“It isn’t a laidback, lounge kind of music, you know”, continues Cohen.
It was a kind of conservative music, that the people associated with Peron liked.” In the 1940s the music was played by the Germans, by the Nazis, you know. “But because it was so successful in Paris at the beginning of the 20th Century, it came back with all of the chic and the glamour of Paris to Argentina – it was accepted by the bourgeoisie. But it was from the bad boys, from the harbor of Buenos Aires”, explains Cohen. And after it was mixed with Europe and immigration from Europe. So it actually already is a hybrid of different kinds of music. The word tango comes from an African dialect, just like the word milonga At the end of the 19th century, European and African immigrants got together in bars and brothels of Buenos Aires, and they started making music with the original Argentinians. “The roots of tango lie, as is the case with many kinds of music, in Africa.
But Philippe Cohen, one third of the Gotan Project, reminds us that, in fact, in his native Buenos Aires, tango began as a punk movement of lowlifes - gangsters and cocaine junkies.
There are always hotheads who want to modernise traditional music, and there are always those who get offended by that.
0 kommentar(er)
