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Author Topic: Daniel Viglietti  (Read 951 times)

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Daniel Viglietti
« on: October 14, 2006, 04:47:47 PM »
I have a fairly huge record collection.. erm, that is, CD collection. And it continues to grow on almost a daily basis. There are very few things I "collect" avidly: RPGs, Pipes, and music.
 
When you look at my music collection, you end up seeing a huge variety of styles and artists, including, I've been told, some stuff that no one who knows me would expect me to have.
 
But if you are a careful observer, you will find that there are only a very few artists that I have such a passion for as to own their entire body of work.  Among the english-language artists, there are only three.  While there are many artists I love, there are very few that warrant (to me) owning their complete collection. The Beatles are great, Joni Mitchell is my favourite female musician, the Doors are astounding; but I don't own all of the albums of any of the three.
 
The three I have the "full set" of are Simon and Garfunkel, Nick Drake, and Belle & Sebastian. Simon and Garfunkel were in many ways "faux" folk artists.  They were college boys making music that had folk sentiments but were decidedly middle-class. Despite this, their albums are all brilliant and conceptually sound as albums (something that is very hard for a band to do; you can make good songs, but making good records is a real accomplishment).
 
Nick Drake was the greatest of the sad balladeers, singing quiet songs of melancholy that touch the heart. The great minimalist, he was at it best when it was just a masterfully-fingered guitar and his soft haunting voice.  Like Jim Morrison, you only need to listen to the guy to get the sense that he didn't really belong in this world, that he was only passing through. But while Morrison was the shaman, the lizard-king who was here to open our eyes to the realms of spirit and death who would burn in an orgiastic ceremony, a mass to life crowned in an early death; Drake was a soft haunting shadow, like a faded image that only barely made itself felt, a sunset or the rustling of leaves in an autumn wind, something beautiful but totally ephemeral.  He was there to show something beautiful and simple for just a moment, and then he was gone.
 
Belle & Sebastian are the modern heirs to these two. The troubadors of the quietly alternative; totally out of the mainstream of music and yet not making a terrible effort to show off their counter-culture. Instead, they are the ones who quietly refuse to fit in, who are truly themselves not because they make a big noise about rebelliousness the way the modern fake-punk artists do, but because they just write and play on their own terms. They make beautiful songs about love, and awkward situations, and going your own way, in brilliantly crafted symphonic pop, without a touch of pretentiousness or slapped-on attitude.
 
To this collection of english-language artists, I must add one and only one Spanish artist.  I wrote here a while back about Alfredo Zitarrosa, and I love the guy's music, but I don't own his entire discography.  Many of Zitarossa's albums were hit and miss, and could be repetitive.
No, the one spanish artist of whom I have all the CDs is Daniel Viglietti.
 
If Zitarossa was the voice of Uruguay, then Viglietti was the voice of all latinamerica in its political struggles in the 60s and 70s.  He was Uruguayan, but his music was far less local and far more international. He sang to the people, all the people, and for good reason. Viglietti is a communist.
 
You might guess from my political commentary on this blog that I don't share that particular ideology. But I cannot deny that communists, as a whole, make some of the best music. Or more accurately, revolutionaries.  The Soviet Union wasn't exactly famous for its musicians, but that's because they were the establishment. The left makes better music than the right, but only when its the underdog.
 
There's a simple reason for that: when it comes down to it, the Right at its very best is pragmatic.  At its best, the Right is about the world as it is, and making things fair in the sense of giving people the opportunity to drag themselves up by their own bootstraps.  Note that the Right usually isn't at its best; more often than not, the Right is about hating the weak and using Jeeeesus as a greatclub with which to smite anyone they don't like.
 
But if the Right at its best is about pragmatism, the Left at its best is about idealism. About creating a world where every child gets bread and milk in its belly and every man can work and be paid fairly for it. Of course, more often then not the Left isn't at its best either, and then they become about forcibly engineering utopias that punish all but the mediocre beaurocrats (and hence, the USSR didn't make any great musicians).

Still, in music it is the ideal that matters, so it is no surprise that the Left with its optimism that makes better music than the Right with its pragmatism.  No surprise that Bill Clinton had Fleetwood Mac playing in his inaguruation (and Kerry had Moby and Eminem and R.E.M. on his campaign), while the best George Bush could get  for his inauguration was Billy Ray "Achey-Breakey Heart" Cyrus. Oh how low we have fallen...
 
Viglietti's music is about that idealism, about revolution. His "Cancion Para Mi America" (Song for my America) was his first big hit in 1963, just when the Beatles were starting to hit it big.  This was in a time when latinamerican folk singers were supposed to sing pleasant songs about rivers, the wind on the pampas, and coming home to one's ranch/girl/horse.  Instead, he was singing about how "america is crying out", how the america of the indians will rise up against its masters, how the "american guitar learned to sing by fighting".
 
Viglietti's lyrical brilliance was in his clarion call to revolution, but his musical brilliance was in the combination of traditional latinamerican folk style with the more modern chords and sounds of the Beatles and modern pop. This combination of traditional folk, communist ideology and modern-pop influence was being adopted by a number of left-wing musicians in latinamerica and became known as "canto popular" (Popular Song). And Viglietti was quite possibly the best of that movement.
 
Listening to Viglietti is something like listening to Bob Dylan with a molotov cocktail.  It highlites just how tame even the sincere hippie "revolutionaries" of english-language musicians were, and listening to it today makes you see how absolutely vapid and empty western musical "movements" like punk were in comparison. Those guys write music about standing up to the man, but Viglietti was living it. "The blood of the new man will come from all the blood of humanity, and it will wipe away the centuries of fear and hunger", he wrote, in his "Song for the New Man". The "new man" he was using as an example was, by the way, Che Guevarra, who was a personal friend of Viglietti's.
 
He had met Che in Cuba, where he'd gone along the path of revolution to cement this new style of Canto Popular with the Nueva Trova, the musical workshop set up by Fidel Castro in the House of the Americas (the Cuban institute for latinamerican culture).  If you're one of these middle-class shitheads who thinks Cuban music is "buena vista social club", you seriously need to check out the Nueva Trova.  Besides Viglietti, there was Violeta Parra, Pablo Milanes, and especially Silvio Rodriguez.  These were artists who were, in the late sixties, making politically charged revolutionary music that fused the folk singers of the pampas with the tropicana sounds of Brazil with the native Cuban beats with Pink Floyd, and jazz, and as always the Beatles.  Woodstock in 1969 may have been the place to be, but the House of the Americas in La Habana was like woodstock all the time, a lyceum of musicians exchanging styles and concepts the like of which has sadly not been reproduced anywhere in our modern times.
 
Back in Uruguay, he sang for the movement, music that was a call to arms, but music that was also brilliantly arranged. He was a revolutionary but a musician above all, never falling into the trap most ideologues (whether they're left wing musicians or christian rockers or something else) fall into, where the "preaching" becomes more important than making a good song. He sang modern music for the youth of the time, singing about the revolution that was coming.  "Let's go students to the streets and the plazas, life is calling us, and whoever fights for something will win it", he sang in that time, "the tyrants will one day tremble, tremble, tremble... we are the fresh air of the spring, and there's nothing that can stop our voices".
 
And Viglietti was there when it all came crashing down.  For a glorious moment in the late sixties, it seemed like it was really going to happen: a new society, a new kind of popular communism, that would light like a flame against the darkness throughout all of south america, as the people cast off the shackles of corrupt governments who were enslaving their people to the whims of American corporations. They wanted to create a new society, where, in Viglietti's words, "all children, even if they're born poor, will drink the same milk and eat the same bread".  If you were anything but a fascist, it was very clear who the good guys were in this war, and who's side the people were on.
 
But by the early seventies it all went horribly wrong.  Che Guevarra was long dead. Viglietti eulogized him in "Che por si Ernesto", singing that "Guevarra had become Che just in case that Ernesto should die".
Viglietti watched as many of his friends were murdered by american-backed dictatorships. He sang about them: Soledad Barret, the beautiful female guerilla fighter who struggled all over south america before being betrayed in Brazil and murdered by a death squad (about her he said "somewhere in the wind or the truth you can find Soledad with her dream intact, She doesn't want eulogies or honours, her day will be the day when everyone says, with guns in their hands: my homeland i love you"); Roque Dalton, the El Salvadorean poet who was assasinated by the (needless to say U.S.-backed) Salvadorean government for writing "subversive poetry" (about him Viglietti sang: "poor little poets, they see their visions colourblind, where there are bones they see lush sunny pastures...I have seen him, in the year 2000, he's not alive but I have seen him, a wrongful death has taken him but he is still among us").
 
On September 11th, 1973, the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, the symbol of peaceful revolution and the hope of all latinamerica, was overthrown by a U.S.-backed military coup. He sang about that too, saying "on the verge of our joy, death has stolen our dreams. The horrors of those in power are so, so many. I sing against them".
 
Viglietti too was imprisoned, in Uruguay, when that country suffered its own U.S. backed coup-d'etat.  To me without a doubt the most stunning song Viglietti ever wrote was "cielito del calabozo" (roughly translated as "little dungeon song"), which he wrote when he was actually in prison.  He had every reason to believe that, like so many others, he was destined to "disappear" too, and that this was the end. The usual guitar (instrument of which Viglietti is a master) was not available to him, so this was a song done with no instrumental backup. He sang "my son, my mother and my lover will know how to continue the story". He sang "and if (the guards) have no conscience, we will make one for them, with or without a guitar". He sang "goodnight little sky, and soon it will be the dawn, the longer we have to wait, the greater will be our joys". He sang "Now it is a black sky, now it is a war sky, but someday it will be a new sky". Viglietti was the optimist, the idealist, even in the face of death he was sure of the rightness of his cause and the promise of the future.
 
But Viglietti didn't die. He survived, and managed to escape with so many other musicians, a refugee in exile from his country. And eventually, when his country came back to democracy, he came back to Uruguay. He was one of the lucky ones, who has had neither his body nor his spirit crushed. If you are a music lover, if for no other reason one of the best motivations for visiting Uruguay would be to come see Daniel Viglietti performing live. The years and the harshness of his life hasn't diminished at all the power of his voice or the perfection of his guitar skills. He sounds, if anything, better today than ever. More clear, more sure of the future. Latinamerica is finally democratic again, moving back toward the left, and slowly, carefully, starting to stand up for itself against foreign domination. Its not the revolution he wanted, but I have a feeling that having lived to see even this is heartening to Daniel. He is as relevant now as ever, his voice and the voices of all those others who did not live to see this day did not cry out for nothing.  Their song is still being sung in all of latinamerica.

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