Many times in north America people confuse my last name with the name of a dance and a song that was popular in the 1990s and that had an infamous video that showed beautiful women dancing at a beach. People say, it is like lambada, the forbidden dance? I usually make jokes about that. However, the other night i ran into this situation and while i was trying to explain that my last name was different and that my heritage was not related to that dance, a friend of mine, from Bolivia, told me that the song was actually not Brazilian as i thought, but french, from the group Kaoma.
My friend jorge also made the observation that the original song was actually from his country, Bolivia. The melody of this song, and also its lyrics, in Spanish, are Andean and from a group called los Kjarkas.
This group sued the french band who produced the lambada, Kaoma, and won the trial at the court. Interestingly, this case is an example of music appropriation and the flow of cultural forms. Call it hybridization or globalization if you want. The fact is that a french band takes a famous Andean song from Bolivia and turns it into a global hit, singing in Portuguese and incorporating an accordion and different instruments from latin genres. Moreover, they create a video that spreads through satellite television and becomes even more popular with the seductive subtitle of a “forbidden dance.”
