My Five Favorite Joe Arroyo Songs

For me, art is not an intellectual affair. It's not something you think about. It's not something you analyze. It's something you recognize, something you respond to, something you feel. And it happens instantly.

It's like when someone tells you a good joke, when the punchline hits you either laugh or you don’t. You don't mull it over, consider everything, and then decide to start laughing uncontrollably. You have an immediate response.

That's what great music is like for me.

When I hear a song I like, I feel it in my chest. It feels like fighting or surfing or making love. An overwhelming infusion of energy and vitality. When a great song comes on, I don’t think about it.

I move.

When I think about the songs that make me respond the most, a lot of them come from the same guy.

Joe Arroyo.

I don't know what it is about his music, but when I hear it, I get hyped. It fills me with this uncontrollable energy that I just don't get from most other songs. It's not just his voice, that high tenor with the edge that cuts straight through your body. It's also what he's talking about and how he says it.

It's like the first time I heard N.W.A. There was this raw, real gritty street quality to it that punched through the speakers. And in a lot of ways, some of his songs could be considered the gangster rap of salsa. Because almost none of them, at least the ones I like, are about love.

They're about struggle, pain, war, and justice.

And given Joe Arroyo's background, that's no surprise. Álvaro José Arroyo González was born in Cartagena in 1955 and legend has it that he was singing in the brothels and red light districts of Tesca when he was still a child. Some say that he was doing this as young as 8, others say 13, but regardless, that's a rough place for a kid to learn their chops.

People tell stories of him sticking his head inside empty lard cans to sing because he liked the way the echo sounded. Whatever he did, it worked because by the time he was a teenager, he was discovered singing in a club outside Barranquilla and recruited by Fruko, the godfather of Colombian salsa, to join the legendary band Fruko y sus Tesos.

He stayed there for nearly a decade, dropping one banging album after another. Until finally in 1981, he left to start his own orchestra, which he named La Verdad. The Truth.

And his truth went beyond just salsa. He started experimenting with cumbia, soca, compas, reggae, porro. Sounds that he incorporated into his own style called Joesón. He described it as, “a sound that has soca, salsa, African sounds, cumbia, sea breeze, and a 50% that comes from me and I have no idea what it is."

But a listen is worth a thousand words, so here are a few of his more famous Joesón recordings:

Joe won more Congos de Oro at the Barranquilla Carnival than any artist in history. Eighteen, by the Colombian press's count. Until finally the festival gave up and invented a trophy just for him, the Súper Congo de Oro.

When he died in Barranquilla in July 2011, his casket was carried through the streets on a fire truck while thousands of people sang his songs.

But as long as there are salsa dancers, his music will never die. Don't believe me? Just listen. I've collected my five favorite songs from Joe Arroyo. If you ever think that I've been possessed by an alien and I'm not who I say I am, all you have to do is put on one of these songs. If I don't get up and start dancing and acting a fool, you'll know it's not me.

Before we get started, one ground rule. I'm not including anything from the Fruko era in this list. I will definitely make a separate list just for that group. But for this one it's Joe only.

So without any further ado, these are my five favorite Joe Arroyo songs.

1Ban Ban (1986)

→ this song in the Salsa Rob catalog

If aliens were invading the earth and I had to pick one song to dance to to save the planet, this is it.

This is gangster rap, salsa style.

It's about a guy whose girlfriend gets harassed so he grabs his gun and prepares to slide. Like many of my favorite songs, the music itself tells the story. Even if you don't understand a word of Spanish, you will still understand exactly what the song is about just by the feeling of the music.

It starts off cool. Restrained. He's telling the story of what happened. And as he tells it, you can feel the escalation. You can feel his emotions rising. The intensity building. Until just before the drop, when suddenly, everything goes silent.

And I have to say, the instrumentation around this transformation is pure genius.

Everything drops out, except the chorus and the clave. And they call out to him:

Ban ban kiribin Ban Ban!

To which Joe responds:

Como?

Five raw bass notes echo out, foreshadowing the turn.

The chorus calls again:

Ban ban kiribin Ban Ban!

But this time, instead of Joe answering, the conga answers for him. Eight drum hits that sound like he’s loading a gun and racking the slide.

And then it’s on.

When the chorus hits, it’s over. Go time. No more talking. No more rationalizing. Just pure musical asswhup.

Mi pistola, dispara sola!

Listen to that. My gun shoots on its own. That is the lyrical equivalent of what I feel in my body when this song comes on. The music takes control.

Here's some interesting history about this song.

First off, it was released on the same LP as "Rebelión." Think about that. Most people go their entire career without one song of this caliber.

Joe Arroyo drops two on the same LP.

Second, there are actually two other versions of this song (that I know of). The original is called "El Tiroteo (Bang Bang Bang)" and it was released in 1970 by New York's New Swing Sextet. The other version was recorded by Fruko himself.

They’re great songs. But they don’t move me the same way. To me, they lack the edge, grit, and menace that make Joe’s version the ultimate expression of what this song was meant to be.

One final aside.

The label copy for the song credits Ban Ban to Jimmy Sabater and Joe Cuba. But I think that might be a mistake. They did write a song called Bang Bang, but it was a completely different song that has nothing in common with Ban Ban but onomatopoeia. I think the actual writers are probably Pete Ortiz and George Rodríguez of the New Swing Sextet, yet they are nowhere to be found in the credits.

2En Barranquilla Me Quedo (1988)

→ this song in the Salsa Rob catalog

Joe Arroyo was born in Cartagena, Colombia. But the city that I associate with him the most is Barranquilla. The house he lived in, the carnival titles he won, and eventually the hospital where he died were all there.

The song was written after Joe attended the funeral of Francisco "Pacho" Galán in Soledad, just outside Barranquilla. Inspired by the way the city poured its heart out to bid farewell to him, he began writing. And just four days later, he entered the Discos Fuentes studios in Medellín and dropped En Barranquilla Me Quedo in a single two-hour session.

Embedded in the original 1988 recording were subtle tributes and nods to Galán. During the song's piano solo (played by Chelito De Castro), listen for Joe singing a vocal snippet from "Boquita Salá", one of Pacho Galán's most famous tropical hits. In the background, you can hear Joe chant the classic line: "Y el sabor de tu boca fresca / quiero llevar en mi memoria", a nod to Galán. But listen closely, because later pressings quietly dropped the tribute, so depending on the version you're hearing, it may not be there at all.

The song also contains the famous line: "Y si a mí me meten preso, Barranquilla a mí me saca" ("And if they put me in jail, Barranquilla gets me out"), which according to legend was inspired by a real event where Joe was detained by the police, only to have an angry crowd of local neighborhood residents formed at the station singing his songs until the police were forced to let him go.

Whether that's actually true, who knows, but the sentiment is real.

You can feel it in the song.

One of the things that I love the most about this song is the composition. The structure. This isn't a simple straightforward song. It starts out with the piano calling for attention, then hands it over to the brass, high energy and the promise of fun.

But then just before the verse starts, they take it all the way back down and drop into a deep guaguanco groove, telling you to settle down and pay attention as they steadily build back up towards the drop.

They do this repeatedly.

They don't just give it to you. They make you wait for it.

One of the most irritating things that I see on the dance floor is when noob dancers start immediately busting moves throughout the entire song. Are you even listening to the music? It's not time for that yet.

Calm down, be patient.

I remember when I would teach people how to surf. They would ask me when it's time to stand up. And I would tell them when the wave has you. They would ask, well, how do I know when that is? And I would say if you're asking if the wave has you, it doesn't have you. Because when it has you, you know. And that's when it's time to stand up.

Same for this song.

Right before the drop hits, the music fades out again. And while the clave marks time, the chorus calls for Joe, almost like the city is searching for him.

¿En Barranquilla me quedo?

But Joe doesn't answer. Instead, the trumpets answer for him.

They call again.

¿En Barranquilla me quedo?

And this time Joe responds:

¡En Barranquilla me quedo!

And it's ON.

This is the point of the song where you unleash all of that pent-up energy. Everything that's been building, everything you've been waiting for. No more patience, time to go. This is the point where the noobs are already spent. Where the people who blew their load too early and have nothing left and they can only watch as the veteran dancers channel the power of the song and enter avatar mode.

3La Guerra de los Callados (1990)

→ this song in the Salsa Rob catalog

It's December 1990. Colombia is right in the middle of the cartel war. Bombs have been going off across the country, people are dying, buildings are exploding. And the people are suffering.

Not just from the attacks, but from the fear.

Doors sealed, windows shut, a whole population locked inside its own houses, crying, afraid to walk, afraid to talk. Not knowing when the next bomb's going to go off or if a stray bullet is waiting for them around the next corner.

La Guerra de los Callados

The unspoken war. The war of the silent ones. The war of the innocents.

And this war was more than just theoretical.

In the song, eight bombs go off in a single Medellín night. In real life, nobody could document that exact night. Because there were too many nights like it to count.

And the violence touched Joe directly. His older brother Jaime had been killed in Panama on December 20, 1989, during the U.S. invasion. Exactly one year later, to the day, right as this album was coming out, six armed men walked into Joe's house and robbed his family at gunpoint.

The song hid none of it. It took the raw, ugly truth and exposed it. And people danced.

How is that possible?

I'll defer to one of my friends, the psychedelic author, David Jay Brown. He says, and I quote, "Using dark energy to fuel creative expression is the time-honored path to alchemical transformation."

And that's exactly what Joe did here. He took all the darkness, all the pain, all the hurt, and transformed it into a work of art, a musical catharsis that let you experience and cleanse all of the dark emotions you were feeling.

In the lead up to the chorus on this song, you can feel the panic building. A sense of claustrophobia. The feeling like you need to run but you don't know where to go. And then the bombs are exploding and you're running through the streets as fast as you can just trying to get away.

Ay, qué pena, señores, todo el mundo en pena

Ay, qué pena, señores, todo el mundo en pena

This song does not have the subtle structure of an En Barranquilla Me Quedo. The push and pull. The waiting. Once it gets going, it's an all out sprint. But it's exactly that primal urgency that I love.

4Rebelión (1986)

→ this song in the Salsa Rob catalog

If you're making a list of the most culturally significant salsa songs of all time, this song might be number one on that list. This isn't just a song. It's a dissertation. A transmission of oral history in musical form.

The story of an African slave rebellion in Colombia inspired by a story Joe said he heard at a museum in Cartagena about a Congolese king who was brought over in chains with his young wife.

Joe starts off like a griot addressing the tribe:

Quiero contarle mi hermano un pedacito de la historia negra
De la historia nuestra, caballero y dice así

Listen brother, I want to tell you about a little piece of black history. About OUR history.

And you can already feel the weight of it. He's not just about to sing a song. He's about to drop knowledge. He’s about to set the record straight.

He takes us back to the 1600s in Cartagena, at that time a slave port in the Spanish empire, where an enslaved African couple is abused by a Spanish master who strikes the wife, forcing the husband to rise up.

The chorus is possibly the most famous salsa chorus in the world.

No le pegue a la negra

There might be more famous songs, but I can't think of any more famous lyrics.

A few stories while we're here.

First, Joe's version isn't actually the first version of this song. When Joe first wrote it, he actually gave it away to a singer named Joe Urquijo who recorded it in 1978 under the title “El Mulato.” Joe Arroyo actually hid the composer credit under the name of his wife so Discos Fuentes wouldn't notice that he was moonlighting on a rival label.

Eight years later Joe took his own song back.

Second, the piano solo, one of the most iconic in all of salsa, was an improvised one-take by Chelito de Castro who was working out the song's structure when Joe told him to let it rip.

De Castro took his shirt off and played seventy-five seconds off the top of his head. After hearing it, Joe shouted "¡No jodás, Chelito, la mataste!" He liked it so much, he even left his own ad-lib on the record, “¡y con ustedes, Chelito de Castro!”

The song quickly transcended Salsa and became an anthem of Black pride across Latin America. It’s been covered by everyone from Raulín Rosendo to J Balvin, and in 2022 gave its name to the Netflix-distributed biopic of Joe's life.

This is undoubtedly one of the greatest salsa songs of all time. Possibly the greatest Colombian song of all time.

So why is it number four on my list?

If I was ranking purely based on cultural significance, popularity, legacy or importance, this would be #1, no question. I’m not trying to take ANYTHING away from the greatness of this song.

But this list is based on my personal opinion. How excited do I get when I hear a song come on? How much does it make me want to dance? And for Rebelión, I think I've just heard it too much.

I've been dancing for over 20 years. And I am fairly certain that in all that time I've never gone to a salsa night where this song was not played at least once. I usually dance between two to three times a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

So if you take the low end, that’s two times a week, 52 weeks in a year, 20+ years which means I’ve probably danced to this song over 2,000 times.

That’s a lot of Rebelión for one guy.

5Con Gusto y Gana (1981)

→ this song in the Salsa Rob catalog

Looking at my song choices is interesting. They alternate between songs about simple, primal feelings and songs of complex, historical significance. And since we just finished with the most significant song in this entire list, it's almost fitting that we end with the most simplistic.

There's nothing deep about this song. Not the lyrics, not the structure. Once we hit the drop, it's all gas and no brakes until the end of the song. No patience, no waiting. Just all out fun. Which is appropriate because that's what this song is about.

Listen to the lyrics.

Con gusto y gana hasta mañana

Joe likes having a good time. He likes spending money. When he finds a good woman, he likes to enjoy himself with her. And he can do it all night long.

This is Joe bragging to the boys, his bravado and machismo on full display. And I think that's one of the things I love about him so much. His realness. He is who he is, and you can see the full range of it in his music.

Just in this list alone, we have a gunfight, an homage to the town he loves, a commentary on the suffering of war, a song about a slave rebellion, and a track about how much he likes the ladies.

Warrior. Scholar. Lover.

That’s a real dude. He's not curating some image. There’s no pretense. This is who he is.

And in the context of his career, it makes sense. This song was released in 1981, a pivotal year in Joe's life. This was the year he left Fruko y sus Tesos.

Think about that for a second. This is one of the greatest bands in Colombia's history and he was their voice. He could have just ridden that into the sunset. But he left it, formed his own orchestra and bet everything on himself.

His real self.

And thank God that he did. Because as great as Fruko y Sus Tesos was, the legacy that Joe left as a solo artist was even greater.