Went to see a cumbia show the other night, Yeison Landeros, and it was a small venue and we had seats at a table right beside the stage to the side, which was great for vibing to the band. He had a five-piece band, and they wore matching outfits (naturally), and I'd guess it was the oldest dude in the band right in front of us, who did backing vocals and played the guira, which looks like a supersonic metal grater of sorts, but cylinder form, and good lord, my man was shimmying and scraping that guira hard all night. It POWERED my fuckin' soul. Anyways, I have often thunk that cumbia music is the perfect amalgamation of pre-colonial forces into post-colonial funk, with indigenous American and slave diaspora rhythms cross-pollinating into a type of resistance that says, "Fuck it, let's shake our asses, happily, and create joy!" The guira is the perfect example of that, an instrument that was born in the Caribbean, but made its way to the mountains of South America, where it became constant percussive backdrop ambiance to cumbia music, with regular down tempo and double scrape up tempo. It's fuckin' perfect. But after seeing cumbia up close, watching the band, and bandleader as well, all working group magic together in subtle and individual but collective ways, it became apparent (more than ever), that cumbia is the sound of the future, after the grid loses some of its power, and after all the data centers are long abandoned, when we bang on instruments together again to make music that will never be shared with strangers beyond walking distance, or marketed and sold online, because online will be off (naturally). I look forward to it, excitedly. A while back I got a few cumbia percussion instruments, including a guira, but to be honest, I was dazzled by the cowbell and agogo bell even more, so just walked around the house banging on them a lot of the time. But I been carrying my guira around this past week, just scraping a little 4/4 to try and synchronize my every step to that unacknowledged rhythm section that was metaphysically always there anyways. It's helping... my steps feel lighter for sure. But if you happen to be driving somewhere around Schuyler, Virginia, America, Earth, and you got your windows down, and you hear the frogs and crows and forest insects, all of which would be normal, but you also hear a rhythmic as fuck metal scraping chirping right alongside them, so smoothly that they're not shocked by it and keep chirping and cawwing themselves, if you hear any of that noice, that's just me and the nature boys, gettin' down. Hit me!
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