The evolution has resulted in different instruments today, five in all. There is the guitar, rhythm guitar, electric bass guitar, bongo and guira. That is no longer the case. Today we sing of love. Urban , Tropical Music. With its hypnotic beat and heart-renching melodies, this Dominican music began to take the world by storm when Urban Latin took over Latin nightclubs and romantics were left wanting.
But Bachata has a long history; from rural Santo Domingo to the streets of Harlem, it was associated with dodgy venues and prostitutes, and over looked down on by the music industry for years. Now it is dominating the global charts, wrestling Salsa as the number one Latin dance music across the world and spawning a whole bunch of sub-genres; modern, traditional, Urban.
As life-long Bachata fans, long before it was popular, Latinolife brings you its top 10 Bachata acts. Bachata groups mainly play a straightforward style of bolero lead guitar instrumentation using arpeggiated repetitive chords is a distinctive characteristic of bachata , but when they change to merengue-based bachata, the percussionist will switch from bongo to a tambora drum. The first Dominican bachatas were recorded immediately after the death of Trujillo , whose year dictatorship was accompanied by censorship.
The s saw the birth of the Dominican music industry and of the bachata music which would dominate it. While the bachatas being recorded in the s had a distinctly Dominican flavor, they were regarded at the time as a variant of bolero, as the term bachata , which originally referred to an informal rustic party, had not yet come into use. This term was first applied to the music by those seeking to disparage it. The higher echelons of Dominican society felt that bachata music was an expression of cultural backwardness, and a campaign ensued to brand bachata in this negative light.
The s were dark years for bachata. The music was seldom played on the radio, and almost unmentioned on television and in print. The music was influenced by its surroundings; sex, despair and crime were amongst numerous topics the genre highlighted. This only furthered the cause of those seeking to tar bachata as a music of the barrios. However, bachata continued to outsell merengue [ citation needed ]. Some bachateros to emerge from this era were Marino Perez and Leonardo Paniagua.
Due to popular demand, more radio stations began playing bachata, and bachateros soon found themselves performing on television as well. Bachata in the meantime had begun to take on a more dance-hall sound: tempos increased, guitar playing became punchier, and call and response singing more prevalent.
Bachata style merengues, or guitar merengues, also became an increasingly important part of the bachata repertoire. By the early s, the sound was further modernized and the bachata scene was dominated by two new young stars: Luis Vargas and Antony Santos.
Both incorporated a large number of bachata-merengues in their repertoires. Santos, Vargas and the many new style bachateros who would follow achieved a level of stardom which was unimaginable to the bachateros who preceded them.
They were the first generation of pop bachata artists and received all the hype and image branding typical of commercial pop music elsewhere. It was also at this time that bachata began to emerge internationally as a music of Hispanic dance-halls. Although he used the word bachata in the album title, none of the songs reflected the distinctive bachata sound. By the beginning of the 21st century, the bachata group Aventura had taken the bachata envisioned by Juan Luis Guerra in the early s to new heights.
While bachata is based on the bolero rhythm, bachateros have traditionally included other kinds of music like son, merengue, vals and ranchera in their repertoires. The influence of all of these styles, and particularly that of merengue, can be felt in the rhythms, harmonies and melodies of bachata proper. In fact many of the songs which these bachateros recorded were covers of earlier boleros, and the music was viewed by society at large in the same way that bolero was viewed throughout Latin America — a romantic music popular with lovers and serenaders.
In time, however, bachata began to be associated with another world, that of prostitution, poverty and delincuency. The reasons for this are many and complex and involve the conflicts within Dominican society around poverty and wealth, tradition and modernity, as well as genuine bad faith on the part of other elements in the music industry. So strong was the stigma against bachata that only one national radio station would play it. While this situation was deplorable and extremely difficult for the musicians involved, it also helped to consolidate the genre.
Relegated to the brothel and the barrio, bachata began to tell the stories of that world, the experiences of the lover of a prostitute, the poor country boy who gets to the city and gets ripped off, the plight of the barrio dweller without light or water—all replete with slang and sexual double entendre.
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