I wanted to write about music and self discovery and innovation, so thanks to Gerrit and Alex I begun to think in all this attempts of musicians to research their origins, which made them come to fairly new insights, new music, art. I was thinking in Dvorak or Cash, or so many more. All cases of we trying to circle down and look at our origins, and reinventing ourselves in the process.
So thinking about that, and me being an argentinian, it was fairly predictable that I would go thinking about Piazzolla, the one that reinvented the unreinventable, tango. Now, given that I intended to write about the great Piazzolla, before write something more stupid than average, I wanted to reassure myself and I did search for extant interviews. And indeed, wonders of internet, few clicks away I found few indeed.
He was such an arrogant prick.
I mean, really. The guy have a call to fame as much as any famous human can have. You might expect that he was, at least, humble. But he wasn’t. In one of the interviews I saw he goes fulminating against the argentinian rock musicians, and that I could not take any longer. I mean, I grew up with that music too, even if I was already in Venezuela. Charly Garcia, Fito Páez, Spinetta… those are foundational figures for me. So I really disliked Piazzolla saying that they were a bunch of ignorant kids. Now, as it happens in internet, there were also links to interviews that Charly Garcia gave about Piazolla. The results? no surprise there. Charly Garcia was, and for all what I know still is, an arrogant prick.
Which after all, it is the image that the rest of South America have of us, argentinians. I wonder why.
Actually, I didn’t wonder why. The whole bad comedy of arrogant argentinians being arrogant argentinians is in between predictable and depressing, so I got to think about other things. Like, how predictable are us all, when our nationality is known? Actually, is this not some sort of reductionist shitty contemporaneous pseudo racism? After all, the whole thing of racism is to say that some people are worse than others just because they were born into a particular human group. But isn’t it kind of the same, or at least the same intellectual mistake to say that the dutch are tight with money, that the swiss are ordered, that the french are chauvinists, the spanish loud and the portuguese sweet?
And then again… what if the dutch are actually tight with money? and the french insufferable about France and the english boringly weird and the german square… and you name it.
What if that is actually true?
Jajajaja think probabilistically, and all that may be true. But to get all cats in the same bag would be misleading at best, or rather manipulativistic at worst (like racism). Big hug!!