León Gieco says that in 1978, in the first years of the Argentine military dictatorship, he was summoned to an office of the main Army unit in Buenos Aires and a general pointed a pistol at him from the other side of the desk.
The singer had not yet released
Solo le pido a Dios
,
his biggest protest hymn, but the public was already chanting it when he closed his concerts with him.
The military man kept his pulse and threatened him: "The next time I sing that song, I am going to shoot him in the head."
The anecdote is only one among hundreds that the protagonists of Latin American music of the last 50 years count in
Rompan Todo
, a six-part documentary series produced by Netflix and premieres this Wednesday.
The story, in the voices of Alex Lora, Charly García, Fito Páez, Rubén Albarrán, Julieta Venegas, Andrea Echeverri and even a posthumous Gustavo Cerati, tells the story of a troubled continent that always found an escape valve in music.
The series follows this slogan throughout six episodes and almost 100 interviews with musicians from all over the continent, which describe everything from the innocence of young Mexicans in the 1950s who translated Elvis songs to appear on television to the globalization of cumbia Caribbean hand in hand with electronics in the first decade of this century.
“The music is nourished by the context;
and the social, political and cultural context of Latin America has always been extremely rich, "says Gustavo Santaolalla, executive producer of the documentary, musician and composer, winner of two Oscars, a Golden Globe and more than 14 Grammys among a hundred records produced for musicians across the continent.
After his meeting with the general, Gieco went into exile.
The same did others like Charly García, Litto Nebbia, Luis Alberto Spinetta and Santaolalla himself.
Most of them returned in the eighties, when the military government incurred the last of its delusions: the Falklands war.
It was April 1982. The Military Junta that governed the country had ordered the invasion of the southern islands that Argentina claimed as its own and that remained under British administration.
The English army regained control of the Malvinas in less than 75 days while the government of General Leopoldo Galtieri told the Argentines that victory was imminent.
The strong nationalist propaganda of the military regime went so far as to prohibit music in English from radio stations in Argentina and, while the last drowning blow of the military regime was raging against the Beatles and The Police, the musicians who had been banned years before returned to sound with the permission of those who had forced them to escape.
The prohibition of the Galtieri regime did not provoke - despite the theories that prevail until today - a rebirth of rock and roll in the country.
By then Charly García had already produced the best of Serú Girán –the super-band that formed a refugee in Brazil after the dissolution of Sui Generis– and almost a decade had passed since the publication of
Artaud
, the best album of Spinetta's career.
But while the music of the seventies was consolidated as an industry when it was being played on the radio again, in the discotheques of the suburbs of Buenos Aires, the youth began to turn towards something else.
The punk of Los Violadores was born, the
new-wave
embodied in Virus and the unclassifiable reggae-funk of Sumo - ironically led by Luca Prodan, a Scottish immigrant - which were fundamental for what would come later.
Among the fans who made pilgrimage to the nightclubs on the outskirts of the capital to listen to Prodan there were never missing three teenagers who were already modeling very tall perms and who with the advent of democracy would debut on television with the bizarre name of Soda Stereo.
The recent history of Latin America cannot be told without the music that put words to the discontent of its social movements.
Much less without the responses from the
under
who emerged when what was born as rebellious rock began to fill stadiums.
“These bands were born in the late seventies, when rock was getting boring.
This is a very concrete example of the transformation of music in a moment of transition, ”says Nicolás Entel, co-producer and scriptwriter of the series.
“Rock goes through periods of hibernation to be reborn.
Like now, it seems that it is in quarantine like the rest of the world ”, deepens Santaolalla.
“When I came to the United States [the destination of his exile in the late seventies], the top bands were Styx, Kansas, Boston, horrible bands that sold a lot of records.
But at the same time The Clash was developing, punk and
new-wave were coming
to renew everything.
Then MTV came and ate those genres, but suddenly grunge was born… so I say: we are in a moment of transition, one more among many ”.
Santaolalla (Buenos Aires, 1951), who lived most of these stories, is called the King Midas of Latin American rock.
Everything he touches turns to gold.
Throughout his career he has been one of the essential protagonists of all the lives of popular music on the continent.
He started by founding Arco Iris, one of the bands that jumped on the wave of the hippie movement, mixing psychedelia and Andean rhythms.
He worked on the album that crowned León Gieco as the troubadour of the time of military repression, produced Los Prisioneros when they were the voice of Chile that was fed up with Pinochet, and discovered Café Tacvba in a Mexico that turned to listen to their rhythms mestizos when prosperity did not rhyme with respect for indigenous peoples.
In less than six hours, 'Rompan Todo' collects the testimony of all the protagonists of these stories to put together a timeline that goes from the Colombian punk that sounded in the eighties while Pablo Escobar terrorized Bogotá with car bombs to the blues that were he sang in Uruguay when the new century brought the economic crisis.
At least until well into this century.
Rompan Todo
leaves the page blank as of 2010. Meanwhile, the continent lives another year marked by discontent and the
trap
star
, Bad Bunny, publishes three albums and becomes the most listened to Latin American artist since there is record.
"There's rock there too," says Santaolalla.
“The future is in the capacity for reinvention, which always happens.
There always comes a time when the genre falls.
Then come those who say that rock is dead.
That rock is dead I've been hearing ... do you know how long ago?
In fifty years, a lot of times.
But the beauty of rock is that even if you only know two tones, you can make the same song.
It is an attitude of life ”, sentence.
"We do not take rock in its form, but in its concept", says in the first seconds of the documentary Rubén Albarrán, singer of Café Tacvba, which describes the construction of the genre in line with Santaolalla: a global culture of young people, with expressions own in each country.
If Latin American rock drank from folklore, cumbia, and even hip-hop, why couldn't it do so from reggaeton?
“The boys of the
trap
are returning to what we had when it all began: we were young talking to young people”, sums up Santaolalla and closes: “Rock had entered a kind of gerontocracy.
I am glad that we are coming out of that ”.
Those who distrust can stay with the vision of Andrés Calamaro who, when faced with the same question, in an episode of the documentary, sentences: “Rock is never going to die.
Every day a child discovers Los Ramones and wants to sound like them ”.