Walter Olmos - Por Lo Que Yo Te Quiero

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.