Whole Lotta Love: Los Rakas and "Lo Mucho Que Te Quiero"

Born in the youth centers of Oakland, California in 2006, our performers today are Los Rakas, a pair of cousins of Panamanian descent that perform in both English and Spanish and, even better, teach Spanish through their music. National Geographic said that their music is bringing reggaeton back to its Panamanian roots, while the New York Observer wrote that Los Rakas is changing how we think of hip hop - two genres that show how broad Los Rakas' repertoire is. Bringing the pride of the pueblo forth in their music, the band uses "raka" as their name, where a raka is a person who is proud of who he or she is. This song, Lo Mucho Que Te Quiero, can be found on their 2009 album PanaBay Twist 2: La Tanda Del Bus.

Listen to songs like this and more on the KUNM Global Music Show every Monday night from 10 pm - 1 am Mountain Standard Time. Live streaming, program information and the two-week digital archive can be found at http://www.kunm.org.

Sources: https://losrakas.com/

Personal Space: Danay Suárez with the Idan Raichel Project and "Closer Now"

Cuban R&B singer and rapper Danay Suárez performs the random tune for today, called Closer Now. Danay Suárez has been getting a lot of attention in Europe, particularly France, and Billboard named her one of the ten up and coming reggaeton artists in 2014. She is joined on the song by the Idan Raichel Project, a group under the leadership of Israeli singer and songwriter Idan Raichel which combines electronic music with Arab and Ethiopian music and Hebrew texts. You can find Closer Now on the Danay Suárez album Palabras Manuales, released in 2017.

Listen to songs like this and more on the KUNM Global Music Show every Monday night from 10 pm - 1 am Mountain Standard Time. Live streaming, program information and the two-week digital archive can be found at http://www.kunm.org.

But Still Roots: Gina Chavez with Eliza Gilkyson and "Todo Cambio"

A Texan bilingual Latin folk singer, Gina Chavez is the 2014 John Lennon Songwriting Contest winner. Her range of styles include cumbia, bossa nova, vintage pop, reggaeton, and folk. Shye did a volunteer year in El Salvador and continues her work with the people there. She is joined on this song, Todo Cambio, by Austin-based folk singer Eliza Gilkyson, You can find Todo Cambio on Chavez' 2014 album Up.Rooted.

Not Your Mama's Lounge: Charanga Cakewalk and "Volcanico"

The enduring image of the lounge singer, so immortalized in all its cheesiness by Bill Murray in Saturday Night Live sketches, or even as satirized by Richard Cheese (his lounge version of Baby Got Back has to be one of the best song parodies of all time), has been taking a beating lately. That's because lounge music is cool again.

A lot of this makeover of lounge music has to do with electronic advances in music. Ambient sounds can be utilized very effectively to create a mood, just as in the old days lounge singers tried to create a mood with their vocal stylings and downtempo versions of popular songs put to exotic rhythms, as well as utilizing themselves the sounds available to them. So whereas my mom would have gone to Vegas to see the Rat Pack, Wayne Newton and Louis Prima (who, for the record, I absolutely love), nowadays people listening to lounge can find it incorporating music from all over the world. It's not as if lounge hadn't done that before - Brazilian forms such as samba and bossa nova were part of the lounge landscape in the 50s and 60s - but the availability and knowledge of different styles of music from other areas of the world is much greater in a world so interconnected. And I find that it is within the bounds of world music that lounge has become so interesting.

In this vein, today's artist is Charanga Cakewalk. Charanga Cakewalk is the brainchild of Michael Ramos, a Latino Chicano Mexican who also describes himself as a citizen of the world. A once sideman and rocker who played with John Mellencamp, Paul Simon, Patty Griffin and others and was a sometime member of the BoDeans and The Rembrandts, he maintained a keen interest in the Latino music of his childhood. Ramos has made Charanga Cakewalk the leading proponent of a style called cumbia lounge. Within his musical landscapes, you might hear tejano, flamenco, merengue, salsa, garage rock, ska and reggaeton. Charanga Cakewalk has released three albums. This song, Volcanico, is from the 2005 album Loteria de la Cumbia Lounge.