Champeta music: between regional popularity and national rejection, Colombia 1970-2000

ABSTRACT

Champeta is the music from the Colombian Caribbean coast and extremely popular in Afro-descendant communities of any age, increasingly fancied by non-black people as well. Despite being highly celebrated on the coast, in the capital of Bogotá and other big cities of the country’s interior, champeta is still marginalized and not recognized as a music suitable for the rest of Colombian society. This article reviews the history of champeta music from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, with a particular focus on the diverging developments in Cartagena and Barranquilla, respectively. It analyzes factors that may explain the local and regional popularity as well as the national rejection of champeta, and concludes that the elements which made champeta regionally successful are precisely those elements which hindered its acceptance on a national level: namely, the focus on blackness and the African Diaspora, distinct class-based tastes, a loud claim to space by the lower classes, and the high regional stratification of the Colombian society.

RESUMEN

La champeta es la música procedente de la costa caribeña de Colombia y es extremamente popular en las comunidades Afro-colombianas de cualquier edad; además, gana progresivamente adeptos entre la gente que no es de color. A pesar de ser altamente celebrada en la costa, la champeta sigue siendo marginalizada y no reconocida como una música adecuada para el resto de la sociedad colombiana en la capital, Bogotá, y en otras ciudades grandes del interior del país. Este artículo repasa la historia de la champeta desde finales de los años 1960 hasta finales de los años 1990, centrándose especialmente en los desarrollos particulares que ha experimentado en Cartagena y Barranquilla respectivamente. Analiza los factores que pueden explicar la popularidad local y regional por un lado, y el rechazo nacional de la champeta por otro, y concluye que los elementos que otorgaron a la champeta su éxito regional son precisamente aquellos que dificultaron su aceptación al nivel nacional, a saber, el hecho de que se centre en la identidad negra (“blackness”) y en la Diáspora Africana, los gustos característicos de las diferentes clases sociales, la reivindicación de espacio por parte de las clases bajas y la alta estratificación regional de la sociedad colombiana.

KEYWORDS:

• Colombia
• champeta
• African Diaspora
• Caribbean
• music
• class
• race

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my interview partners, also those who do not appear in this article. Also, I extend my gratitude to Deborah Pacini who supported me with this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The terms champeta africana, música africana, and terapia all refer to the imported African and Afro-Caribbean music. Terapia, however, was also used later to refer to champeta criolla. The term champeta encompasses the whole musical development, ranging from música africana over champeta criolla to the new champeta urbana. The latter is not part of this essay because its development is very different from the history of música africana and champeta criolla and took place only after 2000.

2. This essay is mainly based on data collected in Bogotá, Cartagena de Indias, and Barranquilla, over a period of four weeks in February and March 2015. The majority of the 25 interviews were conducted in the mentioned period; additional interviews date from 2010 to 2014. The interviews from 2010 to 2014 were conducted by me personally in Colombia and Germany, and via telephone and Skype; and by record label owner Samy Ben Redjeb and record collector Carlos Estrada in Barranquilla. The overwhelming majority of the interviewees have a stake in champeta, either as singers, producers, or key players in the record business.

3. For his double release on Afro-Colombian music, Ben Redjeb produced a booklet with detailed accounts of his field research in Barranquilla, which includes numerous interviews with and personal information on protagonists of Afro-sound music in Colombia.

4. See, for instance, Pacini (1993, 1996) and Martínez (2011).

5. After World War II, massive processes of urbanization took place in Latin America, with extensive migrations from the countryside to the cities (Almandoz 2015, 3). In Colombia, urbanization and rural depopulation increased even more by the middle of the twentieth century during the period of La Violencia (1946–1958) (Chacón, Robinson, and Torvik 2011, 369). Around 175,000 of mostly rural Colombians lost their lives and many more were displaced from their homes (Bushnell and Hudson 2010, 44). With the upcoming guerilla and paramilitary forces, rural conflict increased again from 1980, when new waves of displacement took place. It was conditioned on the one hand by the increasing mass cultivation of marihuana and coca to serve the growing demand for drugs from North America and Europe and, on the other hand, by the steady opening of the country towards neoliberal measures and the sell-out of the countryside to multinational companies.

6. This observation was first made by Deborah Pacini, who observed that world beat was in the early 1980s rather unknown amongst middle-class educated youth in Bogotá but consumed by African descendants on La Costa (Pacini 1996, 432).

7. This is a simplistic approach. Other ethnic minorities such as Colombians of Arab, Japanese, Jewish, or Roma descent appeared in the country much later and do not constitute groups as numerous as the three mentioned.

8. The exclusion from developments in the interior of the country and from the national project is no new phenomenon. Alfonso Múnera has analyzed this deficient nation building (which also occurred in similar ways in other regions of the country) and stated that the Caribbean region did intend to be included during the era of the Republic but that the elites of the interior had a different concept for the nation (Múnera 1998, 166).

9. La Costa has strong historical connections with the Caribbean, in particular with Cuba (until the Revolution, 1953–1959), which functioned as a Caribbean nodal point and had extremely important geostrategic value in terms of trade and communication. Other important connections were Santo Domingo and Jamaica (Vidal 2002, 183, 197). Before the introduction of steam river ships in 1823, traveling and transportation of goods from the Caribbean coast to the capital, Bogotá, over the Magdalena River took at least 28 days, whilst sailing from Jamaica to the Colombian coast usually took three days (Gilmore and Harrison 1948, 336). News, knowledge, ideas, material, and cultural goods, as well as people, traveled much faster and easier between Cartagena or Barranquilla and the Caribbean islands than within the country.

10. Paris was the main destinations of immigrants from the (former) French colonies since the 1960s. See Dobie (2004).

11. Pacini adds that it was the number and quality of the exclusivos that determined the price a picó owner could charge for his show. His success was not measured by sales figures but by the number of persons who followed a picó (Pacini 1993, 95–6).

12. Villanueva was also one of the first to travel abroad to buy music. In 1972, he went to New York, Miami, and Puerto Rico as a representative of Discos Fuentes (Pérez 2011, 10).

13. Fruko, being from the city of Medellín, achieved great fame in the 1970s with his salsa band Fruko y Sus Tesos, which made him known throughout Latin America and beyond (Montiel and Quintero 2011).

14. Additionally, in 1972, palenquero (a person from Palenque) Antonio Cervantes aka Kid Pambelé won the world light welterweight championship in boxing (Cyber Boxing Zone). As it was the first time this title went to Colombia, Cervantes became a national hero overnight and made his home village widely known.

15. The Wayuu are an indigenous group from the Guajira peninsula and are not connected in any organic way to Afro-Colombian music or culture. The anecdote by Carbonó suggests that he randomly came across this book and used the language to attach a mysterious/unknown quality to the song.

16. Compare to Sarah Daynes, who has examined the use of Swahili by Peter Tosh. She has stated that it does not matter whether a practice possesses “real” Africanness but rather that Africanness is attributed and recognized. It is sufficient that a symbolic meaning symbolizes Africa for the individual and makes sense in their collective situation (Daynes 2004, 28).

17. For studies on the relation between champeta and racialized sexuality, see Birenbaum (2003); on champeta and masculinity, see Aldana (2013); on masculinity in Colombia, see Viveros (2002).

18. For a detailed account on vallenato, see Figueroa (2009) and Oñate Martínez (2003); on cumbia see D’Amico (2013). Both music styles are now no longer perceived by society as tri-ethnical but rather as mestizo music (Vermejo 2015; Urango 2015).

19. Pacini confirms this observation, stating that Colombian picós differ from sound systems elsewhere due to a strong emphasis on the visual dimension (Pacini 1996, 442).

20. Mosquera and Provansal point out that the picós and their picoteros generated micro-identities and loyalties amongst their followers; a fact that shows fragmentations on the insight of a phenomenon which at first glance appears to be homogeneous (Mosquera and Provansal 2000).

21. In the 1960s, the picós were instrumental in the diffusion of salsa dura (“hard salsa”) (Contreras 2003, 35). Pacini claims in this context that salsa dura, much appreciated by Afro-costeños, was in the 1970s replaced by salsa romántica. People attending the fiestas de picó were not satisfied with this development of salsa or with the upcoming vallenato, which was a rural music with an emphasis on lyrics and storytelling rather than on rhythm. Neither offered any basis of identification for the black lower-class population and its harsh urban realities. Pacini summarizes that these changes in the Colombian musical landscape produced an “aesthetic vacuum”, in which the arriving African music was received with open arms and could blossom (Pacini 1996, 438).

22. Luis Gerardo Martínez has emphasized that palenqueros did not understand the lyrics of African music, but that there is a cultural empathy which has to do with percussion, rhythm, and the vocalization of the lyrics (Martínez 2011, 165).

23. Colombian cities are divided into estratos, numbered from 1 (sometimes 0) to 6. The higher the number, the higher the – estimated – average living conditions in a neighborhood.

24. Carmen Abril and Mauricio Soto claim that Yamiro Marín came up with the idea of producing champeta criolla locally in 1990 because it became increasingly difficult to get hold of exclusivos of música africana (Abril and Soto 2004, 15).

25. The owners of the discotiendas Yamiro Marín and Jaime Arrieta, “El Flecha” (“The Arrow”), still work on the Bazurto market, but, due to the increased piracy of CDs and the emerging of MP3s, they no longer sell music but clothes (Reyes 2015a). Also see Sanz Giraldo (2011, 13).

26. Louis Towers attributes part of champeta criolla’s success to the fact that it is also consumed and celebrated in Barranquilla (Towers 2015). Hence, although Barranquilla somehow ceded the champeta stage to Cartagena in the end of the 1980s/beginning of the 1990s by not actively involving itself in the production of champeta criolla, its contribution to the regional success of this music is still important by means of active support and consumption of this music.

27. The discussion of whether champeta was born in Barranquilla or Cartagena has been, amongst others, taken up by Abril and Soto (2004, 14). It is a concern of this article to make clear that the development of champeta was heterogeneous, non-linear, and complex. Further research will hopefully show the involvement and contribution of smaller places on La Costa and in the interior of the coast to champeta and the possible impact of San Andrés, a linkage which suggests itself due to the cultural and geographical proximity to the Caribbean and the number of migrants from there to Cartagena.

28. The geographical proximity of Palenque to the city of Cartagena and the fact that many palenqueros inhabit the lower barrios of this city further illuminates the great success of this music in Cartagena.

29. By incorporating Benkos Biohó – according to the legend, founder of Palenque de San Basilio – into the list of black heroes like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Aimé Césaire, Afro-Colombians developed their own discourse on black resistance in the late twentieth century (Cunin 2003, 36–7).

30. See Maribel Barraza, who analyzed the lyrics of a variety of successful champeta songs from 2000 to 2005. She concludes that the content is about everyday life; the singers express their identity through this music and common topics are betrayal, falling in and out of love, sex, social parasitism, arrogance, family problems, crime, and deprivation. Very often expressions have double meanings. The textual modus it follows is the narrative. The sociolect implicitly tells about economic deprivation, poor education, youth, and the masculine sex of the singers. They represent their reality, which is full of shortages (Barraza 2005, 77–8).

31. Furthermore, in Colombia there is a capitalist mechanism called la payola, in which record labels pay the radio stations for playing their music (Butrón 2015; Rodríguez 2015). An employee of the record label Codiscos explained in 1984 with regard to la payola that “there is no direct relation between what is most listened to and what sells most” (Semana 1984). See also Bonilla De Ramos (1980).

32. Additionally, new societal trends have to be taken into consideration by analyzing cultural capital; namely, that over the course of the last decades, popular culture has lost its vulgar stigma and high-cultural art forms are no longer the only ones regarded as suitable for groups with a high cultural capital (Trienekens 2002, 283).

33. Mosquera and Provansal emphasize this thought by giving the example of Arabs and Arab-descendants in Cartagena, who are considered white because they are usually wealthy (Mosquera and Provansal 2000).

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Viola F. Müller

Viola Müller is affiliated with the Institute for History at Leiden University, The Netherlands, where she works as a doctoral candidate. She holds a BA in Latin American Studies from University of Cologne, Germany, and an MA in History of Migration and Global Interdependence. Viola is also a journal assistant to the Journal of Global Slavery (JGS), which reflects her interest in slavery and post-slavery societies.