EVERY GENRE PROJECT - June 10 - Cumbia turra

Genre of the Day - Cumbia turra

Album of the Day - Me declaro culpable [I Plead Guilty] by Nene Malo (2012)

June 10, 2024

Today’s genre can be summed up in a few single truths that invite deeper exploration: the economy is simply not Argentina’s strong suit. Music trends shift with the economy. People in the early 2010s had a moment with the saxophone. The creation of sampling was a mare’s nest in how we think about music. 

Forgive me for drawing some wide conclusions to begin with, but a bird’s eye view is indispensable to understand cumbia turra, mostly because we’ve reached another genre that inhabits the domains of the clubs and the streets with very little accessible information online. Cumbia is a term that only vaguely gestures towards a musical sea, and each little genre within the danceable rhythms stretching across Latin America and incorporating its history of indigenous, African, and European musical agglomerations that fall under cumbia are like the abundant creatures of the sea. They all live in the same ocean, but they’re all thoroughly different; just as each animal fills an ecological niche, each form of cumbia reflects the sounds and particularities of the region it hails from. Cumbia turra brings us back to a late aughts Argentina, where an increasingly destitute middle class sought out musical panacea just as American millennials shook their financial anxieties off with the abandon of Eurohouse-derived four-on-the-floor stompers by the likes of Lady Gaga and the Black Eyed Peas. 

Reggeaton had ascended to pan-regional powerhouse by the end of the 2000s, and cumbia turra artists heavily drew upon it as well as cumbia villera, the simple cumbia productions of Argentina’s slum towns, in refacing cumbia for a digital age. Though the country’s producers like Bizarrap now favor a crisp sleekness in designing the sound of Argentine pop, cumbia turra had no interest in chasing over-sophistication and instead made loose, blown-out music that matched the young and increasingly poorer middle class’ desire to escape their feelings of unease. Unapologetic sonic maximalism was the name of the game. Producers made liberal use of the human right to sample. The use of the word turro, which means shameless in Buenos Aires’ urban slang and is used to describe the variety of youth who might sport Adidas and listen to reggaeton, underlines the genre’s against-the-grain, reckless-abandon skew. 

The duo Nene Malo, composed of Franco Zeta and Daniel Vazquez, takes us on a short, wild, slang-laden ride of an album. It reminds us that the best nights’ moments aren’t spread out across a very long time: they come in rushes and blips. With firework-like ferocity, the hit “Bailan Rochas y Chetas” introduces us to their carefree world; the emcee’s delivery is cartoonishly roaring and insistent, and saxophone paired with Eurodance breakdowns between flashes of reggaeton are engineered to push any wallflower out onto the floor. Beyond the rhythmic variety, Nene Malo catch the ear by employing the iconic saxophone of 2003’s megahit “Destination Calabria” on “El Garrote.” There’s been a renewed interest in and scorn towards what comes across as clichéd sampling, as TikTok has ushered in an era of any song from any era being able to resurface and storm the charts, and myriad artists chase virality through sample uses that might garner the most views and hype for a song. Is it a shortcut to get people to dance by getting them to recognize a different composition as you weave it into your own? Yes. Is it wrong to be so obvious? Only if you don’t want people to dance, Nene Malo and other cumbia turra artists might wink. No matter your thoughts, they prove to naysayers that they don’t only depend on recognizable samples: the car race anthem “Chetos y Cumbieros” is hypnotic, harnessing the power of digital reggaeton delirium, Autotune, and an endless slew of sax to render the listener helpless to the groove. If economic strength was defined by musical potency, Argentina’s inflation could be fixed overnight.