Oh well, if I were looking for him...

Rediscovering my childhood

I used to listen to this guy a lot when I was little, due to my brother, 9 years older than me and already listening to music that had already appeared some years before his time. but in those days things tend to last more. Anyway, this is Joan Manuel Serrat, a catalan siger who wasn't very close to Franco and to whom I probably owe having being able since very early on to know how to deal with weird vocabulary and convoluted metaphors.

(This video comes from what looks like a cheesy Spanish movie from the sixties. How repressive and repressed was Spain in those days? And how did they manage to have at least the looks of more liberated people? I don't know what is going on between those two women, but I liked the short-haired one better than the other.)

A Random Thought

Stupidly, this country actively ignores the legacy of the Sixties, a moment in which the promise of a new and better society was reactivated through politics and the arts. I said stupidly knowing that it's also made on behalf of power. Stereotyping those times as "drugs and free love and excess" is just another way of explaining things, or, in other words, patronizing us, imposing other people's meanings on us.

Why am I saying this? Overwhelmed by the sheer force of Surrealistic Pillow, one of the best albums in the history of rock. Such a piece of art could only be written and played in those years of promise. But, alas, all we have now is shattered dreams... Well, not really, but dig my mood with no questions. I know, I know, everything is still possible.

Anyway, when I fell in love with this country, it was through rock 'n' roll. And it was precisely this kind of rock 'n' roll. The Jefferson Airplane is still flying. At least for me.

Pop Muzik

It just takes four normal blokes...



"Influenced by the Velvet Underground and punk rock, Joy Division went far beyond those entities in search of something that was unobtainable in rock & roll. Rock was only the place where these artists looked together to make the world of appearances disappear. This disappearance happened somewhere inside the music, in a split between rhythm and lyric, where guitars and drums forced each other to take comfort in something that was too large, open, and unwieldy to be contained within a song. Joy Division took on the pop world and did everything wrong, but it did so only to take the music one step further out of the pop context and one step deeper into the world of human beings. The band was hidden, never flashy, issuing singles that never appeared on albums and playing manic sets that never quite ended. Joy Division took upon itself the kind of discovery that pop music is never supposed to acquaint itself with."

Thom Jurek, Review of "Heart and Soul", the Joy Division box set. In allmusic.

My Ever Changing Moods

Am I back to blogging? Maybe. I never know for sure. About nothing. That's why I love this song...

My Ever Changing Moods (Written by Paul Weller)
-The Style Council
From Café Bleu (1984)

Daylight turns to moonlight - and Im at my best
Praising the way it all works - gazing upon the rest
The cool before the warm
The calm after the storm
I wish to stay forever - letting this be my food
But Im caught up in a whirlwind and my ever changing moods
Bitter turns to sugar - some call a passive tune
But the day things turn sweet - for me wont be too soon
The hush before the silence
The winds after the blast
I wish wed move together - this time the bosses sued
But were caught up in the wilderness and an ever changing mood
Teardrops turn to children - whove never had the time
To commit the sins they pay for through - anothers evil mind
The love after the hate
The love we leave too late
I wish wed wake up one day - an everyone feel moved
But were caught up in the dailies and an ever changing mood

Evil turns to statues - and masses form a line
But I know which way Id run to if the choice was mine
The past is knowledge - the present our mistake
And the future we always leave too late
I wish wed come to our senses and see there is no truth
In those who promote the confusion for this ever changing mood

But I'm still around.

Live Better ELECTRICALLY!

There's a great website called "TV Party" in which you can find tons of things related to vintage TV ads, series and many more things. It was there where I found this little jewel: an ad for electricity! The person who runs the blog asks (in a very naïve fashion) "Why advertise electricity? You've got me." Well, it looks like something is going on with energy in these days... Take a look!

Everybody's sayin' that music is love.



























Everybody's sayin' that music's for free.

Looking for the Perfect Beat

There are in my mind two moments in which the promise of globalization looked at the reach of my hand. Both are related to music. The first one was with U2's "Zooropa". Te second, the release of "Clandestino" by former Mano Negra leader, Manu Chao: sung in Spanish, French, English and Portuguese, and with a cameo of Comandante Marcos... Irresistibly political and beautifully written and executed. In the middle of these two releases were also some other that (in my mind) fight for the crown --maybe Asian Dub Foundation's "Community Music" or anything by Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. In short, it was --at least for me-- a time filled with promise.

How could this be possible now? It's not anymore. The time has come in which the real promise of a global scene is fulfilled by the permanent war of ongoing primitive accumulation. Let's think of Iraq, and now Palestine. What strikes me the most is --maybe contradictorily-- that while the claims of the self-appointed representatives of "the West" are of universalizing the conquests of "Civilization", these same representatives are isolating themselves in their exclusivist views of the world. Think a minute about the Israelis, for instance. While Israel's PM claims that theirs is the fight of the civilized West against the barbarians of the East, the foundations of the state of Israel lie in exclusion: the so-called one and only democracy of the Middle East is in reality a racial state, a theocracy from which everybody who is not part of "the chosen people" are excluded. So, the so-called representatives of reason and modernity in the Middle East are not gonna accept you because you are not part of their people. In the meanwhile, radical versions of Islam, fueled by hatred and authoritarianism, are at the same time prone to universalism. And resentment has always been one of the strongest forces that we have out there.

In the meantime, I listen to "Clandestino" thinking on how dated its messianic urgency is. And maybe precisely because of that, its actuality is truer than ever. Maybe that's way the title of the sequel of "Clandestino" is "Última estación: Esperanza."