The trouble for these people is that tango is also the single greatest art form ever to come from Argentina – and that fact is not lost on all Argentines. Many others have taken me aside and urged me to study the tango in depth. They realize that, though they may not approve, tango is too strong a force to be denied - and there are many, many Argentines as well who simply melt with pleasure when they hear tango.
I had studied the music because of my Argentine Spanish instructors. I had turned to the tango lyrics, hoping that studying them would help my study of the Spanish language. What I had not realized was that the lyrics are so filled with Buenos Aires slang (the famous "lunfardo") that I would almost have to learn a new language, one that was imposed upon the classic Castilian, in order to understand what they were talking about in the tango itself. I went ahead with it.
Tango is a hodge-podge, by no means just a Spanish expression. Its antecedents were even more an African expression, and were brought to Argentina by black people when their Spanish masters brought them as slaves. The Spanish themselves, with their flamenco rhythms and dance, provided tango with equally irreplaceable elements that were augmented in very substantial ways in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by shiploads of immigrants that arrived at the Buenos Aires docks from everywhere else in the world.
Most were from Spain and Italy, but there were Asians, Arabs of every sort, Irish, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Jews of every sort, Russians, and English. Early on, the majority of these immigrants were working-class men looking for a job. They spilled from the ships onto the streets of Buenos Aires (in the same way their brothers spilled onto the streets of New York), and were immediately at a loss for - well, fun!
Spanish was the ascendant language, having established itself in the sixteenth century, well before all these others came to South America. There was no changing that fact, but each of these immigrant peoples brought their music with them. As the men walked about the streets and mixed with each other, learning Spanish, as they met each other at the boliche bars and the almacén dancehalls, as they got involved in the ethnic street fairs and parades that were held in all the working-class Buenos Aires neighborhoods, as they joined guilds or unions for whose meetings music was frequently an element, and when they went, as was — to be sure — the case now and then, to the whorehouse prostíbulos, the musics mixed. The rhythms and chords, instruments, ethnicities, cultures, sounds. All of it a stew from the moil of which tango came bubbling to the surface.
Article comments
1 - Deby
I dearly loved Max, and your article is nice...but Spanish and tango are so completely different. You could speak Spanish for years, be a native speaker, and still never understand the letras of the tango because they are in lunfardo. Lunfardo was a street language for the thieves that became part of the local dialect for Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The Rio Platense Spanish and accent is not spoken or used in any other part of Argentina.