Minima Tangalia
Tanguistas on Mars
by Tj Locatelli
Like the Three Musketeers' son, the electronic
tango is born old. In our immaterial times, electronic is
a dated adjective with a craft flavour, that you give to the
vintage things you get from the flea market. "The Electrònica,
the most modern and advanced antique", a sign says at
Plaza Dorrego. Electronics evokes the tubes, the transistors,
the
moog, the man-made fibres, the bakelite. Or the astronauts,
the flying saucers, the martians, the Eega Beeva's childish
technology. Also the machine-music - i am not hinting, just
to show you i have read up, at the
Intonarumori or the Theremin, because in
that case the bandoneòn too could be called a machine
(do you remember the
Cortazar's verse: bandoneòn, maquina pobre de papel
y engrudo?)
- even that music, i say, is a lady who has turned sixty officially.
And over thirty are the Piazzolla's electronic Conjunto and
Grace Jones' Libertango, that incidentally are both
vastly superior in tango and in look to the electrotango of
today. Not to mention the numberless electrification experiments,
from Saluzzi to Moles to Mederos, that have been done so far.
All this demonstrates the soundness of the Adorno's thesis
according to which vulgarity is not, as the faith in culture
would like, a simple waste-article of art, but rather a sleeping
attitude that stays in it, waiting for a chance to jump out
and pose as a champion of the current taste. More than
on false pretences, that's to say the disproportion between
substance and its form, the electronic vulgarity dependes on
a lack of nerves: throwing itself into the totally ephemeral's
arms, the electrotango neutralizes and artistically
disqualifies those sentiments and those raw materials it pretends
to express
while they are still burning. In its overhasty agreement to
the up-to-date fashion, in its hypocritical accomodation
to the show-business book of manias, the electrotango admits
it ain't what it gives us to believe nor what, according to
its idea, has to be: the expression of the right emotion; something
inevitable, vibrating, topical and full of history.
I wonder what's the meaning of watering down
Bristol into Buenos Aires, of translating the hip-hop to lunfardo,
of introducing the elevator-music in a city based on low houses,
of plastering with the lounge-music bars that serve mondongo,
of converting the Boca hooligans to tribalism, of chilling-out
the ardors of people who spend half their salary to get them.
Because this is the matter: the international market's already
expired or soon expiring musics that are distributed, after
a fast vernacular reanimation by a few notes of bandoneòn,
to a public who is always longing to follow the dominant rules
properly. Today we discover that, as the record companies managers
say, even the tango - actually meaning the tango market
- is hot, or rather cot, as the bristolians from
Pompeya pronounce. The industry knows very well
that the consumers of cultural goods react to fashion like
the swarms of sardines to the temperature variations of the
streams, and also the residual products, if fairly supported
by the advertising, can lead to vibrate a hardened phenomenon
such as the tango. At least, this important improvement in
the local color gives the nationalistic toy-trumpets something
to
push for even abroad.
Another bitter victory for Guy Debord! After
having made a lot of money in the digital trade with the tango
music cadaster, now the music-business multinationals gain
from its crumbling and exploitation in conformity with the
ways and the cycles of the "society of the spectacle". Every
angelic cathedral that made this hell worth living, or at least
worth dancing, has been assaulted and dismantled by the softwares;
every fairy orchestral architecture has been wrecked and despoiled.
Now, in the place of the Winter Palace, there is a district
of "contemporary" sheet-iron hovels. The electronic music pioneers
have tried at least to elaborate some structures for those
unusual and buzzy sounds; and the random-music composers have
looked for a statistical legitimacy in the mere occurence
of their materials. On the contrary, the electrotango panting
empirics, superstitiously hope that music will spring out by
itself from the colloidal assemblage of ruins which are shut
in the sickening cage of the BPM grooves. The Beat Per Minute,
or the gospel for dee-jays, adpeople, radio hosts, record producers
and ballroom bands: the Holy Scriptures arranged by James
Last. Here's those geometrical brains' contribution: a stiff
and squared beating the tango never knew before, not even with
D'Arienzo, in all its history; a rhythmic prison that threatens
and strikes out any phrasing, any possible swing of the tango,
either in dance and in music. So much the worse for the tango.
Like in a family of kleptomaniacs, nothing can be found anymore,
not even the old dear clichés that came in so handy for the
touristic shows. The farolito, the Boca, the lengue,
the Gardel's horse: nothing survives the expanded-shows' computerized
repainting by those petty clerks who, posted over their machines
and under their electrical repairs' lights, try to be daring
at cocktail time.
Perhaps, we should have listen to Schönberg
when he said that the road between the radio amateur and the
electronic music is not that long: why, then, should we devote
ourselves to the little sounds if so much is left to do in
the key of C? However, fifty years after, the habit to technology
has created such a complicity with the machine sounds so that
today the electrotango can find, among the millions
of tech fans, less enemies than the Pugliese Orchestra among
the dancers. On the other hand, it's exactly what's lacking
to the electrotango that makes its reception easier.
Half a century ago, when music and dance still were in burning
terms, the Pugliese's pieces granted the pyrogenic tension
of that certain kind of being a tanguero, which today,
in times of inert tango, doesn't exist or it's not
considered tanguero anymore. In fact, that road is
shorter now, so that the radioamateur and the musician often
coincide. Therefore,
we'd better keep on dancing on these Mars peasants' little
sounds, loops, drum-machines, computers, than keep on searching
in the key of D minor, which is the earthly key of
tango and, as Troilo used to say, of the empty stomach.
© Tj Locatelli
Buenos Aires, 2006
translated to english by himself
Minima Tangalia
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