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In the middle of Lopez and rapper Pitbull's paean to globetrotting and dancing, we hear a fragment of its melody again and again, sometimes in her voice (singing in English, or just singing "la la la", sometimes doubled by the accordion that first brought it to international attention. "On the Floor" effectively treats "Llorando Se Fue" as a bit of shared but half-forgotten cultural knowledge. Wisin & Yandel's 2006 reggaeton hit " Pam Pam" paraphrases its melody line Don Omar's current Latin hit " Taboo" is basically just a modernized take on the Cuarteto Continental arrangement of "Llorando se fue."Īnd now the Hermosa brothers' tune has returned to the American pop charts. "Lambada," like all crazes, went into hibernation for a while after everyone got sick of it like all crazes, it came back when people started missing it.
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The Hermosa brothers eventually caught wind of Kaoma's "Lambada"-how could they escape it?-and complained it turned out that Chico de Oliviera was, in fact, Olivier Lamotte d'Incamps, and the song's original composers ultimately got at least some recognition for their work. It is, in fact, a cover of "Llorando se fue," with its original Spanish lyrics and pan-pipes more or less intact. The (all-male) American experimental trio Sun City Girls' 1990 album Torch of the Mystics included a track sneakily titled " The Shining Path," after a Peruvian terrorist organization.
MUSICA DE JENNIFER LOPEZ ON THE FLOOR MOVIE
Other versions of "Lambada" turned up elsewhere: in Japan, the hit recording was by Akemi Ishii in India, as " Sochna Kya Jo Bhi Hoga," the song appeared in the popular 1990 movie Ghayal. In the spring of 1990, there were even two simultaneously released cheapo lambada exploitation movies: Lambada and The Forbidden Dance, the latter of which prominently featured Kaoma's recording, as well as an English-language cover by Kid Creole & the Coconuts. Released in 1989 with a gigantic publicity push, "Lambada" became a huge worldwide hit. Its original writing credit was the suitably Brazilian-sounding Chico de Oliviera. Kaoma's first single was simply called "Lambada"-although it was in fact a retitled, slightly more vigorous cover of "Chorando se foi," with a cry of "dançado lambada!" thrown in at the end. He subsequently organized a band called Kaoma, which mostly consisted of ex-members of the Senegalese-French band Touré Kunda (here's an early Touré Kunda song, " Salaly Muhamed"). A French producer named Olivier Lamotte d'Incamps apparently heard "Chorando Se Foi" on a trip to Brazil in 1988, and saw a bunch of young people doing a dance they called lambada. The next year, the Brazilian pop singer Márcia Ferreira juiced up the rhythm of the Cuarteto Continental arrangement, translated Los Kjarkas' Spanish lyrics into Portugese, and recorded the song as "Chorando Se Foi." In Ferreira's version, she's still singing about crying, but you wouldn't know it from her come-hither delivery. The Peruvian group El Cuarteto Continental, covered " Llorando Se Fue" in 1985, and turned the panpipe line of Los Kjarkas' version over to an accordion.
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(That video linked above was made a bit later, but it's worth watching for its ridiculous karaoke-laserdisc production values.) It takes a lot to make panpipes sound cool even outside of a música folklórica context, but they pulled it off. In 1981, the Hermosa brothers's folk group Los Kjarkas recorded an insanely catchy song called " Llorando Se Fue." Its lyrics are boilerplate stuff-"the one who made me cry is crying now"-but it's got a terrific, sneaky melody, with phrases that go on longer or shorter than they seem like they're about to, and a skipped beat near the end of the chorus. You probably don't know their names, but it's a sure thing you've heard at least one of their melodies. Among the eight names listed as co-writers of Jennifer Lopez's new single "On the Floor," a couple stand out: Ulises Hermosa, who died in 1992, and his brother Gonzalo, a pair of Bolivian folk musicians who belonged to a movement called música folklórica that's pretty much what it sounds like.
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