Tango: Sex and Rhythm of the City by Mike Gonzalez, Marianella Yanes (review)

Given the current boom of tango as a dance and the substantial number of tango “shows” still successful around the world, this new book about the genre by Mike Gonzalez and Marianella Yanes is a timely publication. Part of Reaktion Book’s Reverb series, which according to the publisher “looks at the connections between music, artists and performers, musical cultures and places” and “explores how our cultural and historical understanding of times and places may help us to appreciate a wide variety of music, and vice versa” (2), this book meets the series criteria by weaving together information based for the most part on scholarly, secondary sources about Argentine history, politics, society, culture, music, and dance into an easy-to-read “story” that can be understood by a wide audience. Ballroom dance enthusiasts, the general public (with or without music or dance background), people interested in Latin American history, undergraduates, and scholars will all learn something by reading this volume.

In this book, the authors trace the history of tango from its beginnings rooted in the nineteenth century to the present. Instead of providing technical descriptions of the changing dance style and musical transcriptions to illustrate the genre’s history, Gonzalez and Yanes explain in the eight chapters how tango arose out of its surrounding circumstances and then evolved to reflect the changing times of which it has been a part. In the process, they discuss such topics as immigration, prostitution, how the “division” of Buenos Aires was related to tango’s evolution, the genre’s success in Paris, Carlos Gardel and the tango-song, tango’s decline, the genre’s connection to politics, Astor Piazzolla (the “new” tango), and tango’s spread around the world; they end by giving a short analysis of tango’s continued popularity. Additional features of the book are the prologues, which provide personal insight into how author Marianella Yanes became interested in tango in Venezuela, a description of tango dancers, a few vignettes containing information related to tango that are apparently based on interviews, an appendix with a chronology of important historical events that affected the evolution of tango, a select bibliography, and a discography/filmography.

Throughout this work, Gonzalez and Yanes use familiar terms to describe tango both as a musical genre and a dance and the how/why of its evolution while simultaneously including ample contextual information. For example, after tango travelled to Paris and the United States, it became “a social dance, and increasingly a kind of sport where athleticism prevailed over sensual expression” (70). During this same period it became “modern” instead of “Latin,” taking on the rules and regulations of ballroom dancing of the time: “the interweaving of limbs should now occur only symbolically and at a distance” (70–71). And, given tango’s influence, “fashion acknowledged the demand for freer movement for women, boned corsets were replaced by more flexible basques, and lightweight fabrics were introduced which both permitted ease of movement and emphasized the sensuality and fluidity of the dancer” (69–70). At the same time, the music was changing as a result of tango’s globalization and entry into urban centers: “The fast milonga had given way to the slower more dramatic expression encouraged by the bandoneon. In Paris, the ‘Orquesta típica’ dressed in national dress to play for the dancers. By 1913, however, the ensembles were growing, adding extra bandoneons and strings, and their dress was changing too” (71).

Another central aspect of this book is the ample use of tango lyrics, provided in Spanish with English translations, to reflect what was happening in Argentine society over time and to show tango’s cast of characters. After giving the lyrics of Santos Discépolo’s “Yira, yira,” for example, the authors point out that this song summarizes la mishiadura (the breadline), the reality of the hard times of...