Chicha boom

Olivier Conan kicked off a wave of international interest in vintage Peruvian cumbia with his acclaimed Roots of Chicha compilation. On a recent return visit to Lima he found Peru beginning to embrace a sound which had been marginalized for decades.

Official Peru is a tiny island in the middle of Lima. Its southern tip is the "bohemian" neighborhood of Barranco, where most music clubs are located. Its northernmost outpost is Lima's downtown. Ask anybody within those boundaries - especially in the neighborhoods of Miraflores and San Isidro - and they will tell you they are middle class. And sure enough, by American or European standards, these people are middle-class. They are professionals, they own real estate, they went to college. Most of them have servants, but they will be the first ones to explain to a foreigner that the only reason they can afford servants is because labor is very cheap in Peru, not because they are rich. The irony is lost on them.

Outside of those boundaries is where most music is made. Within those boundaries, is where music is made official. Or not.

Most Peruvians are taught that there are three national styles of music. There’s criollo music, which is mostly waltzes played on Spanish guitars; There’s Afro-Peruvian, which is the music passed down by generations of former slaves, and there’s folklor, which refers mostly to the music of the Andes.

And then, there’s Música Tropical, which encompasses all the styles that use a Caribbean-influenced rhythm section – bass, timbales, congas, bells and bongos. Since the late 60s, the most common tropical style has been cumbia, which in Peru came to be called chicha.

Chicha, until very recently was totally invisible. Yet chicha is loudly represented all over Lima. It blasts out of every passing combi (the small private buses that are one of the only means of public transportation in Lima), It can be heard in stores, on the street, in the market. Yet, until a couple of years ago, it was simply not part of official Peru’s sanctified view of the national culture. Cool middle-class kids knew nothing about it.

It was not always the case. Peruvian Cumbia, as it was simply known at its beginnings, started in 1968. Guitarist Enrique Delgado, with his band Los Destellos, is usually credited as being the creator of the genre. Delgado’s band became extremely popular, and relatively mainstream. His songs mixed every possible style – Cuban guarachas and guajiras, cumbia, rock, surf, folklore, criollo, all of it put through a tropical grinder.

Los Destellos - Elsa, with Felix Martinez

Within two years, dozens of successful imitators were using electric guitars along with Latin percussion: Manzanita, Compay Quinto, Los Riberenos, Los Quantos, Los Yungas, Los Walkers, Los Orientales de Paramonga – most of them ridiculously good. By the mid-70s, the music started to be identified more with the lower classes. Rural migrants were contributing to the pauperization of the city, and were embracing cumbia as their own. A wave of cumbia bands from the Amazon, produced by Infopesa label owner Alberto Maravi, was also changing the sound. Enter Juaneco y su combo, Los Mirlos and Los Silvers.

Juaneco Y Su Combo – El Brujo

Meanwhile, migration from the Andes was accelerating, the slums were growing and life was getting tougher. The joyful cumbias of the late 60s were slowly giving way to a more sorrowful style. Andean melodies were getting more pronounced, the lyrics were taking on a more overtly social tone.

By the early 1980s, Lima was a transformed city. The Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) - the ultra violent Maoist group - was starting to take control of large parts of the ever-growing pueblos jovenes, as the slums were called, and was using them as a base from which to wage its war against all government institutions. The middle class was literally besieged – ands slum-dwellers were practically taken hostage. Electrical power was routinely shut down, bombs were going off daily. Opponents were killed. The ensuing repression was blind and merciless. The period is now referred to simply as La violencia. More than 70,000 people died.

At the same time, cumbia came to be viewed as a product of the pueblos jovenes. It became known as chicha, after the song La Chichera, which is considered the first Peruvian cumbia, and after the drink: a homemade alcoholic corn brew, which is a potent symbol of the persistence of pre-Colombian culture in contemporary Peru.

The new stars of chicha were Chacalon and Los Shapis. Chacalon’s band, La Nueva Crema, played a harder brand of cumbia, more processed, with fuzztone guitars and heavy reverb on his vocals. His lyrics talked about hardship, poverty and hopelessness, about being a cholo - a derogatory word which refers to people of Indian ancestry and has been reclaimed by migrants who identify with it.

In 1981, Los Shapis became a huge sensation. They were Provincianos and stuck closest to their Andean roots than any cumbia band before them. Their first hit, El Aguajal, is a chicha version of a traditional huayno and their own songs, to this day, retain that strong Andean flavor. They also starred in the first ever Chicha movie, Los Shapis en el mundo de los pobres, in which they act out Beatles-like vignettes and carry a giant container of chicha to face adversity – going so far as to fill their tank with it when running out of gas.

Los Shapis - El Aguajal (from the film Los Shapis En El Mundo De Los Pobres)

By the mid 80s, chicha had become a mass phenomenon but paradoxically, it had also become completely marginalized as official Peru never acknowledged the style. Mirroring the social divides on the airwaves, FM stations played foreign pop and rock, while chicha was relegated to the AM stations.

Fidel Guttierez, a journalist and music critic for newspaper El Peruano, explained that he grew up listening to mostly foreign rock. It is as if the trauma of the 80s had caused severe amnesia on the part of the middle class. But in the past 10 years, since the end of the Fujimori years, he and his peers have been exploring popular Peruvian culture of the 60s and 70s. The initial focus of this revival of interest was the Peruvian rock of the early 60s, one of the most cutting edge rock scenes outside of London and California. Bands like Los Saicos, Los Yorks and Los Shains, which had somehow been eradicated from official memories, were suddenly being rediscovered.

Los Saicos – Come On (Ven aquí )(1964)

About two years ago, Peruvian Cumbia also started creeping back in. A younger generation of college kids was rediscovering some of the earlier bands – like Los Destellos, or Los Orientales de Paramonga, with their heavy surf sound. Amazonian bands, however, benefited most from the revival. In particular Juaneco y Su Combo – the legendary band from Pucallpa. Their repertoire sounded very current to modern ears. The exotic lure of the Amazon and the romanticization of ayahuasca, the Shipibo hallucinogenic drug, also contributed to the fascination. Rock bands started using cumbia rhythms.

The band Bareto played a fusion of rock and reggae. In the US, they would probably have toured the jam band circuit. Then in 2008 they released an album called Cumbia. Half of the songs were Juaneco covers – played to suit the taste of a contemporary rock audience. The album became a huge success and contributed greatly to raise the profile of chicha. Even though Bareto’s Cumbia did acknowledge the 80s populist chicha movement by covering a song by Los Shapis and one by Chacalon, the present revival has shunned the word chicha and its class association. It has stuck mostly to the exotic and the foreign as if bringing chicha back meant stirring social realities that should remained unspoken.

Bareto - Ya se ha muerto mi abuelo

Some of the older pueblos jovenes in northern Lima have some relatively prosperous pockets which function as entertainment hubs with live music clubs that cater to fans of folklore and cumbia. Los Shapis were playing a late show at one of those clubs on boulevard los Olvidos last month. The band has been playing non-stop for the past 30 years – they don’t quite attract the same crowds, but the large club was filled with families eager to get a glimpse of Chapulin el Dulce, the singer of Los Shapis. Seeing three generations singing along to every song made it very clear that most were unaware that part of the country had forgotten about them for the past thirty years.

Los Chapillacs – Cumbia Delincuencial

More bands are starting to reclaim the chicha past across social divides. Los Chapillacs, from Arequipa, is one of the promising ones. They are in their early 20’s and seem more oblivious to the social stigma of 80s chicha. On their upcoming record, they mix almost punk-like anthems, with electric versions of Juaneco and guest appearances by chicha legend Pascuallilo. The sound is definitely chicha, but they have integrated the drum-kit in a way that updates the genre without being either slick or trite. Somehow, they’ve managed to create a new sound which bridges worlds and eras in a totally un-self conscious way. They should be received well in both Barranco and Cono Norte. It’s a good sign for Peruvian culture at large – but it’s still a very long combi ride.

Various artists - Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru
is out now on Barbes

Roots of Chicha DOS is out September 2010

Look out for Los Chapillacs’ debut album Odisea Chicha 3000 - out soon
http://www.myspace.com/chapillacs

Olivier Conan

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