If you are lucky enough to land in Vigo on the left side of the plane, and especially if you are lucky that the day is clear, you will see the entire estuary through the window. It is a captivating image that extends from Illa de San Simón, a small and beautiful islet that accumulates more historical horror than any soccer president of the 90s. If you look up to the horizon you will also see the Rande Bridge, under whose structure legend has it that treasures are hidden, surrounded by dozens of mussel trays. And, at sunset in the Ría, you will see its guardian and sentinel: the Cíes Islands. For any person from Vigo or an adjoining neighbor, observing the estuary from an airplane window means returning immediately to their mother’s bed. The Ría cradles us like sleepy and dying babies.
In Oliveira two hundred years old, the hymn for the centenary of Celta produced by C. Tangana, everything begins and ends in the Ría, from which misty and petrified figures emerge, leaning out to the sea from rafts, walls and beaches. Is it possible to compose a football anthem without a single image or reference to a stadium, a ball or a goal? It is possible if you talk about what really anchors a fan to a team: its land, its idiosyncrasies and its people.
The writer Marta Sanz told me in an interview that right now we live in the era of gentrified styles. For example, if you go to the center of Beijing you can sit in a coffee franchise, with recognizable chairs, cups and flavors, and connect to Wi-Fi with your computer or mobile phone, just like you would in any city or coffee franchise in the world. “If you feel good everywhere, like at home, that minimizes your ability to perceive contradictions and problems,” she told me, Sanz. It also happens with music. Each finished track is made up by an army of producers and technicians with the goal of creating a perfectly innocuous and brilliant hit.
In Galicia, women have always played and play music for dancing at parties, using shells, but above all tambourines and pandeiros. And they have not only provided the music, but also the voice, always in chorus, never as soloists. Some of these women were illiterate, but they created poetry without even realizing it. They all belonged to a lineage of furtive female voices that somehow sang of their emancipation. The voice of C. Tangana does not appear in Oliveira two hundred years old. The artist gives prominence to the Casablanca Choir of Vigo, to the female vocal group of tambourines Lagharteiras and to the Celta Tropas de Breogán rock. So in the anthem of the centenary of Celta, tambourines and stunners sound, those sharp screams that come from the very bottom of the sternum of women as a sign of enjoyment at parties and foliates. The anthem flees from the era of gentrified styles (in football, from the classic lolololosísimo) and demonstrates that it is possible to create a football composition assuming folklore and local sounds.
In Oliveira two hundred years old Another fundamental thing appears: the shadows of those who were there and are no longer there, those figures that look towards the Ría de Vigo from a distance. Because that is basically football: an inherited passion. Those who are no longer here but were are the conjunctions that unite the words in the composition of the passions. If football makes us happy, it is because someone smiled inside a stadium before us and transmitted that joy to us. We love them, we collect the fruits of those who paid the silver roots.
You can follow EL PAÍS Sports on Facebook and Twitteror sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
#raise #silver #roots