Colombian Music: Champeta

At first, when listening to Champeta, you might believe that it is music from Africa. This is because it originally is. Champeta not only derives from the African tribal music brought over to Colombia during the slave trade hundreds of years ago, but also recently crystallized as a genre when the port cities on the Colombian Caribbean coast began importing a steady trickle of African music LPs from the continent during the 1970s. If it were not for the lyrics sung in Spanish, one could easily imagine the music being from a lion-stalked savannah, but it is instead a reflection of the mix of cultures and historical trends that make up the Afro-Colombian experience.

Taking the music all the way back in time to its real roots requires going back before independence to when Colombia was still a Spanish colony. The city of Cartagena, a port on the Caribbean Sea, was a major center for the importation of African slaves. However, many slaves managed to flee and hide in the jungle, where they founded free cities known as “Palenques”, including the first and most iconic, San Basilio de Palenque, located about two hours south of Cartagena by bus. Even today, most of the population in these towns is descended from these runaway slaves, and in San Basilio a language called Palenquero, a mixture of Spanish, Portuguese, and the African language Kikongo from Angola and the Congo, is still spoken. The New York Times has written about this language, which is currently in danger of extinction.

In the 1970s, sailors traveling to Africa began bringing back records by African superstars such as Fela Kuti and King Sunny Ade, who were mixing North American rhythm and blues with traditional African forms of music in genres such as soukous and highlife from countries like Nigeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. DJs began playing the records at house and street parties on giant loudspeakers called picós, which often had crazy and colorful graffiti-like designs painted over them. The records were popular at parties, and the relative scarcity of new and novel African records made the DJs competitive. As dancers and fans became familiar with specific records, DJs were loathe to share music with one another, as they wanted to throw the biggest parties with the most varied collection of vinyl. DJs scratched the names and artists off of records to keep their favorites to themselves and their own parties. Demand for new music began to outstrip supply, and Colombians responded by making their own imitations of the African music they were hearing but by mixing it with reggae and soca riddims as well as the Latin percussion from cumbia and salsa, and champeta was born. Or you might say that the Afro-Colombian descendents of African slaves finally reconnected with their roots and brought the journey of their music from one continent to the other full circle.

The name Champeta comes from a knife that is similar to a machete, used on the Colombian coast for chopping fruits and vegatables, cutting sugarcane, and sometimes self-defense. But it is also a code word, originally used to describe the working-class black people who would become the music’s audience as vulgar, ignorant, and above all poor. Similar to Yankee Doodle, the Afro-Colombians adopted the term as their own, and the music reflects the vitality of a people that live close the edge of socioeconomic calamity and without pretension. Some of the cheapest electronic instruments are used to make the popular version of the music that dominates radios in Cartagena these days, including Casio keyboards with pew pew laser sounds and drum machines that sound stuck in the 80s. A reverb-drenched DJ can often be heard on mixes and between songs, who sounds like the guy hectoring you about discounts on vegetables at the food market. The picó speakers are garish and as huge as possible, and slathered with brightly colored drawings and graffiti, not unlike pimped-out cars or the old hip-hop tradition in the United States of carrying around the biggest, loudest boombox possible. Then there is the way people dance to the music, which is basically dry humping to a beat. The music is a like a car-crash combination of Afro-Colombian history and culture, maximized to make a party rage, but it’s not exactly polite or demure.

As you might expect with music so connected to street culture, it can be difficult to find a good entry point to see whether this music is your kind of thing. Short of going to a party in the barrios of Cartagena, it is tough finding solid compilations that tell the story of Champeta or provide a solid’s disc’s worth of tunes that get the party rolling. There is also the fact that more official releases tend to emphasize the roots of the music passed down through oral tradition over the centuries rather than the more pop-sounding music that began showing up in the 1970s as a response to African funk, in addition to the fact that most releases available outside of Colombia are through one record label, Palenque Records, and its enigmatic founder Lucas Silva. There is still a lot to explore in this genre, and most available releases only scratch at the surface, but are an excellent introduction. Below I have listed some albums and blog mixes to get you started on your way to becoming an Afro-Colombian funk fanatic.

Palenque Palenque: Champeta Criolla; Afro Roots in Colombia 1975-91 by Various Artists

Soundway Records does an excellent job here showing how Champeta music developed from copying African records to a real genre reflecting Colombian culture. The 28-page liner notes were written by Lucas Silva, who also helped choose the track listing with Soundways records honcho Miles Cleret. Packed with great photos of champeta record sleeves and musicians sporting short shorts and afros.

Voodoo Love Inna Champeta-Land by Colombiafrica, The Mystic Orchestra

If any Champeta disc is going to make you fall in love with the genre through its sheer and unrestrained joy, this is the one. This jam session brings together champeta stars like Viviano Torres, Luis Towers, and Justo Valdez with African musicians Dally Kimoko, Diblo Dibala, Sékou Diabaté, Nyboma, and Rigo Star, who come from countries such as Congo, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Guinea. The sunny, fluid African soukous guitar lines melt perfectly into Colombian accordion riffs and horn charts, with bouncy rhythms throughout making this perfect for a party or just picking yourself up out of a funk.

Radio Bakongo by Batata y Su Rumba Palenquera

Palenquero singer and songwriter Paulino Salgado, or “Batata” (Sweet Potato) was in his seventies when he recorded this album, but you would never guess it from the vitality of these recordings. In his career has a drummer, he toured for two decades with famous Colombian singer Toto la Momposina, and she recorded a number of his compositions as well. This is the only available album where Salgado actually led the proceedings before passing away in 2004, and the “Vallenato goes to Africa” sound of this disc caps a career spent keeping the musical links between Colombia and Africa alive.

For stuff that is closer to what you might hear on a contemporary Cartagena radio station, try this mix, which was put together by Fabian Altahona, who edits the Africolombia blog. The blog is a great source for all kinds of Afro-Colombian music, especially dubbed into MP3s from the original vinyl records, including lots of champeta but also Afro-Colombian contributions to such traditionally Colombian genres as cumbia, mapalé, porro, and salsa.

Colombian Cinema: El Vuelco Del Cangrejo (Crab Trap) (2009)

Director – Oscar Ruiz Navia

The Pacific coast is a fascinating part of Colombia. Highways have not yet arrived to many parts of the area, and the only way to get to some towns is by boat or airplane. Being that many of the residents of the Pacific coast are poor black fisherman, they don’t get a lot of chances to get out, and it feels isolated, like Colombia’s own Deliverance-like south. I didn’t see more than a couple other gringo tourists while I was there, and even Colombians from other regions were not numerous.

La Barra is an isolated village in this neck of the woods where the movie takes place, a real town that is actually in the department of Valle de Cauca on the Pacific coast, close to Buenaventura and just south of Choco. There is a white guy called “Paisa” (Jaime Andres Castano) meaning he is from the region surrounding Medellin, who wants to build a hotel on the beach, mirroring the real-life situation of Paisas buying up cheap land in the town of La Villa to build surf hostels on the shore. Daniel (Rodrigo Velez) is a guy who comes from some hip urban enclave. He wants to find a motorboat out of the region so that he can continue his backpacking. Daniel has problems; he looks at a woman’s photo from time to time, but we are never quite sure what’s wrong with him. He is travelling on the cheap and stays with Cerebro (Brain, played by Arnobio Salazar Rivas), a local fisherman with money problems. There seems to be no fish in the waters nearby, so Brain has no cash, and all the motorboats are far away, leaving Daniel stranded. Daniel’s money is robbed, so he has to help Cerebro with things like cleaning debris on the beach to pay his room and board. The Paisa, meanwhile, disrupts the quiet village with loud speakers that blast reggaeton. The Paisa has the modern rights to the land, but the Afro-Colombians have lived here since the days when slaves escaped from their masters to hide in the jungle, and resent the interloper.

The movie moves sloooow. It plods lethargically with the same general rhythm of daily life in the region, capturing the way that people don’t seem to measure time in the same manner over there. Much like the Daniel in the film, I was looking for a boat from Bahia Solano to Buenaventura to continue on my journey when I was travelling through the region, and there were no schedules or guarantees that one would even arrive. Sometimes a boat came, sometimes it didn’t. I felt like a total uptight Gringo looking for some sort of timetable. The beaches and jungle are unspoiled as of now; the Paisa’s “development” in the film is not much more than some cabanas and a fence made of plywood to make a claim on the beach, which the Afro-Colombians have no trouble dismantling. The area gets less sunshine than the Caribbean coast, and of course paramilitaries and guerrillas lurking in the local jungles haven’t helped make tourism much of a burgeoning industry in that region. The film captures a sense of this part of Colombia as one of the last frontiers, still surrounded by thick, difficult rain forest and full of people eking out a living off the land. But modernity is coming, in the form of outsiders with disposable income for travel and investment. The film is uneasy about how these foreigners will change the culture and environment of the Pacific coast, even as the changes are pretty much inevitable.

Technically, Afro-Colombians in this part of Colombia have their rights protected by constitutional court decisions to be in control of their heritage, including the lands they have settled, to avoid exploitation by outsiders. However, many Afro-Colombians have subpar literacy, and are unaware of their rights, making them easy targets for narcos, palm oil and mining companies, and illegally armed groups seeking to drive them off their land. A constitutional provision that guarantees a land title to rural Afro-Colombian communities that have organized loosely as a group and occupied their property for 10 years or more does exist, but is often difficult to enforce. As the descendants of escaped slaves once again begin to feel the effects of oppression, will they run or defend what is rightfully theirs? It is the rhetorical question at the heart of this film, and it lingers uncomfortably afterwards without an answer.

Books About Colombia: Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden

It is amazing how violent Colombia was only twenty-five years ago. A major reason for that violence was Pablo Escobar, who is quite possibly the most famous Colombian of all time (sorry Gabo). To claw his way to the top of Colombia’s narcotics trafficking industry, and to stay there, he killed anyone and everyone in his way – judges, newspaper editors, even presidential candidates. He was, for a time, the richest man in Colombia, and the seventh richest man in the world according to Forbes Magazine. He built restaurants, discos, a zoo, roads, electric lines, public soccer fields, and housing developments for the poor, with some media outlets heralding him as a Paisa version of Robin Hood. He was a congressman and owned several mansions in Florida.

Mark Bowden’s Killing Pablo describes the life and eventual death of this most notorious of drug kingpins. Pablo is described as not particularly intelligent or special – his main personality trait, the one that makes him Colombia’s top narco, is his ruthlessness. He was pudgy, loved smoking weed, and enjoyed having sex with teenage girls. The author excerpts a bunch of Pablo’s correspondence, mostly angry missives aimed at the media and government, saying how unjust it is that he is being persecuted. He comes across as a guy who believes in power and little else. From Pablo’s perspective, the government and military is coming after him because they want the power that he has, and it is inconceivable to him that anyone could believe he is being chased because they think drugs or violence is bad. It is a cover story, and he is enough of a meglomaniac to believe that he is the only person helping the poor and taking on the powerful Colombian elite.

Pablo has so much money that he was able to stay out of jail by bribing almost every level of the government in Medellin, and killing anyone else too honest to accept his “plata o plomo” (money or lead) policy. The weak central government of Colombia was powerless to stop him. When he started killing members of the richest families in Bogota in retaliation for the police´s attempts to arrest him, the elites and general public alike both begged for a deal with Escobar to end the carnage. Then-president Cesar Gaviria offered Pablo a bargain where Escobar would accept being charged with one crime of being the middleman in a drug sale transaction in exchange for turning himself in. Then, in one of those “Only In Colombia” situations, part of the deal for Pablo’s surrender is that he could build the prison in a location of his choosing, on a hilltop overlooking Medellin. The prison is essentially a mansion, and Pablo fills it with luxuries like jacuzzis and big screen TVs. He smokes copious amounts of pot, throws huge parties, and even leaves the prison whenever he feels like it, at one point being seen in Bogota to do some Christmas shopping. And of course, he continues running his drug empire from inside the jail. Colombia’s government seems unable to stop him, at one point even deciding that all of his possessions inside the jail are technically legal. After all, the regulations say that he is entitled to have a bathtub, and who can say that a jacuzzi is not a bathtub? When the Colombian government finally decides that enough is enough and tries to move Pablo to a real jail in Bogota, the attempted trasfer is bungled and Pablo escapes.

Bowden is also the author of “Black Hawk Down”, about a covert US operation in Somalia that went awry, leaving 19 American soldiers dead. American covert forces were also heavily involved in the hunt for Pablo Escobar. President George Bush (the first one) expanded the role that the American military could play in intervening anywhere that drugs might be manufactured and readied for shipment to the United States. Special operations forces such as Centra Spike and Delta Force were dispatched to Colombia to gather intelligence and aid Colombian forces in the apprehension of Escobar. Technically, these operations forces were only supposed to be training and assisting the Colombian forces, but the rules were bent and American soldiers ended up accompanying the Colombians on raids in search of Pablo; Bowden even suggests the possibility that an American soldier delivered the shot to Pablo’s head that killed him. There is a certain gee-whiz quality to the descriptions of the surveillance hardware used to track Pablo’s cell phone and radio messages, and how these are used to actually track Pablo’s location. If you’re into that sort of geeky armchair warrior stuff, there is plenty of it here, although I found those parts of the book to be the most dull. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was an enormous waste of money with questionable legality, and that as much of evil bastard as Pablo was, maybe this shouldn’t have been the U.S. government’s mission.

As the book notes in its epilogue, cocaine exports to the United States actually increased while Pablo was being hunted down. As Pablo’s Medellin cartel was being attacked and dismantled, the Cali cartel moved in to take its place. They bribed the police and government officials while all the attention was on Pablo, and the cocaine continued to flow out of Colombia and into the United States. So killing Pablo made little difference in the cocaine business overall. In the hunt for this one man, over a hundred police officers were killed, and many more innocent bystanders were massacred in Pablo Escobar’s retaliatory bombing campaigns and assassinations. When a vigilante group known as Los Pepes begin killing people in Pablo’s inner circle, members of Colombia and the United States’ militaries are alleged to have collaborated and shared intelligence with them, even as their murders were completely illegal, and members of Los Pepes included Cali cartel drug kingpins and soldiers in outlawed paramilitaries. Bowden describes all of this in a fairly neutral manner, and the reader is left to make up his own mind about whether this was all worth it.

As for me, I wondered: Since the cocaine business was essentially unchanged overall by Pablo Escobar’s pursuit and death, was all the killing and money spent worth the trouble? Is there another way to tackle the problem of cocaine consumption in the United States besides killing the salesmen in other countries? What kinds of covert operations are we running against drug barons in other countries today? Would decriminalizing cocaine reduce this sort of violence and misery?

Thankfully, we are no longer in Pablo Escobar’s Colombia; it is Mexico that seems to have the most drug-trade related violence in the world right now. Drug traffickers in Colombia today could never get away with as much as Pablo did. This book is an excellent reminder of how not so long ago, Colombia was a much different place, and of how much it has rebounded from being a completely failed state. It also will make you wonder how any self-respecting Colombian or tourist in the country could go around wearing a t-shirt with Pablo’s face or name on it.

Colombian Cinema: Los Actores del Conflicto (The Actors in the Conflict) (2008)

Director – Lisandro Duque

Two struggling Colombian actors (Mario Duarte and Vicente Luna) and an actress from Venezuela (Coraima Torres) finally find a possible sponsor for their work onstage. Their benefactor is heading to Spain, and asks the actor named Alvaro to keep some boxes full of books in his apartment as a favor while he travels to Spain. There is one box, covered in red masking tape, that is full of business of no concern to an actor, that he is never, ever supposed to open. Mario is cool with it; after all, this guy is his ticket out of poverty! He wasn’t planning on opening any of the boxes, why start trouble?

Then the actors then hear on the news that the man was detained in Spain for laundering money. The group begins opening the boxes, finding most of them filled with books. But the box with the red tape, well, that one is full of assault rifles. This is a conundrum; if the actors tell the authorities about the guns, the owners of the weapons might take revenge on the tattlers. They decide to try a different way out; they will use their skills in the dramatic arts to pretend to be guerrillas. They will bury the guns in a ditch in southern Colombia, and then tell the authorities that they want to “give themselves up” and tell where the weapons are. Using a priest well-known for communicating secretly with guerrillas in the same situation, they will have him ask the Office of the High Commission for Peace to grant them asylum in Spain, where they imagine they can actually make some money as actors.

The three go to a small town in the llanos (plains) region a few hours southwest of Bogota, where they make some money being mimes in the town square. Mario wears a fake moustache and pretends to be a guerrilla, speaking to a priest in a confessional booth to set the whole plot into motion, but with the strictest confidentiality. While in the llanos, however, they manage to get themselves entangled in the conflict for real, running into real guerrillas, paramilitaries, and the Colombian army. The men are both kidnapped. What started as a joke soon becomes all too real, and the men start to get second thoughts about using the armed conflict to get rich when so many are still suffering, especially those kidnapping victims languishing in FARC camps waiting for their release.

The film is an awkward dance around a heavy subject. The actors are sarcastic and practically nihilist about Colombia’s problems at the beginning, upset with their own insolvency and little else. The FARC camp scenes are quite lighthearted. There’s no killing, and no real brutality. The prisoners seem to be free to move around, even as some of them go insane. After giving a glowing revolutionary monologue from one of his own plays, FARC actually lets Duarte go free, a little too convenient to the plot for my tastes. The paramilitaries seem only slightly more threatening, but everyone seems just a tad too cuddly to match up to the sad, gruesome reality. There is also a love scene with a guerrillera who wants to get out of the game, and at that point the movie just flies off the rails into fantasy land. We should all be so lucky if we get kidnapped!

The endless intractable violent conflict in Colombia certainly lends itself to dark comedy, but not to wishful thinking. There is a lot to like in this movie; it won the audience award at the Cartagena Film Festival for a reason. It aches for peace and condemns all the illegal armed groups perpetuating the conflict. Although it had a budget of under a million US dollars, it doesn’t look like it. During production, the cast and crew actually had to flee paramilitaries in the town of San Martin, and the film’s earnestness in the face of such threats is well-intentioned. But its fever dream of reluctant FARC members and bumbling paramilitaries is a little too much to swallow.

Colombian Art: Fernando Botero, and Why He Sucks

Look! It’s the Mona Lisa, and she’s FAT! Get it?

Fernando Botero is a human artistic cop-out. He has one idea – everything is fat – and he has spent his entire life painting and sculpting the same thing, over and over again. He calls himself the most Colombian of Colombian artists, but there is precious little of Colombia in the vast majority of his works; there is just chubbiness and rounded edges, ad infinitum. Okay, so he painted Pablo Escobar getting shot, and he paints people dancing or tiled roofs from time to time, but these are incidental to his work. His main mission is to give people who would otherwise be bored looking at art a case of the giggles with his fat people, and moreso when he paints a naked fat woman. Look at her big ass! Har har!

A Berkeley University Magazine description of the artist’s work sums it up:

The millionaire artist walks to a corner of his Paris studio, bends over, and picks up an illustration of what has become his instantly recognizable franchise. It is a still-life painting of oversize fruit, the canvas ablaze in color and curves. 

This is everything wrong with the art world and Botero in two sentences. He has become a millionaire with an “instantly recognizable franchise.” What is he, McDonalds? Yes, actually. He will be pumping out more of his assembly line fat people for whoever wants to buy it until he can’t paint them anymore. His style is an obese golden goose egg. Even the fruit he paints are fat. Why? Does he have any particular reason for painting this way?

Maybe the artist himself can explain his vision in a way that even peons like me can understand:

"An artist loves a certain kind of form. The artist doesn’t know why he or she is attracted to the form. He just paints based on his intuitive ideas. After his work is done, he may adjust his paintings in the way it can be rationally understood. If not, the artist justifies what he has painted." 

Thanks for clearing that up! So he can’t explain in a straightforward manner what his fat people and things mean or why he paints them. So mysterious! It comes from deep in his subconscious. The paintings just flow through him! I don’t expect an artist to explain every little detail, but pretending like these works come from some mystical and unexplainable artistic wellspring is the same as not having an explanation, or perhaps a cover-up of how embarrassing the real reason is: because they attract attention and money with very little effort.

Then there was the new millennium, when this most Colombian of Colombian artists decided to do a series of paintings about that most Colombian of subjects – American soldiers torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Are you unsettled yet? The original photos and the acts they show, sure that’s shocking. But it is a reflection of Botero’s laziness that he can’t come up with anything more interesting than painting current events. He is riding the coattails of outrage and anger, piling onto a mountain that is already towering with twisted emotions and violence. Botero adds what, precisely, to the reams of commentary and recriminations that Abu Ghraib created? He is a gawking free rider, hating what is easy for the art world and faux bohemians to hate the world over. All that’s missing is the painting of Bush and Rumsfeld with devil horns, or am I giving him ideas?

Botero says that the world of art critics doesn’t like him because he’s not avant-garde enough, and that’s probably true to some extent. Art critics are snooty bunch, and seem to usually prize anything that is abstract or focuses on debased subject matter. The fat and satisfied figures of a typical Botero painting are not going to animate a critic, but for once the critics might have a point: this stuff is not much better than corporate logo. When an artist has an instantly recognizable shtick, it should make him want to experiment, to test limits. But Botero has been doing the same thing for his whole career.

I am not alone in my dislike of Botero’s work; even a grumbling minority of Colombians are beginning to get fed up with man’s deification. There is a punk band here called “Odio a Botero” (I hate Botero) that mirrors my feelings exactly about the man. In an interview, when asked whether they really didn’t like the artist, the band members said hell yeah:

What does the name Odio a Botero mean? Do the band's members really hate the master Fernando Botero? Of course they do, and they've said it many times in public without compassion. Botero, "the master," seems like a mediocrity to them, only painting fat ladies because it's easy and he's lazy. 

In 2006, the band was supposed to play an open-air rock festival in Medellin, and Paisas got offended that a band with that name was playing in the city of Botero’s birth. (Think of his feelings!) The band was removed from the lineup after some sulking Paisas complained. So there is still an uphill battle in having the opinion that the guy is an artistic hack in Colombia.

Consider this post my small part in rectifying that situation. I plan on covering all sorts of Colombian art and artists in future writings on this site, but it seemed important for me to clear my throat and get this charlatan out of the way first. The man so dominates any discussion of Colombian art that most foreigners can’t even name another Colombian artist. From the moment a tourist cracks open their Lonely Planet guidebook the propaganda begins, and one becomes indoctrinated in the gloriousness of Botero’s art before they have even set foot in the country. It’s high time that this guy retired to painting images on Coke cans and left the rest of us alone with art that is actually beautiful and thought-provoking to contemplate.

Colombian Music: Vallenato

Vallenato originally comes from Caribbean coast of Colombia. The word itself means “born in the valley," which in this case is located between the snowy mountains of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Serranía de Perijá on the border with Venezuela. Vallenato is also the name of the people from the city of Valledupar, where this genre originated and the home of the annual Vallenato Legend Festival every April, in which competitions to discover the best new performers and composers of the music are held.

Vallenato originated from farmers keeping the tradition of Spanish troubadours who traveled playing instruments, singing, and telling stories, mixed with the griot oral storyteller and musical tradition brought over with the slaves from West Africa. Cattle farmers had to travel so that their cows could graze, or to sell their animals at the market. To keep themselves entertained during these trips, they played guitars and the indigenous-derived gaita flute. The constant traveling made them “news broadcasters” of events in other towns in the time before mass communication, and oftentimes the farmers would sing their messages to transmit the news, giving vallenato lyrics a very literal quality that endures even today.

There are three traditional instruments in a typical Vallenato ensemble. The caja vallenata is a small drum similar to a tambora made of wood and cowskin, and played with bare hands like bongos. It arrived from Africa with the slave trade. The rest of the percussion is provided by the guacharaca, which is a ribbed wooden stick accompanied by a fork. When rubbed together they make a scraping sound. This instrument was used by the local indigenous tribes to imitate the song of the guacharaco, a bird from the region, so that it could be hunted. Finally, there is the accordion. According to an old story, a boat full of accordions en route to Argentina once got shipwrecked off the shore of Colombia, and once they were found by the locals they changed the face of Colombian music forever. This is probably not true, but it feels true, which is enough in Colombia. Put all three instruments together, and you have a party ready to start.

Lately, La Nueva Ola (The New Wave) of vallenato has swept through every region of Colombia to become the most popular type of music in the country. The traditional instruments have been augmented with guitars and bass, and the rhythms owe a debt to rock music and tropical pop. A vallenato purist would scowl, but this kind of combination is now the reigning type of pop music in Colombia, and in nearly every region as well. The indisputable king of this type of vallenato is Silvestre Dangond, whose “Me Gusta, Me Gusta” I probably heard more than any other song when I was in Colombia.

Vallenato is very difficult for gringos to get into. At the beginning, you hear that accordion in every song, thinking all vallenato songs sound the same, and you associate the accordion with polka, Weird Al Yankovic, and Steve Urkel. It took a few months before I could really tell the songs apart, and part of the problem is the cheesy stuff that’s popular now is not as good as the music from a few decades ago, sort of like what’s happened with North American rock and roll. To help point you in the right direction, I have put some of my favorite vallenato songs, singers, and albums below, so that you can listen to the good stuff right off the bat.

30 Grandes Éxitos by Diomedes Diaz 

Diomedes Diaz was the best of the modern vallenato singers. His crazy life, which includes manslaughter and copious amounts of drugs, got its own telenovela series, and deserves a separate future post where I go into all the gory details of his adventures. Suffice it to say for now that was pretty burned out towards the end of his life; my friend saw him live shortly before he died, and called him a “hollowed-out shell of a man." But in his prime…this guy is the one to convince you that vallenato is good music. Try his first greatest hits collection, 30 Grandes Éxitos.

Clásicos de la Provincia by Carlos Vives 

For a brief time in the 90s, Carlos Vives managed to popularize vallenato outside of Colombia by being a handsome actor in a telenovela portraying the life of famed vallento composer Rafael Escalona. It also didn’t hurt that he jazzed the music up a bit by combining it with rock guitars and big synthesized beats. So yeah, this is miles away from the wandering farmer delivering the news, but it also got millions of people through Latin America interested in a very specifically Colombian musical genre, and is great fun to sing off-key when you’ve had too much aguardiente to drink. Clasicos de la Provincia is a great first disc to see if there is anything you might like about vallenato at all, because it will ease you into the genre with familiar rock and pop rhythms, making it a little easier to swallow than a five-minute accordion solo.

Ayombe! The Heart of Colombia´s Musica Vallenata by Various Artists 

This compilation has to be one of the best vallenato recordings out there from an audio quality standpoint. Put together by the Smithsonian Museum’s record label, every instrument on this album seems to have been miked individually, for a well-rounded sound that lets you hear every scrape of the guacharaca and every note of the rubbery bass underpinning every song. The stellar group of musicians on this album includes former Vallenato Legend Festival champion and “Me Gusta, Me Gusta” composer Omar Geles.

El Cantinero by Silvestre Dangond and Juancho de la Espriella 

Ah, what the hell. This guy is corny enough to host a game show on Colombian television, but there’s no denying that his songs are everywhere these days. “La Tartamuda” (The Stutterer) is a catchy song about a guy who catches his girlfriend kissing another dude, and when he confronts her, all she can do is stutter and stew in her guilt at having been caught red-handed.

¡Juepa je!, and I hope you think vallenato sucks a little bit less because of this post.

Colombian Cinema – Karen Llora en un Bus (Karen Cries on the Bus) – 2011

Director - Gabriel Rojas Vera

This movie excited me for two reasons wholly unrelated to the quality of the film. First, it’s always exciting to see Bogota on the big screen. To see a neighborhood you know, and match up its celluloid with the picture in your mind. I was there! La Candelaria, OMG! It’s not the most common occurrence, and it still feels cool. Second, I could understand this movie with absolutely no subtitles, the first time that has ever happened. It helped that they spoke with those famously clearly enunciated Bogota accents, and that I more or less know the slang here after living here for a few years. I even knew when Karen invited her boyfriend to Monserrate that he would say no, because a lot of people here believe that couples who visit Monserrate together will break up (Colombians are a superstitious lot). I felt a sense of accomplishment watching “Karen Llora en un Bus”, but that was a matter of this movie being in the right place and time in my life.

The film itself is not very good. The story it tells is entirely predictable and hard to relate to. Let’s take it from the top. Karen (Angela Carrizosa Aparicio) is a rich guy’s wife, and is expected to basically take care of him and do nothing else. We only start to know her when she is running away from her spouse, crying on the bus. She moves into a flophouse in the downtown La Candelaria neighborhood, and things start out difficult. She has to shower with cold water, and there are roaches in the bathroom. The other people who live in the building are more or less bemused by her horror – just take a shower and step on the bug, you spoiled princess! But this is a big change for her – no more luxuries. She is on her own now.

Gradually, she begins figuring out how to be independent. Turns out she has a hidden love for theater – she mentions Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” as her current reading. But if she had this hidden aspiring dramatist beneath the doting housewife surface, why did she marry some rich guy with no personality in the first place? In another convenient plot twist, Karen is invited out by the young party girl who lives in the building for a double date with a rich married guy and his friend, who conveniently turns out to be a playwright himself! They talk of art, and drink beer in artsy La Candelaria cafes, and suddenly Karen feels alive with possibility. No more making coffee for Jose Q. Negociante, who nevertheless makes several failed attempts to get back together with Karen and apologize. We can see that it is over the last time they get together, when Karen substitutes the coffee her ex ordered for her with a beer, giving him the shock of his life. A woman drinking beer in the afternoon, the horror!

Sorry if there are spoilers here, but you will discover all of these plot “twists” a mile away as you watch this film anyway. You’ve seen the gringo version of this movie before, maybe in “Eat Pray Love” or any other film where a woman divorces her overbearing husband and starts really living. It is difficult to feel for a character like Karen; we never see any motivation for why she would ever marry a vanilla guy like her husband, and one wonders why she didn’t get cold feet beforehand. There are a couple scenes of her mother saying that Karen needs to go home and fix her marriage, but Karen shows a spine that apparently hadn’t existed before in refusing her mother’s demands. When is the moment that Karen realized the marriage was over? You’ll never know, because the film doesn’t show you. You could make another whole film with the parts missing in this movie that would make Karen seem selfish and less sympathetic for entering and leaving her marriage on a whim, and the overall message of this film seems to be “Get a hobby that your wife likes or she will leave you.”

Books about Colombia: Law of the Jungle by John Otis

If you are looking for a primer that summarizes recent Colombian history in a colorful way, this is the book for you. John Otis is a Bogota-based reporter who has written for various newspapers on Latin American events, and was once South America bureau chief for the Houston Chronicle. Ostensibly the book is about the capture of three gringos who get kidnapped by the FARC, but Otis uses that merely as a starting point, and explores nearly every angle possible about their capture and rescue. The result is a dizzying kaleidoscope and panorama about the conflict in Colombia, with enough barely believable magical realism to convince you that this could only have happened here.

The book starts with the story of the three Americans: retired airline pilot Thomas Howes, former air force analyst Marc Gonsalves, and former marine Keith Stansell (pictured above from left to right). They were hired by military contractor Northrop Grumman to do the kinds of work that the Pentagon increasingly outsources to the private sector, in this case flying over the jungle to find and take pictures of clandestine cocaine labs, evidence of which would then be handed over to the U.S. government. The salaries for this type of work, in the six figures, make up for the high risk, at least in the mind of these guys looking to pay off mortgages and credit card debt. Unfortunately, the money that pays for their salaries is made up in cutting corners elsewhere, and the Cessna plane that the contractors were flying in only had one engine, despite several internal memos at the company warning of the dangers of having no backup engine in case one fails. While flying over the jungle on February 13th, 2003, the three men (and two others who were shot by FARC when they were discovered) crashed after their engine dies, deep in FARC territory. The men are kidnapped, and ended up being held for 1,966 days as prisoners of the guerrilla group.

Their ordeal is fascinating enough: they walk through the jungle shackled in chains, even sleeping chained together. Their families wait for years in agony for any scrap of evidence they are alive, and deal with mostly unresponsive bureaucracies in the U.S. government and at Northrop Grumman that seem to have a “shit happens” lack of urgency in their communications with the families. Stansell, without knowing a thing, finds his life unraveling out in the real world, where his American fiancée finds out about the Avianca stewardess he had gotten pregnant, and leaves him for another man.

But Otis zooms out, covering the stories of other kidnapping victims who stay in the same camps as the Americans. There is the amazing story of policeman Jhon Pinchao Blanco, the only person to have ever successfully escaped from the FARC. After eight years as their prisoner, and after whittling away at his chains with a piece of wood for about a year at night when nobody could see him, he manages to break free and scamper away in the darkness before the guerrillas notice. Dodging FARC patrols, he swims down river, surviving on bugs and leaves for two and half weeks until miraculously running into an anti-narcotics squad in the tiny jungle town of Mitu.

There is also former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt (above), who had ventured in to FARC territory without the proper security detail and against warnings not to do so. She proves to be a lightning rod for strong opinions; Blanco says she was his inspiration to escape, while Stansell calls her a “spoiled bitch." Otis stays admirably neutral, describing the French ex-husband who flew over the Amazon jungle dropping thousands of leaflets proclaiming his support, and the mother who called into a radio show nearly every day to send her messages of love and hope. Ingrid’s campaign manager, Clara Rojas, has her own adventures in the rain forest, eventually having the first child born in FARC captivity (by cesarean! Ouch!) with a guerrilla as the father. It was Blanco’s escape that led to Colombian authorities knowing about the child and Betancourt’s location, setting the table for the eventual rescue.

Then there’s the platoon of Colombian soldiers assigned with searching for the kidnapping victims, a hapless group that ends up getting lost in the jungle and subsisting on monkeys and bats cooked over a spit. Their fortunes change, however, when they stumble on a FARC cache of millions of dollars, in both American and Colombian currency. After some deliberations, they decide to pocket whatever money they can for their troubles, and eventually make their way back to civilization. Their commander tells them not to go on a spending spree and get noticed, but once they are contact with other people the money flows freely. In the city of Popayan, they buy electronics and new clothes, and pretty much take over the whorehouses. Some of the smarter soldiers mail their families the money hidden in newly bought televisions, but before long word spreads and a number of soldiers are caught and jailed, while others are killed by FARC as revenge for the theft. Amazingly, about half of the soldiers are still at large with the money they took. This story alone could be a book by itself, and indeed was later turned into a hit Colombian movie called “Soñar No Cuesta Nada."

After years in captivity, Blanco’s information gives the authorities something to work with in terms of an attempted rescue of the hostages. Painstakingly, the Colombian military worked on first eavesdropping and then intercepting FARC radio communications, eventually placing a mole in the group. The government then created a fake humanitarian non-governmental organization to take the hostages to see FARC commander Alfonso Cano; the soldiers involved in the fake organization took acting classes and wore Che Guevara T-shirts to make their roles seem like the real thing. Then, once the hostages were in a helicopter with the soldiers and several FARC members, the soldiers subdued the guerrillas and flew the hostages to safety. It was a total bait-and-switch, and it worked. The mission, called Operacion Jaque (Operation Check, as in chess), is an elaborate piece of strategy that will make any war buff swoon.

I haven’t even touched on all of the historical background Otis crams into this book; there are mini-histories of the rise of FARC and the paramilitaries, an explanation of how the drug trade works and collaborates with these illegal armed groups, and the time that FARC’s leaders were wined and dined by various European governments in the hopes of seducing them out of the jungle and into peace with champagne and caviar. The book is packed with gossip and top-notch reportage; Otis has seemingly interviewed everyone with even a passing appearance in this tale. Even Colombian news junkies will find new nuggets of information here, but newbies to the world of guerrillas and kidnapping will learn a lot and be highly entertained at the same time. The book can be purchased here.

Colombian Cinema – Las Colores de la Montaña (The Colors of the Mountain) (2010)

Director – Carlos Cesar Arbelaez

Manuel (Hernan Mauricio Ocampo) is a soccer-crazed boy who lives in rural Colombia. His farmer father, Ernesto (Hernan Mendez), gives him a ball for his birthday, replacing the ratty, beat-up ball that he used previously. Manuel and his friends play with the ball on the town’s only soccer field, until one day when an accident involving a runaway exploding pig reveals that the field is mined, probably due to military helicopters occasionally landing there to fight guerillas. But the kids don’t pay much attention to the conflict; the important thing is the ball. It’s plainly visible from the hill overlooking the field, and just sits there among the mines taunting the boys. They devise all sorts of crazy schemes to get the ball without accidentally setting off a mine, including lowering the albino, near-blind Poca Luz (Genaro Aristizabal) from a tree with a rope, or when Manuel throws small stones in his path to see if they explode, and then when they don’t, hopping on the exact spot where the stone hit the ground, getting ever closer to the ball.

In the background, the adults are getting caught up in the crossfire between illegal militias. Guerillas are demanding that all residents of the town join their side, and that Ernesto comes to their meetings. Ernesto doesn’t want to take sides; he has heard there are paramilitaries in the area that would kill anybody who collaborates with the guerillas, and mostly he just wants to be left alone to farm in peace. But even as he wants to ignore the illegal armed groups, the illegal armed groups don’t want to ignore him. One by one, students at Manuel’s school begin leaving, displaced by the violence and fleeing to anywhere else that will have them. Eventually, the teacher, who arrived from out of town, is also asked to leave after she covers some guerrilla graffiti on the school walls with a mural painted by the students.

The children’s acting in this film is fabulous. It would be easy to just make the kids as cute and tragic as possible, but the film just makes them seem normal. They don’t always understand what the adults are talking about, and are often told to stop listening in when the subject of local violence comes up. When Julian (Nolberto Sanchez) shows Manuel a bullet he has that can supposedly take down a helicopter (obtained from his guerilla brother), it almost doesn’t seem any more real than when I played with G.I. Joes at their age. The natural feel of their innocence is all the more remarkable considering that the cast is mostly comprised of non-actors from Northwestern Antioquia near the Panamanian border, where the movie was filmed. The scenery is also breathtaking, like one of those little rural mountainside towns you pass on the colectivo on your way to some other grand destination here. When the teacher gives Manuel a set of pencils to encourage his artistic ability, he sets about painting his own version of the landscape, which resembles a lush green Colombian Valhalla.

The Colors of the Mountain won the Audience Award at the Cartagena Film Festival, and has made the rounds at other festivals around the world. Director Carlos Cesar Arbelaez has said in interviews that he was inspired by Iranian film, and the movie moves at a fairly languid pace, letting you soak in the small-town ambience so that when the violence hits, it seems inexplicable. A sleepy farm town in the mountains, what could go wrong? In Colombia, everything can go wrong.