Spanish Bombs, by The Clash

I have never liked the Sex Pistols. For me, this is the song that might as well be considered the peak in punk rock. Apparently anarchic in structure. Bilingual. Fast. Historically conscious. Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, the Lennon-McCartney of punk rock, singing together. It is hard to describe a single song which comes from such a complex album (London Calling, 1980), but I do believe it sums up the feeling in the album. The drums kicking in, a guitar line leading the song. If you don't move your feet while listening to it, something's wrong with you. In its imperfections reside the perfection, for example, the vocal flubs and lack of tempo. Mick Jones trying to follow Joe Strummer during the chorus. The lyrics printed on the booklet say: "Spanish bombs, yo te quiero y finito". I have always preferred: "Spanish bombs, yo te quiero infinito". And I think that's what they really say. Strummer always (or almost always) wrote songs that made the listener to question him/herself. He made a safe bet in well-built anarchy. And always remember: "Fed'rico Lorca, he ain't gone".

If You're Feeling Sinister, by Belle & Sebastian

You wondered where and I wondered why. How and why and where and when? We wondered together in silence. I grabbed your hand and kissed your lips not knowing where we were going. I took you home that night, in the 77 bus. It felt right since the beginning. We laughed all the way and you asked if I put something in your drink. I never dared doing this before, why am I doing this now?
Questions and more questions came the following days. At the bus stop you said you wanted to love me, you said you were tired of being looking for someone. I sat on your lap as if we were an old couple. We took pictures with your camera and with mine. Mine were all blurred, or maybe we were blurred. What kind of music do you like? I have no idea. What's your name? I can't pronounce it, that vowel does not exist in my language.

Who was following who that night? I'm sure I was shooing you with my kisses all the way. I remember very well. Why did you appear exactly when I was about to kiss that guy who had a girlfriend? You came to me and asked something. Five minutes later we were dancing. Ten minutes later an Haitian was telling us we should love each other forever. Why did you come at the right time?

Have you ever craved for a record? Have you ever felt sinister? Have you ever felt you're no one's cup of tea?

Tell me this is not another dirty weekend. Tell me that you'll stay with me. Tell me what you hear in pop songs. If I'm feeling blue, tell me we can do whatever I want. Tell me things you wouldn't dare say to yourself.

Dont let me down, by Stereophonics

Las mañanas duraban lo que él tardaba en hojear sus revistas. Al levantarse de la cama y mirarse en el espejo buscaba algún indicio de vida. El espejo lo traicionaba y le mandaba de regreso una cara sin mayor gracia que tener una nariz a mitad de ella; una nariz larga, aguileña, aguda. A veces le ocurría que durante las tardes recordaba alguna característica de las mujeres que él había revisado en la mañana y entusiasmado (creía sentir que la sexualidad abstracta tomaba la forma de un huracán) corría despavorido hacia su cuarto y con la puerta entreabierta volvía a las páginas en donde un pezón envuelto en encajes, o la abundancia de unas nalgas eran los elementos, la pobreza (así lo pensaba él) con la que la sexualidad se manifestaba. Todas las tardes en las que la curiosidad le obligaba a repasar las revistas salía de su cuarto con el rostro doblegado por la incredulidad. No podía creer que la sexualidad fuera algo tan inaprehensible para él. Así, derrotado por algo que le era tan cercano, flagelado por la angustia de ser ajeno a su propio cuerpo, volvía a sumergirse en sus libros que le enseñaban lo que él ya sabía: un cuerpo que dependía de la maquinaria compuesta por fluidos, músculos, huesos, tendones y nervios: una maquinaria suceptible de equivocarse, de desbordarse en la producción histérica de células; una maquinaria enjaulada en el terror de las enfermedades, efímera.

The Professor and La Fille Danse, by Damien Rice (Live)

Recién has comprado el disco en la Virgin de Champs-Elysées.

Las gotas en la ventana reflejan lo mismo del cristal en que las miras:te sientas alli y no puedo sino verte, recostada, jugando con el cabello, con la ventana en frente, el tabaco siempre encendido. las imágenes en la te vé te despiertan de un sueño de los justos, que anhelas en secreto, como si puedieses escuchar el sonido de los trenes allá abajo, las piedras milenarias, el adormilamiento de la tarde, la multitud de chimeneas que esconden fríos interiores, humedades destructoras, técnicas suicidas en privado, refrigeradores recatados, retacados de mousses y cocas y limones envidiosos.

No lo intentas por costumbre: las sombras en el techo son como el eminente velatorio de ti misma, la nube que nunca se despeja, la cámara muerta, oscura, de tu vida. La lámpara asusta a un modigliani escondido, un diccionario inexistente de emociones sin palabras, un libro tirado a la basura de la tarde, un crepúsculo tardío, de junio parisino. Has subido hasta el último estadio de un edificio empobrecido, has reclamado la herencia de tus padres aun vivos, más de lo deseado, más de lo anhelado. Volteas de nuevo hacia una ventana imaginaria, y no miras lo inmediato, lo que te rodea desde siempre.

Más bien piensas en eso que nunca ha sido nada, en eso que es mucho menos que vacío, en esa ausencia de silencios, interrupciones, digresiones, pausas y hoyos abismales. Te hueles cerca de un fin más que evidente en tu certeza, en tu plenitud de presente declarado. Real es la presencia triste de las nubes de una primavera que agoniza. Y tú, despierta, que seguís soñando.


Será otra cosa: será lo mismo. Las gotas se resbalan en el vidrio, se ilumina Eiffel como una escapatoria anclada en un puerto abandonado. Cada luz anuncia a la distancia otras cosas, otras formas, nuevos modos de soñar lo mismo. Evidente y cotidiano son tus sombras, tus postales, tus vistas de ventana doméstica y dormida. Una luz hasta arriba parpadea, funcionando como faro listo para anunciar una catástrofe lejana. Cada piedra tiene historia y las nubes lo han sabido, quizá en demasía. Es decir: aquí estoy, después de todo. Y tú, allí, sentada, jugando con el cabello, con la ventana enfrente, el tabaco siempre encendido.

Hablas ahora con el humo del tabaco extinguido.

Y luego, por supuesto, la desesperación.


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Never Let It End, by Albert Mangelsdorff

Oirá un rumor. Un sonido de sillas y mesas que se abren; luego unos pasos. Pensará "son dos". Uno de ellos se sentará a su lado. El otro permanecerá parado, junto a él. Él tratará de alcanzar la jarra de agua. El que está parado lo ayudará. Le servirá agua a él y luego servirá otros dos vasos. Al recoger el vaso recién servido pensará en su nombre, en el suyo. Lo murmurará, Capurro. Creerá haberlo visto en alguna página de periódico. "Capurro, ¿no es así?", le preguntará el que está sentado. Capurro empezará una mueca de desgana pero los hombros se le quedarán tiesos. Recordará el sueño de los perros y melancólico se dirá ya me atrapan. Volterá la cabeza, la girará a la izquierda, notará una panza desfajada y unos pantalones grises. No son sombras. Querrá no haberse percatado de la cacha oscura, tal vez una cuarenta y cinco. Seguirá luchando por ignorar la sombra de la panza en el pavimento. No tendrá más remedio que enfrentar la cara ovalada del hombre que seguirá sentado; la mirará sin entender la vulgaridad, el cansancio de una búsqueda que había durado meses.

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Black Dog, by Led Zeppelin

I have this fantastic memory of my mother.

It's three o'clock in the afternoon, my sister and I are willing to kill anyone that gets in our way. It's April or May and we've been trapped in the back seats of our VW Caribe for more than 45 minutes. Its' so damn hot I'm actually sweating underneath the stupid vest of my school's uniform. We're hungry, tired of streets, cars and teachers. We are too tired to talk.
My mom has her chubby little hands on the wheel. She looks at me from the rearview window and starts the radio on.

For a while, nothing but nasal voices and news.

All of a sudden the nasal voices stop.

Robert Plant's voice makes my mom react and she starts dancing to Page's guitar. She even lets go off the wheel (we're stuck in the middle of a traffic jam anyway) and raises her arms to the rythm as if she was go-go dancing. She moves her face up and down, up and down, (it's all pre-headbanging psychedelic stuff). The inside of the small Caribe goes nuts. I'm so happy my mom's happy that I start imitating her. We're both dancing to Led Zeppelin's Black Dog as if it was the most important thing we've ever done.

My mom, she even closes her eyes to feel the music.

Hey, hey, mama, said the way you move
Gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove...

My sister's ashamed. She thinks all the other drivers will stare at us. She asks us to stop the riot. "¡Mamá, por dios! ¡Qué pena!"

But she doesn't and neither do I. Our burst was our connection. She's been gone for exactly 17 years today, and it still is.

I cannot think of anything else but my mom's dance when I hear this song.

Formiga, by the Notwist

We were on the car. The night was colder than usual for a month like that one and there were no stars except the city lights. We remained silent. The scratch of a non-existent vinyl record snowed on us with the slowness of forgetting. Two minutes, twenty-one seconds of sound. A space-age melody, bleeping like a sick cyborg heart. The melancholy of a space cadet contemplating Earth from his spaceship.

The speed of taking your time. Velocity of perception; the tranquility of cosmic seas. The waves of lack of gravity. Nothing extraordinary, but sheer directness, like the static recorded in an incomprehensible alien message. The vehicle moves smoothly on the semi-deserted streets. A shower of streetlights falls upon us for the short length of this message transmitted from beyond. There is something else that sound can say.

The music of what is not here. The sheer sadness of seeing things from the sky. The sound of being finite. The soundscape of our imagination as we cruised the megalopolis, holding hands, staring in front of us, almost in trance. This is what a crepuscular dawn sounds like.

We are not alone. Believe.



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Sincerely, by Louis Armstrong

Cuando uno está enamorado tiene dos opciones: decirle que la amas desesperadamente o permanecer callado y esperar una oportunidad, pero como las opurtunidades no son frutos que se den en los árboles para ser arrancadas, pues hay que generarlas. Hoy, a esta hora, te presento esta canción:

Sincerely by Louis Armstrong

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Mad World, by Tears for Fears

All it takes is a different way of saying things. It's not at all complicated, if you think about it. It is, indeed, a question of interpretation. A manner. A song from 1982, published as a seven-inch single (with Ideas As Opiates on the b-side), Mad World found its perfect homage through a complex reinterpretation. Richard Kelly knew what he was doing -or so it seems- when he included Echo & the Bunnymen, Duran Duran, Joy Division and The Church in the soundtrack for his film. After the heroic tragedy -what an oxymoron!-, the coda of the story is built over the bricks of a reconstruction. Michael Andrews and Gary Jules rewrite Mad World and save its original sadness, its lost innocence, forgotten by layers of dust over the vinyl grooves. Exactly 20 years later, Tears for Fears prove that theirs was a tragic -failed- enterprise. This is the poem of the flaneur who walks the city, like a waking-man amongst sleepwalkers. All you have to do is open your eyes to what's around you. This is what the poet-singer sees and feels:

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for the daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere.
The tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression

It's the shock of modern life, Walter Benjamin would say. Profound, wounding melancholy makes up the poet-singer's pathos:

Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow

And it makes us realize. Isn't this the way we have felt so many a night? Kelly, holding hands with Andrews and Jules, discovers in the automated coldness of the original the perfect soundtrack for the painful nights of insmonia of his characters; their Mad World is no longer a chaotic, people-infested city, but the utter loneliness of wounded people that, in the privacy of their beds, contemplate their inner fears... and ultimately, the always-present possibility of death. This is the sadness of realization. The wounding nature of insight. This is the role of art: to interpellate us in such a way it is impossible but to experience our own finiteness:

And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had

Because art is what makes us different from beasts; because being conscious we will die is what makes us human. We see it all around us: people run in circles. We clash against each other. And, at night, unable to sleep, when we face ourselves and only ourselves, when we look inside, deep into the abyss of our heart, we feel that sorrow.





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A Loon, by Kristin Hersh

I rarely enjoy solo projects of the memembers of my favorite bands. However, when I stumbled into the Strings EP (1994) by Kristin Hersh (as you probably know, the master mind behind Throwing Muses) I bought it because
1) I thought it was a unique chance to get it (and it was, I haven't seen the EP ever again)
2) I have been in love with the Muses sickly, at least during two periods of my life, when I was 14-15 and for the past 8 months.
So I found it in a special sale at El Péndulo and I bought it that same moment, during a particularly rainy summer eight years ago.
The dramatic strength in this first track reminds me of those rainy afternoons, sitting with Grandfather, reading the newspaper, sipping coffee and this CD in my walkman. It makes me think of Hersh, angry with her step sister, Tanya Donnelly who recently had left the band (Donnelly wrote some of the best Muses' tracks during 1985-1991); not knowing what direction the band would take after The Real Ramona; fighting, as usual, against a world that has never understood her. And still, she sings about an obsessed lover. The lyrics are powerful, but what really makes it so strong is the viola leading the song almost entirely. The voice, as usual, fragile, trembling but straightforward. It all ends, with the cello imitating a falling leaf.

Child of God, by Antony and the Johnsons

It was not just another day, it was not just another book & it was not just another song. My own humanity had pained me before. As I read, "...monstrous thinking devices mounted inexplicably on suffering animal bodies. The stare that we meet in all the surviving photographs of Kafka is a stare of pure surprise: surprise, astonishment, alarm. Of all men Kafka is the most insecure in his humanity. This, he seems to say: this is the image of God?" * the voice, that voice pulled me out of my reading.

I know a man who curses his brother
I know a man who lives for no other
Always chasing after money
Thinks a poor man is funny
It's hard, it's hard to believe he's a child of God

"Is it Nina?", I ignorantly wondered. It was not Feeling Good, for certain; nor it was Mississippi Goddam. & yet, that voice—incredibly familiar, pleasantly painful—tore what was left to be torn.

I find it hard, I find it hard, I find it hard
It's hard to believe these are children of God

The frequency of that voice unequivocally dismantling hope to kindle the remaining pieces afterwards. Chords fusing in familiarity; fusing in yearning; fusing the inextricable & eternal conflict among creators & creations.

I find it hard to believe right now
These people call themselves children of God

Tired of my body, tired of my being, I could only surrender; I too find it hard to believe I am a child of god...it is hard to believe we all are.

"Father, why have you forsaken me them us?"

*J.M. Coetzee, from The Lives of Animals

Child of God, by Antony and the Johnsons

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Little Fluffy Clouds, by The Orb

1991. I was twenty. I used to spend days in bed listening to music. Books of poetry, novels, NME's, Melody Maker's newspapers were on/under my bed/sheets (my personal landscape is quite similar these days, in fact). Obviously, I did not have a job: I was ready for surprises...

I know this is a commonplace but there are songs that changed your life forever but mostly important is: can you remember the exact moment of the sudden musical blow? Can you remember your first time listening to Venus in Furs, How Soon is Now, Karma Police, Suzanne, Unfinished Sympathy, Love Will Tear Us Apart, Lazy Line Painter Jane et al? All of them made me feel the intensity of the waves ( a la Virginia Woolf). I remember the first time I listened to Little Fuffly Clouds: I just thought “What the hell was that??!!”

There is a sense of hope in every dawn. Light becomes a symbol over the trees, even the morning shadows are less chaotic than the sunset. I remember Gerard Manley Hopkins first stanza in That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection:

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows ' flaunt forth, then chevy on an air- built thoroughfare:
heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ' they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ' wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ' lashes lace, lance, and pair.


The tough beautiful rhyme is heard among the clouds…

In 1991, Dr . Patterson created a world of samples (in fact, One Dove and Single Gun Theory were the innovative bands in the early 90’s) The orb’s adventures beyond the ultraworld is the house, the place, the morning, the fire of the dance music: almost two bloody hours of the best/beautiful dance electronic music ever made. The opening track Little Fluffy Clouds plays with a peculiar sample: the voice of the gifted Rickie Lee Jones saying:

we lived in Arizona, and the skies always had little fluffy clouds...
they were long, clear...
the sunsets were...purple, and red, and yellow...
and the clouds would catch on fire…

…and then the arrival/the strength of dub/electronica/ straight to your ears: the Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows ' flaunt forth which Gerard Manley Hopkins beautifully described found its music. The silent clouds above you have unheard melodies but sometimes you are caught by the breeze.

Clouds and daylight, believe me, are not the same after these 4:27 minutes: welcome to the stellar lighthouse…

Little Fluffy Clouds, by The Orb

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Without You I'm Nothing, by Placebo & David Bowie

This is true pain.
The first time I heard this song, I instantly associated it with my First Love, which in that time was creeping through my soul and body.
My First Love came to my life late. I was in my mid eighteenth spring when She stepped (stomped?) into my heart, uninvited, yet her presence came to be a growing necessity to me.
She came to be so important, that I (and I quote myself) told her that I would cut one of my fingers for her; that I would someday kidnapped her (in the romantic sense, of course) and take her away and live happily ever after; that I would let the world burst into flames, if she let me burn with her.
This passion lasted three years. Three years made seem little, but when you are twenty one, three years are an Era.
I never knew what exactly happened.
Why everything went down-hill in matter of days? We had fun, great fun; we share all kind of stuff: feelings, ice creams, dreams, interests, ideas, booze, beers, and so on and on.
What happened?
Probably I will never know.
But I still feel an invisible fist squeezing my spleen whenever and wherever I hear this song; and I hear her laughing and giggling; I see her wearing sweaters, shirts, skirts and trousers; I watch her walking, running, crying and smiling.
This song represents the time in my life that meant suffering, crying, and wondering; but it also stands for true happiness, perfect moments, and walking the line.
This is true love.

***
Download "Without you I'm nothing" (Hurry: this link will self-destruct in 7 days)

Soon, by My Bloody Valentine

This was the object of my desire.

Pure energy: fuzz and buzz, feedback, delicious distortion that becomes an absolute wall of sound. There was something spectral, an eery, thick-layered ambience that shrouded this song-not-song, something that wasn't like anything I had ever listened to since The Jesus & Mary Chain.

Sure, it was the early nineties so I was obsessed with Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation and all of Lush's albums. I was still not sure about Curve's Döppelganger but was as in love with Toni Halliday's voice as I was with Kim Gordon's, Emma Anderson's and Elizabeth Fraser's. But My Bloody Valentine had it all: the flange, the reverb, the melancholy, the noise, the sadness, the drive, the name. For me, in 1991-2, My Bloody Valentine was, indeed, the definition of love: a mixture of fear and desire, passion and pain, pleasure and danger.

Loveless was a fundamental piece of my sentimental education. It provided the sound of early mornings and lazy noons, the soundscape for unmade beds and sticky blankets. Soon, the last song of this providential, visionary album, was the perfect summing up of what My Bloody Valentine was all about.

Lyrically and musically, they had all the terrifying sexyness of a slasher film (hence the reference in their name). Kevin Shields's guitar was, literally, an ax, or rather, a chainsaw: it cut through the thick air-walls of mainstream conformity with a subtle violence that could only resemble the painful, groundbreaking epiphany of truly, madly, deeply falling in love.

Soon was a declaration of love, but also an alarm call, a wake-up siren, a shattering of the numbness of everyday's tedium vitae.

Wake up
Don't fear
I want to
Love you
Yeah don't go there
I let you get to me

Soon still has the power it had fourteen years ago, when we walked, like them, shoegazing, irrevocably falling, forever in love with the ground beneath our feet, afraid to look up but full of rage and passion and desire. It opens with drums that wound you like a machine gun. And then the labyrinth of sounds: you drown in the echoes of lost loves and fears. You are within a hurricaine of emotions. This is the flowing of crimson-red blood translated into pure, perfect pop.

Needless to say, they were not understood at their time. They did not even chart in the U.S., let alone in any country south of the border. But the British Isles felt their twirling, reverberating distortion shake their landscape.

Feel the buzz. Let your hair fall down on your face. Look down. Dance. Feed yourself with their kiss. You are still on time. Let yourself feel.

Soon.


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A Thousand Hours, by The Cure

Remember when you were a teenager? Every time that you went to a party, a bar, or a reunion or just to drive around the city, you were waiting for something to happen. Life was elsewhere but within you (at least what you thought it was life). Remember those parties in those big houses at Pedregal, Altavista, Tlalpan, Tepepan or Ajusco. Sometimes the floor was all wet because it was raining season, but sometimes you ended all covered in dust because it was the opposite. The cover price wasn’t cheap, but you had the option of “hacer una vaquita” with your friends and some other guys in order to save some money. Drinks weren’t expensive, but they weren’t elaborated with the best alcohol though. What did you care? You didn’t drink anyway, nor got high. Still…sodas weren’t free and sometimes, after the party, you felt like eating something. The music in those parties was good (maybe the best); you thought it was because everyone in that scene appreciated it (not as much as you, of course) and not because it was hip to listen to it. You thought your generation was about to make a change and you wanted to be part of it (on your own terms, of course).

There were lights and shadows all over the place, people dancing, singing, laughing, talking, kissing, drinking. There were light and shadows, and in between them; there was you.

Remember that everyone seemed to be having the time of their life with very little effort; they had the friends, the talk, the means and, of course, …the girl. It didn’t matter that you knew every Pixies riff on every album, on every song; it didn’t matter that you were dressed as the youths in Manchester were; it didn’t matter that you’d seen many underground films (apart of all those others, Indie or mainstream, that you were supposed to have seen because everybody had and you were not the kind that stays behind, of course). It didn’t matter that you knew you could feel differently than those others; the thing was that you didn’t think that you had the sort of spark that those others had and you wanted that intensity in your life. But somehow you knew that if you tried to get it, you would have to sacrifice “something” and that would make you as vane as them, at least too your eyes (of course). And then what would happen if you get to know the girl, what would she think of you?

Remember that you firmly believed that someday you were going find the spark without having to sacrifice a little bit of your soul? That such encounter was going to take you far beyond those others and away from your world. That was why you kept going out every Thursday, Friday and Saturday with that spiritual strength, with that will. It didn’t matter that you knew that perhaps you had to wait a thousand hours and that sometimes you felt like you were sinking in despair. Well, that was what you thought and how you felt everyone from those nights, from the moment you closed the door of your house as you were leaving until the moment you used your key to open it again, once you had returned and got straight to bed to fall asleep.

Remember that you thought you knew better…

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Something Changed, by Pulp

A song about possibilities. "What if?". "What if I had gone to the cinema?" One of the top moments in Different Class (1996, and still hard to pick a top moment in an album full of them). One of the most charming and touching songs in Jarvis Cocker's carreer. The song that best defines for me in how strange ways love comes. A song that might have never existed. "We had no way of knowing that in a matter of hours we'd change the ways we were going". Just like with love, after it has happened, this song changes one. Even though it is a tender song, Cocker's sexy voice makes it sound so dirty (not as dirty as "Pencil Skirt" or any of his other sex-obsessed songs, but with that sinful feeling that makes the whole thing so irresistible). The kind of story I would have killed to be there and film it.

The Killing Moon, (The Life At Brian's Sessions), by Echo & the Bunnymen

This is the emotional landscape of Liverpool. Through the thick and thin, across a curtain of fog, the sea clashes against The Island.

The voice comes from England, where the prince of Denmark was supposed to find his fellow men, those inflicted by deep madness. The blue moon illuminates the land that embraces the cold sea. There is history speaking here. This is a land of spectres.

This is the voice, the band, the arrangements that should have taken over the world but didn't. Some people have tragedy in their bloods, she said. Ian, that name, possesed by so many ghosts. He sings from the bottom. The "ocen rain" can be heard in the background, without it being there.

Fate up against your will: the time is, was, will be out of joint. The man behind the microphone knows, without knowing, his role on the stage of the world. With how sad steps, o moon, thou climbst the skies: the moon turns blood-red: it knows what we don't. It's the source of all human anguish: the consciousness of death.

Finiteness, live, impossible to repeat. Recorded, for history, for the angels trapped in the storm. The debirs of progress, the rubbish of modern life, piles up at Echo's feet. It's something mythical. It's the new folk-lore. It's a look back, in anger. It's doing what you have to do. The debris at their feet are those who got better known, who crowd stadiums, who win Grammys. They know, though, that they are the angels: they communicate with a higher plane.

It's the fate of the hero: the beauty of giving up. The cruelty in a kiss. Just let go. Face it: it's not up to us.

The rest, is beauty.


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Ceremony by Joy Division/New Order (cover by Galaxie 500)

Loneliness: a language which goes through us like the ocean, devouring.


It comes out of me in many ways: in the poems I read; in the voices I hear; in the songs I keep in my soul. This song is one that everyone must know with its fatal landscape: it was the vocabulary I learned with ease.

All she ask's the strength to hold me,
Then again the same old story,
Word will travel, oh so quickly,
Travel first and lean towards this time.

It is midnight: silence holds me. The language of my empty house is surrounded by Galaxie 500. Yes, their version is extremely beautiful and I have to gather up all my little pieces to find the immense universe entangled in my flesh.


This madness between you and me: Do I need to tell the first time I listened to this song of yours, Ian, I could see the face of a great pain in the dim luminous moon? I used to walk in rainy days listening to your song: I went straight down to the world of beauty and harmony (for God’s sake, the first five seconds are radiant: the generous expressive line of a shadow). My eyes are clear since the first moment I listened to your voice with an unexpected deep brightness; the wave of fate washed over you. Life had you:

Watching love grow, forever,
Letting me know, forever.

Ceremony by Joy Division

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Ceremony by New Order (vinyl source)

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Ceremony by Galaxie 500

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(I Was Drunk at the) Pulpit, by Palace Brothers

I bought Will Oldham's first Palace Brothers LP, There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You (Drag City, 1993), mainly because I had heard that Slint played as his back-up band for this project. I was expecting something like their Spiderland and instead found these drunken, repetitive verses, especially on this song, whose single guitar note gets played raggedly over & over under Oldham's near-whining voice ("In the whiskey-induced, holy unending night...").

I listened to the album maybe twice when I bought it in NYC in 1996 and decided it was of no interest. It was only two years ago I picked it out of my CD rack and began to enjoy its sublime repetitions, playing it often. The melancholy slowness coincided with certain winter afternoons here in Boston, looking at failure and repetition, in verse or living. I still don't know all of Oldham's work, but this and a handful of his other albums seem like perfect-bound weirdness to me. I think I also read this record as a coda to Slint's brief career, an epilogue made for mourning tongues.

1993 was an important year for me and it surprises me now to think I missed this album when it first came out. I can't help but remember Walter Benjamin's Angel of History when listening to this and a few other albums from that "era" I want to register in a personal (and admittedly romanticized) narrative, where self and history momentarily coincide. But it's precisely the ignored and irrelevant corners of history I hear in this song, mid-way through the album. All it takes is a guitar and voice, maybe what a country-folk rap might sound like, from an empty pulpit. So, the following couplets are my recollection of an epoch I want to acknowledge as distinct and unrepeatable, somewhere between 1990-1995:

"Well, I sucked down a couple and God shone within
And I saw where I'd been was a palace of sin"

--Guillermo

Waterfall, by The Stone Roses

Then sun rises. A new morning. You don't want to get up. It's the tedium vitae of everyday. You open your eyes slowly, as if afraid the ceiling would fall over your head. You are in the place where you have always been. And suddenly you remember. Today is the day.

Chimes sing Sunday morn

Waterfall begins with the sounds of epic hope. The musical narrative of an escape: of the (im)possibilities of change. A sort of working class hymn, a song of light and youthful energy. An optimistic anthem that carries heavy loads of sadness with it. Not the "shiny-happy-people" sort of stupid joy, but an act of imagination, the construction of a mental landscape. The ultimate mapping of a great escape.

Today’s the day she’s sworn
To steal what she never could own
And race from this hole she calls home

Now you’re at the wheel
Tell me how, how does it feel?
So good to have equalised
To lift up the lids of your eyes

As the mile they disappear
See land begin to clear
Free from the filth and the scum
This american satelites won

You are behind the weel of a car you had only dreamed of; the wind against your face, England's weak sun over your head. Imagine the countryside, the city left behind. You have nowhere to go, but you are still running. This is the music of your new-found freedom. And still... and still... you know, deep down, that no matter where you go, there will always be... well, you. "The filth and the scum", "the hole" you call "home" are not quite left behind. Words seems to betray you. It could be you are water, free and wild, unstoppable. It could be, as well, a declaration of failure: you go on, but, with you, there comes all the rest, all that you wanted to run away from.

She’ll carry on through it all
She’s a waterfall

The sky is huge. The blue of the morning soon turns that well-known concrete grey. Drive, he sd. Listen to the bright percussing chimes, the delicious, beautifully wounding guitar, the pounding bass of a deprived heart. It's a Sunday morning. The sun is gone and it starts raining. You take your hand out to feel the water run through your skin. You take the drops to your mouth and taste the rain. You let go the steering wheel. Your hands in the air. You are running away, like a waterfall.

Heaven Or Las Vegas, by Cocteau Twins

The excitement in Rafa's voice over the phone that cold '99 winter afternoon: "You have to listen to these guys, come over to my place". When Rafa likes something, he usually overreacts (for example, when he told me: "Blind Melon could have been the Beatles for the nineties". Yeah, right) so I wasn't really sure about his reaction. I had heard already the Cocteau Twins, I met them because of Massive Attack's "Teardrop" two years before, but I had never heard "Heaven Or Las Vegas". So there I was, in his bedroom, cigarrette in hand, and he said: "Now, get set". From the moment the song began I was transported to the desert, in a convertible 1967 Ford Galaxy 500. Feeling the heat. Escaping from Vegas. A bottle of scotch in my hands. Speed. 90 MPH. Too much tobacco in my lungs. And, now it was either heaven or Las Vegas. A world of possibilities ahead. Thanks to 4AD for recording such beautiful works of art.

Smells Like Teen Spirit, by Nirvana

Those were the years, the age of wonder, our fifteen minutes.

There was a Revolution (with capital R) going on. Everyone knew it. An it had its epicenter on Seattle, a formerly dull town which had become an overnight world capital. Suddenly everything, from Microsoft to SubPop records to Peter Bagge’s Hate comics were happening there, just across the street from Vancouver.

I was barely 19 when heard for the first time the initial riffs of what was to become a generational anthem. Tam-ta-ram Tam-tam-tam Tam-ta-ram… and then the drums blasted into sheer anger. Those were the nineties and I was still young and angry.

“Generation X”, they used to call us. That was how the media labeled the twentysomethings, those “without a future”, the sons of the hippie baby boomers, a by-product of the summer of love. A teenage wasteland.

Soon, teens all over the world were wearing flannel plaid skirts, ripped jeans, baseball caps and Doctor Martens lookalike boots. Every week, a new grunge band would hit the radio waves. Tad, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Thelonious Monster, The Raincoats…

…and Nirvana.

Gina Arnold wrote on her book Route 666: On The Road To Nirvana that in a perfect world, The Ramones would have topped the charts back in the seventies. Twenty years later, it was happening. Punk culture was taking over. Grunge music has actually topping the charts. And for fifteen beautiful minutes, Nirvana was The Greatest Band on Earth.

We weren’t ready. Not for Smells Like Teen Spirit. Neither for its deeply disturbed lyrics nor for its raw music. Not for the rest of the Nevermind CD, probably the first punk record ever to be produced and massively distributed by a major label.

I still can recall the first time I saw that video on the Mexican version on MTV. “Just what the hell is that?”, I thought. It was one of those moments in life in which somehow you know you’re just not the same person you were a second ago.

Almost fifteen years later, it seems to me like the Miracleman “Golden Age” comics written by Alan Moore in the eighties. It was an age of wonder, those were wonderful times. Of course, ther weren’t meant to last forever.

Nothing is.

And just then, the bubble bursted, just as Kurt Cobain’s skull. It ended with a bang, just as violently as it started.

Suddenly, we all noticed that it had been a corporate hoax all the time. That we’ve bought it. And no matter how hard we tried to believe, grunge music was only a hype.

Nowadays no one uses the “Gen X” term anymore. My fellow GenX’ers all junped into the ring. A few idiots died of AIDs, OD or shot themselves. The rest? Got domesticated.

Despite all our rage, we’re still just rats in a corporate office, doing Mcjobs forever.

And missing you, Kurt.

You idiot.

Makin’ Whoopee, by Ben Webstern

Se había comprometido a ser feliz. Había dicho que correría cualquier riesgo para lograrlo. Pronto observó que su propósito tenía la naturaleza de un disparate, y eso parecía alentarlo. Sin embargo, esa noche, cansado y sudado, estaba dispuesto a cancelar ese propósito y buscar otro, “uno menos ambicioso.” Y se puso a pensar. Hacía muchos años que había hecho lo mismo, una pausa para pensar; y en esa ocasión creyó que si aprendía a jugar tenis o si pintaba su casa entonces la felicidad llegaría en oleadas que lo inundarían, haciéndolo más humano, más sensible a sus alrededores. También en esa ocasión se dijo que si fuera capaz de realizar una proeza, y por proeza se le ocurrió conquistar a una mujer hermosa, entonces la felicidad surgiría con el montón de colores que alguien le había dicho eran propios de la felicidad. Incluso, a mitad de su entusiasmo, recordó unos versos que había leído por casualidad: “Val la pena essere solo, per essere sempre piú solo?” pero quizá pensó me serviría más este: “If music be the food of love, play on,”.

Desde la primera pausa habían pasado casi diez años. Ahora, cansado y sudado, se enfrentaba a la misma duda, al mismo desamparo. El día había transcurrido sin mayor problema, como transcurren la mayoría de los días; la noche parecía tener problemas para avanzar, para disolverse en una madrugada fresca y nueva. A mitad de la noche, todavía con la sensación del sudor en las axilas, abrió la boca como si quisiera jalar aire, como si fuera a dar el más grande bostezo del mundo, y no supo más de sí.

Horas después, que bien pudieron haber sido años, despertó con el ánimo tranquilo. Planeó las actividades del día y deseó tener una sorpresa, “aunque fuera pequeña”. Después desayunó y se acercó al balcón: los eucaliptos estaban donde siempre habían estado, las jacarandas eran la promesa del lila y los pájaros grises y feos continuaban volando. Tomó una mandarina y la empezó a pelar y luego la comió gajo por gajo, le gustaba sentir que el color naranja se disolviera en sus entrañas, nutriéndolo. “Una sorpresa, aunque fuera pequeña” y miraba con ansia velada al teléfono, como si esperara una llamada urgente. Al lavarse los dientes sintió un placer minúsculo, un placer que tenía que ver con la frescura de la pasta y el masaje en las encías. Luego recorrió su cuarto para buscar sus cosas y sorprendió a una ardilla lanzándose de una rama a otra de los eucaliptos, se acercó a la ventana y la miró perderse. “Su cuerpo es ligero” se dijo y sintió el suyo: fresco, ágil, sin hambre. Salió de su casa y saludó a sus vecinos, tuvo el impulso de ofrecerles su mano pero lo resistió, pensó que era ridículo. Al llegar a la esquina tuvo que entrecerrar los ojos porque el sol lo deslumbró, a su alrededor había gente recién bañada, cuerpos pequeños y vigorosos, cuerpos que caminaban cubiertos con las telas más alegres que él recordara. “Soy cuerpo” se dijo y sonrió “uno en medio de otros”. Y quizá le hubiera gustado decirse este verso: “i thank you God for most this amazing day […] and for everything / which is natural which is infinite which is yes” pero nunca lo había leído.

Chelsea Hotel No.2, by Leonard Cohen

In my book, this is one of the most beautiful songs ever written. The first time I was in NYC I went to the Chelsea Hotel, drunk with the city's sad beauty, and touched its walls. Some passerbys looked fixedly at me, making me feel all self-conscious about what I was doing. There I was, 21 years old, trying to hold an old building in New York.

It was about 7 years later, though, that I would understand what this song means to me. This was the saddest, most honest love letter ever written, ever composed, ever sung. His was the voice of memory and heartbreak, of lost days and cherished dreams. A song about an unlikely encounter between a man and a woman. A song of true love: Leonard Cohen makes us feel, in flesh and blood, what herr doktor expressed as one of his most important intellectual inheritances to the world: we are never so defenseless and prone to suffering than when we love.

But true love is not its signifier (herr doktor's brightest student knew this too): love was not verbalized. Never once heard you say. Neither this nor the opposite. Never once heard you say, he sung, with the presence of a memory, the ghost of an absence, darkening his voice.

"I remember you well", the writer, the singer, the lover, begins. And what follows is the testimony of a miracle. I can't think of a better way to describe it: an honest, wounding way to bear witness of the possible-impossible; the giving-away of two bodies, two names, two souls, a man and a woman, each her own legend, leaving fingerprints of history... of the history of human love and desire and their (im)possibility.

Listening to this song works like the trigger of a loaded shotgun. One cannot simply forget. You cannot simply go on living, como si nada. I listen to it and I remember you well. We were ugly, but we had the music.






But you got away, didn't you babe?


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Little Johnny Jewel, by Television

There was this time, when we all got together and played music for each other: just CDs, on a cheap plastic stereo that was about to give up and break down.

It was our first summer together; it was our last summer together. There were many of us, too many to mention, so I won’t mention any. But, ultimately, there was no one.

Being thrown together like that, in an alien environment, meant that bonding went on as a necessity. There was nowhere to hide except in music, and we bonded though music.

We were in university, but we could have been, equally, stranded on an oil rig in the North Sea, or keeping an isolated research post in the Arctic Circle running in spite of extremely hostile local alien activity, like in that film the Thing.

But we were in university. And this was our last summer. We drank the night away, and when I woke up the next day I was on a plane, and the only thing I could remember was Little Johnny Jewel playing on the stereo in the corner and the lights in the kitchen too bright and the imposing boom of human voices as they echoed around the room pursuing different trajectories in conversation, in space. And then, as soon as the voices were there, they were gone, and the music slipped away too.

But music never slips away completely, and it begins to accrue a meaning it maybe never had at first, but it holds this meaning alright. It holds it as long as it can. It holds it as long as a human heart can hold it.

Now Little Johnny Jewel,
Oh, he's so cool,
He has no decision,
He's just trying to tell a vision.

You are the Everything, (demo) by REM

Claridad aural: del lacónico Green una de las canciones más hermosas de REM. You are the Everything es la madurez de la melancolía de esta banda. Un puñado de buenas letras que hacen posible el asombro ante la belleza de las estrellas que tanto aterrorizaban a Pascal:

The stars are the greatest thing you’ve ever seen
And they’re there for you
For you alone

La eternidad cabe en la mirada de ella: porque la verdadera luz se expande palpitante en el mundo femenino: se descubre la finitud ante la inmensa presencia de esa persona. Consume luz con esta canción.


You are the Everything, (demo) by REM

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You are the Everything, (demo) by REM

Les and Ray, by Le Tigre

You were my oxygen
The thing that made me think
I could escape.

Growing up always hurts.

But when you are a child it hurts inexplicably, indirectly proportional to your size.

For everything out there seems new and mesmerizing, mysterious and mischievous, turning out to be common, dirty and far from what you read in the beautiful candy-coated stories of childhood.

For the other kids will find your weak spot, and they will. Beat you down for it, be it too small, too big, too fat or too thin. Too black or too white while everybody turns a nasty shade of grey.

For the ones you love will leave, or forget, without an explanation or a kiss, breaking a young heart, unmendable.

For your dreams and longings are nearer to what you think: they're called next day, next girl, next big thing.

As we become 'real' persons, we only have this much: escape.

Venus in Furs, (demo) by Velvet Underground, 26-abril-1966

¿Qué es Venus in Furs? ¿Un homilía de sensualidad con todo el encanto de un demonio seductor? ¿Belleza poderosamente desgajada para fortuna de nuestros oídos? Mientras una inmensa manada distraída piensa que (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction de los Stones es el himno fresco de una revolución juvenil (más rancia que nunca: brincar en un escenario de más de ochenta metros durante un par de horas no es signo de jovialidad creativa, es sólo buena condición física a secas).

He aquí una versión rara de Venus in Furs del 26 de abril de 1966 en pleno bosquejo de esta obra maestra. El sonido del acetato es indispensable para saborear esta joyita…

Venus in Furs, (demo) by Velvet Underground, 26-abril-1966.


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Venus in Furs, (demo) by Velvet Underground, 26-abril-1966

Ring Of Fire, as performed by Joaquin Phoenix

It is strange that an actor performing the role of a musician gives his own version of the songs. It is even stranger that he/she makes it so good. I can only think of what Robert Altman did with his actors in Nashville (1975). Phoenix not impersonates Johnny Cash, he actually creates something new about the Man in Black. He does not try to imitate his style, that would have been simply pathetic. That is, of course, talking about only the performance of this great, great track. The production and the sound is the work of T Bone Burnett. Instead of using the mariachi arrangement that appears in the original, a powerful guitar sounds, together with the drums and bass, making the experience quite peculiar. June Carter defined Cash's style as a marching train, this arrangement proves that statement right. A rolling train that is burning, burning, burning...

Black Forest (Lorelei), by Mercury Rev

To listen to Black Forest (Lorelei) is like coming to yourself from a dream, but basically everything I've heard by Mercury Rev has that quality to me. You start listening and before you know it you are trapped in that Black Forest that

...took a strange course...promised a danger...
For a while

You go through a fantasy journey full of darkness, sadness, and hope, which cannot be avoided, which is necessary for all, a sort of rite of passage. Somewhere, there is a hint of light, but it is not completely tangible.

There is only the expectancy of riding through the spiraling black forest, and leaving behind all the possibilities of loss, of being persuaded by all those dragonflies.

Please do not let me go, by Ryan Adams

I was sick. I loved.
I don't know if I was alone in that sickness, or if it was just that we had different reactions to the same virus.
I suffered a lot though I can't remember being happier. I still don't know what to do when I run into him. He looks at me and sort of quietly sings this song:
Please, do not let me go...
He knows I haven't. I can't really, and I hate myself for that.
While we're talking about the most recent traffic jam, I seem to sing back:
True love ain't that hard to find,
Not that either one of us will ever know
When I go home, my only confort is to listen to sad songs until I grow tired of myself.
Then, for a year or two, I go back to living in a parallel universe in which he doesn't exist.

Papercup, by Heather Nova

¿Cómo llegamos a reconocer un momento, un sólo instante? Sus bordes son tan vagos, tan cambiantes, que uno esperaría percibir el tiempo en unidades más grandes que un 'momento'.

Pero los hay, y de eso está hecha la memoria. No somos grandes bitácoras estenopéicas, grabando cada inflexión de la luz, el sonido y el gusto, sino álbumes destartalados donde hay algunas fotografías, algunas canciones, algunos amores.

Momentos que se confunden unos con otros, que no son nada únicos y sin embargo los atesoramos con cuidado obseso. La música es uno de ellos - irrepetible, aunque perdurable. Y el baile que trae consigo es igual de fugaz pero valioso - nadie nos quita lo bailado.

En mi libro, no hay nada como un momento íntimo entre dos personas que se aman. No es el clímax de la boda, no es el nacimiento del primogénito, no es la compra de una casa... es cuando acaricias el cuello de alguien mas por la mañana y disfrutas su olor, cuando una sonrisa te enamora, una despedida en aeropuerto, cuando en un abrazo reconoces la química que te sobrepasa.

Añoramos ese momento de quietud - se vuelve eterno en la memoria, y bien cuidado, es un amor para siempre.

Here Comes Your Man, (demo) by The Pixies

¿El demo es una canción en estado de gracia? ¿Cuántas veces has escuchado el demo de una canción que está muy dentro de tu vida? Sí, el demo es un estado de gracia musical: la belleza inmaculada llegará después con su perfección. El demo es un fantasma que siempre ha estado ahí y que se puede convertir en una suerte de santo grial efímero (y te puede convertir en un incansable buscador de tesoros). Here comes your man: alguna vez tuve el doce pulgadas en mis manos y por un descuido terminó hecho pedazos en el asiento trasero de un coche. Nunca había escuchado esa canción eterna del Doolitle en su forma bruta y precaria. No hace falta decir que este demo tiene una delicia extraña después de haber escuchado hasta el cansancio la versión del disco. Es como estar encerrado en la computadora mandado correos a todo tus amigos y haber olvidado el placer de tomar una pluma para escribir sobre una hoja de papel blanco: deslizarla sobre esa superficie lisa tiene un contacto más humano: esa sensación evocan los demos de mis canciones favoritas.
Hasta hace un par años pude escuchar esta canción en su estado de gracia por días enteros. Los Pixies siempre serán una especie de retorno, para mí, a los días de mi miserable walkman que enredaba hasta el cansancio las cintas Sony HF. La canción de hoy se encuentra en la mítica Purple Tape (minúsculo ejercicio soberbio de nueve canciones)

Here Comes Your Man, (demo) by The Pixies.

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Blister in the Sun, by Violent Femmes

I used to skateboard. I would read Thrasher magazine and imagine other landscapes, the hills of San Francisco, the Embarcadero, Times Square being searched and destroyed by a couple of skateboard trucks, Trocadero in Paris invaded by kids in baggy jeans and airwalk shoes, the Arc of Triumph outlined behind a young man with transparent wings flying against the old European sun. I think it was in Thrasher where I first read their name: the Violent Femmes. The excitement of skateboarding had found another piece for its never-ending soundtrack.

When I finally got the tape, it was quite a discovery. The truth is they were not anything like what I thought they would be. I was amazed. It took me a while to understand what they were all about. There was a complexity there, a violence in their originality, in the way they whispered and yelled songs of happiness and sorrow. I was mesmerized: the album's name asked a fundamental question. They shock me because they were pure emotion.

Some years later I listened to a song that made me rediscover them. The song was called Blister in the Sun.

Gordon Gano had the voice. A tone, an electric current, a flash, a rush to the head. Before "folk" and "indietronica" became the buzz words of this decade, the Violent Femmes had all the style, all the chicness. This was, to me, pure aestheticism. This was the meaning of "Americana": the great highways, route 66, the mountains, the lakes, the big cities, the enormous skies. Una manada de hermosos ponies corriendo por la pradera.

A song of happiness, to listen to in Sunday mornings, staying late in bed, wrapped in the arms of your love. High as a kite with love, in ecstasy, the deferral of pleasure. The color was blue, an intense shade of blue. It pierced the chest's skin.

It's, again, the simplicity of a good pop song. Maybe this was what the Pixies meant with Here Comes Your Man. Maybe this is what Kurt wanted to do when he wrote Dumb. Maybe he hadn't in him. The true teen spirit, though, was somewhere else. Gordon had expressed it better before. A song to cry with joy, not even knowing why. The ecstasy of love; the simple emotion of ecstasy.

At the end, you just want it to go on. And on.

The acoustics of the heart. The body singing, electric.


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You Were Right, by Badly Drawn Boy

I remember I thought this song was the new track by the Flaming Lips when it came out in may or so 2002. It took me few weeks to realize who was it. Just like with "Badhead", it was one of the darkest mornings ever in my life. Another bloody school day. High school and the feeling I was going to be trapped there for the rest of my days. So I turned the radio on, as usual. I still was half-sleep and I suddenly began to listen closely to the lyrics. I thought they were funny, very funny, but clever and touching. I stepped out of bed, smoked a cigarrette, went to take a bath and had a fine day, all in all. It made me recover my faith in mankind. Ah, the power of a good pop song.

Ladies in Gentlemen We are Floating in Space, by Spiritualized (Flux Festival, 8-14-1998)

All I want in life is a little bit of love to take the pain away

El abismo del presente y del futuro caben en siete minutos y medio. Intimidad deshojada con extraños colores de voces masculinas/femeninas. La certeza de un instante donde la soledad es un sepulcro y entonces...

...en la penumbra es posible el descubrimiento de un nuevo emisario de la claridad sonora: Jason Pierce. El amor, entonces, es el esbozo de una súplica: un rostro que se desengaña con su hermosas plegaria...

...el amor cae entre esas palabras...

Ladies in Gentlemen We are Floating in Space , by Spiritualized (Flux Festival, 8-14-1998)

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I Still Remember, by Gary Numan

You can imagine yourself walking through the night, illuminated by flashing neon lights. London seems so awake and so asleep at the same time: it's as if the city had been frozen, or framed in someone's mental picture. You walk the roads of Soho, getting lost in a labyrinth of alleyways decorated with rooftop shadows and dark entrances to basements. You can feel the city breath, slowly, and clouds of smoke partially veil your sight. You have, of course, been drinking, and you feel the all-too familiar warm numbness in your limbs. You wish you had somewhere else to go, but the truth of the matter is you are broke and lonely. The double-decker buses arrive to Oxford Circus like ghost transports eerily illuminated with a strange green light. Lost souls, dressed in black, look from the windows, their eyes turned inward, dreaming without sleeping, tired but incredibly awake. As the night gets colder the beauty of the city becomes almost impossible to bear. You did not know about it then, of course, but you wish you could freeze that moment forever, walk to embankment, maybe through the Strand, and die in the waters of the Thames like a suicidal whale. Give your last breath there, an enormous, amplified sigh.

But you are not alone because you are walking with your ghosts: as you feel every cobblestone on your way to the river, you repeat to yourself: I remember. You know it's useless to take photographs of the present because the past is blurring every view. The city comes alive in front of you, talks to you with the sound of distant, private moanings. You wish you could trust your body and think with it, become what it feels, understand in its complexity what it senses as the feet touch the ground and the face feels the air and your eyes turn watery. You sing an "old song:

I'm surrounded
By old stories
With nowhere to hide

The song, you remember, begins with a most unusual instrument; it is, after all, a beginning which joins roads, a start for a sentimental journey. It's all about past and present here, about new ways of interpreting the blues. A cyberpunk ballad of memory and brokenheartedness. It could very well be the soundscape as I walk the city, this night, this very instant:

I can't sleep
All your words
Seem to let me down

I still remember it all: it's been a long time, but I still remember. Photographs, indeed, are useless: it's more a question of memory and time-passing, of ghosts and nights, of sleeplessness and the still-burning flames of lost loves. I still remember the river mirroring that London night. I just stood there, wondering, miserably lamenting: "how could you do this to me/again?"

I remember. An electronic jazz, before William Gibson imagined Idoru, before Satoshi Kon directed Perfect Blue. The voice in the machine, the electronic beat of a broken heart: the ghost is remembered, still.

I will never forget those London nights, in which I walked, many times alone, still remembering, often thinking,

This could be
My last song
Everything must end some day

In a Sentimental Mood, by John Coltrane

Porque la verdad era que en el día no sabíamos estar y por eso preferíamos la noche; porque en la noche las cosas eran menos nítidas y los márgenes ambiguos; porque cuando nos veíamos de día no sabíamos cómo hacer para decir o hacer las cosas que en la noche salían de manera natural, por eso ese día cuando nos vimos decidimos encerrarnos y esperar a que la noche llegara. Y como la noche se tardaba empezamos a idear la manera de atraerla a nosotros. Primero repetimos su nombre hasta enronquecernos, y nada; luego intentamos cerrar los ojos y fingir estar en una noche sin estrellas y luna, pero nos aburrimos. Más tarde recordamos un cuento de la infancia en donde un hombre solo llega a su casa y prende el radio para no sentirse solo, o tan solo. Los minutos pasan y el radio tiene el volumen más alto y las voces son más nítidas, como si de pronto la alta fidelidad realmente existiera. El hombre sale de su cuarto decidido a apagar el chingado radio y se encuentra que en su sala están las personas de las que el radio daba noticia: un asesino, un panadero, una cantante venida a menos, un oso, el empresario rico, etc. El hombre piensa que es un fastidio estar entre tanta gente y apaga el radio: las personas desaparecen, el cuarto queda vacío y el hombre se va a la cama.

“Quisiéramos hacer eso”, e imaginamos la mejor manera de hacerlo. Volvimos a intentar lo anterior, lo de cerrar los ojos, lo de decir muchas veces “noche, noche” pero siempre fuimos vencidos. Ella propuso cantar pero lo de cantar era algo ridículo pues las gargantas estaban heridas, así que propuso tararear: y lo primero que intentó tararear fue algo que yo no reconocí, se desesperó; luego llegó mi turno y creí hacerlo mejor, pero ella sólo se rió; ella lo intentó una segunda vez y fracasó, luego yo, y lo mismo. Frustrados decidimos dejarlo, hacerlo a un lado y esperar pacientes a la noche. Desde donde estábamos se oía el bullicio del día: los carros, las voces, los tacones sobre el pavimento. Frustrados y dominados por el tedio observábamos las líneas de sol que se colaban por las cortinas. Esa tarde no hubo nada sobre la tierra que pudiera acarrear a la noche.

Perfect Day, by Lou Reed

-Será divertido- dije mientras contemplaba el naranja atardecer incendiando la torre de Mexicana.
Sí, claro... me contesté en voz baja mientras daba la última calada al camel. Sí, sí... divertidísimo, pensé suspirando al tiempo que arrojaba la colilla desde el quinto piso del edificio.
Le di la espalda a la ventana para ver mi imagen en el espejo del pasillo; mi disfraz consistía en saco y camisa negros, con una corbata azul, pantalón de mezclilla y unos converse.
The Stroke Outfit.
Sonó el timbre y la voz de la enfermera flotó desde el baño.
-Es Bere, ¿Le abres, por fa?
Me puse derecho y me acomodé la corbata. Me ví en el espejo de nuevo.

Puta madre.

Abrí la puerta y dejé entrar a una playmate color rosa con unos tacones absurdamente altos.
-Hola
-Hola. Oye, ya es tarde. ¿Y tu disfraz?
-Ya estoy disfrazado
-Ah... ¿y de qué?

Puta madre.

En el coche se nos unió un ángel con un escote muy poco católico.
-¿De qué vienes disfrazado?- preguntó el ángel - ¿De semi-burócrata? Ja, ja, ja...

Ja, ja, ja (sigh)

En el coche quedé como copiloto, no había discos así que puse el radio. Comenzó a sonar David Bisbal y le cambié al instante a Reactor.
-No la quites...
-Esa canción es la neta...
-Déjala...
Lo bueno de Reactor es que cuando no hay locutores la música suele ser buena y así, casi llegando a la dichosa fiesta de disfraces sonó Perfect Day de Lou Reed.
Una joya como esta debería ser capaz de pararle el corazón a cualquiera, pero a mis acompañantes no les provocó ni un parpadeo.
-Es por aquí.
-No, te digo que es la siguiente calle...
-¿Alguien trae un cigarro?
Lentamente me fui hundiendo en ese piano, en la melodiosa voz de la sarcástica esperanza, en la letra de la canción que calienta el pellejo escrita once años antes de que yo naciera... clavándome, pues.
Luego: la realidad.
El coche se había detenido y la radio se había apagado.
No más Lou Reed esa noche. Habíamos llegado.

El rumor del viento trajo a mis oídos un ritmo rápido, monótono y aburrido. Punchís-punchís barato.
-Hmmm...
-¿Qué pasa, amor? Ya te vas a empezar a enojar por la música y todavía ni entramos.
-Hmmmm...
Gruñendo le tomé la mano y me recordé a mi mismo que venía a acompañar a mi chica. No a socializar, ni a ligar, ni a hacer berrinches. (Tampoco fui a divertirme, como bien me di cuenta después.)

En la entrada a la casa me detuvieron dos guardias de una empresa de seguridad privada.
-¿Eres de La Salle?- me preguntó uno con su manaza en mi tórax.
-No, pero vengo con ella- dije, señalando a la enfermera.
-Ah, ok. Ciento veinte pesos por favor.

!!!!!!

Pagué la chingada entrada y me quedé con ochenta pesos para todo el fin de semana.
Por fin entramos al jardín de la casa enorme de las Águilas y a mis espaldas escuché murmumar a los guardias.
-¿Viste a la enfermera?
-Sí, ¿Qué tal la coneja?
-No se la perdono a ninguna. Ja, ja, ja.

Mis nudillos crujiendo y la enfermera calmándome. En mi cabeza comenzaron los acordes de un piano.

Just a perfect day...

La fiesta era organizada por el CAM (Consejo de Alumnos de Medicina) ; pura gente bien educada y fina, con comentarios tan atinados e inteligentes como:
-Que chida tu mata... ¿Te explotó el boiler?
-Ah. ¿Vas en la UNAM? ¿No te alcanzó para otra? ¿Eh? ¿Eh?
-Letras, ¿eh?. ¿Y eso para qué sirve?

Al voltear para buscar apoyo con la enfermera, la encontré a quince pasos saludando a un león, un reo, un travesti, y un payaso.

Bueno... alcohol.

Me dirigí a la barra.
-¿Hay cerveza?
-No. Tengo tequila (casco viejo) y vodka (oso negro).

And then later when it gets dark
We go home

-Dame un vodka, pues.
-Toma. Eh... Son cuarenta pesos

Oh, its such a perfect day

-Amor, ¿Me detienes el vaso?

La enfermera bailando sopa de caracol y el pendejo stroke wanna be con su jeta y una vaso en cada mano. Miré a mi enfermera de lejos.

I'm glad I spent it with you

Cuando la música empeoró de Fey hacia Arjona, decidí beberme el chupe de la enfermera también.

La busqué con la mirada y sólo ví idiotas, idiotas, idiotas y más idiotas. Puños de idiotas.
En el camino al tercer chupe, me encontré a la coneja, que amablemente me invitó un raspado de oso negro. Me presentó a dos hadas.
-Hola, chinito. ¿Me regalas un cigarro?
Amablemente le ofrecí mis camel y de la nada salieron ocho manos que redujeron mi cajetilla a un caparazón muerto. Fue como arrojar una mazorca a nido de cuervos.

Feed animals in the zoo

Cuando empezó a sonar Rebelde, me tomé mi raspado aguado de un trago; ví a la enfermera tomándose fotos con un GI Jo(to)e.

You just keep me hanging on
You just keep me hanging on

Llegó el ángel y que me dice, la muy cabrona:
-Eres muy serio, ¿verdad?

I thought I was someone else
Someone good

A las dos y completamente sobrio, nos fuimos de ese infierno (la bebida estaba mal planeada y el alcohol se acabó en tres horas) para dirigirnos al (praise the Lord) Borrego Viudo.

Al final de su segundo taco, la enfermera se conflictúa y me pregunta:

-¿Estás enojado?, ¿Por qué no comes?, ¿Por qué no me contestas?

Me reí de buena gana y canté mentalmente:

You're going to reap just what you sow,
You're going to reap just what you sow,
You're going to reap just what you sow,
You're going to reap just what you sow,

***
Gracias, Lou. Aprendí mucho esa noche.

Bachelorette, by Björk

Si alguien es experta en relaciones amor-odio en círculos viciosos imposibles de romper, es Björk. Irónicamente, una de las canciones que mejor ilustra este recurrente tema en su obra, Bachelorette, no fue escrito por ella. Sigurjon Birgir Sigurdsson, mejor conocido como Sjòn, es el responsable de la letra de esta melodramática espiralosa e hipnotizante joyita.

Esta canción es puro amor violento. Los amantes se alimentan el uno del otro, una suerte de vampiros (leave me now - return tonight). Ella, fuente de sangre en forma de niña, le ruega que beba. Ese dolor es real. Si la olvida ya no podrá seguir adelante, tiene que recorrerla, que darle sentido al camino de cenizas que arde sólo para el, que no le permite regresar. Esta mujer-árbol produce corazones para que él los tome, él es la tierra que la alimenta. Están jugando a vivir, y su única manera de amar es al sufrir. Se entregan por completo y exigen la vida a su otra mitad, son un complejo ciclo imposible de romper, un organismo emocional indivisible e inquebrantable. La vida sólo viene de la destrucción.

life is a necklace of fears (my love)
your uncried tears on a string
our love will untie them - come here (my love)
loving me is the easiest thing.

Badhead, by Blur

Sunday morning (or evening, I don't know), I'm waking up. French horns pumping inside my head. October, 2001. The first of many disenchantments to come. Why did I have to tell her that I was in love with her? She said that we could still be friends. Yeah, right. As if that would be enough for me. She didn't understand back then how bad she did to me. I was completely drunk when I told her everything. Few minutes later I was wasted. The last time I saw my watch, it was around three o'clock in the morning. I decided I should step out of the party. She saw me leaving, she didn't say a thing, didn't try to stop me. As if I had cared. I walked and walked. I sat down outside a Seven Eleven. Several patrols passed by, but not a single cop asked me anything. Strange. I've been on the street at five o'clock in the afternoon and they had asked me for my IDs. Around six in the morning I ran into a friend who walked me home and hugged me, repeating: "Don't worry". I woke up and played at maximum volume "Badhead" by Blur. "So far, I've not really stayed in touch. Well, you know as much, it's no surprise that today I'll get up around two with nothing to do except to get a touch of flu". I wished I had the flu, but no, it was only "a badhead in the morning" and the bad taste of tobacco and booze mixed up with rage. In the Parklife booklet, beside the lyrics for the song there's this photo from The Graduate.

One Too Many Mornings, by Bob Dylan

[This text was originally published in the September, 2000 issue of the now-defunct magazine ViceVersa. I had erased from my memory that these were the first exercises I did of "free writing" about pop songs; in a time without blogs, printed media was all we had. I have to thank Claudia Muzzi (to date, she's still my editor and dear friend) for asking me for this series. I hope you can forgive me for posting "recycled" material.]

La simple necesidad de la escritura. El deseo de decir. El viejo Bob Dylan pinta una naturaleza muerta, un elogio del paso del tiempo, una necesidad de resistir. Un universo donde los sonidos de la mente estrellan el silencio de la noche como un espejo roto, donde la noche cae sobre nosotros, intempestiva. El viejo Bob Dylan antes de ser realmente viejo que se para, suertudo él, en las "encrucijadas" de su puerta, para mirar hacia delante, hacia fuera y, a la vez, hacia dentro, hacia atrás. Cuando el pasado nos alcance no habremos tenido que ir a ningún lado.

La tragedia inevitable de la imposibilidad: la frontera, la distancia, física, mental. Tú estás de tu lado. Yo del mío. Y el tiempo, como sustancia física, como materia, como cortina gris, a veces transparente, a veces oscura, negra. Paisajes de la mente, de la memoria, una y muchas mañanas detrás. Y todavía dice: "When ev'rything I'm a-sayin'/You can say it just as good". ¿Ironía dolorosa? ¿Incompatibilidad radical? ¿Imposibilidad del dialogo, de la vuelta, del regreso? Y la mañana, espacio romántico, melancólico, patético por excelencia, como unidad del tiempo, como ámbito de la memoria, de la memoria como distancia, como lejanía.


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Such great Heights, by The Postal Service

Todo empieza con unas campanillas electrónicas, luego, un bajo que retumba las bocinas Un beat constante, seguro, aparece; pequeños latigazos en su estructura...

Ben Gibbards comienza:

I've been thinking it's a sign
that the freckles in our eyes are mirror images,
and when we kiss they are perfectly aligned."

Una canción de amor que se extiende por millas, buscando al otro a través de carreteras, trabajos y compromisos. Una canción para el camino.

El soundtrack perfecto para un amor inocente, un día soleado y para compartir en el baile.

El beat continúa con la misma intensidad, la historia, infinita y el amor por The Postal Service cada vez más sincero.

They will see us waving from such great heights
"Come down now", they'll say
But everything looks perfect from far away
"Come down now", but we'll stay.

Three Days [Live at the Hollywood Palladium, 12/19/90], by Jane's Addiction

One of my very first MTV experiences was with some relatives I have in Aguascalientes; they had satellite TV with MTV every Sunday. I remember I saw a video by Jane's Addiction, "Been Caught Stealing", musically and visually it appealed to me. I must have been nine or ten years old. Several years passed by and, then I heard on the radio "their first new song in seven years", "So What!" from Kettle Whistle, a new album with rarities, new songs and live versions. I liked the song, but not that much. However, I bought the album because I had heard other songs at the record store and I liked it. I was 13 then. I was mesmerized with what I was listening, and when track 10 arrived, there was one of the most impressive moments I've had as a pop music fan. Perry Farrell yelling: "At this moment, you shouldn't be with us. Feeling like we do... Like we love to...". Then my favorite bass line of all time. The song growing and changing its rhtyhm unpredictably every three minutes. The lyrics, relating the experience Farrell had with his girl and a girl friend of them: "Three days was the morning light/Three lovers in three ways". I couldn't stop listening to the song for three or four weeks... until my mother threatened me with breaking the album. My classmates at the public junior high I was in all listened to Grupo Límite or Kabah, while I was playing at all volume in my walkman a copy I made of the album in cassette. Obviously, I was the class misfit and I spent the breaks alone. Still to this day, my mother can't listen to the song. "Three Days" [live], twelve minutes and "all of us with wings..."

First Light, by Brian Eno/Harold Budd

La claridad dura siete minutos. Son unas cuantas notas que, como las palabras entrañables del ser amado, son un modo de soledad dichosa. Si tienes unos buenos audífonos disfruta del eco del scratch del acetato: el sabor de la eternidad que ha sido atravesado por un mar fraternal.

The First Light: Eno/Budd entonan el fruto de la soledad sonora que describe San Juan de la Cruz: nace la melodía como el amanecer que se abre ante tus ojos: el saludo de la flor de Coleridge que está a punto de convertirse en sueño.

¿Cuál fue la primera luz de tu vida? Pienso, como lo evoca Carlos Pellicer, en un amanecer submarino: hay algo de sueño/esplendor/desencanto ante la primera luz. La mañanas heridas caben en una perfecta melodía.

Eno/Budd: entre tanto silencio escucharás los ecos del agua que no se bebe: recordarás que una flor es apenas el borde de la noche oscura que enmudeció a San Juan de la Cruz.

First Light (Vinyl Source)


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First Light, (Brian Eno/Harold Budd) directo del acetato. Para inmortalizarla en tu iPod o en un hermoso tracklisting.

Ashes to Ashes, by David Bowie

It's been two decades since I first realized that sooner or later I was going to die. I remember the precise moment my childhood ended: I'd been playing Bowie's "Ashes to ashes" over and over, hoping I could get those lyrics straight. Something had me thinking David Bowie was talking to me (of all people!). There was a hidden message and all I had to do was figure it out. I'd been looking for answers without knowing the questions, like most of us do when we're young and sad. A great song was as good as any other place to look.
I never got half the song, (there wasn't a way to 'google' lyrics at that time). All I got was bits, loose lines which discovered a strange new feeling for my young self: melancholy.

...they got a message from the action man, I'm happy, hope you're happy too...
...I've never done good things, I've never done bad things, I've never done anything out of the blue...
...ain’t got no money and I ain’t got no hair...
...ashes to ashes...

As simple as those lines were, they made made me understand that time consumed people and their decisions as it did with vegetables left on the counter. It was the only other reference I had so I figured we were just big cabbages waiting to rot.
Time began to crawl over my skin, minutes felt like ages and I stopped being a child. In a very sweet way, I realized my own race to death had started.