For twelve long days, Chuck Prophet waited. A stage four lymphoma diagnosis had knocked the wind out of him, dragged him off the road and into surgery, and now here he was, a perpetual motion machine forced to sit still, confronting his mortality for the first time as he wondered if he’d live long enough to see the end of the year, let alone get back on tour.
“I was going through a tunnel,” he recalls. “It was dark. But I had music: music to play, music to listen to, music to get me out of my head. Music was my savior.”That much is plain to hear on Wake The Dead, Prophet’s extraordinary—and unlikely—new album. Recorded with ¿Qiensave?, a band of brothers from the Central Coast farming community of Salinas, California, the collection dives headfirst into the world of Cumbia music, which consumed and comforted Prophet during his illness and subsequent recovery. The songs are intoxicatingly rhythmic, all but demanding you move your body while you listen, with arrangements that blur the lines between tradition and innovation, between past and present, between cultures and countries. There are flashes of rock and roll, punk, surf, and soul, all filtered through the streets of San Francisco and wrapped up in the rich legacy of a genre that traces its roots back hundreds of years and thousands of miles.
“Some say this music started in the jungles of Peru and Colombia,” Prophet explains. “Then it really caught fire in the 1960s. In fact, there was such a demand for Cumbia in Mexico that DJs would travel to Colombia just to bring records back. Now that’s trafficking I can get behind!”While Cumbia’s exact origins are debated, such details are in many ways irrelevant to Wake The Dead. Prophet approaches the music not as an academic or an historian, but as a fan with a voracious appetite and an insatiable curiosity. The result is a profoundly adventurous celebration of life that balances hope and fear in equal measure, a rich and exultant meditation on what really matters from an artist who always manages to find the light, even in the face of the most oppressing darkness.
©
2025
Globe Hall
