The Chilean mambo is a treasure of our music, but the local media is not ready for that conversation. I guess a gringo or a European would have to come and say it for them to realize it here. It would be the umpteenth time it happens. The established press only discovered Nvscvr two months ago, after seeing them in the report on Chilean trap published by Rolling Stone. If an American magazine doesn’t come to tell them (in English!) that the group is good, they won’t even know about its existence here.
I have a memory like that with Chilean indie too. Maybe now it gives the impression that he was always integrated into the local environment, but the truth is that at first they didn’t even piss on him.. I wrote in the indie press at that time and even there everything was super Anglophile. The change came in 2011. What happened that year? An important Spanish newspaper, El País, put Chilean indie pop on the cover of its cultural supplement, with a photo of Javiera Mena in full color and the headline “Chile, new pop paradise.”
I would love for the Chilean mambo to have a moment like that. Let the most refined European journalist come and say “hey, this is unique in the world!” Let the first world press that they consume in Cuicolandia highlight it. Let some ultra-serious researcher certify its cultural value. For now, all I can do is use this showcase to point out that the local media suffers from selective blindness. It’s as if they see Chile in a blur, but they see everything outside in 4K.
This is an old problem. “At school they teach that culture is anything strange except what you do,” Jorge González sang in ‘Cultural Independence’ (1986) by Los Prisioneros. Jorge himself reflected decades later in his self-interview about the national spirit, stating that “Chileans are cool”, but the powerful have taken it upon themselves to demoralize the population through systematic mistreatment of all kinds, a constant in our history as a country.
The Chilean mambo is culture. I write it because someone, even if it doesn’t come from outside, has to say it. It is a way of making music, writing and singing that contains keys to the identity and aesthetics of the flaite world., essential to understand the present of the country in all areas. Much of our idiosyncrasy is reflected in the Chilean mambo, from how we weather grief to the way we celebrate, from what moves us to what worries us.
If I were a gringo, I would be crazy about the Chilean mambo, in the same way that being Chilean I am amazed by the Argentine villera, the South African kwaito or the Cuban rumba. How can you not enjoy at least the transporting dimension of music, the one that takes you on a trip to the geographical point from where the sounds emanate. Or its documentary function, the one that informs you about what is happening in a place and immerses you in the way of inhabiting the reality of the people who live there.
I feel that Chilean mambo lacks that little push that local trap had, for example, when Yung Beef gave it to Pablo Chill-E and transferred part of the energy of the PXXR GVNG to it. Some time later, El Seco, a visionary who never stitches without a thread, surrounded himself with Chileans (Pablo, Pipobeatz, Julianno Sosa, Harry Nach and Drago) to perform in ‘If Tomorrow I Die’ and, in the process, increase his street prestige by showing up with Third World artists and playing their own game.
Why does a European artist see what seems invisible here? It seems that Jorge González is right and it really is a problem with a long history. In fact, I recently had the opportunity to access “Speech sounds in urban genre music: Coa and sociophonetic variation of consonant phonemes”, an article by researcher Claudia Mora that highlights the historical classism of language academics in Chile, only refuted at the beginning of the 19th century by, guess what, a German.
Before this researcher, named Rodolfo Lenz, arrived, popular speech was considered by scholars as a crime against good Spanish and a sign of bad education. Lenz was the first to tell them that they were wrong and that “the Huasa language” (an old ancestor of the Coa) was rich and valid as an object of analysis.. In more than 100 years, it sometimes seems as if nothing has changed: the culture vibrates strongly, but those who have a platform do not react alone. Long live the Chilean mambo. And in case a gringo sees this: Chilean mambo rules.
