In the 1940s, Argentina was tango and tango was Argentina. Born in the marginalized outskirts and upscale brothels of Buenos Aires, the musical genre slowly but surely seeped into the very roots of the country’s culture and took a strong hold. Fathers would spend years teaching their sons how to dance, singers like Carlos Gardel were national figures, and social gatherings were always accompanied by the sound of the tango concertina, the bandoneon.
Then, two disparate but hugely impactful things arrived: a series of military dictatorships and rock ‘n’ roll. While in opposition in every other respect, the dictatorships and the new music genre inadvertently collaborated in dethroning tango and driving it to near oblivion. [...]
There was also the question of censorship. When tango first emerged, the church banned it because it was the music of the “immoral” factions of society. It was no longer banned when the coup of 1930 occurred, but there was censorship of lyrics that supported populist ideas and used lunfardo, the slang of the working classes in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Even Peron banned songs like Cambalache for being too pessimistic. [...]
At the same time, a shift in social mentality began to occur. While there had previously been time to allot to social gatherings, the new economic models promoted by the regimes relied heavily on the idea of production. Marcelo Solis, an Argentine tango professor at the Escuela de Tango de Buenos Aires, who lived through the last two regimes, explained that in the mind of the military, if Argentina was a mess, it was because its culture was a mess. If the country wanted to be more prosperous, it should look at foreign countries and seek to imitate them. The xenophobic attitude of peronismo was replaced by the obsession of achieving a version of the American Dream. There was no time or money for something as frivolous as culture.
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