With the obvious exception of tango, the music of Argentina has a fairly low international profile. True to its image as the continent's "odd man out", the country has a tradition which doesn't quite fit the popular conception of "Latin American" music: there are none of the exhilarating tropical rhythms of say Brazil or Cuba, and very little of the Andean pan pipe sound popularized worldwide in the Seventies by Chilean group Inti-Illimani. Within Latin America, however, Argentina is famed for its rock music, known simply as "rock nacional" - a term which embraces a pretty ecletic bunch of groups and musicians from the heavy rock of Pappo, through the sweet poppy rock of Fito Páez to the ska and punk influenced Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. You'll hear "rock nacional" throughout Argentina and it's well worth checking out a concert - attended with a fervour similar to that provoked by football - if you can. Folk music, known as "folklore" in Argentina, is popular throughout the country and provides a predominantly rural counterpoint to the essentially urban tango. The genre has also produced two internationally renowned stars; Mercedes Sosa and Auhualpa Yupanqui
Tango
The great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges was a tango enthusiast and something of a historian of the music. "My informants all agree on one fact," he wrote, "the Tango was born in the brothels." Borges's informants were a little...
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Rock nacional
Listened to passionately throughout the country, Argentina's homegrown rock music - known simply as rock nacional - is something of an acquired taste, though amongst its numerous charismatic performers there's something for just about...
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Chamamé, cuarteto and folk
Tango aside, Argentine music is mostly rooted in the rural dance traditions of the countryside, an amalgam of Spanish and immigrant Central European styles with indigenous musics. Many of these dances - rancheras, milongas, chacareras and more...
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