Pase lo que pase, el tango sigue siendo lo mismo de siempre: un teatrito de cartòn pintado con color local para los turistas, y para los Argentinos tambièn. El tango - dijo el Director Comercial del Festival del Tango - tiene que ser para Buenos Aires lo que es el carnaval para Rio de Janeiro. Y asì es: mientras hoy en dìa (ndr: 24 de marzo, aniversario del golpe militar) hasta los boy-scouts estàn marchando contra los milicos y contra la guerra yanqui, los tangueros estamos bailando nuestro tango re-masterizado, sin ruidos, sin descargas electricas, sin relaciòn con la realidad. El arte del tango es a la miseria, sus artistas son màs mansos que Lassie atada, sus poetas hace mucho que no dicen nada, ni siquiera con metàforas torcidas, que pueda molestar al poder, sus mùsicos tocan como si los bailarines fueramos sordos y directamente renuncian a toda creaciòn. El fracaso chabacano del tango-show iguala la modesta sopa recalentada del milonguero viejo, del patio, del buen vecino, del cuñado que es un fenomeno bailando, del Buenos Aires de ayer y de siempre. Ya es demasiado. ¿No era el tango la expresiòn maxima del pueblo argentino? Bueno, si esto es el tango, entonces que siguan vendiendolo, pero no a mì y no en mi nombre.
Lic. Isidoro Cuaglione - Parque Chas, Capital

We have already said it many times: the Tango does not give in to the kaleidoscopic illusions of reality; instead of the little nothings of life it would rather deal with the universal subject of everyday occurrences; to the haziness of a social fresco, it prefers the accuracy of the watercolours. The Tango does not join the news' skirmishes because it has devoted itself to the eternal and metaphysical themes of time, love and death. Therefore it does not demonstrate either for the peace, or for the war; it is not an antimilitarist and it is not a militarist; it is not a pacifist and - except for a few unenthusiastic lyrics in support of the Malvines war - it is not even a warmonger. The Tango stands on neither side, it never takes up a position: the Tango "no se juega nunca".
In this sense, the Rock Nacional has outclassed us: groups such as the Sui Generis and Los Abuelos de la Nada or artists such as Charlie Garcia were able to say all the forbidden things, even during the sanguinary dictatorship. The Rock Nacional, not the Tango, has been able to give voice to the dreams of that young generation who was rebelling against the establishment, in Argentina as well as in the rest of the world, at the end of the Sixties. The Rock Nacional, not the tango, has expressed the Argentine society's living wave in the last years. Today, we should otherwise direct our attention to the Rap Nacional or so. If anything, it will.embody a choice, an ideal.
To any solicitation for civil commitment, the Tango steadily answers back the way a classmate of ours used to do in the oral tests: "I would like to have such a small problem myself". The Tango doesn't want to quarrel with the cops: its social expectations are moderate – migas y trabajo - or "coarse and vile like the family nights and the tidy confeterias", as Borges would say. The Tango's newest words are by Ferrer, an author whose lexical updates, whose laborious metaphors make the Tango look like one of those chirpy old men with dyed hair and fashionable tee-shirt we can see at the Riviera. Whoever regards an opportunist tune like Libertango (1974) as a hymn to freedom, should also think of Mundial 78 (1978) as an arse-lick to the Junta Militar and its macabre carnival. Piazzolla could clash bravely with taxi drivers and reactionary tangueros, but not with his employers.
The Tango's true poets were armed with quite different passions: Francisco Paco Urondo, or Juan Gelman, have been murdered or forced to exile by the Junta, as well as any opposer, any syndacalist, any commited intellectual. Their poems, the Cuarteto Cedròn/Stroscio's music, the Urondo's marginal notes, the whole Gotan's teamwork, give us some indications, thirty years later, of what the Tango could have possibly become today, rather than the sad bazaar the public kiosk-managers are trying to sell to the european major cities and to Buenos Aires itself.
"The tango – Copes said – it's like a cork: it floats." Among the resoucers of this dancer "who graduated at the Milonga University" this is probably the most elegant and least obvious analogy.
So, let's hug "in the embrace that resists to the winds of war", since they are really blowing now. Let's go on dancing, since it often happens, at less than one block away from the illegal detention and torture centers and their pauper's grave full of sorrowful corpses. The tango, like that Fellini's Great Ball, is slowly leaving on the big raft, drifting away in the dark ocean, en el medio de la nada.
Copes is right: it's floating very well.

Jean Fajean,  March 24th 2003

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