"Did cumbia villera bother us?": Criticism of the academic common sense about the links between women and music

SPATARO, CAROLINA; SILBA, MALVINA

Music, Dance, Affect and Emotions in Latin America

Lexington Books

Lugar: Nueva York; Año: 2016; p. 141 - 170

(SE ADJUNTA LIBRO COMPLETO. LAS PÁGINAS DEL ARTÍCULO SON DE 141 A 170)In a very well known cumbia villera song "Pamela" by Los Pibes Chorros, an emblematic cumbia villera band that began a mass distribution circuit in Argentina by the year 2001) it is stated that Pamela has a problem because she cannot stop sucking penises. Accusing her of being and addict and worried because she can get sick, the lyricists points out that ?She grabs it and sucks it with enthusiasm ? you are going to gorge yourself on it.? Additionally the last portion of the song claims that Pamela is so obsessed with penises that if you take them away from her, she begins to cry and ?She asks me with enthusiasm to give it to her immediately.? In an article written in 2006 (and published in 2008), encouraged by that and other lyrics, we wondered how women were portrayed in cumbia villera songs, and without hesitation we stated that cumbia villera built an image of women as if they were objects to be consumed by heterosexual males, so we affirmed that in those lyrics women were denigrated and treated as ?easy girls.? Pamela ?liked it? but that went unnoticed for us. However, we began to see that young woman could find in the dance a space for enjoyment, through the festive celebration of body and sensuality.The starting points and the premises of analysis were getting more complex as we carried out two fieldworks, one focused on the link between cumbia and young women and men from popular sectors, and the other focused on the relationship of middle-aged women with romantic music. From an ethnographic method, our questions stopped concentrating on what the lyrics and the dance meant for us, and began to put the emphasis in the meanings that music had for those who listened to it and in the ways in which music was inserted in people´s social, cultural and emotional lives.