Ethnomusicology Forum

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Exchange, materiality and aesthetics in Colombian

champeta

Michael Birenbaum Quintero

To cite this article: Michael Birenbaum Quintero (2018) Exchange, materiality and aesthetics in
Colombian champeta, Ethnomusicology Forum, 27:1, 3-24, DOI: 10.1080/17411912.2018.1454842

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2018.1454842

Published online: 23 Apr 2018.

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ETHNOMUSICOLOGY FORUM
2018, VOL. 27, NO. 1, 3–24
https://doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2018.1454842

Exchange, materiality and aesthetics in Colombian champeta

Michael Birenbaum Quintero
Department of Musicology & Ethnomusicology, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Champeta is music from around the Black Atlantic played by large Colombia; champeta;
sound systems called picós in the cities of Colombia’s Caribbean exchange; informal economy;
coast. I argue that champeta is comprised of the mutual co- materiality; technology;
assemblage
constitution of a system of exchange (through which music,
technological devices and material artefacts circulate), a social
system (in which local and transnational networks of people are
organised around particular picós to participate in that system of
exchange) and an aesthetic system (which dramatises the social
networks’ access to the system of exchange by encoding those
processes into sound). In doing so, I suggest that the
entanglement of these three fields might be understood through
economic anthropology, materiality, informal economies and
Manuel DeLanda’s interpretation of the assemblage.

Champeta is dance music played by large, loud sound systems called picós in Cartagena
and the other cities of Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Before the 1990s, the champeta reper-
toire derived entirely from imported LPs of popular musics from Africa, the Caribbean
and sometimes further afield, usually sung in languages other than Spanish—especially
Congolese soukous, Haitian kompa and South African mbqanga. All of these constituent
musics were called ‘champeta africana’ regardless of the specific provenance of a given
recording, which was often unknown. During my 2002 fieldwork, the genres I found in
the champeta repertoire included Jamaican reggae, Brazilian samba, folkloric Puerto
Rican acoustic string music called jíbaro music and, in one instance, a Bollywood
techno-dance remix of Cutting Crew’s 1986 soft rock ballad ‘(I Just) Died in Your
Arms Tonight’.1 Although Colombian ‘champeta criolla’ [‘local champeta’], sung in
Spanish but replicating the electric guitar-driven instrumentation of those imported
genres, began to become popular in the early 1990s, this article focuses on the system
of exchange through which champeta became consolidated: the pre-1990s repertoire of
imported champeta africana recordings.2
As musical commodities from far-flung, non-hegemonic musical industries were
brought through ad hoc networks into the unlikely space of the hardscrabble working-
class neighbourhoods of a small Global South city, champeta emerges at the conjuncture
of three fields often conceived separately: the economy of exchange; the social realm in
which the local understandings of value which drive that economy are formulated; and

CONTACT Michael Birenbaum Quintero mbq@bu.edu Boston University, School of Music, 855 Commonwealth
Ave., Boston, MA 02215, USA
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
4 M. BIRENBAUM QUINTERO

the aesthetics by which the economic and the social are encoded into and dramatised by
the experience of champeta.
The transnational circulation of musical recordings and music playback technology—
exchange—was foundational for champeta, and quite idiosyncratic, relying on a system of
musical trade that was, on the one hand, non-corporate and small scale, but on the other
transnationally networked and cosmopolitan in taste, directly linking the individual
associates of a particular neighbourhood sound system with international popular
music production from varied Caribbean and African settings. As Deborah Pacini Her-
nández (1993b) has noted, champeta precedes by some 20 years the ‘world beat’ trade
of multinational record companies, constituting something like a south-to-south world
music industry from below, and exemplifying the kinds of black cosmopolitanism that
arise from the circulation of black musical forms between different diaspora populations
(Gilroy 1995; Pacini Hernández 1993a, 1996; Waxer 1997; see Brown 2005).
As transnational as these processes of musical circulation were, their bypassing of the
corporate musical industry suggests they were agnostic to global capitalist economics.
Instead, the logic that structured the musical circulation of champeta transnationalism
arose from the very particular local social and cultural system of the marginal neighbour-
hoods of Cartagena. Even the aesthetics of champeta are inseparable from the particula-
rities of this encultured mode of circulation. The most important aesthetic or formal
commonality between the heterogeneous musics of the pre-criolla champeta repertoire
(aside from their danceability) is precisely their incorporation into champeta, a process
in which LPs of foreign, mostly Afro-descendent music, generally sung in languages
other than Spanish, were imported through informal economic networks, and played
through gigantic sound systems called picós for the dancing masses of Cartagena.
Mediating and co-constituting the terms of exchange and aesthetics are local social
arrangements, driven by the accumulation of social and symbolic resources. For the
majority of its participants, the informal economy of champeta generates not cash, but
aestheticised symbolic resources derived from participation in social networks whose cos-
mopolitanism is marked by their access to such goods as the LPs, amplifiers and synthe-
sisers that comprise the picós.
The question of blackness abuts all of these fields—exchange, aesthetics and sociality.
Cunin (1999, 2003), Streicker (1995) and Mosquera Rosero and Provansal (2000)
provide textured, ethnographically centred accounts of champeta’s role in local nego-
tiations of blackness, alongside gender, class and generation. Discussions of aesthetics,
such as those by Bohórquez Díaz (2002), Castro Aniyar (1999) and Contreras Hernández
(2000), tend to describe champeta’s embrace of blackness as cultural resistance (see Bire-
nbaum Quintero 2005). As already mentioned, scholars have recognised that the racialisa-
tion of champeta is closely tied to exchange; champeta arises from intra-diasporic
circulations among black populations, exemplifying the kind of ‘outernational’ processes
(Gilroy 1995) that constitute the Black Atlantic (Brown 2005; Pacini Hernández 1993a,
1993b, 1996; Waxer 1997). Since champeta’s racial ramifications are so central to the
extent literature, I do not dwell on them explicitly here, but I do want to gesture
towards them as a transversal and ongoing presence in the constitution of the exchange,
aesthetics and sociality that I discuss.3
In this article, then, I argue that champeta’s underlying aesthetic logic did not arise from
a stylistic corpus that happened to have been assembled from particular processes of
 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY FORUM 5

musical distribution, exchange and practice; rather, those practices of musical distribution,
exchange and practice themselves comprise champeta. In other words, champeta is essen-
tially the aestheticisation of those practices; the champeta africana repertoire became cos-
mopolitan and gained its aesthetic appeal precisely as an index of the transnational
processes by which recordings arrived in Cartagena.
I begin by introducing the device by which those processes are staged for audiences in
the Cartagena neighbourhoods: the picó. I then describe the inhabitants of those neigh-
bourhoods more closely, and examine the kinds of symbolic and social capital regnant
for them, before turning to the ways in which local modes of sociality, economic practices
and systems of prestige manifested themselves in the creation of picós and the increasingly
transnational networks through which they, and the music they play, were constituted.
This allows me to then examine the champeta aesthetic and the ways in which it
indexes Cartagena’s neighbourhood social networks and symbolic system. After a brief dis-
cussion of ways in which this older champeta africana system continues to impact the more
contemporary, locally produced champeta criolla, I conclude with some remarks about the
theoretical ramifications of thinking through champeta in terms of assemblages.

The picó
The roots of the music that has come to be called champeta lie in the insertion of a par-
ticular technology—the phonograph—into the social practices and informal economy of
the working class, or ‘popular class’ (see later) of Cartagena in the 1940s. Referred to
throughout Colombia as picós,4 phonographs were rented out by small-time entrepreneurs
to dance to the popular records of the day at popular-class family and neighbourhood
gatherings. In the 1950s, picoteros (as picó owners are known) began to be hired for
dances in open spaces or dancehalls called casetas, which made money by charging admis-
sion and selling beer and rum.
As the field became more competitive, picoteros began to invest in progressively larger
configurations of amplifiers and speakers to create the picó proper that by the 1960s would
dwarf the original phonographs. In the 1950s and 1960s, Cartagena was becoming an
important port and industrial site and local peasants began to migrate there looking for
economic opportunities, occupying land to create new neighbourhoods, and subsequently
creating the popular culture and economic system of which the picós form a salient part.
Rural musical practices included the traditional drum-dance, song, and flute styles called
cumbia, bullerengue, baile cantado and gaita, as well as Cuban son music, learned from
Cuban engineers supervising the region’s sugar plantations in the 1920s (Minski, Ríos
and Samper 2006). Accordingly, recordings of urbanised Afro-Cuban and Afro-Antillean
music comprised a valued part of the recorded repertoire for picós during the 1950s. These
recordings and those that would succeed them were obtained by sailors travelling in the
many ships passing in and out of the port city of Cartagena, and purchased by picoteros
or given to them by those sailors who were members of the picoteros’ intimate social net-
works (see Waxer 2002).
By the 1970s, the picó had become emblematic of an appropriation and aestheticisation
of technology particular to popular-class culture in Cartagena. Immense, bone-rattlingly
loud and anthropomorphised by names and nicknames, the picó is iconic of the social
network that constitutes it materially through the exchange of its constituent technological
6 M. BIRENBAUM QUINTERO

components and music collection. Indeed, the function of the picó is to make the presence
and power of that social network manifest.
Picós are lavishly decorated with lights, scrolling LCD messages and huge paintings
covering the speakers; they are fitted with strobe lights, smoke emitters and even project-
ing ramps and balconies, and endowed with names and even alternate nicknames, perhaps
of a favoured child (El Félix), a comic book hero (El Diamante), a fierce or dramatic figure
(El Escorpión), or references to the hometown of its owner (El Rey de Rocha). They are
physically gigantic and preposterously loud, usually containing from 30 to as many as
120 vacuum tubes (preferred over the more modern and readily available transistors
until the newer bass systems outstripped the capacity of tubes). They used to have bass
cabinets as large as 8 feet × 10 feet until one of these monstrosities fell on, and killed, a
DJ, leading the picós’ owners to reduce the size to a nonetheless formidable 6 feet × 6
feet (Pacini Hernández 1993a, 1996) (Figure 1).
Sonic volume asserts the presence of the picó and its social network. The DJ crouches
with his assistants in the control booth, dwarfed by the immense speaker cabinets that sur-
round him.5 His agile hands move rapidly over the drum pads on which he extemporises
the drum patterns, electronic effects and re-recorded boasts layered over the recorded
track, whether africana or criolla.6 The blasting, bass-heavy music is not only (extremely)
audible; it can be felt vibrating in one’s chest cavity.7 This is an enactment of human
mastery over a sonority that seems practically elemental in its power; it is not by
chance that picós are sometimes referred to as ‘tumbatechos’ [‘roof-topplers’]. This
sonic power has the ability to assert the picó’s presence through Cartagena’s physical
and (extremely segregated) social space in a radius of sound of up to 20 km (Cunin
2003: 285). Inherent in this domestication of forceful sonority is the notion that the tech-
nology which produces it is not local in origin, but rather has been appropriated by the

Figure 1. ‘Betoman’ and friends with the picó Son Africano, in San Basilio de Palenque near Cartagena.
Photograph by the author, 2002.
 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY FORUM 7

ingenuity of the social network from a cosmopolitan, hyper-modern, overseas technologi-

cal sphere which is largely imagined from snatches of television movies and in the LCD
screens and strobe lights of the picó but contrasts starkly with the unpaved roads and
open sewage which characterise the spaces of daily life for poor barrio-dwellers.8

The popular classes in Cartagena

Champeta is embedded in the particular aesthetic logic, informal micro-industrial
economy and politics of urban space of what in Cartagena are called the ‘popular
classes’. This is a heterogeneous class simultaneously constituted culturally, spatially,
economically and racially. Its place in the city’s economic structure is that of the unem-
ployed and underemployed, workers and entrepreneurs in the informal economy, and
in informal and service sectors of Cartagena’s tourist industry. Spatially, the popular
class is associated with the ‘barrios populares’, poor neighbourhoods ringing the colonial
walled city of tourists and Bogotá millionaires, often founded by the occupation of unused
land (squatting), and sometimes lacking basic services such as electricity, running water,
paved roads, transportation services, sewage and refuse collection, although some barrios
are more or less marginal than others (Cabrales 2000).
Although the popular class participates to a degree in mass popular culture (such as
television), it also has its own self-created aesthetic and iconographic systems that appro-
priate and recontextualise mainstream symbols and aesthetics within the very specific
popular class aesthetic. Champeta consumption and dance style, bus decoration and
certain types of diction, speech and dress exist as forms of the popular class aesthetic
and everyday practice.
Cartagena’s popular class is mostly mixed-race and black. Daily life, for popular-class
Cartageneros of all phenotypes, is immersed in Afro-syncretic cultural forms and affected
by anti-black racism (Mosquera Rosero and Provansal 2000). Race itself is not necessarily
marked by phenotype:
but rather [is] situational and relational. In Cartagena, to categorize a person as black, one
must take into account a [person’s] economic status […], the barrio in which they live,
their use and knowledge of Spanish, their gestures, their manner, their dress, or the situation
in a determined social interaction. (Mosquera Rosero and Provansal 2000: 107)

Nor is poverty entirely synonymous with the popular class: picó owners, bus drivers and
small business owners—self-made economic figures in popular-class Cartagena—may be
relatively well-off economically but continue to be seen as part of the popular class,
whether by choice or through discrimination. Thus, being black or a member of the
popular class in Cartagena is performative, dependent (rather tautologically) on enact-
ment of behaviour and inclusion in social networks understood within the conflated cat-
egories of black and popular. Among the most marked of these comportments and
affiliations is champeta, an important indicator of certain popular-class values (Streicker
1995).

Picós and the social networks of exchange

By the 1970s, the picós had become veritable social and economic institutions, articulating
popular-class networks that were still also marked by kinship, hometown origin and
8 M. BIRENBAUM QUINTERO

neighbourhood of residence. In the social network surrounding a picó, the picotero would
be aided by (one or more) DJs and technicians. In the heyday of champeta Africana, picós
were associated with the record-buying sailors or ‘correspondents’ [corresponsales]; post-
1992 picós, like the Rey de Rocha which I followed in 2002, also included a producer who
managed the singers that recorded for the picó, a narranger and guitarist who ran the
recording studio, a man who distributed the CDs to a network of informal vendors
throughout the city and the region, and a number of singers varying in age and prestige,
from veteran hit-makers to young hangers-on seeking to move up from mere attaché
status. Generally, a picotero may also have one or more patrons, often nouveau-riche
entrepreneurs of popular origin, who invest in the picó for a cut of its profits. Additionally,
there are the customers who rent the picó for a party in a caseta to which they have access,
the truckers who transport it, the inevitable host of young gofers, roadies, bouncers,
flunkies and assorted hangers-on who travel with the picó to its shows, as well as assorted
friends, relatives, children, romantic partners and neighbours. Most of these individuals,
from the picotero to the gofer, share some degree of common ties to a family, hometown
or neighbourhood (Figure 2).
The line between producers and consumers in the social network of the picó economy is
fluid. Many picoteros and singers told me that they started off as boys attached to a picó as
fans or attachés. These fans, who are also part of the picó network, organise themselves not
as one-time audiences but as consistent followers of a particular picó, supporting it with
the fanaticism with which other Colombians might follow a local football club. More
than one champeta aficionado proudly told me that he or she lived in such-and-such a
neighbourhood, where such-and-such an artist or picó was based. These groups of
friends even travel to the potentially dangerous space of unfamiliar neighbourhoods to
dance to their favourite picó and to root for it in picó competitions (see later).

Figure 2. Picotero, DJ, technicians and others ‘warming up’ the picó El Felix at the picotero’s house in
Barrio Getsemaní before a dance in another location. Photograph by the author, 2002.
 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY FORUM 9

Bus drivers are another node in the picó economy. Privately owned by individuals, often
of popular-class background, buses are themselves minor social institutions and sources of
a prestigious livelihood for the local figures that own and drive them. Individual buses are
distinguished by their flamboyantly decorated aesthetic (related to the picós’) and often
blaring music (Figure 3). Some passengers prefer to wait for a friend’s bus in order to
have someone to talk to, good music to listen to—and maybe a free ride. The ubiquity
of buses in Cartagena’s daily life, their spatial mobility and the number of people they
come into contact with every day has led to their use as a favoured promotional tool
for picoteros, who give allied bus owners or drivers mix-tape cassettes featuring snippets
of the picó’s music collection, heavily laden with voiced-over advertisements (‘placas’)
to play in smaller picó-like stereo systems on their bus. Less well-connected bus drivers
or owners of home stereos-cum-mini-picós might also purchase bespoke cassette tapes
(in 2002) from small-time entrepreneurs who set themselves up in the market or a cen-
trally located bus stop with a battered old Casio sampling keyboard to record personalised
sound effects and ‘shout-outs’ (see later) over a custom mix tape.

Champeta as an informal economy

Champeta is both an economic and a cultural system. The way in which it is economic is
structured by a cultural logic as much as, or even more than, a logic of capital accumu-
lation, or even of material subsistence. In economic terms, champeta can be regarded as
an informal economy that takes place alongside other ad hoc and unregulated activities
(food vending, petty manufacturing from repurposed scraps, domestic services, music
piracy) that predominate in that large part of the urbanised world ‘not directly employed
by the formal, modern sector’ (Safa 1982: 5). Informal economies emerge in the gaps left
by the incomplete installation of formal commercial entities, material and managerial
infrastructure and capital investment in the Global South. The informal economy also
embodies the continuation of residual traditional forms that linger, or more properly
are repurposed, within a capitalist system. For example, unpaid family members or long-
standing hometown, affinal and extended kin networks often provide cheap labour (Safa
1982: 5), local and transnational trade networks (Bruner 1982: 107; Kleinekathoefer 1987;

Figure 3. Typical bus decorations. The one on the left references a family network. Photograph by the
author, 2002.
10 M. BIRENBAUM QUINTERO

Pacini Hernández 1995; Safa 1982: 11; Simone 1998, 2004, 2003) or capital investment
through migrant remittances (Fouron and Glick Schiller 2001; O’Dougherty 2002).
Informal economies do not merely insert local forms (kin-based networks, local com-
modities) into pre-fabricated capitalist categories (labour, distribution or the formal capi-
talist rationale of maximising profits and accumulating rent). Nor do they passively
manifest either marginalisation or unreflexive cultural continuity. Rather, they are emer-
gent, dynamic and even creative cultural forms. Michael Kleinekathoefer writes: ‘[h]idden
behind the quantitative economic terms is a peculiar form of life. It is a dense network of
social and economic relations, cultural patterns, and new forms of coexistence and survi-
val’ (1987: 9–10). But it is not that culture lies behind economy; the processes of making
value that structure economies are themselves cultural processes. This is particularly
salient in informal economies, which are characterised by the interpenetration of capitalist
and extra-capitalist logics of value and exchange and complex processes of re-valuation,
re-commodification and re-combination of formal economic structures in informal
ambits.
Situating champeta as an informal economy should not reduce it to economic deter-
minism, but rather pull economics (which is, after all, a social science) into the realm
of culture, as a human social interaction mediated by the exchange of things, an enterprise
that has been central to anthropology since the 1920s (Appadurai 1986a, 1986b; Bascom
1948; Lincoln 1989; Malinowski 1920, 1922; Mauss 1925; among many others).9 Ethno-
musicologists, too, have resisted vulgar economic or technological determinism, positing
that there is no necessary one-to-one correlation between modern or traditional musics
and capitalist or non-capitalist economic systems (Stokes 2002), and that new media
formats can spark both corporate consolidation and independent regional music prolifer-
ation (Manuel 1993). Anna Morcom has provided particularly supple analyses of the
densely reticulated economic forms—capitalist, non-capitalist, pre-capitalist, anti-capital-
ist and just plain unexpected—that emerge in the context of Global South late capitalism,
where a given music economy ‘cannot be located outside capitalism, yet at the same time it
is not in and of itself capitalist’ (2015b: 274; see also 2015a). This is in part because capit-
alism itself is stippled by contradictions (Harvey 2014; Polanyi [1944] 2001; Sassen
1991).10
One way, methodologically, to examine both the economic and the cultural ramifica-
tions of champeta’s system of exchange is by examining local theories of value. The
logic that makes particular sounds, objects and devices valuable emerges from champeta’s
networks of exchange, social structures and infrastructural gaps—and aesthetics. This
allows us to examine champeta as the performative aestheticisation of an economic
system structured by that value-making logic.

Voracious exclusivity
As the picó business became more competitive in the 1970s, picós became increasingly
large and elaborately decorated and the trade in records became correspondingly more
intense, with picoteros richly paying the sailors who acted as corresponsales to buy
records in the ports they visited.11 Picoteros soon discovered that if only one picó had
access to a particularly popular record, people would follow the picó just for that song,
which would be called an ‘exclusivo’ [exclusive]. They would go to great lengths to
 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY FORUM 11

obtain exclusive records and to maintain their singularity, which was constantly threa-
tened by the possibility that a rival picó’s corresponsal would find another LP of the
same song by chance or design. Picoteros attempted to poach one another’s exclusivos,
subvert their corresponsales, discover their overseas sources and identify their records,
and took such precautions as relying only on supposedly incorruptible kin and affine net-
works as corresponsales, paying exorbitant prices and jealously guarding the records’ iden-
tities by scratching or soaking off the labels (see also Pacini Hernández 1993a). Wilier
corresponsales soon learned to manipulate the value of exclusivity: bringing back a
single record garnered more money than multiple copies of the same record because its
exclusivity was virtually guaranteed. On the other hand, a picotero might buy all the avail-
able copies of a potential exclusivo to shut out a rival. Other corresponsales, more closely
tied with a particular social network, would sell exclusively to a particular picó, sometimes
buying up all the available copies they could find of a particularly promising record to
avoid its falling into another picó’s hands (Manuel Reyes Bolaños, interview, June 2002).
It was precisely the voraciousness of exclusivity that drove change in the picó repertoire
at the end of the 1950s. After a sailor brought home a record not of Cuban music, but of a
Puerto Rican peasant string band music called música jíbara, there was a subsequent rage
for exclusivos in that new (for Cartagena) style. When the limited number of jíbaro records
began to dry up, sailors began to buy dance music records from further and further afield.
One of the first was Haitian kompa of Coupé Cloué, which was based on the familiar pat-
terns of Cuban son music, although prominently featuring electric guitar, and, signifi-
cantly, in a foreign language. The popularity of music in unintelligible languages helped
keep secret the titles of exclusivos, but it also permitted the inclusion of more and more
different types of music from a wider variety of sources.12 By the late 1970s, a variety of
Caribbean musics, followed by West African and South African musics, had been incor-
porated into the picó corpus, including Congolese soukous, South African mbqanga,
French Caribbean zouk, Trinidadian soca, Jamaican reggae, Panamanian ragga, Brazilian
samba and other mostly Afro-Diasporic musical forms. (The aforementioned Hindi
techno-dance version of the 1980s ballad may have come from England or perhaps
Trinidad.)
The champeta system, then, was articulated by the informal economy of the picós and
its aesthetics of exclusivity, rather than becoming a local site of the global music industry.
Indeed, mass-mediated musics of the era, such as New York or Puerto Rican salsa,
although familiar to Cartageneros, never entered the champeta repertoire precisely
because their mass distribution obviated their exclusivity. Popular genres such as valle-
nato, a staple of the Colombian formal music industry, might be played on a picó at
times but are not understood as champeta, but rather more properly as a kind of filler
before the desired champeta is played—after all, vallenato can be heard outside the picó
context.

Exchange, singularity and cosmopolitanism

Igor Kopytoff (1986) holds that total singularity of a particular thing tends to preclude it
from commodity status, but it is precisely the singularity of the exclusivo commodity that
makes it so desired.13 Far from removing it from commodity status, the effective acqui-
sition of the exclusivo and the maintenance of its singularity by a particular picó heightens
12 M. BIRENBAUM QUINTERO

its marketability, as people congregate to pay admission to a picó dance where they will
hear it. What does change, once singularised as a picó’s exclusivo, is the material means
by which it circulates. It is no longer an LP or CD, but a sonority emitted and mediated
by the picó which controls it, consumed by those dancers who pay to dance to it. At the
same time, it may return to the material status of LP or CD if another picotero or corre-
sponsal finds it in that condition.
The exclusivo is not a feature, but a central element of champeta culture. At a typical
picó dance, the latest exclusive (by 2002, a locally produced recording rather than an
imported LP) is not merely played at a certain point in the night. The picotero teases
the audience throughout the evening, playing the introduction or other snippets, or
even the first few minutes of the exclusivo—but withholding the danceable breakdown
or ‘despeluque’ [literally, ‘un-wigging’] section that is the dancers’ apotheosis.
The pursuit and manufacture of singularity holds for other champeta commodities and
services as well, through a regime of authenticity that demands particular goods that are
hard to obtain. These are not only foreign recordings; corresponsales are also necessary to
acquire the technology integral to the picó, particularly the Casio SK-5 keyboard and the
Yamaha DD series of electronic drum pads (Manuel Reyes Bolaños, interview, June 2002).
The Casio SK-5, on the market in roughly 1987–88, was difficult to obtain in Colombia
then, and even harder when it was discontinued shortly afterwards (it is far easier now
to find it on the Internet) (Figure 4). While only the SK-5 is acceptable for Casio, obtaining
the latest of the periodically released versions of the Yamaha DD drum pads is highly
valued by picós, but requires that the buyer be connected and up to date with a market
far removed from the slums of Cartagena.
A similar logic of singularising authenticity applies to access to particular services,
which often isolates a single individual as the most legitimate provider. Manuel Reyes
Bolaños described, in June 2002, one painter, located in the city of Barranquilla two
hours from Cartagena, who was most widely sought out to paint the large decorations
that grace professional picós (Figure 5). Another man’s resonant baritone voice was

Figure 4. The indispensable Casio SK-5 digital sampling keyboard. Photograph by the author, 2002.
 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY FORUM 13

Figure 5. Typical picó painting, picó El Felix. Photograph by the author, 2002.

regarded as optimal for the picó’s recorded voice announcements, advertisements and
boasts (called placas); his value only increased when he moved from Barranquilla to
Miami. The particular individuals likely change over time, and more socially or economi-
cally disadvantaged picós probably find less desirable, more accessible artists and announ-
cers for their picós, but the valorisation of the particular, singular or scarce remains.
The system of exchange inherent to champeta, then, depends on knowledge of and
access to commodities and services understood as singular or at least rare—or rather,
actively constructed as such through local value-making systems. Clearly, market price
is only part of the valuation of LPs, technological devices or individuals. Knowledge of
such esoteric subjects as the release of the newest update to the Yamaha DD, where to
buy African music in London and used Casio keyboards in New York, of the original
names of the exclusive records or of the types of sonorities that could potentially yield
a new exclusivo, combines with the social capital necessary to include such in-demand
individuals as knowledgeable and geographically mobile corresponsales and the placa
announcer in one’s social network and with the financial capital necessary to purchase
all these goods and services. The engine of champeta as a system of exchange, then, is
the accumulation not of capital, but of social prestige. This search for and accumulation
of prestige is distributed through the establishment of savvy, transnational social networks,
a kind of creole cosmopolitanism that elevates all of the members of a social network
through their access to rare goods and services. Also, crucially, it is dramatised in sound.

Technophilia, cosmopolitanism and the sonic manifestations of social

exchange
The picó sonority not only suggests the exchanges that brought their technological com-
ponents to Cartagena’s barrios: it enunciates them directly through the distinctive sounds
that reference the scarcity of those commodities. This is the role of the Yamaha drum pad
series and the Casio SK-5 keyboard. These machines produce a battery of sounds that are
14 M. BIRENBAUM QUINTERO

ladled liberally over champeta arrangements. Dancers are inspired by the rhythmic appli-
cation of sound effects from the Casio over the beat of the underlying musical recording,
sometimes obscuring it in a sonic haze of synthetic-sounding dog yelps, laser blasts, lion
roars, rolling surf and ‘hi’ and low bongo sounds (Casio 1987: 16, 23). The Yamaha drum
pads, meanwhile, feature a number of drum sounds, fake seagull noises, car horns, a man’s
voice counting to four in English and what can best be described as a distinctive clink,
among other effects (Yamaha n.d.), which increase in number with each new version.
In the champeta aesthetic these comprise a canon of desirable sounds, applied rhythmi-
cally to mark the beats of the music for the dancers. The sounds of the Casio date back
to the Stone Age of digital technology, but their use authenticates the picó’s ability to
mobilise its social network to obtain the discontinued SK-5. The release of each new
version in the DD series, equipped with a larger repertoire of sounds, in turn, provokes
a veritable arms race between picoteros, since audiences can recognise the up-to-date
sound effects of the newest models of the DD line (Figure 6).
A particularly transcendent moment in the champeta aesthetic is when the technology of
the picó is used to enunciate the social network, a kind of mediated shout-out, naming a
specific member of the social network, group or place—a practice also common in other
musics of the Spanish Caribbean (including Dominican bachata and Colombian vallenato,
the latter extremely popular in Cartagena). This gives the person named the pleasure and the
honour of being recognised as an important part of the collectivity. A shout-out may take the
form of being named by the DJ as one enters a dance, or by an artist in a locally recorded
song. In the Puerto Rican música jíbara track ‘Debajo de un mosquitero’ [Under a Mosquito
Net], popular on picós in the early 1970s, singer Germán Rosario exhorts a musician with the
common Puerto Rican surname ‘Cartagena’: ‘Oye [listen up], Cartagena!’14 This literal enun-
ciation of the local from the perceived cosmopolitan space of a foreign record must have
been greeted with delight in picó dances as a shout-out to the city as a whole.
These shout-outs are the maximum expression of the link between technophilia and
social networks: not only is the collectivity foregrounded in a shout-out; it is mediated
through the powerful sonority of the picó, when the machine, the icon of the power
and cosmopolitanism of the social network speak one’s name. This helps explain the ever-
green popularity of the Casio keyboard. Alongside its bank of canonical champeta sound

Figure 6. Yamaha drum pads: the DD–6 (right, released circa 1990) and DD-55 (left, released 2001).
Photograph by the author, 2002.
 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY FORUM 15

effects, the SK-5 also samples short utterances spoken into its built-in microphone, which
can then be sounded on its keys or small drum pads. When the Casio samples a shout-out,
it rhythmically reproduces the human voice in a robotic timbre that merges the name it
‘speaks’ with the technology that reproduces it, a cyborg-like embodiment of technology
by the voice of the DJ, and of the identity of the person named by technology itself.
Another merging of technologically mediated sonority and the social network is the
placa, a voiced-over announcement by a picó bragging about its own quality and denoun-
cing competitors. The placa also functions to ensure that an agent of a rival picó does not
surreptitiously sneak a recording device into a dance to make a copy of another picó’s
exclusivo, since the copy would feature the original picó’s placas, marking it as ‘stolen’.
Bohórquez provides us with this example of a placa:
Conceited loudmouth. So you still think you can match up with this picó? With that kind of
dream you’d better go back to sleep. Because nobody’s as good as me, let alone better.
(Quoted by Bohórquez Díaz 2002: 70)

Or, in a reference to the social network by El Rey de Rocha, the leading picó of the
moment:
Listen, do you know what really ticks off my colleagues [i.e., rival picós]? That a picó has come
from a humble family, from a small town in [the province of] Bolívar, that it has stolen the
heart of the Cartageneros, and that it’s in possession of the throne of first place. Ah, but that’s
nothing. It’s proven: from there, nobody can take it down. Listen up: nobody brings down El
Rey! (Rey de Rocha 2002)15

The placas suggest another element inherent to the informal economy—competition

between picós and their social networks. In Cartagena, which is the best picó, the
loudest, the most elegant and so on, is a subject of considerable and unending debate in
the popular class. (In 2002, the best picó in Cartagena was almost uniformly agreed to
be El Rey de Rocha. By the summer of 2003, its reign was being threatened by El
Huracán, revamped and under new management.)
The ultimate expression of these rivalries is the picó competition or ‘war of the picós’,
when two or more picós try to blast each other out of the caseta, utilising strategically
gradual rises in volume and the careful ordering of songs to counter a rival picó’s exclusivos
with their own even more popular exclusivos. The stakes are the picó’s reputation, which
can be gained or lost in one night.16 My 2002 fieldwork took place during a temporary ban
on these competitions, but Cunin’s description of a picó competition in 1998 is clear:
… lovers of champeta … from the middle of the afternoon, under an inclement sun, follow
step by step the installation of their favourite sound system, although the first blows of the
duel by decibels only begin well into the night, in an environment electrified by the wait
… Four picós were invited: El Capo from Magdalena province, Los Melódicos from Barran-
quilla. El Rey y Walditrudy from Cartagena. For two hours, the picós take turns, successively
attracting the mass of dancers. Later, when Los Melódicos starts its third turn, El Rey also
puts on its music, first softly, and then raising the volume. Trying to resist, Los Melódicos
also raises its volume and they bet all, putting on an exclusive … But El Rey, the most
popular picó in Cartagena, responds immediately, raising the volume again and throwing
a challenge at its rival … The scene, already overloaded in front of El Rey, intensifies even
more: the throng sings, dances, yells and laughs; the DJ of El Rey … pleases the crowd by
putting on the latest hit of the moment, La guapa (‘The Pretty Girl’), over which it has exclu-
sivity, evidently. The picó Los Melódicos, first victim of the night, had been definitively
16 M. BIRENBAUM QUINTERO

silenced, and in front of it, as testimony, was the field of battle, completely empty. (Cunin
2003: 293–4; italics in original)

The picó competition is mirrored in economic competition within the informal

economy and in the inter-barrio conflict which plagues popular-class Cartagena. After
all, these social networks not only reference solidarity between individuals: they also
compete with other social networks. Significantly, the judges of these competitions are
the dancing crowds themselves, who by the end of the night are dancing in front of one
of the picós while the space in front of the other(s) is virtually empty; picós must mobilise
their social networks to ensure the largest contingent of dancers. The competition may or
may not also be accompanied by physical conflict between the fans of the different picós.

Champeta criolla
By the 1980s, the music of the picós had evolved into a barrio subculture with its own dress
and speech styles, visual aesthetic and erotic couple dance and competitive male dance
styles. In 1992, a young picotero named Yamiro Marín, unable to obtain exclusivos,
decided to make his own, recording local artists singing in Spanish over a backing track
from an African record, and later original tracks, ‘to counteract música africana’ (inter-
view, June 2002). This has changed the political economy of champeta—but not its aesthe-
ticised forms of valuation (cosmopolitanism, social connectedness, exclusivity, access). In
2002, rather than depending on corresponsales, a producer would commission an arranger
and a singer to record a track, which would then be given or sold to an allied picó as an
exclusivo. If the track did well, it might be sold to another picó clamouring for the same
exclusivo. After a stint as an exclusivo, it would be passed to the local radio stations and
played on constant rotation. At the peak of its popularity, it would be released alongside
one or two other hits and a number of less successful songs on CD, sold to informal street-
corner vendors throughout the Colombian Caribbean region and as far as Venezuela by
travelling salespeople (and almost instantly pirated—a kind of double informality
within the champeta informal economy). When the public would get tired of the song,
it would be replaced by another.17
This shift from imported recordings to local production did not downgrade the picó—
most producers are either allied with or are themselves picoteros. The jealously guarded,
actively singularised exclusivo remains intact; however, now it is locally produced, and
its public release on radio, CD and other formats alienable from the picó allows it to
have a second life after it no longer serves the picó. The rapidity with which champeta
recordings are produced and cycle in and out of fashion, and the relative centralisation
of their production by a handful of musicians and studios, have led to a certain standard-
isation of the sonority of champeta, generally following the guitar-led formats of Congo-
lese soukous and, occasionally, South African mbaqanga.
The rise of local recording has also integrated singers, arrangers, musicians and studio
engineers into the champeta social network. As with the artist who decorates picós and the
placa announcer, the integration of these new figures involves a certain process of singu-
larisation/authentication that limits the number of people who are seen as legitimate to
perform these roles, particularly sought-after arrangers. The studios, with their sleek con-
soles and computers, have to a certain degree supplanted overseas cities as the symbols of
 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY FORUM 17

cosmopolitanism and modernity in the champeta system—on one studio-produced CD,

the DJ boasts that he is in an air-conditioned room, a luxury of no small impact in swel-
tering Cartagena, where most residents will never know air-conditioning unless they get a
job in tourism.
By 2002, singing had become another role within the champeta networks, with ranks of
young men hanging around the producers and passing out demo cassettes recorded at one
of the roadside mix tape kiosks described earlier. If the songs were good but the aspirant
did not have a good voice, the producer might buy the composition, to be recorded by an
established singer. Once adopted into a local producer–picotero network, singers become
part of a local star system, and are called upon to record exclusivos for that network. Since
they are paid little (although their social capital is greatly boosted), singers augment their
income by singing live at shows (which also functions to promote the picós for which they
have recorded exclusivos). As champeta gains new audiences across the western Caribbean
basin, singers travel further afield and even occasionally to Colombian communities
overseas.18
Despite the fact that an exclusivo may be heard at a live show, it by no means supplants
the spectacle of the picó, which continues to attract large crowds with the new homemade
exclusivos.19 Some picós have even begun to specialise in pre-criolla champeta, playing the
foreign-bought exclusivos of yesteryear, a kind of demographic targeting of older gener-
ations of champeta fans who grew up listening to the imported records.
Whereas the picós remain largely unaffected by these changes, the fact that champeta
can now be listened and danced to outside the spatially bound context of the picó has
made it possible for middle and upper-class audiences in Cartagena to listen to and
dance champeta in their own spaces without having to enter the stigmatised spaces of
the popular class. As such, champeta began to be taken up as local youth music as
much as popular-class music in the early 2000s. Sony released a globally available but
lightly promoted champeta compilation, although champeta artists in 2002 theorised
that the signing of exclusivity contracts with champeta singers was more a means of ensur-
ing champeta would not compete with reggaetón, which was on the verge of becoming an
international musical powerhouse. More successfully, Colombian labels have occasionally
promoted champeta criolla recordings for a national market, as was the case for national
hits by singers Mr Black in 2013 and Kevin Florez in 2015, both licensed to the Colombian
major label Codiscos by ‘Organización Musical Rey de Rocha’, which by the mid-2010s
had expanded from strictly working with the picó to artist representation and the pro-
duction of albums of exclusivos for the local market (Juliao Rossi and Wills Herrera
2015: 58).
The rise of multiculturalism as government policy in Colombia (see Wade 2002) has
also brought a focus on Afro-Colombian musical styles, which champeta, although grud-
gingly, and with reservations because of its newness relative to folkloric Afro-Colombian
musics, is sometimes understood as being. Within this kind of Afrocentric discourse, some
of the old exclusivos have been licensed to national and multinational labels to live a
second life as ‘world beat’ in cities like Paris, although their impact abroad remains
limited. The export of this already cosmopolitan local music adds another step to the pro-
cesses of circulation that constitute its sonority and materiality. For example, I saw a CD
by the group Anne Zwing with two different mixes for Cartagena and overseas audiences
—the second without the distinctive sounds of the SK-5 and Yamaha drum pads, which
18 M. BIRENBAUM QUINTERO

are deeply meaningful in the local context but which smack of low production values in the
north.
My fieldwork on champeta predates its appearance in online spaces; however, Colom-
bian champeta africana aficionados have certainly been doing their research. YouTube
now hosts a significant number of videos searchable under the champeta titles of songs
that feature the old hits of champeta africana with information about their original
titles, the artists who recorded them and even translations from Lingala, French and
other languages into Spanish (and sometimes English). The comment sections20 reveal
that even when listeners are disappointed to find that, for example, the champeta hit
known as ‘El Asprilla #4’21 (originally released in 1980 as ‘Au Président Omar Bongo’
by the Cameroonian group Étoile de Namaco) is in fact sycophantic political propaganda
for a corrupt ruler of Gabon and his wife, the song continues to remind them of their cities,
their neighbourhoods and the favoured picós of their youth.

Final thoughts: champeta materiality and assemblage

In this discussion, I have suggested that an understanding of the champeta as a system by
which the circulation of particularly valued musical objects through human social
relations helps tie together the entangled fields of economy, sociality and culture. Econ-
omic anthropology has moved towards an increasing emphasis on objects themselves
over the human social relations they mediate, in ways that have clearly influenced ethno-
musicologists (see Appadurai 1986a, 1986b; Brown 2001; Kopytoff 1986; Keane 2003;
Miller 2005; Mitchell 2002). Inspired by philosophical ‘thing theory’ (Bennett 2010;
Harman 2002) and especially Bruno Latour’s work, they posit that as human agency is dis-
tributed through networks including objects and other non-humans, the materiality of
things tenders affordances and obstacles to human agency; indeed, objects sometimes
supersede humans to take on, for all effects and purposes, their own agency (Latour
2005). These insights have been adopted by ethnomusicologists, primarily in the sub-
field of organology, to examine how musical instruments’ materiality has such social
effects as ‘mobilizing publics’ and ‘mediating relations’, and how they not only receive
human intentionality but also re-channel or dislocate it in unexpected ways (Bates
2012: 371; Roda 2014).
But if human agency is not absolute or autonomous, neither is materiality, particularly
for artefacts that arise from human technicity (Gallope 2011). Music’s materiality, for
example, is vexed and contingent; it resides in and circulates as, but is only conditionally
co-terminous with, the printed score, the live performance and the material artefact of the
LP—let alone the MP3 file or the fleeting event of sound (see Goehr 1992; Taylor 2007).
The fact that the materiality of an object of use and exchange is plastic as it inheres or
adheres to the networks through which it moves is often occluded in the new Latourian
organology which, as productive as it has been, treats the musical instrument as a fairly
stable, discrete and integral construct. Even if its materiality pushes back against other
human and non-human actants in its network, and even if its construction is beholden
to that materiality, it is not predominantly posited as assembled from or divisible into
smaller components, or as itself a component of a larger material object beyond its par-
ticipation in the larger network. Contrast this with Gavin Steingo’s (2015) recent discus-
sion of the devices employed to make electronic music in urban South Africa. If, in
 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY FORUM 19

Latourian form, music-making is influenced by the materialities of breakdown and Soweto

power failures, the artefacts themselves are also constantly disaggregated by human action
and notions of property, as hard drives are removed, devices (or parts of them) stolen or
lent or returned, often with viruses contracted, new files added and others erased. Thus,
Steingo does not privilege either the materiality of breakdown or the sociality of theft
and lending, an important corrective to the provocative but somewhat one-sided insis-
tence on the ‘agency of things’.
This difference is reminiscent to me of the difference between Latour’s notion of the
network, which has proven so influential in ethnomusicology, and Manuel DeLanda’s
(2016) understanding of the assemblage.22 Latour’s network is populated by a kind of
material ‘actualism’ by which every actant in a network is utterly and irrevocably concrete;
everything ‘simply is what it is’, even if ‘what it is’ is only revealed in its relationship with
other things (Harman 2009: 16–17). For DeLanda, on the other hand, assemblages are
more than the sum of their parts, but gain particular properties from the assemblages
of which they are part, in part because the parameters of assemblages can be coded in
different ways to give them different characteristics. It also means that assemblages can
themselves be nested: the mounted archer in the nomad army; the horse, bow and
warrior in the mounted archer; the arc, string and projectile in the bow; and so on
(DeLanda 2016: 2–4).
This seems an appropriate way to describe champeta, a system in which the recombi-
nant, layered and aggregate nature of both the material artefacts of champeta and the
sonorities they produce suggests that the components of the networks which comprise
musical forms may be more plastic than the discrete material objects offered by ethnomu-
sicology’s new organology. This provides a more useful model for understanding cham-
peta, in which material technological artefacts, sound media and the intensely layered
sonorities they produce are prominently characterised by a practice and aesthetics of
assemblage. Diverse materials are cobbled together through the transnational circuits of
exchange, as components are obtained, combined, ornamented, maintained, financed
and put to use within a more local political economy, social form and set of aesthetic
ideals to form the picó. Importantly, the picó itself acts as a mediator of the sound of cham-
peta music, by embedding sonic traces of the system of exchange—most saliently the
marks of cosmopolitanism and references to the social network—within the sonority of
the music itself, as the picó operators layer a variety of sounds over the LPs they
amplify. This is less a counterargument to ethnomusicological ‘thing theory’ than a
modest shift in emphasis. Simply put, object-agents are not ineluctable, because both
the assemblages that comprise them and the assemblages of which they are part are
often more than the sum of their parts. Champeta is particularly illustrative as an assem-
blage that materialises, dramatises and aestheticises as it assembles; that renders the
patron’s name a danceable sound sample by running it through the SK-5; that whittles
the LP into singularity; that concretises the social world into the bulk of the speakers
and the roof-rattling tumult of the sound that issues from them.
Much more remains to be said and studied about champeta. In terms of what champeta
means for local experience, an examination of the role of dance, the body, sexuality and
gender in champeta is sorely needed, especially one that expands on the more sociological
scope of Streicker’s (1995) brilliant ethnography on these themes in specifically ethnomu-
sicological or ethnochoreological terms. On a broader historical plane, it is important for
20 M. BIRENBAUM QUINTERO

champeta to be integrated into a larger discussion—alongside Jamaican sound systems,

New York hip hop, Brazilian baile funk, Miami bass, New York-Panamanian-Puerto
Rican reggaetón and more—of the range of black cultural phenomena manifesting
intra-diasporic music circulation, working-class appropriations of technology, and aes-
thetics of loudness and competition in the twentieth century. The global circulation of
black musical texts that these aesthetic forms manifest is foundational to modernity, as
Paul Gilroy (1995) has famously suggested. But beyond Gilroy’s rather theoretical
musings, an empirically based, historically specific, multi-sited account of the circulation
of black sound texts and musical subcultures including champeta and all the examples I
mentioned remains, lamentably, unwritten.

Notes
1. My initial fieldwork, conducted under a Tinker Foundation Summer Grant administered
through the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center at New York Univer-
sity, was carried out in May–July 2002. I returned to Cartagena for some follow-up fieldwork
in August 2003 and April 2005.
2. There were prototypes to this practice in recordings by Barranquillero guitarist Abelardo
Carbonó and Justo Valdés’ group Son Palenque during the 1980s (Monsalve 2015), among
others. Cartagenero salsa singer Joe Arroyo also seems to have been influenced by the cham-
peta repertoire. On champeta history, see Abril and Soto (2004).
3. Another component of the literature includes the particularly Afrocentric spin on champeta
provided by artists from the old maroon town of San Basilio and the ways in which Afro-
centric cultural resistance became a selling point during champeta’s brief adoption by the
world music industry in the early 2000s.
4. From the English phrase ‘pick up’, which is what one does with the arm holding the phono-
graph needle.
5. The DJ may or may not be the same person as the picotero, who is usually present. As the
pronoun suggests, he is always male, appropriate given the masculinist power narrative
the picó enacts.
6. For an example, see ‘El Gato Rompe Tecla’. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIQIJ4tepDo
(accessed 7 April 2017).
7. Henriques (2003) describes this loudness as making for an experience of both embrace and
submission.
8. In a related observation, when I showed people the pictures I had taken of them on my digital
camera (a novelty in Cartagena in 2002), they preferred to view themselves with the digital
readouts of exposures left, flash mode and light meters blinking away in the margins of the
screen, which I wanted to remove to show them the ‘unmediated’ image.
9. So, too, have non-western and pre-modern forms of exchange been the objects of speculation
by sociologists and economist, as in Marx (1990, Capital Vol. 1 Part VIII), whose famous
‘commodity fetishism’ winks at ethnology, and Simmel (1990).
10. Such contradictions, whether historical or sociocultural in nature, have also proven fertile for
music studies. Timothy Anderson (2014), for example, identifies them in recent technologi-
cal rupture, positing peer-to-peer music-sharing networks as a return to the gift economy. Joe
Trapido (2016) describes the intermingling of prestige and market logics in the transnational
Congolese popular music industry. Anna Morcom (2015a) examines the confluence of neo-
liberal socio-economic factors in the Indian context that structure expenditure, aesthetics and
ethics in Bollywood dance bars.
11. Most accounts mention Paris, New York, London and South Africa.
12. Listeners and picoteros gave songs imaginative titles based on sounds heard and words ima-
gined. The 1987 South African song ‘Awuthele Kancane’ by Mahlathini and Mahotella
Queens is known as ‘La muda’ [mute woman] for the repeated isiZulu word ‘mhwaa’. The
 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY FORUM 21

1976 Congolese recording ‘Nostalgie’ by Stuka Boys, prominently featuring children’s voices,
was dubbed ‘Los pelaitos’ [‘The Kids’].
13. See Laing (2003) on the ambiguity of music’s status as singular or as public good work in the
market.
14. I have been unable to find the original name of the group or the song for this recording.
15. Featured on the 32nd volume of the picó’s compilation CD series El Rey de Rocha en
Concierto.
16. Picó competitions were outlawed in Cartagena during my time there.
17. For accounts of the champeta economy in the 2000s and 2010s, see Abril and Soto (2004) and
Juliao Rossi and Herrera (2015).
18. Champeta is popular throughout Colombia’s Caribbean coastal region, the Venezuelan Car-
ibbean and even Nicaragua’s Corn Islands (Amanda Minks, personal communication,
December 2004). There were live champeta concerts in New York City in 2003, and there
have been others since.
19. See Waxer (2002) on the preference for recordings over live performances elsewhere in
Colombia.
20. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLtri6YXgcI (accessed 10 April 2018).
21. Various records are called ‘El Asprilla’, although I am unsure why.
22. DeLanda borrows the ‘assemblage’ [agencement in the original French] from Deleuze and
Guattari (2015). On differences between DeLanda and Latour, see Harman (2009).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Michael Birenbaum Quintero is an Assistant Professor of Music at Boston University. Since com-
pleting his PhD in Ethnomusicology at New York University in 2009 he has held an Andrew
W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Johns Hopkins University, an Assistant Professorship
at Bowdoin College, and a Fulbright Core Scholar Grant at Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia.
His research focuses on the music of black Latin Americans (particularly in Colombia), examining
black cosmopolitanisms, musical framings of blackness, loudness and political constituencies, the
social meaning of violence, and the politics of music selection algorithms. He has published
widely in English and Spanish; his book Rites, Rights, and Rhythms: A Genealogy of Musical
Meaning in Colombia’s Black Pacific is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

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