The origins of Tango and my opinion
As the cities grew, they began to attract an increasing number of people from the estancias(privately owned ranches primary focused on livestock farming, especially in the pampas region ), the pampas(vast, flat, fertile grasslands mostly in Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil), the haciendas (are more integrated into local communities, providing housing and employment to a significant number of people.
In Buenos Aires, this phenomenon occurred earlier than elsewhere, simply because no other Latin American city at the turn of the century grew faster or became such a tremendous magnet for immigration. In 1869 Argentina had a population barely of 2 million people. Between 1880 and 1905, almost three million immigrants came from Europe. In 1900, fully one third of Buenos Aires was foreign born. By the end of the nineteenth century, both migratory currents, the guacho and the European, met in the orillas flacas, "the shallow outskirts" of Buenos Aires.
"The stars," says Martin Fierro," are my only map in the pampa. '' They guide him into the city, where he gets off his horse only to lose himself in a city alley. Lawless, landless, and lonely, the former guachos were left strandedon the pavement of Buenos Aires. They met immigrants from Europe in the bars and brothels of the city, in solitude. This was a city of lonely men, men without women. They recognized themsleves in the tango, a music of immigrants in a transitional, lonely city.
The tango tells a tale of frustrations, nostalgia, fragilities, insecurities. Jorge Luis Borges has called Tango "the great conversation of Buenos Aires" But it is above all a potent sexual event. It takes two to tango: a man and a woman, embracing. And in it they realize both an individual and a shared destiny, and the impossibility of controlling it --hence the composer Santos Discépolo's fitting definition of the Tango as "a sad thought that can be danced"
Above all, I don't like tango in general, whether it be Electronic tango or traditional, no matter how modern traditional tango is.
References:
Fuentes, Carlos. The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World.
