Yesterday, a thread popped up on Facebook about a question that is, I think, troubling all of us: why is music today changing so incredibly fast? For anyone genuinely interested in promoting or producing new sounds and ideas, it can be a true nightmare. The experience comes closest to some absurd action flick: avoiding obstacles on top of a recklessly rumbling train, constantly jumping on board of the next ramshackle bandwagon in order to stay ahead of everybody else. And with a bit of bad luck, you have to fight a couple of epic kung-fu duels at the same time. So much for extended metaphors. But it makes one wonder where times have gone when genres still had time to built a faithful following, and artists were more concerned with maturing in their own style than with the constantly hounding pressure of the so called ‘next big thing’. And this is where the secret power of cumbia comes in. Because, Discussing all this with Café de Calaveras yesterday, I realised that the history of nu-cumbia shows why the end of an inflated fad doesn’t need to be the end of the world. Cumbia has been among the focus genres of Generation […]
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