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A weekend with the king of the quartet La Mona Jiménez - Work Zone

The Argentina of the 1990s had a lush and pachanguera soundtrack: tropical music. Thus, the quartet and the dancer have made everyone dance without distinction of sex, class or religion. One of its pillars is La Mona Jiménez, an eccentric singer from Córdoba who teaches every weekend in some incredible and crowded dances. With more than eighty albums released –and more than three million copies sold–, La Mona is the unavoidable icon of the quartet –the folklore of the Mediterranean city. But her figure does not rest only within the four walls of Cordoba, but has also expanded to other climates and other genres. That is why it is not strange that many of his fans come from rock groups. La Mona Jiménez is the tip of a vague iceberg for the general public –which does not usually perceive the differences between the quartet and the bailanta– but which mobilizes an enthusiastic crowd every Friday and Saturday with a very clear objective: to have fun. The photos that illustrate this note are part of the happy stay that two humble chroniclers of this magazine had in Córdoba capital for an unforgettable weekend in the year 2000 accompanying –and interviewing– La Mona. Here, the radiography of a singular phenomenon.


#HemerotecaZdeOReportaje originally published in 2000, at number 21 of Zona de Obras


The crack through which to spy on Argentina in recent years may be the world of tropical and Latin music, the one that every weekend ignites the joy, disdain and longing for a country that we do not look at. We are in Buenos Aires, so similar to Paris, as seductive as Barcelona, ​​as potentially arty as New York, but its music, the soundtrack that is heard in the streets – those songs escape from car radios, run through the vines that support the elevators, live on the skin of the buses, come off the rails of the trains–, it comes from a universe that would seem marginal due to its appearance but that is on everyone's lips. So? Marginal because it is not signed by our hands? Marginal because we don't understand that happiness is not only Brazilian?

We've heard all about it. The comparison with the Mafia is always sought. Of course, the guys who run a bailanta – a space that in the dark is the closest thing to a huge warehouse, with several bars that sell drinks and a stage where the hysteria and electricity of the night come together – usually have several of them and They make groups walk through all their businesses throughout a night that begins at 11:00 p.m. and can end at 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning. Alcohol, drugs, prostitution… They are the Mafia. They squeeze you (a threat with physical or gestural violence) if you don't want to accept their rules, they swear and perjure you that you will never be better than with them. The master-slave relationship first of all. The musician –although in truth it is not always about people who know how to play, but rather carilindos from the same dancers, chosen via a casting– is gladly exploited, because he seeks fame and money. Below, the misery and exhaustion of belonging to the working class. Do you want to be a working class hero? Do you want to be a dancing star? All this is part of the vox populi, what is said; those stories that everyone knows but that no one dares to affirm.

Now, the crack, only the crack catches our attention. That place that catalyzes the rumours, the anxieties and the desires of a population marked by a meager and precarious destiny. Friday night arrives and you have to get rid of the hardships of the week, the exhausting and poorly paid work; of the inhospitable of the unfinished shacks; of the dreams that are evaded with the speed that a plane takes off. Argentina model 2000 moves to the sound of that mutant tropical music (far from the tropics, the genre includes everything from melodic cumbia to Cordovan quartet), with all its baggage of direct and explicit lyrics, decorating a tense social situation, shaken many times due to violence resulting from exclusion. Cracks in an increasingly polarized society, where the rich are less and less and have more and more, where the poor are more and more and have less and less. The rhymes are loaded by the devil.

In the midst of this desolate and everyday landscape, this music is articulated from several fronts: radio, television and dancers. The ether is covered by many stations in charge of broadcasting all the groups and soloists that are part of the movement throughout the country – from La Rioja, Corrientes and Catamarca, passing through Córdoba and Buenos Aires to Ushuaia. The spaces where tropical and Latin music is danced tend to settle down in places where there are terminal train and bus stations such as Constitución, Once, Pacífico and Liniers in the Federal Capital (already areas where people from the suburbs come to the Capital to go to their jobs); while in the province of Buenos Aires they occupy popular neighborhoods such as Lanús, San Miguel, José C. Paz, Moreno and Isidro Casanova. Some of the names of the dancers may tell you a little more about this phenomenon: Fantastic, Metropolis, Cachaca, La Bomba, Tesoro, Tentación, Copadísimo, Super Villaseca... The radio stations also have their own thing: FM Desamparados, FM Brisas... For its part, television is not far behind: Always Saturday, Tropical Passion (which has a segment like Surprise and a half, where they are in charge of fulfilling the dreams of the artists' fans) and Rhythm, salsa and games are in charge of fill the small screen with a parade of groups and soloists of the genre, in addition to promoting the dances that will unleash the party at night; yes, without ceasing to spice up the panorama with juicy and sponsored female asses – of course, sometimes a little inappropriate, due to the schedule in which these programs are given, usually every weekend afternoon.

This is not everything. The tropical music industry, hardly taken over by the multinationals (which have relevant artists in their catalog, but have not been able to position themselves throughout the market), rewards its artists year after year with the Clave de Sol, something like like the Grammys of tropical music, which are broadcast live from a downtown theater. The way in which this material circulates and is acquired is through specialized record stores (such as Kuky in the Constitución neighborhood of the capital) or the Musimundo mega-store. What is happening is striking: while the record market is showing signs in recent times of being at the height of the recession and the economic problems that tend to mistreat the country (in 2000 record sales have decreased by 35% in relation to previous year), tropical music in all its meanings has sold five million copies in 1999 alone.

As for the antecedents within the popular culture of this singular phenomenon, it would be necessary to go looking for it in the 19th century, with the Cielitos of a gaucho poet such as Hidalgo (from the same period as the mythical Martín Fierro); Already at the beginning of the 20th century we find the sainete (a form of popular theater) and the appearance of the radio, the radio dramas of Juan Carlos Chiappe; We cannot ignore the paintings that portrayed the world of the laborers and the gauchada of Florencio Molina Campos (which reached the general public through the advertising of the Alpargatas clothing line). These are some of the forerunners of a rather peculiar way of seeing such as tropical music, quite friendly to the picaresque and casual and direct stories.

If in the last twelve months the genre has gained a transcendence unthinkable a decade ago, when the irruption in Buenos Aires of the themes of a varied tandem such as La Mona Jiménez, Ricky Maravilla and Alcides united the lower class with the Argentine upper class (some of these artists came to play in the select Uruguayan city of Punta del Este), everything is due to the charisma of the recently deceased Rodrigo. This Cordovan with changing blue eyes and sparkling hair colors had a sudden rise: in less than three months he became a repeated and essential figure on television (he could even appear in three programs that were on the air at the same time) . Something incredible. This luck of James Dean (he lived and died very quickly: he was only twenty-seven years old when death found him on a Buenos Aires highway, in a dubious maneuver of his 4 × 4 truck still not cleared up by justice, while returning from a show in the city ​​of La Plata) managed to capitalize in his figure the kindness and approval of the masses. At one point even his records began to be sold on magazine stands, something quite unusual. His fateful death occurred on the same day that the 65th anniversary of the death of Carlos Gardel was celebrated. One of the merits of the overwhelming personality of the singer was that he was respected by various tribes, not only the one that manifests a predilection for tropical music. That is why some pointed out that Rodrigo died at the same age as many of the famous rockers such as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin...

Un fin de semana con el rey del cuarteto La Mona Jiménez - Zona de Obras

Rodrigo embodied the saying "no one is a prophet in his land." Coming from the Mediterranean quartet Córdoba, his name does not credit much honor in his native land. There are not a few of his co-provincials who relativize his conquered media celebrity achieved in Buenos Aires. Soy Cordobés was the hit that elevated him to all radio and television programs. There he recounted in the first person the vices and virtues of belonging to that sunny and happy province: «Hey, gentlemen, I want you to have a lot of emotion like this / where my singing was born / sparkle, tune, piano, bass and accordion / that's how Leonor played the rhythm of cuartetazo / Pibe Berna, Carlos 'Pueblo' Rolan and the Cuarteto de Oro / gave music, joy to my city / I'm from the university of joy and song / I'm from Córdoba / I like wine and partying / and I I drink without soda because that way it hits better / I'm from Córdoba and I like dances / and I feel up in the air / if I have to sing about the city of the most beautiful women / about fernet, about beer / early mornings like no other / I'm from Córdoba / and I walk without documents / because I have the accent of Córdoba capital / As a believer I thank God / for this blessing that we carry in our blood / it is all year long 'tunga tunga' of the best / it is our rock and roll and we idolize Mona / it stops on Monday because we have to rest from everything we dance / and on tuesday in caravans again / we have to shine the pepes / because we're going somewhere / I'm from Córdoba / I like wine and party / and I drink it without soda because that way it sticks more / I'm from Córdoba and I like dances / and I I feel in the air if I have to sing / I'm from Alta Córdoba where 'la Gloria' is / or you can see it in Jardín Espinosa at Talleres / and if you want I'll take you to Alberdi / where the celestials are / my Cordovan pirate from the city of the prettiest women / of the fernet, of the beer / unparalleled early mornings / I am from Córdoba and I don't care if she is fat / like the arch of Córdoba I want her to dance».

Unrivaled X-ray of some of the recurring themes of that captivating city (more than anything, weekend life, where there are lots of dances and which people attend en masse), in this song all the debt that Rodrigo spreads its wings had with the icon of the quartet: La Mona Jiménez. But that is another story.

Córdoba is eight hundred kilometers from Buenos Aires, an hour and ten minutes by plane. The airport is less than half an hour from the capital. The sun unfolds on the skin of women and gives brightness to the faces of happy young people. Beyond the fact that the good humor of its provincials is characteristic (there are many comedians who have bequeathed the Argentine popular imagination), these days good humor is breathed. There is a reason: Governor De La Sota came to power with the promise of lowering taxes. And something incredible happened: he lowered them! This is the first thing that welcomes us: good humor, good disposition. In an Argentina where uncertainty is increasingly the palette that paints the social and political situation, where latent violence pulls the strings of a thick and misty reality, Córdoba seems like another country. On our horizon is the image of Mona Jiménez, the god of a religion called quartet. No more no less. The man who gets twenty thousand people (yes, twenty thousand human beings) to move their bodies throughout the weekend, in three dances spread over Friday, Saturday and Sunday in different parts of the city. And joy walks with height and approval.

The first comparison that jumps out at anyone linked to rock culture is the king of funk: La Mona is James Brown. But we fall short or do not say much about what that character implies, the poles of attraction, the lines of flight. Although in terms of music hers is not sophisticated at all, nor did it open doors to new territories as the author of Sex Machine did, Mona was in charge of renewing the sound coordinates of the genre at the time. It is that the quartet was born on June 4, 1943, by the hand of a woman, Leonor Marzano. She was at the head of the Characteristic Leo Quartet, an ensemble armed with a piano, a double bass, an accordion and a violin. Descendant of folk music brought by Italian and Spanish immigrants, fundamentally the pasodoble and the tarantella, the music of quartets was in those times a purely rural manifestation. But let Mona, at one of our rallies around town before one of his dances, give us her impression of the history of the genre.

“Here in Córdoba we have a large source of immigrants – Spanish and Italians for the most part. The quartet is born from the conjunction of tarantellas, pasodobles, foxtrots, rancheras. All that music that we played for our grandparents. The inventor of the quartet, Leonor Marzano, when she played the pasodoble made the piano 'jump', she made it a good dancer. The famous 'tunga tunga' with the left hand. We played a lot in all the festivals of the communities and in the patron saints. Always on the periphery. I started with the Berna quartet, when I was fifteen years old: I arrived for a casting where they were looking for singers from fifteen to seventeen. It was for the radio program Festival of Success, hosted by Carlos Del Solar. Among the sixty boys who applied, they chose me. Those who played were all very young. Previously I did folklore and rock'n'roll. My dad gave me a Jackson guitar. On the radio I started singing a waltz and a pasodoble. In Córdoba city we didn't play: the quartet was very marginalized. The clubs did not accept our presence. So we were bordering, surrounding it… The only accepted group was the Leo Quartet. The typical thing was the use of a very nasal voice… (and he starts to sing one of the songs…). The Berna Quartet hit it hard with a song called Azul, it stayed and we managed to enter Córdoba capital little by little. Our audience was made up of many of those guys who followed us in the early days, when we hit the hottest spots in town. Of course we were constantly rejected by society. It was very common for the police to carry out raids, to take us all to jail (prisoners). Our audience was very low class. All because in our dances people could enter in espadrilles, something that did not happen in the others: they were forced to wear shoes and a tie».

The dilapidated but highly efficient car, driven by its driver for twenty-five years, heads into the city. We are arriving at the scene of the events: a basketball club from Córdoba; one of the places chosen so that every weekend the joy is only from Cordoba. Just a little while ago, his friend and personal chauffeur came down to buy a bottle of champagne: it's the only thing that shouldn't be missing from his catering. oh!!! And two or three bananas. Of course it's not because it's about Mona and her favorite food, but it's part of his strict diet to be able to offer long and incredible shows. We continue listening to him, we closely follow the entrance of the quartet to the corners of the city. «In 68/69 the quartet was already hitting the city. At the time of the 78 World Cup, it was banned from the radio and it was taken off the shelves of record stores so that foreigners would not know that we existed. So we advertised through pamphlets by going out on the streets in person.

Who is Mona, this man who doesn't stop talking for a second, who doesn't stop getting on his racing bike that came from Italy and travels fifty kilometers a day; that he does not stop greeting the people who affectionately recognize him as we approach the pulpit where tonight he is going to celebrate another but always unique ceremony? Sincerity seems to be the basis of his magnetism. A chanta Argentine sincerity, but with all the aura of those touched by the magic wand of magnetism. Because Mona is pure magnetism: the one that makes people go up on stage to give her kisses, hugs; to dance with him or for him, as a series of ladies usually do that would break more than one heart.

La Mona dazzles the very young with those songs that speak to them of the precariousness of life, of modesty but the need for joy; of broken dreams, of the ghosts of drugs and alcohol. All based on a direct and simple language, so that no one gets lost, so that everyone enjoys the party. He says: «Today's kids don't stay at home and come to see me as if it were a ritual. I made the grandparents and parents dance. They are the third generation following me. When I started, my audience was forty-year-old women, women of the night, the cafishos. All good suburban ». In La Mona there is that magnetism that does not differentiate between social classes –later at the dances we will be able to distinguish, among the incessant procession of boys and girls, dark-haired no more than eighteen years old, a few couples whose blonde hair was lost in the quagmire of bodies moving – no musical barriers. The latter was very present on the first night of our visit, when the singer from Los Pericos came on stage later. El Bahiano, along with Andrés Calamaro, Los Auténticos Decadentes, Bersuit Vergarabat, Kapanga and many others, are declared fans of the Cordovan. And they didn't object when the idea of ​​making an album with Mona came up. The idea is to launch it in the middle of 2001.

But let's not sneak away. La Mona is eager to tell us who he is: «I never laburé (worked) in my life. I was always on stage. My bass player, Ricardo Verón, has only worked as a musician for twenty-five years. Jorge, my assistant, has been working with me for twenty years. The quartet used to be only four musicians: piano, accordion, violin and double bass. I separated from the Gold Quartet because I wanted to modernize it a bit, that's why they told me I was crazy. More than anything he wanted to give him a little more youth. Violinists were not available at that time: the youngest was seventy years old. He didn't balance. The older ones played because it was a twine for the stew. But the young people didn't want anything to do with playing with us, more than anything because of the status. They said: 'If the quartet is black... it's people's music'».

The curiosities are mixed in our heads, they jump at the same time as the people who get on stage (and it is not a group that plays any sound conducive to mosh, stage diving or whatever). We will surely take the curiosities with us to the grave, almost like transvestites carry their silicones. Girls who are going to dance the waltz of their fifteen years with him, which means that they arrive, climb the stairs of the precarious stage (guard with the cables, which are everywhere and in view of no one!) and whoosh… The band plays the usual Happy Birthday and Mona fulfills her mission. To all this, the girl's parents take photos and follow everything with her video camera. Not to believe

Another of the reasons for not losing sight of it is related to the special communication that it maintains with its public through a complex (although it seems very simple due to the speed with which these mails are sent by hand) system of signs and codes, of both neighborhoods and personal names. All this while she is singing, all this while she moves her body to songs like Russian Roulette, The White Bride, Juan de la ciudad and so many other instant classics. They want more? Number his records. To date it goes by the number sixty-five! She says it occurred to her when he was in his forties. Do the math: release an album in July and another in December. Plus? She has endless drawers where she puts the clothes that her daughter makes for her and she doesn't usually repeat her outlandish and flashy clothes more than twice. Plus? Before he leaves for the dances from his chalet – without fanfare or luxury if we start thinking about the amount of money he must bill – between fifty and eighty people come to greet him, to wish him luck; to ask for an autograph, to take a picture with the idol.

La Mona is clear about her role in life. He will never consider himself a singer. He affirms that his thing is more about being a good entertainer at a birthday party or a wedding. «Here I do not come to do a show: I come to have fun. But I sing with my heart. At the same time, people pay the entrance to see me well and that's why I try to be with all the batteries. In places other than Córdoba I can dance, jump and move; here they hardly even let me dance and there are also signs. The shows change according to the provinces. Here you have to follow the boys, you have to be attentive. They absorb you, leave you without weapons: by signs, by gestures, so that names. Sometimes they repeat themselves and come to all the dances. The spirit of the boys is barbaric. That spirit is what mobilizes an impressive number of people every weekend to different areas of Córdoba, the same spirit that led the quartet to La Mona. Faced with the question or tongue twister if he is happy because he listens to a quartet or if he does a quartet because he is happy, the creator of Beso a beso does not let up: «I was happy before listening to quartet. I was always a very talkative guy, from the day my mom gave birth to me. I am a guy with a lot of energy, wanting to invent things. The quartet fed back to me the other energy that I had before.

La Mona Jiménez live at Luna Park in Buenos Aires. 2019 (Part 1)

La Mona Jiménez live at Luna Park in Buenos Aires. 2019 (Part 2)

CUMBIA IN CONSTITUTIONBy Sergio Pujol, extracted from History of dance (Emecé)

Diffusion«The diffusion of the bailanta in its beginnings is carried out in the dances themselves, and above all in the record stores of the station neighborhoods. Around the Pacífico, Constitución and Retiro terminals, as well as at the Roca de La Plata station and the intermediate stops of Quilmes and Berazategui, record stores with abundant offers –mainly cheap cassettes– propagate cumbias day and night. In the pizzerias that adjoin the street stalls where the cumbia cassette shares a showcase with the stockings on sale and the colored lighters, hundreds of young people and not so young people savor beer or glasses of red wine surrounded by a dancing atmosphere. One or two generations before, those same 'little black heads' would have listened to Tormo, in '50s and 50s' bars».

Look«The dancing and tropical kings appear in the bailanta very late at night, dressed as Flash Gordon, and with backing bands that include accordion, trumpet, trombone and sax, although later all that will be eliminated by keyboards and, in more than one occasion, for the incredible phonomimics (the favorite resource of music on television). In reality, the only thing that interests the excited public –they have waited for their idols for many hours, in sheds or sheds where not even a pin fits– is the singer, a kind of evangelist of the dance rhythm, who just by appearing on stage generates a riot With their sequined shirts, skin-tight pants and pointed white shoes, the tropical soloists are the most direct sexual expression in Argentine popular music since the days of Sandro. Little by little, the first stereotype of the 'ugly with charisma' will be succeeded by the boy with long hair and delicate features, a kind of Ricky Martín for 'tropical' consumption».

Origin I«As before the chamamé and the ranchera, now the intersection of cuartetero rhythms and Colombian cumbia acclimatized in Argentina represents the popular classes in the big city. Some will wonder about the origin of all that. Where does this world of apocryphal palm trees and provincial picaresque, chamamé drag, ranchera, pasodoble and joys of a night come from that tries to compensate for the hard, the very hard life in the city of the 80s? There are names and a story. Córdoba is an important emitting center. Since the early 1940s, the Characteristic Leo Quartet – double bass, piano, accordion and violin, plus a singer – marks the transition from that characteristic orchestra to a small group. This is how the quartet settles, an entire Cordovan institution. The rhythm plays a decisive role: it has the quadrature of the pasodoble –an elementary two by four–, and the presence of the accordion refers to other regional geographies».

Origin II«As Rubén Pérez Bugallo has studied, the trend of the so-called 'tropical chamamé' expands around 1982 at the initiative of musicians… from Santiago. Ensembles with cumbia instrumentation and piano accordion cross the tropical color with the chamamecera tradition and, above all, with the already established cuartetero style. The phenomenon will take root in Greater Buenos Aires, but not in Corrientes itself, where people will remain faithful to the most classic forms of the species. For the rest, the term bailanta is long-standing: it has been used on the coast to name the spaces where the dances of the people take place.

Public«The ageless enthusiasm of the beginning –La Mona Jiménez appeals to the young and not so young, to men and women, to the poor and the rich– will finally be replaced by a marketing apparatus oriented towards lower or lower middle class female adolescents. Shortly before the end of the century, they will be the ones who buy the tropical fanzines, cry on each anniversary of the death of the singer Gilda, star in scenes of collective hysteria before the performance of the group Sombras and make long and painful queues at the door of a television channel on a Saturday afternoon. Parallel to this main market, tropical music tandas will be created in many discs throughout the country, already as a constituted species. It is established that cumbia amuses everyone, erasing inhibitions and facilitating body dialogue.

Tropical today«Already at the end of the 80s the 'tropical' mold was configured with the hybridization of several elements. The 'fiestera' and picaresque attitude is rooted in Cordoba. Some instruments and stylistic features come from the 'accumbiada' version of the chamamé. And the supposed tropical nature, which will end up identifying the new species in the codes of the night, derives from the Colombian cumbia that ignited strongly in Buenos Aires and the provinces in the 1960s. For those who have been listening to cumbias since the 1960s, the new tropical scene is uninteresting, at least in musical terms. The tropical factor has been neutralized, in its festive appeal, by the 'characteristic' factor. However, in the popular imagination, the maximum party must reproduce a hot beach landscape. And for that, nothing better than cumbia, whether it's hot or cold."

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