La Rebelión

Joe Arroyo grew up in the Nariño neighbourhood of Cartagena, on Colombia's Caribbean coast, and from the age of eight he was singing for money in the brothels of the city's red-light district. As an adult he built a style of his own by mixing salsa and cumbia with soca, compas, zouk and other music of the African diaspora, and he wrote his most famous song about the city that made him. "La Rebelión" tells the story of an African couple enslaved by a Spaniard in seventeenth-century Cartagena. When the master abuses the woman, her husband avenges her, and a rebellion begins. It is a brutal story set to a groove made for dancing, lifted further by a piano solo from Chelito De Castro, and that contrast is part of its power. The song became an international hit and an anthem of pride for Afro-descendant people across Latin America. Arroyo won the Congo de Oro at the Barranquilla Carnival ten times, so often that in 1990 the festival created a Super Congo de Oro just for him. When he died in 2011, one newspaper headline simply said that El Joe had been the rebellion. Billboard has named the song one of the best salsa songs ever, Viva Music Colombia put it first among the most important Colombian songs of all time, and a bronze statue of Arroyo now stands in Cartagena, the city whose past he set to music.