From Colombia, Encouraging Sounds

Rock Is Troubled Nation's Booming Export

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Jorge Villamizar remembers plenty of those nights when every aspiring musician wonders what on Earth he's doing and why on Earth he keeps doing it.

There was the gig near Fresno last year when Bacilos, the smart Latin-tropical pop group Villamizar fronts, played to a gathering of itinerant Mexican grape pickers amid acres of well-tended vines in California's Central Valley. Then there was the night at an Indian casino near El Paso, where Bacilos played for just 40 people, most of them old enough to be the band members' parents. A strange night turned positively surreal when Villamizar got word that Bacilos, now appearing at basically the end of the road, had been nominated for a Grammy.

It's safe to say the band won't be playing the fields or the casino again: Bacilos won that Grammy earlier this year, and subsequently two Latin Grammys, for the group's album "Caraluna" and Villamizar's sharp, witty single, "Mi Primer Millon" ("My First Million"), about the pitfalls of fame.

Villamizar, 32, who calls himself "the fattest, worst-dressed pop star I've ever known," is one of a host of Colombian musicians who in recent years have come to dominate the Spanish-language music scene -- both creatively and, now, commercially. They have invented mixtures of seemingly disparate musical styles and made them work, and in the process they have given the world a different reference point for Colombia, long known for drug cartels, guerrilla kidnappings, paramilitary massacres and violence of every imaginable form.

The crossover diva Shakira is the headliner, a pop star from the partying port city of Barranquilla; her global reach is illustrated by the fact that her recent English-language album went multi-platinum even in India. Backing her up in the Colombian music invasion are others, Villamizar and the soulful rocker Juanes among them, who have sailed to the cusp of superstardom with the help of highly original rhythms, sharp lyrics and the slipstream of a few compatriots who came before them.

Most startling, perhaps, is that they have made the accordion cool.

In the past three years, Colombian musicians have won more than a dozen Latin Grammys and at least three of the mainstream version. That may not be an absolute measure of talent -- pretty-boy boxer Oscar De La Hoya once was nominated -- but it does offer a sense of how the $554 million U.S. market for Latin recorded music sees the Colombians. Juanes, whose music mixes heavy metal with the peasant rhythms of Colombia's violent northwest, won five Latin Grammys this year alone and shows signs of breaking through to the general American audience.

"Where once there were one or two Colombians on the international scene, now there are a half-dozen or so," said Humberto Moreno, general manager of the independent record label MTM. Moreno, who has been involved in the Colombian music industry for 40 years, said the artists have been able to build on one another's success as they occupy more and more space in the marketplace.

The Colombians have matured along with the genre called "rock en Español," which emerged in the mid-1980s amid the political ferment of collapsing South American dictatorships. The catchall category has come to encompass a profusion of styles, ranging from Mexican ranchera to Argentine tango, all laid over rock-and-roll rhythms. Colombian bands, like the pioneering alternative-rock group Aterciopelados (the Velvets), mixed Colombian vallenato with Jane's Addiction in the early 1990s and broke across Colombia's borders into what the industry calls the pan-Latin market.

Globalizing Forces

Like other successful Spanish-language musicians, Colombians are profiting as never before from the globalizing forces of the multinational recording industry, the replicating spread of MTV and other music video channels, and the relative affluence of the 38 million self-identified Hispanics living in the United States -- a demographic that is getting larger and richer at a time when Latin American economies are struggling.

The Colombian diaspora, scattered by civil war and a poor economy, has reached a critical commercial mass overseas thanks to the 1.5 million people who have abandoned the country since the mid-1990s. Like the Mexican and Cuban and Dominican immigrants who came before them, Colombians in the United States are demanding to hear their own music on radio stations, in nightclubs and on college campuses.

Many of the most successful Colombian musicians now live in Miami, the center of the Latin pop music industry, and thus are at risk of succumbing to the Ricky-Martinizing influences of the bland U.S. pop market. Witness Shakira, whose Colombian musical roots have been bleached blond after handling by singer Gloria Estefan's hit-machine husband, Emilio Estefan Jr.

There is also the larger question for Colombian artists of what it means to be the other face of a country best known for its drug lords, Marxist rebels and paramilitary butchers. The ghost of cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar and the brutality of the hemisphere's longest civil war have long belied the existence here of a sophisticated business class and a vibrant artistic life. We are more than the sum of our sins, goes the frequent Colombian lament, and these musicians have become a national hope for a second chance at international respectability.

"There isn't a shame of being Colombian, nor is there a lot of joy in it at the moment," said Eduardo Arias, the culture editor for Semana, Colombia's largest weekly newsmagazine. "Through some of these artists, there has been the possibility of recovering some national pride."

Colombia is where Caribbean, European, Andean, Amazon, African and cowboy cultures meet, and the result is a rich musical stew. The sounds filter up from small, secluded communities, some of them founded long ago by freed slaves, that have been cut off by distance and war like the town of Macondo that Colombia's favorite son, the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, invented for his landmark "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

"Our Jimi Hendrix will never be known, our best drummers will never be discovered," said Andres Cabas, a 26-year-old rising star with a Lenny Kravitz look, a contract with EMI and a distinctive rhythmic sound that relies on drums from the Caribbean coast and heavy rock guitar riffs.

Cabas trains with an 80-year-old drummer from Palenque de San Basilio, one of the communities founded by freed slaves. He has explored remote parts of Colombia since he was 17 in search of "new" sounds, many of them in fact quite old.

"There are so many people in this country behind us that are unknown, and never will be [known] because of the huge cultural gap in this country," he said. "We don't have our own MTV."

The sultry cumbia and pounding African drums of the Caribbean and Pacific coasts, plaintive acoustic laments and tango from Antioquia province, and a vibrant salsa scene in southwestern Cali have all been drawn on by Colombia's rock and pop stars. The borrowing has spread the sounds far and wide. But it has also brought criticism from purists, who say the Afro-Colombian sounds, in particular, are being hijacked for commercial success.

Toto la Momposina, the doyenne of musicians who play an indigenous Caribbean blend of strings, horns and drums reminiscent of Cuban son, has criticized the pop stars for distorting native sounds. She refuses to listen to the music.

The sound that most successfully spans Colombia's regional insularity to form the closest thing to a national style is vallenato, the music of afternoon beers in corner cantinas. Emerging from the coast, the style features bouncy, accordion-laced rhythms behind melancholy lyrics of lost love, drunken pledges to dead friends, and odes on violence. Vallenato is the score of rural Colombian life. It served as the musical foundation for Carlos Vives, a multi-Grammy Award winner from the coastal city of Santa Marta.

A television actor and unheralded rock singer in the early 1990s, Vives appeared in a popular soap opera based on the life of legendary vallenato performer Rafael Escalona. Following the show's run, Vives was invited to try his hand at recording some of the music he had sung on the small screen. What he turned out in 1993 was "Classics From the Province," the world's first taste of vallenato-pop.

The album's success in Latin America coincided with the opening of Colombia's economy, which turned a $20 million domestic recorded-music market in 1992 into one that four years later was grossing $130 million. Vives' commercial success, which he used to shine the spotlight on up-and-comers like Juanes, focused the attention of multinational record labels on Colombia, where copyright piracy, risk-averse radio and a scant nightclub scene conspired against local artists.

"It all started with Carlos," said Villamizar, whose own music draws heavily on vallenato and the coastal rhythms of his native Cordoba province. "We had our Elvis."

But the Colombian domestic music market has since crumbled, making international success all the more important for local artists. The arrival of easily copied compact discs in Colombia, where the law has a light grasp on the narrow segments of society it reaches at all, ravaged the industry. Only a quarter of the market is controlled by the legal industry. The Tower Records-like displays of illegal CDs arranged by street vendors at busy Bogota stoplights suggest who controls the rest.

Shakira's Rise

The multinationals' arrival resulted in the phenomenon known as Shakira Mebarak, the precocious daughter of a Lebanese immigrant intellectual. Shakira, who no longer uses her last name, was discovered by a Sony Music Entertainment executive after an a cappella audition in a Bogota hotel lobby arranged as he passed through town. At 13, she had her first recording contract.

After a few teen-pop failures, Shakira recorded "Pies Descalzos" ("Bare Feet") in 1996 and had her breakthrough. The alloy of sounds and her intense voice generated huge sales in Argentina and Mexico. And her slightly bohemian style, combined with fluid, original lyrics, drew comparisons with Alanis Morissette. She topped those sales with "Donde Estan los Ladrones?" -- the title song ("Where Are the Thieves?") is an indictment of Colombia's endemic official corruption -- and even experimented with Arabic melodies on "Ojos Asi" ("Eyes Like Yours").

But her fame reached stratospheric heights only with the 2001 release of "Laundry Service," her first English-language recording, produced in part by Estefan, godfather of the Miami sound made famous by his wife, Gloria. The album reached the Top 10 on charts in 19 different markets and has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. It has gone triple platinum in the United States.

As she changed languages, Shakira also changed her image. Her hair, once dark, is now blond, and her wardrobe has become ever-skimpier and ever-tighter. In her Latin Grammy-winning video for the song "Suerte," she wears a silver halter top as she grovels in mud. Her flamboyance has made her God's gift to the Latin American paparazzi.

"Shakira is the only one to have reached the Anglo-American market," said Celeste Delgado, who has written extensively about the Latin music industry for the weekly Miami New Times. "But she didn't do it with Colombian rhythms."

The most celebrated Colombian musician of the moment took a different route, one that led him far from the Miami scene all the way to Los Angeles.

In the late 1990s, the West Coast was the cradle of rock en Español in the United States and a base for such influential bands as Cafe Tacuba, Los Fabulosos Cadillacs and Caifanes. It was also headquarters for Gustavo Santaolalla, a kingmaking Argentine producer, who one day in 1998 received a self-made demo tape from a young rocker named Juan Esteban Aristizabal.

Juanes, the Spanish contraction of his first two names, had left Medellin and his heavy metal band, Ekhymosis, despite its modest success in Colombia. Barely making ends meet with infrequent club engagements, Juanes approached Santaolalla with material that would become the album "Fijate Bien" a little more than a year later.

"Every album is a book, and every song a chapter," Juanes said during an interview at his manager's office in Miami's design district. If so, "Fijate Bien" ("Pay Close Attention") is his Gothic novel.

The title song is a meditation, written from Los Angeles after a phone call with his mother about happenings in Medellin, about the terror of the land mines that seed Colombias war zones. The song samples a typical Colombian radio news broadcast about guerrilla attacks, and warns, "They are children, they are the old, they are mothers, we are all walking, don't forget this." The album, suffused with anger and loneliness, won three Latin Grammys.

"I am in deep pain for my country," said Juanes, who has begun displaying a message on a screen during his shows that celebrates Colombia's soldiers and police officers. "It is moral support, and it's trying to say that these are your people, young people, people with families, and four or five of them are dying every day. I've never seen this as a delicate matter. I worry, I feel it."

Colombia's long civil war has been a troubling theme for many of Colombia's musicians, save Aterciopelados, whose lyrics are, among many other things, hostile to U.S. policy in Colombia. Shakira has steered clear, and Vives only touches the subject glancingly. Villamizar eliminated a song from Bacilos's eponymous first album (at Warner Music's request) that described the guerrillas killing a friend from Colombia's Naval Academy whom he met while completing his mandatory military service. Juanes, however, has come back to the theme repeatedly with a generalized condemnation of violence.

The youngest of six children, Juanes grew up listening to his siblings playing the folkloric guitar strains of Antioquia. His province is the most self-conscious and distinctive in Colombia (Medellin believes it, not Argentina, is the true birthplace of tango.) Like many Antioqueños, Juanes is deeply Catholic, darkly superstitious and fascinated by mortality. His music mixes Metallica (his early favorite), vallenato and elegiac peasant guitar rhythms.

But the darkness lifted with "Un Dia Normal" ("A Normal Day"), his 2002 album that kicks off with a universal prayer, "A Dios le Pido" ("I ask God"). Juanes, 31, had fallen in love. The couple now has a 3-week-old daughter, named Luna.

The album not only won Juanes an armful of Latin Grammys, but it has also been certified gold in the United States. It has ranked on Billboard's Latin Album Top 10 list for 71 weeks, which includes a record-setting stretch of 65 consecutive weeks. Currently it holds the No. 1 spot.

Juanes still wears worn jeans, T-shirts and black Nikes, and keeps his hair unfashionably shaggy. But the Fender Telecaster he bought in a Medellin pawnshop when he was a teenager is now a museum piece on display in Bogota's Hard Rock Cafe. After promising his band and crew $1,000 each for every Latin Grammy they won, he paid out $70,000. That's roughly his take from two concerts, which are increasingly populated with people who don't speak Spanish.

"The whole thing is impossible to believe. Three years ago I was sleeping on a friend's floor, and now I have a house in Coral Gables," Juanes said. "But I miss Colombia. I plan to die there."

Already, though, his next album is emerging as a return to darker, more political themes. He described one song in the works that narrates the thoughts of a soldier in the midst of combat, family and friends scrolling through his fearful mind, and another that presents the dreams of a kidnapped victim.

"There is a parallel universe in my country of life and work and love," he said. "We have these huge lungs, and we are trying to get a breath of freedom and hope."