[Tango-L] "the disruptive effects of rock and roll on tango"

[carolyn merritt]

For those interested in a thought-provoking read on contemporary tango
music, there's an interesting article in the Spring/ Summer 2007
edition of Latin American Music Review - Tango Renovacion: On the Uses
of Music History in Post-Crisis Argentina, by Morgan Luker.  I can't
attach the article, but have included an excerpt below and a link.  I
was only able to access through my university library's account with
Project Muse, but perhaps you can request access directly through the
publisher:

http://libproxy.temple.edu:2119/journals/latin_american_music_review/v028/28.1luker.html
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/latin_american_music_review/v028/28.1luker.html

Towards the end, he discusses La Chicana (the band seen in the
documentary 'Tango: Un Giro Extrano) and their claim to authenticity
through a 'rougher' tango that is closer in spirit to rock and 1920s
tango than golden era orchestra recordings.
One of the most important points he makes - certainly relevant to
discussions of the dance as well - is that debates over 'realness' and
'authenticity' are at heart about inclusion and exclusion.  Claims of
truth and authenticity are about more than preservation, they are
motivated by very real social and economic implications.

Best,
Carolyn

excerpt (pp 83-5):

"La Chicana was formed … with the clear intention of producing tango
music with a
rougher edge. They favor the 'canyengue' rhythms and humorous melo-
drama of early tango as opposed to more solemn later flavors. They truly
believe that the essence of tango lies in its 1920s spirit of rebellion and
spontaneity [which] puts it ideologically closer to rock music than to the
orchestral forms that popularized it in the world since the '40s" (lachi-
canatango.com).

This statement makes several complicated historic and aesthetic moves
that get to the heart of the work of new form tango groups. La Chicana
proclaims golden age tango to be a less than authentic rendition of the
"true" tango spirit due to both its aesthetic features (the "solemn fla-
vors") and its international reception ("popularized in the world"). The
group's rejection of the golden age, however, does not represent a
sweeping dismissal of tango history, but rather an invitation for further
and deeper historical exploration. Indeed, rather than discursively posi-
tioning themselves at the forefront of a progressively developing tango
tradition, La Chicana cites a pre-golden age moment as their inspira-
tion, the music of which they claim to be emblematic of the true tango
experience and sensibility.

At the same time, by claiming that the "rough edge" of early tango rep-
resents an oppositional position vis-à-vis hegemonic expressive forms sim-
ilar to that of rock, La Chicana at once incorporates and validates the
musical and stylistic sensibilities of rock as part of tango. This is a crucial
claim, not least because of the confluence it sets up between tanguero and
rockero aesthetics that have historically been taken as opposites. This claim
of confluence is also important to these groups because many new tango
musicians have extensive backgrounds in rock. Melingo, for instance, was
once a prominent figure in rock nacional, playing in the 1980s with Los
Abuelos de la Nada, Los Twist, and alongside Argentine rock superstar
Charly García (rock.com.ar).

The discursive links between tango and rock relate to the continuing
saga of how outside aesthetic influences and forms are variously accepted
or rejected in Argentine culture and what role they play in the imagina-
tion of the Argentine self.  Debates over such influences stretch at least
as far back as the "civilization vs. barbarism" dichotomy articulated by
educator and statesman Domingo F. Sarmiento (1811–1888) in his 1845
book Facundo(Sarmiento 1998).  The variously positive or negative per-
ceptions of outside influences in Argentine culture remain a crucial issue
for many artists, and clearly play a role in strategies of tango renovation:
while the new orquestas reject the tango vanguard as overly influenced by
international styles and therefore not real tango, La Chicana rejects the
music of the golden age at least partially because of its stylistic codifica-
tion and acceptance in the wider world. At the same time, groups like
La Chicana embrace the repertoire and aesthetic of musical genres imag-
ined as coming from the "outside" such as rock and world music that
are rejected by others because of their perceived foreignness. By incor-
porating elements from international genres into their original tango
compositions, La Chicana creates music that sounds not entirely unlike
contemporary pop music yet claims to be more directly aligned with the
spirit of "real" tango, that is, the genre that emerged from the conflu-
ence of the local and the transnational in the heterogeneous milieu of
turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires.

So is this "real" tango? Who can say? What is important to recognize
is that contemporary tango as performed by these ensembles is connected
to yet fundamentally different from canonized tango. If their music and
the experiences from which it is formed are to be accepted as valid—
which, of course, they are—some of the core tropes of tango and of the
nation will require renovation. That is the project of the new form tango
groups. It is not a matter of musical "realness" or authenticity, but a mat-
ter of inclusion and exclusion, and the stakes are high. This renovation,
in turn, parallels the larger crisis of social inclusion and exclusion facing
Argentina following the neoliberal transformation of society, in which
the very real divisions between the included and excluded were laid bare
(Svampa 2005).