Tango and Lunfardo

Tango is at once a musical genre and a sensual close-embrace partner dance of the Río de la Plata, rooted above all in the cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, where it took shape in the immigrant suburbs at the close of the nineteenth century.^[1] What most sets its song apart from the region's other popular music is the language of the words: a large share of tango lyrics is composed not in standard Spanish but in lunfardo, the local Rioplatense argot of the porteño street.^[3] Sung in this insider's vernacular, the tango lyric became the medium through which the city's ordinary people gave voice to their own lives, so that the argot is inseparable from the genre's sense of itself.

The argot of the verse

The bond between tango and lunfardo is one of voice and subject matter. Lyrics written in the argot dwell on the feelings and sorrows of ordinary men and women, with a pronounced focus on the affairs of love.^[4] The English-language literature on the genre describes the songs in parallel terms, finding them steeped in nostalgia, sadness, and laments for love now lost.^[5] Their cast came from the margins — prostitutes, petty thieves, and disappointed lovers — and their stories were told in the language of the streets by the young immigrant men who crowded the brothels and cabarets of the outer districts where the tango first found its voice.

Lunfardo had itself risen from the waterfront. However inelegant purists judged it, it spread inland from the docks into the casual speech of all porteños, developed a literature of its own, and, borne by the ever-popular tango, reached the rest of Argentina and crossed beyond its borders. In this way the argot binds the language of the verse to the everyday speech of the city's common people — the very figures whose sentiments the songs give voice.^[6]

A music of many sources

That popular world was itself a product of mixture, and the sources place tango at a confluence of older forms. From its beginnings the music was understood as a composite: the writer Ernesto Sabato stressed its hybrid condition, and others traced its lineage to Afro-Rioplatense, gauchesco, Spanish, and Italian currents amid the ethnic variety of the great European immigration.^[2] Italian newcomers in particular are remembered as authors of both tango and lunfardo, two cultural products of that transatlantic migration.

Researchers identify six principal styles that left their imprint on the genre: the Andalusian tango, the Cuban habanera, candombe, the milonga, the mazurka, and the European polka.^[7] Such a pedigree situates tango within a broad Río de la Plata musical culture shaped by colonial and immigrant strata rather than descending from any single national source.^[8]

The poets of the lyric

The writers who worked in this idiom gave tango some of its most quoted lines. Enrique Santos Discépolo, among the genre's foremost lyricists, defined the tango as "un pensamiento triste que se baila" — a sad thought that is danced.^[9] Discépolo also supplied the words for several widely circulated tangos by the pianist, composer, and orchestra leader Mariano Mores, among them "Uno" and "Cafetín de Buenos Aires"; "Uno" became one of the most diffused tangos in the world, carrying the genre's emotional vocabulary to audiences far beyond Buenos Aires.^[10] The singer and songwriter Carlos Gardel stands at the head of the form's leading figures, alongside composer-performers such as Francisco Canaro, Juan D'Arienzo, Carlos Di Sarli, Osvaldo Pugliese, and Ástor Piazzolla — a measure of how tightly the sung lyric is bound to tango's identity.^[11]

Recognition and endurance

Tango's standing as recognized patrimony reflects the durability of this lyric tradition. Argentina declared the genre part of its cultural heritage in 1996, and in 2009 UNESCO inscribed it as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity at the joint request of Buenos Aires and Montevideo.^[12] Musically the tradition is still built around the bandoneon, whose timbre gives the characteristic orchestra its distinctive air, while the verse it accompanies preserves the lunfardo register that first carried tango's sentiments — a way of speaking, in the porteño self-understanding, that became a way of being.^[13]