This text is an excerpt from the book "Bachata, A social history of a Dominican popular music", published by Temple University Press in 1995, written by Deborah Pacini Hernandez. 

Música de amargue (music of bitterness) 

In the early 1980s a few bachata musicians, especially those whose music was of the more romantic variety, made an effort to distance themselves from the negative images associated with the term bachata by coming up with a new name. They began referring to their music as música de amargue (music of bitterness), thereby emphasizing the feelings of nostalgia and suffering that characterized their music. They insisted that the term bachata applied only to the raunchier, more danceable music being made by some musicians, their own slower, romantic songs werre to be called canciones de amargue (songs of bitterness). As Luis Segura asserted, "Esos son los que son bachatas, que van corriendo" (those are the bachatas, the fast ones). In contrast, Tony Santos, one of a younger generation of bachata musicians whose music was indeed faster and more sexually explicit than Segura's and Paniagua's, had no problem with the word bachata, although he did recognize the symbolic power off the words used to describe the music: "

I'm not bothered if it's called bachata. But since names are always changing and making things nicer, amargue makes it more acceptable, more decent". 

While the term amargue was indeed free of social stigma, it had limitations that prevented it from replacing bachata, which continued to be used by bachata's patrons themselves. First of all, the term bachata provided Dominicans with an appealing continuity between the traditional informal family and neighborhood parties of the same name ande the musical genre that grew out of them; the newer term amargue, on the other hand, had no such historical resonances and evoked an unhappy state of mind. More importantly, the term amargue would not adequately describe those songs within bachateros' repertoires that were modeled after other guitar-based genres-particularly the merengue, but others such as the son and the ranchera as well- that were not based on the bolero and that were not necessarily romantic. In contrast, the term bachata could incorporate all these musical relatives, distant as they might have been; the very ambiguity of the term bachata provided the necessary flexibility for a stillemerging genre. This inclusiveness became particularly important in the 1990s, when almost all bachata musicians began including guitar-based merengues in their live as well as recorded repertoires. Rhythmically these were clearly merengues, but they could be comfortably accommodated within the boundaries of bachata because they were guitar based.