CD Systems de Colombia

Hip hop is a cultural and musical movement that emerged from Black, Latino, and Caribbean communities, centering around rapping (MCing), DJing/turntablism, sampling-based production, and rhythmic speech over beats. It prioritizes groove, wordplay, and storytelling, often reflecting the social realities of urban life. Musically, hip hop is built on drum-centric rhythms (from breakbeats to 808 patterns), looped samples, and bass-forward mixes. Lyrically, it ranges from party anthems and braggadocio to political commentary and intricate poetic forms, with flow, cadence, and rhyme density as core expressive tools. Beyond music, hip hop encompasses a broader culture, historically intertwined with graffiti, b-boying/b-girling (breakdance), fashion, and street entrepreneurship, making it both an art form and a global social language.

Reggaeton is a contemporary urban dance music that blends the dembow rhythm of Jamaican dancehall with hip hop’s MC culture and Caribbean–Latin melodic sensibilities. Its hallmark is the propulsive, syncopated “dembow” drum pattern, typically around 85–100 BPM (often felt in half-time), which powers energetic verses and catchy, sung hooks. Lyrically, reggaeton is most often in Spanish or Spanglish and centers on dance, nightlife, flirtation, romance, and street life, with a performance style that alternates between rapped bars and melodic chorus lines. Production emphasizes tight, punchy drums, rolling 808 sub-bass, percussive plucks or stabs, and bright, hook-forward toplines—crafted for the club and tailored for crowd participation and perreo.

Rock is a broad family of popular music centered on amplified instruments, a strong backbeat, and song forms that foreground riffs, choruses, and anthemic hooks. Emerging from mid‑20th‑century American styles like rhythm & blues, country, and gospel-inflected rock and roll, rock quickly expanded in scope—absorbing folk, blues, and psychedelic ideas—while shaping global youth culture. Core sonic markers include electric guitar (often overdriven), electric bass, drum kit emphasizing beats 2 and 4, and emotive lead vocals. Rock songs commonly use verse–chorus structures, blues-derived harmony, and memorable melodic motifs, ranging from intimate ballads to high‑energy, stadium‑sized performances.

Salsa is a pan–Latin dance music forged primarily in New York City by Puerto Rican, Cuban, and other Caribbean diasporas. It synthesizes Afro‑Cuban rhythmic blueprints, Puerto Rican bomba and plena, jazz harmony, big‑band horn writing, and Nuyorican street culture into a tightly arranged yet improvisation‑friendly style. The music lives on the clave (either 2‑3 or 3‑2), with layered percussion (congas, bongó, timbales, cowbell, güiro, maracas), a tumbao bass that anticipates the beat, and piano montuno guajeos that interlock with the rhythm section. Call‑and‑response vocals (coro/pregón), punchy horn mambos and moñas, and instrumental solos energize the montuno section. Tempos range from medium to fast in 4/4, optimized for social dancing (commonly “on1” or “on2”). Across decades, salsa has branched into harder, percussion‑forward “salsa dura,” smoother “salsa romántica,” and regional scenes in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Colombia, while continuing to influence—and be influenced by—neighboring tropical and jazz idioms.

Vallenato is a traditional folk-pop genre from Colombia’s Caribbean region that centers on storytelling and danceable rhythms. Its signature sound comes from a trio: the diatonic button accordion (melody and riffs), the caja vallenata (a small, single-headed drum providing punchy accents), and the guacharaca (a ribbed scraper driving the groove). Classic vallenato is organized into four main aires (rhythmic-feel types): paseo (lyrical and versatile), merengue (not to be confused with the Dominican genre; it is brisk and bouncy), puya (the fastest and most virtuosic), and son (the slowest, deeply expressive and sentimental). Themes often revolve around love, everyday life, travel, and regional identity, delivered through vivid narrative verses and memorable choruses. Over time, vallenato has absorbed elements of cumbia, porro, son cubano, and bolero, and it has also blended with pop and rock to create modern variants. In 2015, UNESCO recognized the “Traditional Vallenato music of the Greater Magdalena region” as Intangible Cultural Heritage in need of safeguarding, underscoring both its cultural importance and the need to preserve its roots.

Electrocumbia (often called digital cumbia or nu-cumbia) is a contemporary, electronic reinterpretation of traditional cumbia. It merges cumbia’s signature off‑beat percussion, guacharaca/güiro textures, and tumbao bass with modern production elements such as synthesizers, drum machines, sampling, and dub-style effects. While rooted in Colombian cumbia, the style took shape across Latin America—especially within Buenos Aires’ club scene—where producers fused folkloric rhythms with downtempo, house, hip hop, and dub aesthetics. The result is a sound that can be both hypnotic and dance‑forward, oscillating between dreamy, psychedelic atmospheres and gritty, bass‑heavy grooves.

Tropical (often called música tropical) is a broad Latin American dance‑music umbrella that grew from Afro‑Caribbean styles and big‑band arrangements. It emphasizes lively, percussion‑driven grooves, syncopated horn lines, piano montunos, tumbao bass patterns, and call‑and‑response vocals. The feel ranges from elegant ballroom danzón and bolero to the high‑energy drive of mambo, cha‑cha‑chá, salsa, cumbia, and merengue. While repertoire and instrumentation vary by substyle and country, a shared rhythmic DNA—rooted in the clave and Afro‑diasporic percussion—unites Tropical music across the Caribbean and the Americas.