Eblis lvarez's Meridian Brothers unites the many strands of Latin music.

Rhythm Collector

By Daniel Alarcón
September 23, 2024

When my parents moved from Lima, Peru, to the United States, in 1980, they brought with them the basics: three children, several suitcases of clothes, some books, and a small but cherished collection of vinyl. We were not a particularly musical family—no one played an instrument, no one sang—but the records came with us because it was simply inconceivable that they would not.

Like most family record collections from those years, ours was diminished by the arrival of CDs, by garage sales and the occasional cull. Through it all, though, my parents’ Peruvian LPs remained—it’s not surprising, I suppose, that a record of the criollo singer Eva Ayllón didn’t sell at an Alabama garage sale in 1992—and those were the ones I eventually inherited, or appropriated, depending on your point of view. In fact, my parents’ records make up an important part of the collection I have today, augmented over the years by jazz and salsa and cumbia; and, even if they aren’t my musical favorites, it feels like a real privilege to own these records, artifacts of an era and place that mean so much to the people I love that certain songs can still bring them to tears.

When I was in my early thirties, some friends and I started what could accurately, if somewhat ostentatiously, be called a d.j. collective. We named ourselves La Pelanga, and hosted an eponymous party that roamed from one house to another, and now and then to a local club, but whose truest home was the East Oakland loft where I lived at the time, which we’d pack with a hundred people or more, only a few of whom I knew. We liked everything, every kind of music, but mostly we liked how disparate styles sounded when played in succession. Rock en español and samba and reggaetón and salsa—somehow the people who came, our friends and their friends and the friends of their friends, danced to it all, no matter how esoteric or apparently illogical the transitions between tracks might have seemed. We could go from Lebrón Brothers to Café Tacvba to Yuri to Calle 13 to Os Mutantes, and no one would miss a beat—a joyfully scrambled Latin American songbook, spanning the continents and the decades, played at ear-splitting volumes, for a crowd that never stopped dancing.

These are boom times for Latin music. U.S. revenues reached $1.4 billion in 2023, up by sixteen per cent from the previous year. The Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny was a host and a musical guest on “Saturday Night Live” last season, fulfilling both roles while speaking frequently in Spanish. From 2020 to 2022 (before he was displaced by the generational phenomenon that is Taylor Swift), Bad Bunny was the most streamed artist on Spotify. Last year, he was joined in the top five by the Mexican singer Peso Pluma, who was also the most viewed artist on YouTube. The Colombian singer Karol G sold 2.3 million tickets on her global tour, grossing more than three hundred million dollars. Latin music is a big business and, culturally speaking, a very big deal.

More:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/30/meridian-brothers-new-form-of-latin-music

Or:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240923105933/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/30/meridian-brothers-new-form-of-latin-music