[Pablo Lescano]
A brand new tune from Damas Gratis arrived in my inbox direct from Pablo Lescano last week. And it’s awesome.
“La 3ra del Borracho”, a thematic appetizer for their upcoming album Esquivando El Exito, is a song about appetite and excess (“but I only had five glasses of red!”), institutionalization’s passivity vs. the self-guiding twitch of compulsion. Classic accordeon and horn lines sort their way around catchy, acidic keytar melodies, all chorused up with a reggaetonesque appeal to pa’tras pa’tras as the narrator escapes from the doctor to end up with a piba on the dancefloor, grinding against the wall.
I also appreciate the way Lescano flips cumbia’s convention of calling a followup/response song ‘2nda’ etc. so that, here, it edges into relapse, repetition…
[audio:https://negrophonic.com/mp3/01 la 3ra del borracho.mp3]Damas Gratis – La 3ra del Borracho
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In other news, the Kumbia Queers just dropped a video, “Celosa,” from their Pablo Lescano-produced album, La Gran Estafa del Tropipunk, which brings in the reggaeton-edge more explicitly. Who cares about your glitz and glamor or your video’s cinematography/after effects budget/set design; the Kumbia Queers are awesome: radical and inclusive and punk in a way that makes those three tired words mean something again. And that is the big picture uniting both Damas Gratis and Kumbia Queers — they ‘sidestep success’ (esquivar el exito) by ignoring standard ideas about beauty and propriety to successfully create their own worlds, unprecedented before they arrived, now thriving such that the (cumbia) mainstream bends towards them, as it should…