First, a confession: I do not love the tango. That is to say, I do not love the dance known as the tango, with its showy steps and poses, its domineering male partnering and its ostentatious pauses. I do, however, have a soft spot for tango songs--the yearning melancholy of "Madreselva," the aggressive cynicism of "Cambalache," the cheerful resignation of "Adiós Muchachos," the bitterness of "Mano a Mano." These and other tangos are the inescapable soundtrack of daily life in Buenos Aires; you cannot be in that city for more than five minutes without hearing one playing in the background of a cab or cafe, or blaring from the radio of a construction site.

This personal preference should not be an impediment to enjoying Robert Thompson's Tango: The Art History of Love; tango, after all, is both a dance and a musical form, and more than anything a cultural phenomenon with a long and rich history, as varied and curious as that of the country that produced it. But only a few pages into Thompson's book, which is in many ways an informative--and surprising--account of the tango, it becomes clear that Thompson has no time for such tepid consumers of tango songs. In his view, "tango is action. That's what the world loves, more than the text or the sound." So much for the lilting strains of Carlos Gardel's voice and the arch melodies of the bandoneón.

For Thompson the history of the tango is a history of the repression of its origins and meaning, the deliberate rubbing out of its African roots. His passionately argued, sometimes bullying, book tries to demonstrate the impact of "African and Afro-Argentine influences" on the "rise, development, and achievement of the tango." He presents this work as a corrective to a field (tango studies) that has been "biased toward literature"--i.e., the lyrics of the tango song, written by and for white lyricists and musicians--and that, in his opinion, has fomented the false idea that "black influence, if present at the beginning, ha[s] long since disappeared." His mission is to prevent the "attempt to destroy this black-enhanced heritage."

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