mixing cumbia with punk rock: Kumbia Queers

[the_future_modernes]

Kumbia Queers- Chica de calendario

Macha Mexico: Conversation with the Kumbia Queers

After meeting at the Belladona festival in Buenos Aires in late 2006, five Argentine girls and one Mexican got together to experiment playing cumbia, and the Kumbia Queers were born. Although they’ve been playing live shows for a little over a year, all are veteran musicians; bassist Patricia “Kumbiadaver”, guitarrist Pila “Zombie” Jackson, and drummer “Inspector” also play in the Argentine queercore band the She Devils. Strumming the charango is accoustic punk musician Juana Chang, and lead singer Ali “Guaguanco” is a successful DJ and front-woman for Mexican dyke punk band the Ultrasonicas. In the past year, the Kumbia Queers have toured in both North and South America, and the 2007 video of their cover hit “La Isla con Chicas” was considered “Revelation of the Year” on YouTube and currently has over fifty thousand hits.

We sat down with the Kumbia Queers in Ali’s apartment in Colonia Doctores a few days after their packed show at the Centro Cultural España. Over a bottle of tequila we discussed their opinions about the difference between punk and cumbia, women in the music industry, and the meaning of the word queer.

MM: So, why “queers”?

Juana Chang: Why not?


MM: The name “Kumbia Queers” is very political, but is also very bilingual. It’s almost like you have to have all these English and Spanish references to really “get” the title [with its reference to established male cumbia bands like the Kumbia Kings as well as to the word "queer"].

Patricia Kumbiacadaver: For some people, it’s the word “kumbia” that gets their attention.



Pila “Zombie” Jackson: For me, it’s really great. For me, it’s political and at the same there is no need to explain anything. Those that understand, understand and those that don’t—maybe say, “What is queer?” And I tell them it’s everything that isn’t normal, that isn’t what they impose as “normal.” I think it’s something that is impossible to define, and, for that, I love it. It’s so many things.

Ali Guaguancó: First came the name, and then came the band. MORE

Introducing… Kumbia Queers

This July Berlin had the pleasure of welcoming Kumbia Queers, a band from Mexico & Argentina in Berlin for no less than three concerts, in which they introduced us to their version of cumbia, aka tropipunk. And what a joy that was! We met the day after their hot and crowded first show at Raumerweiterungshalle in Berlin-Friedrichshain for an interview at an empty pool at tentstation, a camping site not far from the Berlin-Hauptbahnhof.

Kumbia Queers came into existence in Buenos Aires in 2007 when Juana Chang and the She Devils from Argentina met Ali Gua Gua, of Las Ultrasónicas from Mexico. They started off covering their favorite songs with a cumbia rhythm. Cumbia is a musical style which originally evolved during colonial times and blends, among other influences, African rhythms with indigenous Latin American instruments and Spanish lyrics. It’s commonly known as the music of the slums in contemporary Latin America. Nonetheless, we were told, everybody in Latin America secretly looooves cumbia. People might not admit to that during the day, but after a couple of drinks everybody dances to it. Kumbia Queers took well known melodies ranging from Madonna’s La Isla Bonita to The Cure and even Black Sabbath, and pimped them, with cumbia rhythms and new queer lyrics, applying their punk attitude to them to queer both style and attitude, surprising not only traditional cumbia lovers and haters, but also the punk and metal community.


The well known track Chica De Metal, for instance, a cover version of a Black Sabbath‘s Iron Man, deals precisely with the gap between metal and cumbia that they’re trying to bridge. “Metal-heads usually hate cumbia”, Ali Gua Gua explains. She herself is not only a big fan of Black Sabbath, but also of the Scorpions, she admits. “In this song we’re trying to figure out if there’s a way for a metal girl to be in love with a cumbia girl. The metal girl tries to change, because she’s in love, but after a while she can‘t bear it anymore and leaves the cumbia girl.” MORE

Kumbia Queers-Chica de Metal

KUMBIA QUEERS - MUSICIANS @ whats up buenos aires

Could you talk a little more about this? It seems like cumbia still gets limited media coverage in this city, whereas rock has a really strong presence.

Pilar: In many places it’s prohibited. Cumbia villera is banned from the media. Straight up prohibited. But the Pibes Chorros album is what — 15 years old — it’s really crazy, because in one moment all the commercial production [of cumbia] exploded, and it was censured, and it got stuck in history, it really disregards what’s fashionable, or what’s most listened to. It’s the opposite with rock, where there are lots of things that are underground, or banned, and later, kind of suddenly, they explode. But with cumbia it happened backwards: first the scene exploded and then it was prohibited. It’s strange what happened, really weird. And here particularly, cumbia is seen as music for ‘negros’[people from the lower class], it’s all wrong.

For example, at one point I was looking on YouTube to see how people were playing, because there are lots of people who film themselves playing the guitar. It was incredible, because I was watching this guy play the guitar to cumbia, and you see his surroundings — a tiny house, there’s a baby sleeping, an older woman is washing, and there’s a man in the corner playing guitar wonderfully, and below there are tons of comments from rockers that say, “He plays so well; it’s a shame the music’s shitty,” or “Negro de mierda — all the cumbieros should be killed.” All the comments are really horrible. It really caught my attention and so I started to look at the youtubes of rockers, and obviously all the comments are like, “Wow, they play so great, excellent.” Nobody comes in to criticize them, it’s not like a cumbiero is going to go online and say, “Hey, what you do is terrible.” There’s so much animosity. I don’t understand what’s going on with these people.
MORE

Kumbia Queers - Kumbia Zombie

Kumbia Queers - Kumbia Dark (Videoclip)

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Kumbia Queers - La isla con Chikas