…si te quedan agallas: Ricardo Arjona… I have been listening to his music for ten odd years, own six of his albums, saw him live once, and even wrote an essay about him in one of my postgraduate courses. Yet, I have to admit that I have a unique love-hate relationship with his music. At times I have been taken aback at how unbelievably abysmal some of his songs are: Recycled melodies and rhymes that were already cheesy the first time he used them (no more luz/blues, please!) and some extremely awkward arrangements where the music seems composed around the most pedestrian poetry.
But I am not here to bash him. Because, on the other hand, he keeps surprising me with things all kinds of amazing; amazing poetry, amazing melodies and themes, texts that seem easily accessible and only when you look closer you discover there is a different layer of meaning… in short, music that touches something inside and which as a musician you can learn an immense lot from.
Santo Pecado is in my opinion Ricardo Arjona’s best album. One reason is that there is no really weak song on it, no song that seems like a rehash of earlier ideas. To the contrary there are some superb tracks, including but not limited to No sirve de nada, La nena, Mujer de lujo and the present track. But maybe most important are the arrangements; as I understand it Ricardo Arjona writes his song on the guitar, or maybe sometimes the piano, so what he ends up with are his lyrics and the sung melody, plus a harmonic skeleton and maybe sometimes a riff. I don’t know in how far it is him who decided that Mujer de lujo was going to be a tango, for example. It doesn’t really matter either. My point is that on this album it fits together perfectly; the genre of a song with its theme, in other words, the musical realization of a song’s content. So many of the songs on this album are really good tracks that could stand alone even with much weaker lyrics. A problem on some of the albums is one of musical economy: While Arjona has of course all the resources he could wish for, to me it seems ridiculous to have a whole string section on a song when all they do is add a cheesy flourish here and there. Such a sumptuous ensemble is only justified when it adds something fundamental to the song in terms of mood or harmony; otherwise it constitutes a poor aesthetical/artistic choice, like a dish with little nutrients and way too much MSG. Santo Pecado features great musical economy.
The present song is representative of the album’s balanced sound: I count the constituents of a classic rock band (acoustic guitar, bass, drums) plus a string section consisting of around one violin, viola and violoncello each, some backing vocals and an occasional synthesizer chord. The song features a classic structure of two verses, pre-chorus, chorus, verse, pre-chorus, chorus and a musically different bridge leading to a short acoustic outro that is usually omitted in live performances. Yet, throughout the repeated parts – the verses, pre-chorus and chorus – there are some subtle changes in the musical texture, creating contrasts and keeping the piece musically interesting. The most obvious example is beginning of the second verse (“Como duele gastar…”) in which only the string section accompanies, but also the second pre-chorus (“El ministerio del tiempo…”) during which the string section rests. Two more things related to the musical realization deserve mention: First, before I transcribed this song I had never realized that the characteristic guitar chord arpeggio that opens the song is actually maintained in some form throughout the whole song, making it a plausible musical representation of the minutes that keep ticking away; except, that is, during the beginning of the second verse which creates a sense of pausing for a moment that coincides with the meaning of the lyrics (“How painful it is to spend the moment in which you are no longer there, what a drain it is to struggle with the things that don’t come back…”). The second thing is Vinnie Colaiuta’s superb drumming that deserves a mention of its own – as on the whole rest of the album his excellent choices of grooves, accents and his awesome fills add something substantial to the songs as a whole; just listen to the part “Minutos pasajeros de un tren…” and you will know what I mean.
My piano arrangement is rather self-evident in almost every possible sense, so I will limit myself to just a few comments – it seemed quite difficult to me at first, especially the big leaps in the right hand during the chorus, as well as a few other things, but with some practise it was quite manageable. In the verses I have tried to incorporate some of the drum accents in the left hand, as well as the most noticeable drums fills before the beginning of the second verse and the one mentioned above – it may seem a bit silly, but I liked it that way. During the pre-choruses (“La casa no es otra cosa.../El ministerio del tiempo...”) the bassline in my arrangement runs an octave higher than in the original – at first I just practiced it wrong, but when I noticed my mistake, I realized that it sounded better, stripping away some density to create a greater contrast with the chorus, so I continued to play it like that. I am especially proud of the arrangement of the bridge (“Minutos como lluvia de sal…”) – at first it seemed impossible to play, but even though it may not have turned out 100% smooth in my recording, it was great fun to play, and seems like one of my more successful arrangements to me. This brings me to the next and last point – the lyrics.
I had never really paid particular attention to this song’s lyrics, but as I listened to it again and again while I transcribed, I must say I was moved. The ambivalence of time… who has not wanted the time to pass slower at times and faster at others? Yet, no matter what you do, how you spend your time, the minutes keep ticking away… mercilessly. Once again, if you make an effort to look beyond the sometimes slightly silly expressions you will find that the song is telling a rather moving story that almost anyone can relate at some level. Lyrics-wise, again, I want to turn the attention to specific parts: The part “… si te quedan agallas” (“It’s already 7:16/ and the corpse of the minute that just passed/ tells me your strategy has ruined you/ so there is no choice, but to live alone/… if you have agallas left”). I remember asking my Paraguayan host brother Raúl what “agallas” meant and after short consideration he answered that it meant the same as “ganas” (something like “desire/wish/feeling like doing something”). The Real Academia on the other hand defines it as “Arrestos, valentía, audacia.” (“determination, courage, audacity”) which is close enough to what Raúl suggested, and which I had already intuited. Yet, my point is that I have always loved the illogicality of the phrase: If you have no choice, then why do you need determination? Is it the option to live alone that requires determination? But since there is no other option, why? Or does the option to live alone require courage, so as not to kill yourself? I am not really looking for an answer though – in a way the text is perfectly logical, through its illogicality: “You have no choice but to live alone, and good luck with it” is the slightly harsh meaning I get out of it.
Finally the last part of the song’s lyrics – the bridge: “Minutes that make fun of me/minutes like the fury of the sea/minutes, passengers on a train that is not going anywhere/minutes like a rain of salt/minutes like fire on the skin/minutes, strangers that come and go without letting you know/minutes that hurt when spent without you/minutes that don’t pay rent/minutes which upon dying form the battalion of yesterday/minutes that steal the light away/minutes that corrode my faith/minutes that inhabit the time for as long as they may last/minutes that enjoy dying/minutes that have no place/minutes that crash into me… they are God’s own kamikazes.” Just in case you were wondering why I like Arjona’s music so much.
and I lick off the knife: Come is certainly one of the bands that I have a very special connection with, so even though this post will hardly be seen by many, it was a particular pleasure to engage with their music. Just as with Chokebore, I read about Come in the Kurt Cobain biography written by Michael Azerrad; it stated that during their last tour, Nirvana had enough of a say in their touring conditions that they could take longer rests between their shows and choose their own opening acts to travel with them which led Kurt Cobain to pick some of his favorites, namely these two. Now while for me Kurt Cobain is not an idol anymore in most areas of my life, especially as concerns his unfortunate suicide and the erraticness that undoubtedly sprung from his also extremely unfortunate and out-of-control drug use, his musical taste and great musical appreciation are beyond question, to the point that I nowadays much prefer these two bands to Nirvana with whom the story started for me, not least because of the limited amount of material (including all their unreleased songs and cover versions) that Nirvana put out, certainly at least in part due to Kurt Cobain’s untimely death.
Anyway, from when I read the biography these two bands were on my radar. Then one day I was at a record store, back when CDs were a thing, as usual having a great time browsing the shelves for hours on end, looking for things that might interest me enough to spend my savings on, such as bands that I had heard of, and whose albums looked appealing, bands that I already had some albums of, etc. – in my decisions, I usually struck a balance between personal interest and price of the album, so a very expensive album would have to interest me a lot in order to make it into my cart. That’s how I came across Come’s superb “Don’t ask don’t tell” some 11 (coincidence?) years ago, attracted by the somewhat bizarre and spooky but strangely uninformative album artwork – I had in fact no idea what expected me. This was then the album I listened to as we moved out of the flat I had been living in all my life, as I assembled all my LEGO toys to ensure no parts were missing and later during the painting works. Afterwards I went on a long student exchange to Paraguay for one year; since mp3 was not around, I decided to limit myself to a single CD to take along, and instead buy and discover new stuff there (needless to say, I found a lot!). I picked this one, feeling that it would make for very interesting company in Paraguay, and also because it might have been the first time a Come album visited Paraguay, and that vice versa (a limited circle of) Paraguayans had a chance to listen to Come. I never regretted this decision, went on to explore tons of music, and came back to Come many years later under different circumstances. I ordered all the other three by now out of print albums at once and received them with some delay due to weather conditions in the US which is just what you expect to happen with Come albums. “Near Life Experience” became another favorite whereas after some initial excitement the last album struck me as a bit indigestible, and likewise the first one also failed to fascinate me as much as the others. One of my earliest Youtube covers was of Come’s “Wrong Side” and one of the few times a band member from a band I covered actually sent me an encouraging message – Chris Brokaw. I met him a few months later at a dirtmusic concert and talked to him before the show. As my life got better, Come gradually dropped from my heavy rotation list, as to me – honestly speaking – Come’s music talks of alienation, trauma, and as I would later realize, maybe even misplaced drug nostalgia. Come appeared on my radar again in 2013 when they had a reunion tour in support of the re-issue of their first album. They came to London and although I had long stopped attending rock concerts (save a Chokebore show on their 2010 reunion tour), I decided that this was something I could not miss. Honestly, I could not say that I enjoyed the concert too much, mostly because I was feeling a bit exhausted and under the weather, and they unsurprisingly played mostly songs from the first album which I hadn’t listened to in a long time. However, this song was a special experience, and I was much more familiar with it because for some reason it was for a long time the only Come song streamable on last.fm.
Transcribing this song was cumbersome, but fascinating because for the first time it allowed me to understand the intertwining guitars so crucial to Come’s sound, although I could not say for sure if the basic way in which it achieves its effect is the same in other songs. In this one, it works by combining a main riff on Thalia’s guitar with miscellaneous types of accompaniment by Chris: Sometimes it is just the same chords, but with different picking patterns and rhythm, creating overlap and displacement, sometimes it is similar chords with added notes, little patterns and licks, ornaments and effects such as vibrato, or in rare cases even mostly different chords. The most difficult part of the transcription was doubtlessly the drums and at some point I gave up trying to detail all the variations, little fills and extra accents. The drum parts challenged my dogma that the best drummers keep it simple which is certainly true for a lot of songs, situations and bands. It’s the old problem with drummers that they tend to hear their own part more prominently than the music as a whole: But you don’t want a drummer who turns his part into a song-length drum solo because it creates confusion and blurs a song’s rhythm and structure. As much as this golden rule is eminently broken in this song, it fits surprisingly well with the rhythmic prominence and disjointedness of a Come song. Needless to say, Arthur is a great drummer whose style is an integral part of Come’s unique sound.
I will never forget the strange face Chris pulled when at the end of the song’s long build-up the glorious Gb7 chord came on, coinciding with the shouted line “Will pump out a brand new vein”. It opened a new chapter in my relationship with this song, and so it became the first Come song I picked for a piano cover.
I’ve been standing here, waiting, Mr. Postman: The Beatles are little less than the musical equivalent of elementary school for me. As virtually everybody in my family was a Beatles fan at some moment, I first got the exposure necessary to get me interested at the age of 8 I believe. I subsequently started to record their albums on cassettes for me to listen to while I spent the time in my room, playing games of patience, instead of meeting friends and playing with them, which upon reflection seems a little autistic for an 8-year old – certainly music impacted me a lot from a very young age. I remember that in our needlework classes at elementary school we were allowed to bring cassettes to listen to while we worked, and I monopolized this privilege, bringing Beatles cassettes and constantly pointing out and leading my classmates’ attention to what I thought were the most noteworthy parts, up to the point where the teacher banned me from bringing any more cassettes as I was not progressing on my needlework at all (to this day, needlework is not one of my greater talents).
I first listened to the blue and red best-of-albums and then moved on to other ones we had at home: Meet the Beatles which we had a vinyl LP of, Beatles for Sale, With the Beatles, three discs which I got as birthday gifts – Please Please Me, the black Past Masters record and the Free as a Bird single – later also Help, (to a lesser degree) A Hard Day’s Night, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road and finally the White Album. So much great music! As a child, my first favourite was “Do you want to know a secret” and I pretty much listened to nothing but the Beatles for the next three years. Incidentally, the Beatles also originally got me interested in learning English in order to understand what I was hearing, so I started asking my father lots of questions about lines I had heard in their songs and ended up speaking some kind of English before I ever attended a single English class (in my high school English classes started only at age 13, two years after Latin).
More than enough has been said and written about the Beatles and I hardly aim to add to this wealth of narratives and interpretations with anything more than a few minor observations. I agree that the Beatles worked as a band with four members none of whom was expendable for the Beatles being the Beatles, despite the fact that Ringo’s drumming lacks greatness and Paul McCartney is a bit of an embarrassment (although he was always my favourite member of “The Wings” to borrow the joke from Weird Al Yankovic). My favourite Beatle, the one I can identify with most is certainly Lennon as the craziest of the Beatles, full of ideals that he didn’t live up to, as well as hypocrisy, but at the same time source of some of the most groundbreaking songwriting ideas and in, my opinion, the best voice among the Beatles.
It has been especially interesting to come back to Beatles at several points of my life, as my outlook and taste in music had changed, first towards punk rock and heavy metal as a teenager, and later towards classical music at the beginning of my twenties. Despite these changes in taste, I never stopped liking the Beatles, but I did start paying attention to some very different songs than the ones I had liked as a child. Now able to understand English, I started feeling a little bit underwhelmed by the lyrics, noticed that musically some things were rather simple and at times got annoyed by the Beatles’ British snottiness, acutely realizing that when they started out they were little more than a bunch of ignorant punks; but I never got to the point that I’d agree with pianist Glenn Gould’s wonderfully flippant dismissal of the Beatles for “bad voice-leading” (more on that later though).
Please Mr. Postman is one of the Beatles songs I like best nowadays. Of course it is not by the Beatles, but was performed by the Marvelettes originally, complete with dance and all (if you haven’t seen it, you should watch it NOW). However, it feels like a different song in the version by the Beatles. I have just checked again: the voices singing harmony seem pretty much unchanged from the original. What has changed is to a certain degree the melody of the lead vocals during the verses, but most significantly the overall mood of the song. The Beatles have replaced the light-hearted and slightly swingy feel, the thinner texture and the falsetto of the background vocals in the original with something else entirely: Rather crooning lead vocals, a more dense and pounding texture with loud guitars and a slightly opened hi-hat on the drums, backing vocals in a lower register, making it a more massive song, apt to express the despair of the protagonist waiting for mail from his sweetheart. Needless to say, Lennon’s idiosyncratic singing style is just perfect in this song, too.
All in all, I think this is a perfect song in its version by the Beatles, despite consisting of only four chords repeated over and over, a perfect balance in the structure (Intro – verse – verse – chorus – verse – chorus – outro) that never feels as if something is being repeated too often (balance in song structures is incidentally one of the Beatles’ greatest songwriting skills) and I never get tired of hearing it. The multi-part singing, of course one of the Beatles’ trademark characteristics are one of the great tools of expressivity in this song, maybe the crucial one. For once, Mr. Gould might have been satisfied: The voice-leading in this song is not bad at all, even by the Baroque standards he may have had in mind (maybe the original composer had some formal music training?). Not bad – as in not running in thirds the entire time, for example; instead we mostly have oblique motion between the parts of George and Paul, while John is mostly singing into the breaks between their lines (in the chorus at least where the multi-voice texture is most prominent) – possibly a remnant from older call and response structures in genres like gospel which are, of course, at the root of rock and roll, though this kind of structure is no stranger to the voice-leading of Baroque music either where it is favoured as it makes for a less dense texture and takes away difficulty where a multi-part piece is played on a single key instrument (cf. for example the fugues BWV 532 and 564 by Bach and how the first counterpoint plays into the breaks of the subject). Still the Beatles’ voice-leading does stand comparison to Bach’s of course, but then neither does the voice-leading of virtually anyone who lived after Bach.
Finally, it is funny to think that I as someone who belongs to the last generation which remembers a world without internet am possibly one of the last generation of people to sing this who fully understand what the song is talking about. Maybe future songwriters will write songs imploring their smart phones or tablets for that long-awaited message from their sweethearts but mailmen bringing love letters certainly seem an endangered species.
no sabes lo que es tener que andar así: Walter Olmos can be seen as one of the outliers of my taste in music. I am not from Argentina and have altogether spent not more than a month in that country spread out over several occasions. Yet it is my impression that Olmos is considered as being from the bottom of society and of the musical hierarchy. Olmos’ untimely death at the age of 20 from a gunshot self-inflicted in a round of Russian roulette (apparently he was sure the gun was jammed and in a macabre joke pulled the trigger at various friends and finally at himself upon which the weapon fired, killing him instantly) bears witness to a lifestyle that must have been destructive – Olmos himself on an occasion voiced his fear that he was going to die young as he was burning too fast (not the exact expression he used but something to that effect; I also hear that he took cocaine and was under the effect of it when he killed himself).
My Paraguayan host brother Raúl never got tired of telling me that Walter Olmos’ music was incredibly bad and he could not stop wondering why I would listen to something so trashy. So when I say that Walter Olmos is an outlier of my musical taste, I mean that I may just be the only person in the world who mostly listens Bach’s organ works but at the same time admits to liking Walter Olmos. I may also be the only person who listens to Walter Olmos but not his godfather in music, the cuarteto legend Rodrigo who died in a car crash not much earlier than Olmos, but more on that in the following.
I came across three of Olmos’ songs thanks to a CD that my brother brought in 2001 from a stay in Argentina which contained popular songs from that era. I also bought an original record of Olmos’ “A Pura Sangre” (most of my Paraguayan friends could hardly believe original CDs by Olmos and much less people who bought them even existed) – since my brother’s CD didn’t contain any Rodrigo songs, I just never got interested in him in the same way, as I do not connect any special memories to Rodrigo songs and I am not a systematic cuarteto listener.
The problem is evident from just a fleeting listen to Olmos’ album: Indeed, people rightly seem to suggest that Olmos’ music is incredibly bad because almost all of the songs undeniably sound the same, one of the hallmarks of incredibly bad music (cumbia act Ráfaga constitutes a similar case). Despite this, I think that if somebody knew only one song by Walter Olmos, or for that matter Ráfaga, they would think that this is quite amazing and lively music with nice chord progressions and a captivating rhythm. Therefore, let’s pretend for the present purposes that Olmos made no other songs except this one, Amor de Adolescentes, Adicto a ti and La Mano de Dios, and also that he premiered these songs rather than ripping them off from Rodrigo.
All things said, this song is great and I believe Olmos’ best in an unsurpassable version. I have heard the original by La Mona Jiménez as well as Rodrigo’s version, but I think Olmos owns this one and I never get tired of the melodrama and despair in his particular version of the song.
In my arrangement the violin plays the part of the both the synthesizer/keyboard in the beginning, as well as the accordion part throughout the main part of the song. I cannot deny that this arrangement was a venture into unknown territory – I am hardly familiar with any of the instruments played in a cuarteto ensemble, particularly the rhythm section: the congas and timbaletas. So I could not transcribe these things in much detail, but in any case my brother who is playing the drums in the video wouldn’t have been able to recreate it on his crappy drum kit anyway.
Apart from this my arrangement is very straightforward: The cello plays the bass part (one octave higher) and the guitar which does not appear in the original reinforces the cuarteto rhythmical pattern in the offbeat accents.
Walter Olmos may have been ignorant and may not have taken the best life choices, but his talent as a performer and his professionalism on stage are worth admiring.
para darse cuenta, te digo, no hay que ser muy pillo: Bersuit Vergarabat always has been and will continue to be one of my top five favourite rock bands. It is their strong lyrics writing, their members’ level of musicianship which allows them to transit effortlessly between the musical idioms of all manner of musical styles, and this incredible fusion of musical styles itself, to name only a few of the things that I admire about them, which are at the root of my ongoing fascination with this band.
Bersuit Vergarabat are so far the only band that I was eager enough to see live to actually travel to another country (Madrid, 2008) for a chance to see them. But the story started much earlier.
I first heard a Bersuit song when my older brother returned from an exchange year to Argentina in 2001 and brought back a CD with songs by various artists that were popular in Argentina at that time. Next to Los Abuelos de la Nada, Ráfaga, Walter Olmos and others it also contained the song La Bolsa by ersuit; we all listened to the CD for the whole summer vacation and La Bolsa soon became a favourite.
When I went to Paraguay in 2003 “De La Cabeza” was one of the first albums I bought, right at the beginning during a half-day stopover in Buenos Aires, and from there things took its natural course… Amazed by their range of styles, by the diverseness that is undoubtedly the result of having a band with eight members all of whom take part in the songwriting process and make their own contributions to it, and especially by the many traditional rhythms they incorporate in their music and which were unlike anything I’d ever heard before, I became a Bersuitero, soon bought all of their albums, including the first three which I only managed to find on a trip to Argentina, and I was a first-hand witness to the publication of “La Argentinidad al Palo” (about which I even wrote an essay at university which I hope to share at some later point). Finally a band which was at their peak just as I started liking it!
To this day I consider the album “Hijos del Culo” as Bersuit’s finest work and this song continues to hold a special place; therefore when I suggested this as one of the songs to play in our little concert for my mother’s 60th birthday, the response from my siblings was unanimous.
In arranging the song for the instruments we had – keyboards, drums, violin, violoncello and guitar – I was faced with several challenges. A true bass instrument was lacking, the rhythm section was thin, the violin part would have to be newly created, and a solution would have to be found for the second voice and the second guitar.
Finally, in my arrangement the violin plays the second voice wherever it appears; where there is none the violin plays some of the licks played by the second guitar, and during the intro, solo etc. it doubles the melody of the accordion (the part of which has been played on a keyboard, as Bersuit themselves do in live recitals). Accordingly, the guitar plays the offbeat chord pattern during the parts where the violin is playing the licks in the second guitar; when the violin plays the second voice, however, the guitar plays these licks, since the offbeat chord pattern (in typical cuarteto style) is also present in the keyboard accompaniment.
What observations can be made after understanding the musical skeleton of La Bolsa? It is a cuarteto piece with a distinct rock feel. As in a lot of the best songs, the backbone of the song is simple – a four chord progression (Am – F – C – E) which is repeated throughout the piece, albeit with constant variations. There are a lot of really nice harmonies between the two voices, and great solos by the accordion and the guitar at the end. The main melody from the intro is the greatest recognition factor however.
There is not much to be said about the lyrics – I am by now convinced that they are about a tour Bersuit did with “La Mona Jiménez” and one of the members of that band stealing Bersuit’s cocaine bag – we’ve all been there. I love how the lyrics periodically stray from this topic with sentences that are not easily understandable in the context of this interpretation, but which create a colloquial register causing an eagerness in the listener to understand what the story that is obviously being told, is about. Fuertes aplausos!
