Music streaming platforms opened up gateways to weird, and by weird I mean obscure - sub-genres like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Instead of a friend saying, “You’ve got to check out this powerviolence band” only to send you to the record store after getting a taste, to try to figure out how the store would sort out where they might put that very not rock/country/rap genre in their stacks.
That’s all pre-amble to a conversation I had with one of my brothers about cumbia some years ago. “I’ve been listening to a lot of cumbia.” “Oh cool. I think I know what that means, but my brain automatically goes to Ozomatli saying cumbia, cumbia. Is that what you’re talking about?” “Yeah, but older. So like, think 70s, in Peru, and instrumental psychedelic latin rock. More punk than Santana, more funk than Tito Puente, and way more bar band or local scene than all the other places it shows up.” “Sounds cool. Where do I start?” “I’ll send you a playlist.”
There’s no way I could have dug through the record store bins, save for finding a lucky sampler, with late 70s Peruvian instrumental funk-rock. The playlist was a shortcut. My cumbia obsession was born from there. It became one of my go-to background genres, which isn’t even something I always love music for, but it is all at once present and ambient in a special way.
The first time my wife and I went out to Joshua Tree, maybe it was the desert, maybe it was the coyotes and wind and Dr. Seuss on Mars looking scenery, I felt the urge to put some cumbia on. My wife had heard me playing it before, but never really spent a ton of time with it on. She agreed in that moment, and a couple playlists took over the rest of our trip.
Cumbia is a walk in the desert, probably to a bar or some socially accepted respite, where life on your alien planet makes perfect sense for the duration of every song. And the best part about it only making sense for the duration of every song, is that there are tons of adjacent, genre-familiar songs to make the next world for you, and the next, and the next, etc. etc.
“Ollantay” by Los Beltons is the ultimate example. Of cumbia. For my money. It’s like - the gateway drug, I think. When I’m explaining the genre, I like to start HERE:
The song follows an ABCDABCDA format. 4 sections, that all repeat, and mirror the intro on the close as an outro/vamp. It invites you in with bass and bongos/congas. Then you get the pentatonic guitar lead for an earwormy hook in B. The C section is built on a minor melody and for a moment you’d swear this is a Ventures song. Lots of surf guitar energy here. Just, funkier. Meaning, surf but with more funk, if that makes sense. In D the progression switches up a bit, you get some new harmony and the organ cuts just a bit harder on the lead line, and then the whole thing loops.
It only evolves as much as it needs to which is not very much at all.
I could hear this song 10x in a row or I could hear 10 cumbia songs on a loop and - it would all be different but the feeling would be all the same. I can get lost in those lines.
There’s a cactus garden in the middle of Joshua Tree National Park that is nothing sort of stunning. The cacti get closer together and between blossoming flowers and stunning views as far as your eyes can see, you can’t really go there and not take a walk through the garden.
There’s a cumbia-ness to the garden. In the way it’s all repeating but all so interesting when you zoom in. You get lost in it, and because they’re sharp prickly things, you can never quite tune out what’s going on, so much as you can appreciate the proximity to different, on all levels, standing in that garden is.
We were strolling through and the sun was dizzying. It’s spring so the desert isn’t death level hot yet, but it’s also one of those you’ll get sunburned in 80 degrees days. The breeze blows and your cold, but the breeze pauses and you sweat. Such is the atmosphere there.
Seeing as it was midday, the sun really was blinding and that put me, sunglasses on (but not enough sunscreen as I’d find out later), leading the duo of my wife and I through the garden. There’s not so much a path as there are places where cacti aren’t. You basically go into these hedges and keep an eye on the road and the approximate location of your car. There you are, with the cacti, and the tourists all bumbling about. It’s nice. Beats Disneyland, probably.
I’m pointing at ankle height plants and the occasionally prickly pear assuming my wife is paying attention when she says, “Oh no, my shoe!” I turn and, sure enough, she’s got a prickly pear sized needle-ball sticking out of the front of her sneaker. “Don’t touch it - hang on” I say, like I have any clue what I’m doing, and she slips her shoe off and holds it up in amazement.
We both look at it. It’s one of those things where - the spikes are so small, the needle tips are so fine, that they can actually stick into and through the rubber toe pad, that wraps into the soul of her shoe. You don’t want to touch this with your hands. I start looking for a rock or something on the ground that might help us unstick it. My wife sits down.
“Why’d you do that,” I ask. “To get the needles out,” she says. “But there are cactus needles - did you look where you sat?” She hadn’t. I mean, she didn’t start screaming so she didn’t sit in a cactus but, these gardens SHED, you know. It’s the opposite of find a needle in a haystack. This is a find a non-needled square inch in this cactus garden situation. So now my wife had one shoe on, cactus needles in the toe, cactus needles in her butt, and - vacation is swell, you know?
We had a laugh. A real laugh. The hearty kind that lasts and lingers and shows up 3 hours later when you have a memory of the moment. We got enough of the prickly pear out of the shoe, and then delicately plucked needles from the cloth on her jeans and shirt so she could get back into the car, and that was part of the afternoon.
I don’t even know if Peru and Joshua Tree have anything in common. All I know is that every time we’re in the desert it’s what we want to hear. If a few cactus needles are the cost, they’re totally worth it.
We drove through the park to various locations 3 or 4 times over the 5 days we were there. Every time we listened to cumbia. The repetitive sonic waves, which I get the irony, it’s like imaginary waves in the desert and - maybe that’s just why it works as well as it does for me? How exactly the psychadelia fits in is anybody’s guess, or maybe you don’t need to guess because the phantom waves say as much as you need to know. My hunch is you don’t need to guess and you can fill that in, too, but even without substances - which is how we were receiving this, ahem - you get a sense.
Sometimes music helps you travel as much as traveling makes you hear something in a whole new way, for the first time.
*powerviolence could be found in rock>alternative>punk/hardcore, if you were at a cool store. Now, you can just put a band like Spazz into search and not only find whole albums to work through, but similar artist playlists. Future is amazing.
