This text was taken from the book "Bachata, A social history of a Dominican popular music", published by Temple University Press in 1995, written by Deborah Pacini Hernandez.
Defining Bachata
The music that today is called bachata emerged from and belongs to
a long-standin Pan-Latin American tradition of guitar music, música de
guitarra, which was typically played by trios or quartets comprised of
one or two guitars (or other related stringed instrument such as the
smaller requito), with percussion provided by maracas and/or other instruments
such as claves (hardwood sticks used for percussion), bongo
drums, or a gourd güiro scraper. Sometimes a large thumb bass called
marimba or marimbula was included as well. When bachata emerged in
the early 1960s, it was part of an important subcategory of guitar music,
romantic guitar music -as distinguished from guitar music intended primarily
for dancing such as th Cuban son or guaracha- although in later
decades, as musicians began speeding up the rhythm and dancers developed a
new dance step, bachata began to be considered dance music as
well. The most popular and widespread genre of romantic guitar music
in this century, and the most influential for the development of bachata,
was the Cuban bolero (not to be confused with the unrelated Spanish
bolero). Bachata musicians, however, also drew upon other genres of música
de guitarra that accomplished guitarists would be familiar with,
including Mexican rancheros and corridos, Cuban son, guaracha and guajira,
Puerto Rican plena and jibaro music, and the Colombian-Ecuadorian vals
campesino and pasillo- as well as the Dominican merengue, which was
originally guitar-based.
Before the development of a Dominican redording industry and the
spread of the mass media, guitar-based trios and quartets were almost
indispensable for a variety of informal recreational events such as Sunday
afternoon parties known as pasadías and spontaneous gatherings that took
place in back yards, living rooms, or in the street that were known as
bachatas. Dictionaries of Latin American Spanish define the term bachata
as juerga, jolgorio, or parranda, all of which denote fun, merriment, a good
time, or a spree, but in the Dominican Republic, in addition to the emotional
quality of fun and enjoyment suggested by the dictionary definition,
it referred specifically to get-togethers that included music, drink,
and food. The musicians who played at bachatas were usually local,
friends an neighbors of the host, although sometimes reputed musicians
from farther away might be brought in for a special occacion. Musicians
were normally recompensed only with food and drink, but a little money
might be given as well. Parties were usually held on Saturday night and
would go on until dawn, at which time a traditional soup, the sancocho,
was served to the remaining guests. Because the music played at htese
gatherings was so often played on guitars (although accordio-based ensembles
were also common), the guitar-based music recorded in the 1960s
and 1970s by musicians of rural origins came to be known as bachata.
The word bachata also had certain associations, upper-class
parties would never be called bachatas. In his book Al amor del bohío (1927), Ramón
Emilio Jiménez, a distinguished Dominican "man of leters" and "writer of manners,"
described a bachata in terms that reflect
how such gatherings were associated by the elite with low-class debauchery
and dissipation:
The "bachata" is a center of attraction for all the men, where the social
classes ao those who attend them are leveled and where the coarsest
and libertarian forms of democracy predominate. The most
elegant figures of the barrio are there, daring and audacious. The setting
of these dissolute pleasures is a small living room impregnated
by odors that seem conjured to challenge decency....In an adjoining
room a guitarist plucks and unleashes into the contaminated air of
the house (a) blazing street-level couplet, to which a singer with a
well-established reputation as a "second" makes a duo, provisioned
with a pair of spoons which he strikes to accompany the melody.
Among Dominicans there is considerable disagreement as to exactly
when the term bachata come to refer to a particular kind of music. In the
absence of any systematic research into the subject, there is a tendency
for people to rely on their own memories, which vary according to their
age, class, and where they grew up. According to bachata musicians
themselves, it was in the 1970s that
the guitar-based music they recorded came to be identified by the term
bachata, which by then had lost its more neutral connotation of an informal
(if rowdy) backyard party and acquired an unmistakably negative
cultural value implying rural backwardness and vulgarity. For example
on hearing one of these recordings, a middle- or upper-class person might
say something like "¡Quítate esa bachat!" (Take that bachata off!). By
using the term in this way, a style of guitar music made by poor rural
musicians come to be synonymous with low quality. The condemnation fell
not only upon the music and its performers, but upon its listeners as
well; the term bachatero, used for anyone who liked the music as weel as
for musicians, was equally derogatory.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, the worsening social and economic conditions
of bachata's urban and rural poor constituency were clearly reflected
in bachata. The intrumentation remained the same, but the tempo
had become noticeably faster, and the formerly ultra-romantic lyrics inspired
by the bolero became more and more concerned with drinking,
womanizing, and male braggadocio, and increasingly, it began to express
desprecio (disparagement) toward women. As bachata's popularity with
the country's poorest citizens grew, the term bachata, which earlier had
suggested rural backwardness and low social status, became loaded with
a more complicated set of socially unacceptable features that included
illicit sex, violence, heavy alcohol use, and disreputable social contexts
such as seedy bars and brothels.
Untill recently, bachata was a musical pariah in its country of origin,
the Dominican Republic. Since its emergence in the early 1960s, bachata,
closely associated with poor rural migrants residing in urban shantytowns,
was considered too crude, too vulgar, and too musically rustic
to be allowed entrance into the mainstream musical landscape. As recently
as 1988, no matter how many copies a bachata record may have
sold -and some bachata hits sold far more than most records by socially
acceptable merengue orquestas- no bachata record ever appeared on a
published hit parade list, received airplay on FM radio stations in the
country's capital Santo Domingo, or were sold in the principal record
stores. Bachata musicians appeared only rarely on television, and they
performed only in working-class clubs in the capital. In contrast, even
second rate merengue orquestas were given lavish publicity and promotion,
and they entertained at posh private clubs and nightclubs.
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