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CD Review
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Head Butler, CD Review >>
When you finish reading this, you're likely to be the only person in your circle to know about chicha.
And if you actually watch/listen to the video --- or wilder still, bring Masters of Chica, Vol. 1 into your home --- you will almost certainly be putting this wonderful Peruvian sound into your local environment for the first time.
Chicha is that obscure.
And if you listen, this will make no sense to you, for those who have the good fortune to wander in while your chicha CDs are playing will say, in dazzled wonder, “This is great...uh, what is it?”
Good luck explaining how this music came to be invented in dive bars in Peru. Or how that Tex-Mex Farfisa organ got in there. Or why you hear surf music. And what demon slipped some LSD in the formula so there'd be a psychedelic vibe. And, not least, who ripped off the Sergio Leone Western-movie theme music.
Look at that video again.
Not in a sexist way, I say: Man, she can shake it.
And why?
Because they can play it.
These are happy people, making music that makes other people happy. A very simple transaction, and unselfconscious, as befits music that sprang from the lower class and, if the tastemakers in South America have their way, will forever remain there.
Chicha is actually a kind of liquor, home-brewed from maize and cheaper than Coke. Peruvians drink a lot of it --- which is kind of the point. The Incas may have used it in their rituals; in Lima, it's the nickname for the Saturday night music of the working class. Which is to say: It gets you high.
“God respects us when we work, but He loves us when we dance,” says the filmmaker Les Blank. If so, chicha is in God's top ten --- like Toots & the Maytals and Amadou & Mariam and Manu Chao, this music gets you out of your chair and moving in the very way that made Daddy want to lock your bedroom door.
Music despised by right-thinking people? In my experience, always a good sign.
-- by Jesse Kornbluth 10/14/08 >> go there
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