A mixtape can be many things, but one thing is for sure, a mixtape is more than just random songs put in a particular order. It’s about recontextualizing sounds, giving them a new meaning (sometimes very different from the original) by setting them side by side, or juxtaposed in ingenious ways with others. Best thing about mixtapes, most of them are FREE (!), and they’re a great way to discover new music. In this column, Juan Data gives you a worthy one every week.MIXTAPE: Mexinaco
DJ: Pa Changas Collective
All the way from Mexico DF we get this crazy cumbia-mashup mixtape signed by Pa Changas Collective. Unfortunately, there’s almost no information available online about who these guys are. They are apparently very secretive about their real identities, and on their SoundCloud page, they wrote Bruno Díaz as their alter-ego. As you may know, if you happened to be in Latin America somewhere between the ’60s and ’70s, Bruno Díaz was the name given to Bruce Wayne in the Spanish translation of the classic Batman TV series, the ones with Adam West portraying the masked super-hero.
As far as I know, Pa Changas are two guys, yeah like Batman & Robin, who probably took their collective name from the über-famous Sonido la Changa, the pioneers of Mexican cumbia sonidera. But unlike Sonido La Changa, who talks with excessive delay all over the slowed-down cumbias, this dynamic duo specializes in blending cumbia beats with internationally-known pop tunes. And they have no self-imposed limits, they’ll blend pretty much anything that comes their way and can be beat-matched with a güiro riddim. For example, here on their Mexinaco mixtape (the name says it all), they start and finish their set with classic reggae mashups, but in between you’ll find plenty of unexpected guilty-pleasures like Britney Spears, R.E.M., Calle 13, Kelis and so many other totally random picks.