Spanish-language music?

[Tomás]

How could I have forgotten Los Van Van? My favorite Cuban dance band:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH1Pj5LoqAo

[FyrsteSumarenINoreg]

Christina Aguilera:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hMC8pQkEmk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVe6NfqT-BU

[aliciaftw]

I'm just going to share a few songs I'm really fond of. I really like a lot of Julieta Venegas, and here's just an example song: Eres para mi. And I'll just list a few other songs that I like but I don't really follow the artists of:

Los Rakas feat. Faviola - Abrazame
Calle 13 - No Hay Nadie Como Tú ft. Café Tacuba
Libido - En esta habitación

[Tomás]

Juan Luis Guerra's masterpiece--an incredible blend of merengue with South African Afro-pop guitars and choral arrangements:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cOQR9dH_w4

[MorkTheFiddle]

I like The Gypsy Kings. I have listened to some of their tunes hundreds of times, because their first "album" was my favorite music to walk to.

Perhaps their music is not for beginners, because their Spanish drops final -s and intervocalic -d- and nasalizes final -a. So "nada más" ends up sounding like "now mau."

One of their oldest and most popular tunes is "Tu quieres volver."

[solocricket]

If you use Spotify, I've had some fun listening to the Latin Indie and Latin Alternative playlists that they've compiled-- I've discovered a lot of cool artists through those!

[Gala]

I have vintage taste in music (and many other things.) Before I knew Spanish, I mainly listened to vintage American roots and blues and American & British popular music from the 1920's to the 1960's (most especially the 20's-40's.)

So when I began learning Spanish I focused on those same eras in my search for music in the language (and I must say that the contemporary Latin music I knew of [Shakira, Daddy Yankee, etc., as well as virtually all of the banda and salsa I'd ever heard on the streets or coming from car windows] appealed to me even less than what was current in English... although I had once lived across the street from a very elderly Puerto Rican man that played stuff I liked.)

Anyway, I discovered that the Spanish-speaking world had really outdone the English-speaking during those decades, in terms of the quality and diversity of its musical output. Some of my favorites include Ignacio Corsini, Carlos Gardel, Ada Falcón (all early Argentine tango singers), the early years of Lydia Mendoza (Tejana singer/guitarist), Guillermo Portabales (singer, guitarist and composer of guajiras, a rural Cuban style,) and Bonet de San Pedro (Spanish jazz-pop/big band), among many others. I began to discover artists and genres mainly by doing searches on Spotify such as "vintage tango,"vintage Mexican", etc., which would tend to bring up lots of compilation albums in the results.

Edit: How could I have forgotten to mention Chavela Vargas. Although her music became something of a parody of itself in recent decades, she was brilliant in the 60's. Not classifiable... she covered classic rancheras, boleros, tangos, etc., but always made them sound entirely unique.

[outcast]

Living in the Caribbean, I like Salsa, Son, Guaguancó, Bomba y Plena and Guaracho. I'm not so much a fan of Merengue and Reggaeton. In a language like Spanish, with so much original music in genres born in the Spanish-speaking world, I am constantly amazed at why people want to ask about Rock and Heavy Metal sung in Spanish. OK, I understand that people like what they like, but to me, half the fun of learning a second language is the access and entree it gives me into the culture and I want that culture to be not US/Euro/International.)

Which is why Argentina is so under-represented in this thread so far, yet it has produced amazing modern music, among young people through the last century to recently (with rock music in the 60s to 2000s), and then in the electronica genre, Argentina is like the UK of the spanish speaking world: many of the best rock bands, DJs, and most famous dance music festivals are from there. It does not produce, or has ever produced, the kind of music that most people here associate as "Latin" whatsoever: high rhythm, upbeat, multiple-instrument, incredibly eclectic fusion of elements that Brazil, the Caribbean, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico produce. Even the Cumbia from there sounds different (and it's more popular offshoot with young people, the Villera, which fills the social niche of Hip Hop in the USA and other countries). Tango is unlike any other Latin American music. Argentine folk music is said in some circles to be the most diverse in the Americas, but most are very small and regional styles, and again it does not sound Latin (Mercedes Sosa, Leon Gieco, Yupanqui). So because people around the world expect "Latin" music to sound a certain way, they mainly stick to the most celebrated styles from other countries, where you have a lifetime and more of material to keep you content and happy anyway! And then they discover there is much more even in those regions than salsa, merengue, son, bolero, etc.

[Tomás]

I have vintage taste in music (and many other things.) Before I knew Spanish, I mainly listened to vintage American roots and blues and American & British popular music from the 1920's to the 1960's (most especially the 20's-40's.)

So when I began learning Spanish I focused on those same eras in my search for music in the language (and I must say that the contemporary Latin music I knew of [Shakira, Daddy Yankee, etc., as well as virtually all of the banda and salsa I'd ever heard on the streets or coming from car windows] appealed to me even less than what was current in English... although I had once lived across the street from a very elderly Puerto Rican man that played stuff I liked.)

Anyway, I discovered that the Spanish-speaking world had really outdone the English-speaking during those decades, in terms of the quality and diversity of its musical output. Some of my favorites include Ignacio Corsini, Carlos Gardel, Ada Falcón (all early Argentine tango singers), the early years of Lydia Mendoza (Tejana singer/guitarist), Guillermo Portabales (singer, guitarist and composer of guajiras, a rural Cuban style,) and Bonet de San Pedro (Spanish jazz-pop/big band), among many others. I began to discover artists and genres mainly by doing searches on Spotify such as "vintage tango,"vintage Mexican", etc., which would tend to bring up lots of compilation albums in the results.

Edit: How could I have forgotten to mention Chavela Vargas. Although her music became something of a parody of itself in recent decades, she was brilliant in the 60's. Not classifiable... she covered classic rancheras, boleros, tangos, etc., but always made them sound entirely unique.

Do you know the pachuco (Zoot Suit) music out of Los Angeles in that time period? Check out Lalo Guerrero. This one's a rhumba:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4_oD56Pzg8

This one is early R&B boogie in Spanish:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcXP3zvGAg4

[Gala]

Argentina... does not produce, or has ever produced, the kind of music that most people here associate as "Latin" whatsoever: high rhythm, upbeat, multiple-instrument, incredibly eclectic fusion of elements that Brazil, the Caribbean, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico produce... Tango is unlike any other Latin American music.... So because people around the world expect "Latin" music to sound a certain way, they mainly stick to the most celebrated styles from other countries, where you have a lifetime and more of material to keep you content and happy anyway! And then they discover there is much more even in those regions than salsa, merengue, son, bolero, etc.

As I don't much like and am therefore somewhat unfamiliar w/ modern music, I've edited out the bits of your post dealing with it. But as to your description of stereotypical Latin music, that's exactly what I was once afraid of being stuck with. Virtually none of the music I listen to now (and almost everything I listen to is in Spanish) fits that description, tending on the whole to be more melancholy than upbeat. Yet almost all of it is also very different from any Anglo music from the same eras, and to me is unmistakably Latin.

Tango may have once been, and almost certainly is once again, unlike any other Latin American music. But from the 30's-60's the influence of tango was very evident in the popular music of the Spanish-speaking world as a whole. Non-Argentines that primarily or often performed tangos (or milongas, etc.) include Emilio Tuero (Mexican,) Rafael Medina (Spanish,) Julio Jaramillo (Ecuadoran,) Chavela Vargas (Costa Rican/Mexican,) Bonet de San Pedro (Spanish) ... I could go on and on. Some of the same artists also (or primarily) specialized in boleros, and/or rancheras, and/or pasillos, and/or coplas, etc. Evidently tango was once part of the general "Latin" repertoire.