From Bob Dylan to Los Chunguitos: Greatest Hits of Philosophy (Sung)

Bob Dylan gives a concert in Los Angeles in January 2012. Christopher Polk (Getty Images)

The announcement of spring is from a department store, but the announcement of the arrival of summer is carried out by a brewery.

performed by Santi Balmes and Renaldo and Clara, and composed by Rigoberta Bandini, is the song of his announcement of him for this year.

On Twitter, some adore her and others despise her.

One confesses that he has cried with emotion when listening to it, another says that it is the message he needed after being in opposition for a year, and another marks the bottle self-help song.

In any case, the song speaks of the urgency of living in the moment.

In

, Parmenides says: “Being never was nor will it be, since it is now, one and continuous”, something not so alien to what Bandini describes with a handful of chords.

We regard philosophy as a sophisticated academic system only fit for scholars.

But philosophizing is an act in the open, which occurs in any situation in which humans participate, alone or in company.

Also in music.

In verses that are almost philosophical capsules, the thought about the human condition is present in countless songs.

The all-time champion—loathed by so many—is probably

from Kansas, the one who says, “I close my eyes just for a moment and the moment is gone / Just we are dust in the wind / Don 't hold on, nothing lasts forever”.

A sugary lesson in Stoicism, the school of philosophy that helps us live in recognition of the finitude and decadent nature of the world, of what we love, and of ourselves.

Because everything dies and any achievement will come to nothing.

In

, Heidegger wonders about that existence, that being there, thrown into possibility.

If we are made of time—the most indomitable material, mud and cross of humans—Nina Simone reveals herself as the most genuinely Heideggerian artist.

In

he sings: “At some point in your life you will have occasion to ask yourself / What is this thing called time?

/ What are you doing?

/ and, above all, is he alive?

Simone, who wrote 500 songs, a civil rights activist who left the United States because of racism, said that freedom was not being afraid.

But that is not easy.

In

the great Etta James sings, "I'd rather go blind than lose you/More than anything because I don't want to feel free."

James is not alone in this idea of ​​the abyss.

One of the keys to Immanuel Kant's philosophy is, precisely, the problem of freedom, that effort of independence of the will with respect to everything that is alien to the moral law —not linked to impulses—, that capacity to choose above our wishes.

Do what you want

Free will is a classic that we deal with every day of every week in every year lived.

A swing between the question and the doubt that leaves us exhausted, wanting to throw in the towel at times.

But most of us keep going, overwhelmed by a strange force.

There is no academic proof, but it is likely that the song

, by Eddie & The Hot Rods, has saved many from desolation and has freed many minds, because the song explains that you can do what you consider, that is, what you honestly believe you should do, without paying attention to commandments imposed by others.

.

Beyond the struggles to free ourselves from our own and other's chains, Friedrich Engels warns us that the law of conservation and transformation of energy is the fundamental law of movement, and that this —la

means in its African origin: movement, later used in the Puerto Rican

to catalog something full of energy, rhythmic and tasty.

It is that something that moves and changes, as Rosalía sings in

when she says: “When it is night in the sky it becomes day / All that has already changed / I am all things / I transform myself ”.

Power and glory are only human, but there are many, almost all invisible, who meditate on it and, like Albert Camus choosing between justice and his mother, they choose to set aside abstract concepts and stay with the finite reality of human warmth.

.

One day in 2019 Rosalía sang

on TV and, after being fascinated with her, some eyes remembered the eighties, when Los Chunguitos published that song, and then they did not pay enough attention to a letter that says: “If you give me a choice between you and my ideas / that without them I am a lost man / oh love!

I stay with you."

cosmic loneliness

Antonio Vega did listen to

then and he liked it so much that he played it in some concerts.

The songs of Vega, one of the great singer-thinkers, are full of lightning-ideas that sing, in his case, to cosmic loneliness, as in the song

: “Nothing matters to me today / I don't even know where I'm going / Chasing shadows / Such is the ice here / This is a cold country”, or in

“I chase an illusion / where I want to go / passing without fear / next to the total emptiness”.

Vega also covered Joan Manuel Serrat —the great musical thinker—: he sang the extraordinary

which narrates the struggle for life and the struggle for love, and their successive shipwrecks.

It is the art of the existence of a person in seven minutes, embarked knowing that there is no safe port —as Voltaire well said— and that begins with “Life and death / embroidered in the mouth / I had Mary Janes / the one in the wardrobe”.

Other composers name, directly or indirectly, the thinkers who have influenced them, such as The Cure in

based on

the work of Albert Camus —where sing: “I am alive / I am dead / I am a stranger”—, or Bob Dylan in

“I have dreamed that I saw Saint Augustine / I live like you and me / with his wild breath.

Some call Dylan

, but the one from Minnesota is not an entity or a ghost, but a living man, a real person.

He is an 81-year-old guy who, at 32, in his song

tells us that the path is to death.

A destination that leaves us thoughtful and makes us thinking beings.

Every moment in life is a gift and also a countdown.

Perhaps the best thing is to turn on the song

, by Mongo Santamaria, at full volume and start dancing.

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