Priming the Musical Pump1

I’ve been slow to embrace traditional tango music. It wasn’t in my cultural reference. There aren’t drums pounding out the rhythm like I’m used to. The lyrics are in a language I don’t speak. I was always wondering why this music from a 20-30 year window ending in 1955 held such a special appeal. Why did all the recordings sound like scratchy vinyl records?
The scratchy record question has a simple answer. In the early 1960s, probably 1962, there was a fire at the RCA Victor record building in Buenos Aires that stored many of the master recordings for a large body of tango music. The details of the fire are lost to history, but it is known it was the deliberate act of RCA manager Ricardo Mejia. Whether it was his willful act is subject to debate. Theories about tax avoidance, royalty avoidance, feuds among the participants, need for more space, need for a current tax year loss, desire to clearly end the tango era to make way for profitable rock n’ roll music, even political pressure may have been a factor. In any case, after the fire the vinyl record in the best condition of any given song became its’ new master.
To my American born ears, tango music was distant, sometimes odd, maybe bordering on cartoonish. There was a good reason for that. My introduction to tango music was from cartoons, the same cartoons that presented tango as an overly dramatic dance with deep dips that was best performed with a rose stem between the teeth. This was later reinforced by the non-animated cartoons of Lucille Ball & Ricky Ricardo, Al Pachino & Gabrielle Anwar, Richard Gere & Jennifer Lopez, Colin Firth & Jessica Biel, etc.

This also reminds me of ballet and the music that it was danced to ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballet_%28music%29

Namely, that it started with simpler music, and then the music became more complicated as the dance became more free.

And I think there was some of the same evolution in traditional tango music (going from more simple and rhythmic to more complicated).

I remember hearing a story where someone essentially said "why not dance ballet to the great classical music of this day, instead of to "ballet" music".

Random thoughts :)