In 1962 Bob Dylan threw some disturbing questions into the wind. How far do cannonballs have to fly before they are banned forever? And how many years must some live before they are granted freedom? How many times does a man turn his head pretending not to see what he sees? The answer, my friend, Dylan sang, is in the wind. And for having asked what so much needed to be questioned, and although we still have no answers – neither for bullets, nor for freedom, nor for what one pretends not to see -, the Swedish Academy had the audacity to grant the American musician the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Twenty years after Dylan’s claims were heard, a Latin American musician who at that time was already at the peak of his popularity, used his pedestal and put his hands on the fire to throw other heavy questions, and not exactly into the wind. While with his songs he went in search of a hidden and wounded Latin America, the Panamanian Rubén Blades asked where the disappeared from many of our countries go, and why they disappear and he wanted to know when the disappeared return and he answered that last question: they only return to the memory of your loved ones. Rubén Blades wrote some of his perhaps most radical lyrics and sang them in 1984, a time (another time) when dictatorships were proliferating on the continent and, as so often, the value of life had plummeted. Bob Dylan’s questions continued to make sense and Rubén Blades’ questions contextualized them.
Searching for America It is now celebrating 40 years of publication. It was the first solo album by the already famous Rubén Blades, with whom he made his debut as band director with Los Seis del Solar and in charge of production, and it was also the first that he recorded outside of the then powerful record label Fania Records, so important in the consolidation of so-called salsa music.
The moment Blades launches Searching for America The Caribbean and Latin American artistic movement called salsa, forged in the cauldron of Hispanic New York in the 1960s, was experiencing its period of greatest creative splendor and acceptance in much of the continent and among Hispanics in the United States. Such success was due, among other reasons, to the contributions of the Panamanian, author of the most expressive and best-crafted lyrics, which had elevated him to the category of “salsa poet.” But the musician wanted more (in reality, he had never stopped wanting more) and he burned his ships and went looking for America.
With the production of this album, Blades took various and heavy risks because that work represented, perhaps, his most daring artistic and political bet. The first of these challenges was of an artistic nature but of commercial effects. Six years earlier, thanks to his prodigious collaboration with bandleader Willie Colón, these two pillars of contemporary Latin music had achieved the greatest public and sales success in salsa music thanks to the album Sowing (1978). Considered by many the most finished work of the movement, Sowing gave the first big push to the so-called “conscious salsa”, thanks to the content of the Panamanian’s texts. However, his own artistic evolution required Blades not to sleep on success, but to move along other paths. His opera-salsa already recorded Teacher Life (1980), another bet in itself, with stories that take place in Hispania, that Latin American country that is none of them real and is all in reality, in 1984 the musician ordered seven pieces in which he dared to challenge all tastes , to the point of including a song-story without music, GDBD (People Awakening Under Dictatorships), made to listen to and impossible to dance to, that festive complement considered inherent to the pieces of popular dance music.
But the other compositions on the album, all created with a strong narrative sense, also went for more. Thus, while Disappearances focused on the tragic matter that provoked the composer’s questions, a work like Father Antonio and his altar boy Andrés He remembered the murder of a “good priest,” the Salvadoran priest Arnulfo Romero. With green paths He spoke about those who emigrated due to poverty and violence. In Decisions He attacked the masks of bourgeois morality. And in the song that gave the album its title, Searching for Americaa hymn to the identity of the continent, stated that “as long as there is no justice we will not have peace.”
The consequences of this daring by an artist who was supposed to make our lives happier and not more complicated, were immediate. Radio stations that, due to political considerations, refused to play the album, sites in which their presence was rejected or explicit censorship such as the one the song suffered in their own country. Decisions. But the praise from connoisseurs, the acceptance from music lovers, the consolidation of those songs as social and cultural references of a turbulent reality did not take long to arrive either. AND Searching for America It became the essential work of Latin American culture that it has been since then.
The significance and permanence of his songs has been due to two factors, one social and the other artistic. On the first side is the reality of the continent itself that, without suffering the attacks of those military dictatorships (now other suits are used), still suffers from many of the conflicts collected by the album: exoduses, social injustice, violence, repressions, attacks on its identity. On the artistic side, it is due to the fact that Blades was not satisfied with what he achieved with Sowing, Teacher Life either Searching for America and maintained his social commitment but also continued to evolve, taking creative risks to expand the boundaries of salsa’s influence with his collaborations with rock and jazz musicians, with songs sung in English or with that universalist look very evident in an album called World (2002).
And in that transition, Rubén Blades has installed himself on the highest pedestal. On the steps are the 14 Latin Grammys and the 12 absolute Grammys obtained although, significantly, the first of them only came for the album Scenesfour years after the launch of the revulsive Wanted America. His political projection has also been along not so parallel paths, which was not limited to a frustrated presidential aspiration or the exercise of a Panamanian ministry, but is manifested in his positions regarding the problems of his country and the continent, his defense. of social and individual freedoms and criticism of excesses, both on the right and on the left. That is, the position of the non-conformist intellectual that he has always been.
It should not be surprising, therefore, that 40 years after Rubén Blades took on the challenge that entailed Searching for America, some young urban artists walk through various cities in Latin America “painting” the songs from the album on the walls. It is a way, from culture and history, to thank the daring and deep commitment that an artist sealed with his culture, society and his time with his memorable album. Making music with literature and with conscience and launching painful questions that still float in the wind.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#salsa #consciousness #literature