lyrics were limited to themes such as love or partying. Some of the most affected by this crisis were workers and the lower classes, and among them were the inhabitant and dwellers of the villas miseria ( slums or shantytowns) in Buenos Aires and its metropolitan area, which favoured cumbia and other tropical music genres. The introduction of neoliberal economics in Argentina in the early '90s gave a quick boost to the nation's economy but progressively marginalized large areas of society, and by the late '90s, Argentina was in a total and implacable depression. ![]() ![]() History Ĭumbia villera was born in the late 1990s, amid an economic and social decline in Argentina. Over time, the genre has evolved, bands and artists have explored different sounds, and new fusions have arisen, such as cumbia rapera, with Bajo Palabra mixing cumbia villera with hip hop, and tropipunk, with Kumbia Queers mixing cumbia villera with punk.įor its characteristics, cumbia villera has been compared to gangsta rap, reggaeton, rock rolinga, raggamuffin, baile funk, and narcocorrido, among other music genres. Lastly, the creator of cumbia villera, Pablo Lescano, admitted that his lyrics were influenced by bands from Argentine punk rock, like 2 Minutos and Argentine rock rolinga, like Viejas Locas. Cumbia villera's characteristic sound was created using influences from Colombian and Peruvian cumbia, cumbia sonidera and cumbia santafesina in the realm of cumbia, and from reggae, ska, Argentine folklore, and electronic music in other music genres. Musically, cumbia villera bases its sound in a heavy use of synthesizers, sound effects, keyboard voices, keytars, electronic drums, and other elements from electric instruments. Lyrically, cumbia villera uses the vocabulary of the marginal and lower classes, like the Argentine lunfardo and lenguaje tumbero ("gangster language" or "thug language"), and deals with themes such as the everyday life in the villas miseria (slums), poverty and misery, the use of hard drugs, promiscuity and/or prostitution, nights out at boliches (discos and clubs) that play cumbia and other tropical music genres (such as the emblematic Tropitango venue in Pacheco), the football culture of the barra bravas, delinquency and clashes with the police and other forms of authority, antipathy towards politicians, and authenticity in being true villeros (inhabitants of the villas). Cumbia villera ( locally or ) (roughly translated as " slum cumbia", " ghetto cumbia", or " shantytown cumbia") is a subgenre of cumbia music originating in Argentina in the late 1990s and popularized all over Latin America and Latin communities abroad.
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