Cumbia and Cuarteto: Tunga-Tunga and the Villas (1940–today)

And yet — or precisely because of that — cumbia and cuarteto were for decades the most danced music in Argentina. While national rock filled stadiums and tango received UNESCO Heritage status, cumbia filled the dance halls every weekend with millions of people who found in that rhythm what no other genre offered them: the liberated body, the community of dance, unconditional joy.

The Quartet: The Rhythm of Córdoba

The Córdoba quartet was born in Córdoba in the 1940s, developed over fifty years almost exclusively within the limits of that province, and when it finally reached the rest of the country, it did so with the energy of something that had been simmering for a long time.

The most sung choruses in Córdoba dances of the 20th century are marked by the rhythm of the glorious tunga-tunga — the characteristic rhythmic beat of the quartet, derived from the Italian paso of the corrido and the Central European polka processed by Argentina in the 1940s.

The name "quartet" comes from the original formation: piano, violin, accordion, and double bass — four instruments for a danceable and accessible rhythm. Over time, the formation grew and became electrified, but the name and the essential rhythm remained.

La Mona Jiménez: The King of Cuarteto

Carlos Alberto Jiménez RufinoLa Mona Jiménez — is the most important cuarteto artist in history and one of the most extraordinary figures in Argentine popular music. He was born on January 11, 1951, in Córdoba, to a mother from Salta and a father from Tucumán.

He debuted as a singer with Cuarteto Berna at the age of fifteen, after winning a casting among forty applicants. He sang only for the sandwich and the coke. They called him "La Mona" since he was a child, when he played at being Tarzan and the neighbors would say: "No, you are La Mona Chita."

His real name is Juan Carlos Jiménez Rufino, but people know him as La Mona Jiménez. Born on January 11, 1951, from "a mix of provinces" — mother from Salta, father from Tucumán, grandparents from Catamarca — he is today the most famous person from Córdoba.

La Mona Jiménez's career is proof that consistency and authenticity build a legacy that no trend can destroy: fifty years playing every weekend, non-stop, in neighborhood clubs and stadiums across the country.

"Beso a beso" — — is his most popular song: physical love described with the frankness of cuarteto, without euphemisms, with the joy of someone who knows that the body is also a language.

"¿Quién se ha tomado todo el vino?" — — is his most universal party anthem: the rhetorical question that any Argentine has asked at some point turned into a tunga-tunga rhythm.

In 2019, La Mona Jiménez played at Lollapalooza Argentina on Main Stage 1 — the main stage of the country's most important rock festival — and for an hour and five minutes convinced an audience of young rockers that cuarteto was exactly what they needed. No one cut the sound even though he had exceeded the five minutes planned. No one wanted him to stop.

Rodrigo: The Colt Who Could Not Continue

Rodrigo Alejandro BuenoThe Colt Rodrigo — was the artist who in the nineties brought the cuarteto to national mass appeal with an energy and charisma that no other artist of the genre had had before. Born in Córdoba in 1973, he made his professional debut as a cuarteto singer at the age of sixteen.

He died on June 24, 2000, in a traffic accident in Berazategui, Buenos Aires, at the age of twenty-seven. The wake attracted more than two hundred thousand people. The figure of the Colt Rodrigo in the Argentine popular imagination grew after his death with the same logic with which Gardel grew after his own.

The Cumbia Villera: The Chronicle of the Margins

Cumbia arrived in Argentina from Colombia and the Caribbean in the fifties and sixties, and for decades it was adopted and transformed by the communities of internal migrants who came to Buenos Aires from the northern provinces.

The economic crisis that between the late nineties and early 2000s set the country ablaze produced a musical attitude that translated into the cumbia of the slums.

Pablo Lescano was the architect of the cumbia villera: in 1999 he created Flor de Piedra and in 2000 founded Damas Gratis — the name is a reference to the signs at dance halls: "Gentlemen $10 / Ladies Free."

Thus, other genres like Cumbia Villera emerged, led by groups such as Yerba Brava, Damas Gratis, and Los Pibes Chorros with lyrics describing situations of poverty, crime, or drugs.

What cumbia villera did was exactly what tango had done a century earlier: take the experience of the city's margins — poverty, violence, drugs — and turn it into danceable song. For the communities living in the shantytowns of Greater Buenos Aires, cumbia villera was simply the chronicle of their daily life — the first time Argentine popular music spoke directly to them, in their own language, about their own experience.

The Legacy: Cumbia as a National Language

In the 2010s, Argentine cumbia completed its legitimization process: rock and pop artists began to incorporate its rhythms, alternative music festivals programmed it, and critics who had ignored it for decades started writing about it with the seriousness it always deserved.

Damas Gratis performed at Lollapalooza Argentina 2018. La Mona Jiménez the following year. The cycle had closed: the music of the dance halls and airfields had reached the rock festival. Not because the festival had lowered its standards but because the standards had always been broader than the programmers believed.

Editorial note: La Mona Jiménez promised his mother he would be a professional musician "even if now they pay me with a sandwich and a soda." He fulfilled the promise and went beyond: fifty years of career, a Lollapalooza at sixty-eight, and the certainty that the cuarteto is Cordoban in the same way that tango is from Buenos Aires — not as dead folklore but as a living culture danced every weekend. The difference between tango and cuarteto is that tango received UNESCO Heritage and cuarteto has not yet. But in the neighborhood clubs of Córdoba, people dance cuarteto every night without needing UNESCO to tell them that what they dance is important. They already know it.

🎵 Practice these songs in Doresol