One of the signatures of Latin pop today is the use of traditional instrumentation–from drums to flutes to accordions–in the mix. Listen to Shakira, Juanes, Gloria Estefan and even Don Omar, Pitbull and Daddy Yankee, and you’ll hear at least one track that incorporates either regional genres (vallenato, cumbia, salsa) or instruments.
But it wasn’t always so.
In the ’90s, when Carlos Vives rose to popularity, pop and tropical genres were segregated. Tropical radio stations played salsa, and later, merengue and bachata. Pop stations played romantic fare, and, occasionally, uptempo tracks. Rhythmic stations didn’t exist.
When Vives first recorded vallenato as part of the soundtrack to “Escalona,” he stuck by those parameters. But in 1994, when he took vallenato standards and infused them with electric guitar and drums on “Clasicos de la Provincia,” he broke new ground.
“In the beginning, many people were incredulous,” Vives said in 2005 of his seemingly incongruous mix of styles. “Today, they’ve opened up to the power of what I call the ‘Colombian pattern.'”
That “pattern” would influence the sound of other Colombian acts like Cabas, Fonseca, Fanny Lu (with whom Vives is working on her upcoming album), Mauricio & Palodeagua and the now-disbanded Bacilos, and would give rise to a new genre. Known as “tropi-pop,” it referred expressly to the mixture of tropical and pop rhythms, and it was used specifically to gather the growing number of Colombian acts who fell under that umbrella.
But since the mid-’90s, the fusion of specific, indigenous rhythms with contemporary sounds is now commonplace, as heard in many Latin hits of the past decade including Juanes’ “La Camisa Negra,” Bacilos’ “Mi Primer Millon,” Daddy Yankee’s “Lo Que Paso Paso” and even Don Omar’s hit “Danza Kuduro,” with its Brazilian beats.
As for Vives, his music has evolved along the way, sometimes pointing more aggressively into experimental directions, other times veering into traditional material, but always balancing tropical with pop.
“When I look back on those 20 years since I released my first album, I see we were very ballsy and we were very lucky,” Vives says. “Because it was a risky project. And we tried a lot of things–old sounds, new sounds, it’s a big pot of things…What I really value is we tried many things, but we allowed ourselves to be touched by many things from our community. You experiment and you find certain sounds, and programming and loops, and in the end, all those patterns come from very ancient traditions.”