The Living History of Changa Tuki

Thirty years ago, in the improvised hillside barrios that overlook the skyscrapers and fancy homes of Caracas, a group of kids developed a passion for electronic music. These kids – many of whom were Black and darker skinned, and led lives of great economic precarity – created a vast and complex subculture around a new dance music genre that mostly escaped the notice of the city’s elite, but which still influences dance music culture in Venezuela and globally to this day.

Changa tuki is an umbrella term for a set of related genres of electronic music that emerged from this underground party scene in the ghettos of Caracas. Sonically, this movement – which also includes subgenres such as street house, raptor house and hard fusion – is in every way a child of its frenetic mother city: raw, energetic, violent, witty, Caribbean. The music is fast – up to 150 BPM at times – and is a style developed by the push-and- pull of the beat and the dancefloor, a collaboration between DJ and dancer.

Pedro Elias Corro, a.k.a. DJ Baba, is one of changa tuki’s foremost progenitors. Growing up in Propatria, on the west side of the city, he learned to mix at just 14. “I learned how to sync music on two turntables and Afrika Bambaataa’s Just Get Up and Dance,” he explains. Baba began his career as a DJ in the 90s in the minitecas, Venezuela’s iconic mobile sound systems that brought the discotheque experience – DJs, lights, and, most importantly, incredibly loud speakers – to the streets. One day, while working for a cable company, a kid in Los Naranjos gave him a CD with Fruity Loops burnt onto it. “I had no idea about the implications of making or producing music,” Baba remembers.

“It was always just a simple curiosity.” He began to make a name for himself as a DJ when in 2001, inspired by huge parties on the rooftops of a set of buildings in Lomas de Urdaneta near Baba’s barrio, he created Lomas, a song calling out the neighbourhood. “It said, ‘baila, baila, Las Lomas!’ It was the first time I made a song for the barrio.” The track became an underground hit.

On the other side of the city in Petare, another young DJ called Yirvin began learning to mix by playing around on equipment belonging to his father, who owned a miniteca. He experimented by making sounds on his dad’s drum machine, and practised synchronising music on the decks; by 14 he was already a dab hand mixing. As soon as someone told him there were computer programmes for making music, he was hooked.

“Without having any real knowledge about creating music, of course,” he laughs. He refined his skills and recorded his own loops. In the early 2000s, he linked up with Baba and formed the Raptor Crew. “Baba was the best on the west side [of Caracas], and I was the best on the east.” Soon they formed a formidable squad, including DJ Linares, DJ Deep, DJ Elieser, DJ Armando and DJ Byakko. They collectively named this new style of changa they were creating ‘raptor house’.

Changa – the name given by Venezuelans to the house and eurodance that was gaining global notoriety in the early 90s – was already hugely popular in Venezuela, including in the Caracas barrios, where FM radio’s changa programmes were in demand. The minitecas played salsa, merengue and whatever else was danceable – and this always included changa. Baba credits Byakko with coining the name ‘changa tuki’ when he used it as the name for one of his changa mixes, an onomatopoeic reference to the music itself: tuki-tuki-tuki-tuki.

The subculture at its core was a youth movement. Its signature parties were matinées, starting at noon, to get around the age restrictions in place at most clubs. “It was for high school kids, young people,” Yirvin says. The scene soon developed beyond music, becoming an underground social and cultural phenomenon with its own codes. Kids developed a strong visual aesthetic, dyeing their hair wild colours and donning bright clothing, at-brimmed hats, US athletic attire and sneakers – usually knock offs – like Nike Air Jordans. Dancers became an integral part of the scene. “The dancer has a very essential role in [tuki] because its music was made for dancers,” explains Elberth ‘El Maestro’, possibly the most well-known tuki dancer. Dance battles began taking place, and those involved produced videos that would come to be watched – though conservatively – by hundreds of thousands.

In some ways, changa tuki was everywhere; on buses, in stores, blasting out of cars driving past. It was a major boom. “But it was an urban boom,” Baba explains. “That didn’t exist for the upper and middle class. They didn’t even know that music was made in Venezuela.”

Like many nations with oil wealth, Venezuela was, and remains, a society of great chasms between the rich and the poor. Already deeply divided by class and plagued by the racism embedded in all of the Americas’ post- colonial nations, the height of changa tuki’s popularity was also beginning to develop the deep and immutable political polarisation that characterises the country today. Populist leader Hugo Chávez had been in power for just a few years, promising a reworking of the social order that never quite materialised, and posing a threat to the nation’s wealthy – whose longtime disgust with working class and poor Venezuelans became even more barefaced and bold. “We haven’t been able to rid Venezuelans of that bad habit,” Yirvin says of the racism and classism that is so deeply woven into the country’s cultural fabric.

These profound divisions meant that, while it became a national sociocultural phenomenon, it’s impossible to know any exact numbers. Established record stores in Venezuela didn’t carry changa tuki records; the entire operation was always bubbling beneath the surface. Everything, from the creation of the music and artwork to its distribution, happened through informal economies. Burnt CDs and dance-battle DVDs with art produced in the barrio were distributed at parties and through street vendors at local markets. Changa tuki was everywhere, if you bothered to look. Venezuela’s wealthy, white elite, for the most part, did not.

But the parties often ended in violence. Though at its height there were thousands of kids attending each matinée, it only took a few altercations to cause violent scenes – fights that over time resulted in the deaths and injuries of many young people. “The issue was controlling those kids when they left the party,” Yirvin explains. “And as a result of that, there was a lot of controversy.” Baba compares his crew back then to something like NWA. “We lived an adolescence rife with crime and found an escape in music.”