- PUBLISHED BY Alfredo Cohen Montoya
A very young Carlitos Vives revolutionized the music scene of the Colombian Caribbean by recovering old songs, and I, when I was only seven years old, hugged my father in the midst of 20 thousand souls, singing these stanzas as if really someone other than my mother were waiting for me at home.
“When I leave the parranda many times I am distracted by some friends, but I never forget you because our hearts can no longer be separated. What happens is that I want you to rest, pa’ always have you well preserved…”
Thirty years have passed since that concert, but the song composed by Sergio Moya Molina is more than six decades old. However, it would not be strange today to find a teenager from some neighborhood in my native Barranquilla still singing:
“As you know me I thank you, I forgive me if I return a little late, when I arrive at my house I want to see you very cheerful, affectionate and complacing, but you will never receive me with discouragement, because that way I will have to go again”
During 2016, on one of my trips to Colombia, outraged by the news of the rape and murder of a poor girl, of indigenous origin, at the hands of a millionaire, I also cursed Les Quatre Babys, the song that Maluma had just released on video.
In the summer of 2019 during a festival in Bilbao, C. Tangana was removed from the line-up thanks to a request from Change.org . The argument was that the concert of a guy who sang “machistadas” should not be paid for with public money. In the Basque Country, a herd of unpresentables had recorded a video raping a young woman weeks earlier, so the signatures on the petition went up like foam.
Then Maluma came back singing: “If with another thing you go rat, we are going to be happy, we are going to be happy, happy four, we will increase the four…” And now, was the macho Sudaca singing to polyamory? The possibility of this relationship without jealousy has so far 1687368274 views on YouTube, but perhaps all it indicates is that the industry knows how to build its characters. When a journalist from Cadena Ser asked C. Tangana if she considered herself sexist or feminist, the graduate in Philosophy from the Complutense University of Madrid replied that she was transsexual, and that Spain’s ideas about masculinity and femininity eat her pussy.
I promised in my previous columns that this space would limit it to explaining that any cultural product, especially audiovisual, can be considered an educational experience. Educational in the sense that it constructs images about what crosses us and what surrounds us. It educates us about who to want, who to vote for, how to love. Stereotypes, prejudices and worldviews that can mean, especially for the youngest, simplistic ways of understanding otherness. It will be impossible to accompany teenagers if we do not worry about understanding their music, their codes, their reinterpretations of rebellion and sarcasm. Yes, in addition, in our infinite arrogance we ask them to turn off the mobile and we criticize their YouTubers. We are lost if we don’t care how new social networks and the algorithms that define them work, while asking them stupid questions.
My father understood Sergio Moya Molina singing The Jealous, but he felt more cultured, from a better family, listening to The Beatles sing Run for Your Life, which translated would say something like: “I’d rather see you dead, girl… Let you be with another man. You’d better keep your head high, baby. or you won’t know where I am.”.
In 1984, the year I was born, The Police won the Grammy for song of the year for Every Breath You Take. Sting’s songwriting topped the Billboard chart for eight consecutive weeks. The translation of his lyrics reads as follows: “Every breath you take, every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take, I’ll be watching you. Each and every day, and every word you say, every game you play, every night you stay, I’ll be watching you. Oh, can’t you see that you belong to me?”
I recently asked young people in a workshop: what was the first thing that came to their minds when they thought of reggaeton? “Intense perreo,” a girl replied. I’m still not sure what it means, but maybe it has something to do with it helping me jog in the mornings, when J.Balvin affectionately “cuts” my ears.
Of course there are many reggaetons in bad taste, but at this point I also like intense perreo, that explicit performativity of sexual desires in a generation that grew up with true access to information. Nor will I lose my mind about the racism and classism expressed from certain Spanish sectors towards so-called Latin music. This one that long ago sneaked into the outlying neighbourhoods of New York, Madrid, Barcelona and Paris, and was soon accepted by the elite, as has always happened with all popular music in the world. What does concern me, however, is the romantic perreo. These songs that have been promoting for decades, in a loop, in any language and in all rhythms, myths such as that love is an exclusivity that can do everything, that opposite poles always attract. I am disturbed by the romantic perreo of Shakira, Malú, Leyva, Aitana, Camilo or Alejandro Sanz. The usual one, the one that leaves you dirty, blind, deaf-mute, clumsy, stubborn, turned into something that does nothing but love it.
In a world where men continue to kill “their” wives, someone must dismantle the correlations between love and violence, tell young people that love does not imply suffering and that jealousy is nothing more than insecurity of those who feel them. No, not all Sudaca music is reggaetón and that not all reggaetón is sexist, but, above all, that the half orange never existed. That no one will lack like air to breathe and that no world ends when the other leaves. That no one should lead them to lose, to any destination, without any why. That perhaps no one will cover them tonight if it is cold, but that alone and alone they can be cured, the “heart parted.”
Text originally published in EL COMEJÉN.