lambada

Lambada comes from the Portuguese word for a strong slap or the crack of a whip — lambar means to lash. The dance emerged in the northern Brazilian state of Pará in the 1970s, blending elements of carimbó (a traditional Amazonian dance), merengue, and forró. The defining feature was close body contact: partners' hips pressed together and moved in synchronized waves. It was danced in bars and festivals in Belém, the capital of Pará, and it was immediately controversial.

Brazilian municipalities banned the lambada in the 1980s. The physical closeness was considered obscene. The prohibition, predictably, made the dance more popular. Lambada spread south to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where it merged with other dance styles. It might have remained a Brazilian regional phenomenon if a French-Brazilian music group called Kaoma had not recorded a song called 'Lambada' in 1989.

Kaoma's 'Lambada' sold over five million copies worldwide. The song was actually a melody borrowed — illegally, as the courts later ruled — from a Bolivian group called Los Kjarkas. The legal battles over the song's authorship were secondary to its cultural impact: lambada became a global dance craze. Dance schools in Europe and Japan taught it. The word entered languages that had never encountered Brazilian Portuguese. A banned Brazilian dance, set to a stolen Bolivian melody, produced by a French label, became the world's dance for a summer.

The lambada craze burned out within two years. By 1991, it was already nostalgia. The dance itself evolved into zouk-lambada, practiced by a smaller but dedicated community of social dancers. The word lambada, which means a whiplash in Portuguese, hit global culture with the same speed and disappeared with the same sting.