There have been many attempts to document the history and identity of Latin America through its music, whether through specific styles or visions. César Miguel Rondón’s The Salsa Book (1980) or Raquel Z. Rivera’s Reggaeton (2009), although many others with limited resources have exhausted their strength.
A little over three years ago, knowing that creating a long list is a risk for a curator, a group of 19 journalists from different parts of Latin America took on the gigantic task of compiling a long list of albums that could serve as a sound panorama of the musical wealth of the entire region. Against all odds, and after a long journey of discussions, careful listening and revisions, the digital project was The 600 Latin Americans was officially launched on July 16, after a preliminary release a few months earlier.
A project by José Luis Mercado (Peru), Jorge Cárcamo (Chile), José Juan Zapata (Mexico), Felipe Figueroa (El Salvador) and Eduardo Rodríguez (Mexico) and 14 others reached the whopping number of 600 albums from different countries, eras and musical styles. The list includes collections from 1920 to 2022… 102 years in total.
This review is not only an orderly compendium of records, but also highlights outstanding aspects of the region’s musical history, its geopolitical context and evolution. Cárcamo explains the journalists’ reflections: “As we reviewed the different artists, we realized how the genres influence each other between countries. Look, for example, at how the cumbia arrived in northern Mexico. In one of Andrés Landero’s reviews, he also describes how (this folk music) appeared in Argentina in the 1980s and ended up influencing the accordion and the way we listen to cumbia today.”
“Ultimately,” the Chilean continued, “you realize that Latin America has been well connected since the 1930s and 1940s, since (Carlos) Gardel. For example, (the Mexican singer) Jorge Negrete visited Chile in the 1940s, arrived at the central station and was received as if he were Elvis Presley. These are the kinds of things you learn when you immerse yourself in all genres.”
Shortly after its publication on the Internet on its official website 600discoslatam.com, this independent publication has generated joy, anger and intense debates on social media and has gained the attention of the public in the region. Critics, journalists and artists mentioned on the list have all spoken out. These include Andrés Calamaro or Rubén Blades, who occupies the first place on the index with his 1978 album. Siembrarecorded together with Willie Colón.
The Latin American 600 stands out because it offers a kind of celebratory window onto the music of a region that until recently remained excluded from the discussions and mechanisms of cultural recognition on a global level, especially given the dominance of the English-language recording industry.
The list was designed and digitized by José Juan Zapata, a Mexican journalist living in Argentina. It can be accessed by genre, country, numerical order, singer or composer. It can also be consulted randomly, with the option to listen to the selection through digital platforms. This easy availability facilitates a varied, non-encyclopedic and flexible reading.
Cárcamo explains to EL PAÍS that although the order is not chronological, the main objective of telling the history of Latin American music is present in the list in different ways, allowing the index to address other types of historical records and appeal to a larger number of readers than if a much more synthesized and conventional chronology had been created instead.
“The criteria were always worked out little by little… but the main goal was to include albums that tell part of the history of Latin American music and try to leave out as little as possible so that it wasn’t just about our discussions. Suddenly we were choosing a lot of rock, or there were a lot of Argentine rock records that we are all fans of, but they had to be left out to tell a greater variety of stories,” explains Cárcamo.
How do you rank an album by Los Prisioneros, Shakira or Emmanuel over another by Charly García, Violeta Parra or Caetano Veloso? Beyond the complexities, reflections and comparisons, the ranking of this list – a format on which not all participants agreed – presents itself as a game that encourages and provokes dialogue. It has clearly succeeded in doing so, and in turn reveals the fractures within this collection.
“What happened with the list is that many people reacted both for and against it. Many praised it, others spread a bit of hate… but in the midst of all this noise, there are people who discover music that catches their attention. All this controversy helped them discover the music. It helped me remember things I had forgotten,” says Zapata, the Mexican journalist based in Buenos Aires.
“The rankings are easy to visualize,” he adds. “They help spread Latin music so that people can learn more and expand their musical options to include countries, genres or songs they don’t know. It’s not about establishing a canon, but inviting people to play and discuss, and also offer their own lists and choices.”
Through their X-account @600DiscosLATAM, the project’s participants publish and share all the opinions, threads and editorials they hear about the list, whether positive or negative. They often attack the presence of completely digital productions, much newer musical styles such as trap, records recorded in indigenous languages, etc.
As people continue to learn more about the 600 albums, discuss the songs and listen to them, the authors of the list do not rule out the possibility of expanding it in the future. The song list could be kept alive by further contributions from readers or take the form of a reference work, thus expanding beyond the digital and self-managed scope.
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