It is a day in mid-November, and in Madrid it is raining and cold.
Jorge Drexler (Montevideo, 58 years old) has just won seven Latin Grammys in Las Vegas, ahead of Bad Bunny and Rosalía, ahead of everyone, thanks to the album
Tinta y tiempo
, and the song
Tocarte
;
his second night of glory, after 2019 with
Telefonía.
The singer looks at the Castellana, gray, and it suddenly escapes him: “I would be better off in August in San Vicente do Mar, eating seafood and drinking Albariño”.
In that corner of O Grove (Pontevedra), Drexler, thirteen Grammy winners, Oscar winners, Goya winners, are encouraged to go up on the Náutico stage to sing and play with local musicians, to dance, to soak up everything.
Years ago at a
Vanity Fair party
dedicated to his friend Antonio Banderas, and in the middle of the cocktail, Drexler approached a journalist and, in an aside, gave him a monumental and hilarious lesson on the metric and rhyme of the tenth spinel, a stanza of ten verses that Vicente perfected. Spinel in the 16th century.
Ask.
What happens?
Response.
[Smiles] It obsesses me in every way: it attracts me, it captivates me, it's dangerous.
It's a metric trap, it's very difficult to get out of there afterwards.
I have friends who dream of tenths, it is difficult for them to break that formality.
It is so powerful that, almost 500 years later, without any mutation, there is no viable alternative to the
abbaaccddc
structure in octosyllable consonants.
It has developed autonomously in all Latin American countries.
Everyone believes that it is their own, but it has developed without contact between them and has not mutated: it maintains the same structure, it is incredibly solid.
Q.
What is the secret?
R.
The secret, and I discuss it with my poet friends, is that the tenth is not a poetic genre: it is a musical genre.
Q.
Oh yeah?
R.
Vicente Espinel was a musician, and it has a structure of a system of tensions.
Look at the moment when he defines the first embracing rhyme quatrain:
abba acc
, and when he defines the second quatrain, you think he's going to close on
a
because you're ready.
But he puts the
d
on you , a new rhyme: it baffles you.
He closes
cddc
, back into another hugging rhyming quatrain after having you taken off in another direction by a new rhyming system.
He presents a reality.
Pretend to return it.
At the last minute he changes it.
And when you're completely taken aback, he closes it back to you with the same structure as the quatrain above.
That is a classic system of tensions in music.
Q.
A game.
R.
The tenth is incredibly good to insult, to insult and to flatter, to praise and to insult.
Q.
How do you sleep the night before the Grammys?
A.
No expectations.
Expectations do not have a good outcome: if they are not met, frustration ensues.
I have been lucky enough to earn much more than what logically should come to me, without expectations.
Because when an expectation is fulfilled, the feeling of emptiness is very great.
That's why I'm not worried about the night before, but the morning after.
The expectations cause that, if you win, you have the satisfaction of having fulfilled your duty;
If that was the top of your life, the only way you have is down.
Q.
So?
R.
I don't know what day the nominations will be.
I ask my team that if they want to organize something (because they will have to do press later) they don't tell me.
Every time I've been nominated, including the Oscar, it's been on a day when I wasn't aware that the nominations were being given.
When they told me I was nominated for an Oscar, for example, I thought it was a joke.
Q.
Among people of your generation, the different forms of urban music are viewed with great suspicion, sometimes downright contempt.
And you, however, come closer and soak up the new.
R.
I approach things from the studio.
I'm interested in seeing what really happens: seeing it for myself.
Now we were in Puerto Rico and we stayed there for five days after the concert, which is what I do when I'm on tour.
We went every night to dance to a different type of music.
We danced to the Bomba and Plena rhythms [musical roots of Puerto Rico created by enslaved Africans on the sugar plantations] and, of course, reggaeton.
They are the three central rhythms of the country.
We went to perrear to the
NIE Bar
from Santurce, to learn to dance reggaeton and see how it works.
The first day we went salsa dancing.
And of course, we talk to people from the urban world with a lot of curiosity.
I came very full of information.
That's why I can't write, but I'll write when I sit down.
I haven't written a verse for a whole year, and that's normal.
Q.
Writing is not important, the important thing is to have something to write about.
R.
As the great Antonio Escohotado said, who was the greatest influence on my way of seeing reality in recent years, and his friendship was one of the most precious things I had: "Reality is infinitely dense, that is, the ideal It does not have concrete densities”.
It is very easy to idealize someone and say something very specific about reality.
The closer you get to a person or a phenomenon, the more complex it is, not the simpler.
Unlike the ideal, which is a structure: whether you move closer or further away, it has the same density.
It's simple, it's flat.
But, reality is three-dimensional, it is complex.
Q.
Give me an example.
R.
When you see reggaeton from the age of 58 like me, you see it from a generational distance, and the first impulse is defensive: it seems hypersexualized, macho, simple, it has a commercial intention.
Everything bad you can think of.
But get closer to reality, I get closer by studying.
I don't mean studying in a library.
I mean they teach you how to dance it.
To go to Santurce and the neighborhood of La Perla, where the first Panama City mixtapes from the children of the Jamaican Canal workers were received, the mixture of raggamuffin with Spanish and who began to design reggaeton in the early 90s, at the end of from the 80's
Q.
When it all starts.
R.
In Puerto Rico it was an explosion.
In other words, when Daddy Yankee's career began and in the La Perla neighborhood, a system of diyéis with cassettes was innovated that began to combine those Jamaican rhythmic patterns with the way Panamanians rap, and they made it their own, and they consolidate as the genre that is reggaeton.
And from there the rest of the story.
Today, of the ten most listened to songs in the world, seven are in Spanish.
There are a lot of people singing in Spanish without understanding it or beginning to understand it.
In Istanbul, in Prague, in places where music in Spanish did not reach before.
When something is so important, how am I going to turn my back on it just because it's not my gender?
When something is so important, I want to go and I go.
I grew up in two families that looked at me with love but with mistrust: let's see if it's one of ours, or from the other side.
But very close.
It was nice to see my non-Jewish grandfather put on his kippah and go visit my grandfather in synagogue, and my Jewish grandfather dress up as Santa Claus for Christmas
Q.
You are listening to a podcast about the origin of reggaeton.
R.
And I study that complex rhythmic cell, that 332, that
ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta
, 1-2-1-2-3, which is the same origin as the milonga.
Let's start by giving it the three-dimensional hierarchy it has, not seeing it with the generational plain and fear.
What does my generation have? What does it have for reggaeton?
He is afraid of it, just like my grandparents' generation was afraid of rock & roll.
It is neophobia, phobia of the new.
It is a generation that suddenly loses its cultural and sexual hegemony in the city, that finds itself displaced, that the bars are not theirs, that the city is no longer theirs.
It is a dramatic loss for a generation.
Q.
And how do you react?
A.
In two ways: either you get into your impregnable fortress and point your finger from above at
all that crap that is happening now,
or you try to see if the young people will let you get into it.
And you'll find some who don't, but you'll also find people just as eager to open up as you are.
Age discrimination is discrimination the same as sexual discrimination or racial discrimination.
It is leaving a human group out for a characteristic that homogenizes it.
In this case, age, that is, young people.
I distrust prejudices, I have grown up in a mixed marriage.
My father and mother came from different religions, origins, languages, gastronomy and music.
Q.
Your father is Jewish
R.
My father is Jewish, German, born in Berlin.
He escaped four years after the Holocaust with his family to the only country that received Jews in 1939, very late, which was Bolivia.
He lived there ten years.
My mother, Creole, Uruguayan of several generations.
Deep-rooted, with two families.
Her parents were rural teachers.
She grows up in the countryside.
Both are studying medicine and meet at the university.
Against all logic, they fall in love and I am the eldest son of that marriage.
I grew up in two families that looked at that child with love but with suspicion.
Let's see if he is one of us, or he is from the other side.
But in the end, two very close families.
It was very nice to see my non-Jewish grandfather put on his kippah and go to visit my grandfather in the synagogue, and my Jewish grandfather dress up as Santa Claus for Christmas.
Drexler poses during the interview.
MOEH ATITAR
P.
A childhood like this marks.
R.
I grew up in an environment where there was no room for that barrier of: I am me, and we are us, and the others are the others.
There were more Jewish years, more Creole years, there was everything in my house.
Music of everything, mix.
It's a characteristic of my old man, always: the disco, open.
My father still has that avidity at 86 years old.
He bought the Beatles records at the age of 40 when he no longer corresponded generationally.
When we brought Marley, the guy said let's see what that is about the Lion of Judah and what the curious guy about the Rastafarians is saying.
And he listened to that.
And when he came with Cohen, I would listen to what he brought me too.
In my house there has always been that thing that I have seen in gypsy houses and that seems wonderful to me, that must have to do with the origin of the town that feels discriminated against at some point.
P.
Bad Bunny.
R.
I listened to Bad Bunny's last album very carefully when my 13 and 10 year old children brought it.
A summer without you
seems to me the best album I've heard in a long time.
It's wonderful, and even more so after listening to it in the Santurce neighborhood of San Juan.
For them, reggaeton is what rumba is for the Barcelona of the suburbs of the 70s. The dimension of national hero that Bad Bunny has in Puerto Rico is impressive.
It is a country with an existential conflict responsible for a large part of the musical genre they created, the identity rebellion that it means.
Q.
Against the odds, you won more Grammys than him.
R.
Then you come back here and see that people try to praise you saying: how lucky that yours won, not that horrible music.
I am not comfortable with such a statement.
When I went up to collect the awards, I dedicated the last one to urban music, which is doing something unprecedented for our language.
Maybe tango did it at the time.
P.
Touch you, with C. Tangana.
A.
When Pucho [C.
Tangana] tells me
brave chicken, money or life, chop medicine, suck candy, lose the game, drink your saliva, risk my life, seek ruin
.
Eight.
Great-great-great
.
Eight heptasyllables with assonance rhyme.
In scholarly poetry circles, where alternation comes first, repeating all the rhymes eight times is considered childish and sacrilege.
When he starts reciting it, I said: "He's fucking crazy, I understand that it happens in trap, I'm not going to be able to sing it because it's not for me."
But when he takes me by the hand and you sing it, you're like, “Okay, he's mine too, he belongs to me too,” and it's like putting on shoes you didn't think you could wear.
Your world expands and suddenly it becomes
that
the most interesting of your compositional spirit.
It happens many times, suddenly you go to buy a garment and you say: this is not crazy.
And some friend says: "Buy it and then look", and then that is your main garment and your entire wardrobe future is built from that garment.
Sabina invited me to come to Madrid on a very crazy night that I recount in a song called 'Let's say I'm talking about Martínez'.
It was full of promise and excess and madness, and it was so beautiful.
We were closing four bars one by one: who wouldn't believe you?
Q.
Two of the three main categories in the Latin Grammys, Tocarte.
R.
Two of the three main categories in the Latin Grammys: it has a minimalism that I am very proud of.
I can praise it because I didn't do it: I didn't do that rhythmic base.
I participated in the production of the song, but all the melodies were made by Pucho.
The whole first half of the letter was done by him, because he writes so fast that I couldn't.
I started writing from
I want to lick the salt you bring from the beach, ask for asylum under your towel
, that's more me;
long sentences, consonant rhyme,
beach-towel
and
I want the whole neighborhood to know about our obsession
and show off kissing you on the balcony
.
Then rhyme structures of long verse and consonant rhyme.
But the rest, all the melodies, the obsessive refrain to repeat eight times,
touch you
, all of that is by Pucho.
The way of singing is directed by Pucho as well.
In the end, it is mine and I got hold of the song because the voice is a very powerful seal and marks a lot, but I can praise it calmly, because I did not carry out the artistic direction.
Q.
Sex and reggaeton.
R.
A very brutal sexual content.
The choreography so animal of the perreo.
It is a type of dance that I swear to you that, being in Santurce, I understood what happened with the zarabanda in the Golden Age. The zarabanda is prohibited in the Golden Age because it seemed to people the same as it seems to you when you go to a place and people are perreando: "Oh my God, can you dance that or can only with your partner?".
Then people dance it with everyone, and there are some codes, like everything else.
Q
...
R.
It reminds me of the first time I went to dance forró in Brazil.
The forró is a type of contact that is too intimate.
But that has happened with all artistic geniuses.
Tango suffered exactly the same fear, the same prejudice and the same fascination.
As they say in politics: it's the economy, stupid.
I mean, what is the other reason that reggaeton is where it is?
It's the sex, stupid.
It is that, and it is the recipe.
It's very nice to see those things as an amateur anthropologist in the first person.
Sabina was a teacher, because Sabina at the time I met him made a cultural revelation of the place he went to.
Q.
You met Sabina in Montevideo.
R.
He invited me to come to Madrid on a very crazy night that I tell in a song called
Let's say I'm talking about Martínez
.
We were closing four bars one by one / Montevideo, it had been a while, dawn was coming / You predicted tinsel and groceries for me / And when you returned from the bathroom, who wouldn't believe you?
It was a night full of promise and excess and madness, and it was so beautiful.
He was in Montevideo and he knew the Montevideo musical environment much better than I did, who was inside, not because he knew the details, but because he knew the things in common that he had with what was happening in Lima, with what was happening in San Juan, with what was happening in Havana, with what was happening in Madrid, in Barcelona, with what was happening in Buenos Aires.
He was an eagle watching your reality from above.
Why?
Because he didn't go to the hotel after the concerts, he would go around and he knew exactly who each of the Uruguayan musicians who were there was.
He knew exactly what each one was doing with having heard a syllable of what they sang.
A kind of amateur anthropologist, bar anthropologist, let's say.
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