The Roots Of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias From Peru

Description

The Roots of Chicha, compiled by Barbès Records, originally released in 2007, became the first recording to popularize psychedelic cumbia worldwide. From the late 1960s to the late 1980s, Peruvians invented a new popular musical hybrid inspired by the music of the Americas. In 1968, Enrique Delgado released his first record on Odeon with his new band, Los Destellos, single-handedly creating Peruvian cumbia. He codified the genre early on by using the electric guitar as the main melodic instrument, blending cumbia rhythms with Peruvian folklore, Cuban guarachas and guajiras, rock, boogaloo, surf, psychedelia, Eastern music, classical music, and pieces from Brazil, France, Chile... All Peruvian cumbia bands of the next thirty years would end up drawing from exactly the same sources (Grupo Celeste, Los Mirlos, Juaneco Y Su Combo, Manzanita Y Su Conjunto...). This new wave of Peruvian cumbia is known as chicha. Chicha is originally the name of an alcoholic beverage made from fermented corn, of which the Incas were particularly fond. Over the last thirty years, however, the word has taken on a pejorative connotation. Peruvian cumbia began to be called chicha in the late 1970s, around the time the music came to be seen as the expression of the shantytowns — the pueblos jovenes. Little by little, the word became an adjective, and today we speak of chicha culture, chicha press, chicha architecture, and even chicha president, and none of that — you guessed it — is a compliment. Chicha evokes corruption, shady dealings, and cholos — a pejorative term for a person of Andean origin which, recently, has been reclaimed and worn as a badge of honor by the very cholos it was meant to demean in the first place.