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Carlos Vives on His Colombian Identity and Bringing Vallenato to the Pop Spotlight: ‘My Greatest Act of Rebellion’
Carlos Vives, the Latin Recording Academy's person of the year, gets his flowers for ushering in the traditional music of his native Colombia.
It was 1993 when Vives burst into the scene with “La Gota Fría” — a raucous vallenato nugget from 1938 that he transformed into a Latin pop mega-hit by preserving the fiery spirit of the original while updating its instrumentation with a rock ’n’ roll sensibility. An accordion-heavy folk genre from the Caribbean region of Colombia, vallenato was the kind of provincial song format some upper-class Latinos would consider coarse and inappropriate — much like tango in Argentina or bachata in the Dominican Republic. Songs like “La Gota Fría” and “Fruta Fresca” — a rollicking 1999 hit about the folly of romantic love, with Vives comparing a kiss from his beloved to the taste of fresh fruit — bypassed the usual pathways of Colombian music to mainstream success: frothy erotic salsa, bouncy cumbia vibes or Anglo-influenced pop.
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