THE SPANISH PURPORTED CANON META-LIST. RANK 49: MORIS

Style: Rock'n'roll, roots rock, pop rock
He's in the list because... Efe Eme magazine deemed his album "Fiebre de Vivir" important enough to place it as #18 in their list.

In a typical case, we have here a pioneer of Argentinian rock who only appears in the list due to the impact he had when he relocated to Spain. Moris (born Mauricio Birabent) began in the 60s as part of bands like Beatniks (with which he did the first rock single ever recorded in Argentina) and Los Gatos, earning himself the title of "father of Argentinian rock", and went solo in 1970 with an album that is considered part of the canon of the Argentinian rock but virtually unknown in Spain. Later, due to the political climate he crossed the pond, and while he played in band settings, made a lot of impact in Spain with his solo shows in which he was playing only with an electric guitar and an array of pedals. In a reversal of sorts, he recorded (backed by Tequila, more on them in a later post) in 1978 an album which was tremendously influential in Spain but wasn't issued in Argentina until two years later. He recorded several albums that had modest success (the rootsy approach of rock'n'roll having faded from the mainstream) before relocating again in Argentina in the 1990s for good. His latest work of note is an album performed and written colaboratively with his son Antonio Birabent.

But let's begin by stating the maybe not-so-obvious. What struck me about Moris is that, for all the rock'n'roll cred that is usually attached to him in Spanish mentions of him, his first solo works in Argentina sound more like typical singer-songwriter fare, part folkie part chansonnier à la Georges Brassens, and apparently there in his home country he's known for his poetic lyrics and his blend of rock aesthetic with tango attitudes as much as for his role in the foundation of Argentina's national rock scene. As an example it would suffice to listen to his first classic, "El Oso"; an acoustic fable from Treinta Minutos de Vida (1970) which is an Argentinian classic but couldn't be more removed from the stereotypical rock and roll sound we mentally attach to him in these latitudes.

Actually that's something that I've frequently seen in 60s band leaders in Spain as well; once they went solo in the 70s most of them turned softer, confessional or straight MOR melodic pop. In any case, the very homogeneous sound of the album also contributes to all the songs having a similar feel; just for demonstration purposes let us jump ahead a bit to this live recording of one of the most uptempo songs from the album, "De nada sirve" recorded during his Spanish stint, which shows that some of these songs had the potential to become rockier numbers.

His second Argentinian album, Ciudad de Guitarras Callejeras, was released in 1973 - it's not like he was a prolific artist, apparently - and was a bit more varied, if only because the differences between songs are made more prominent - the rockier stuff was wilder and the heartfelt stuff was more dramatic. A trick he also employed was to make longer songs which were actually multi-part, with a rockier or bluesier half going straight into a melodic one; in that regard "Muchacho del taller y la oficina" is emblematic.

But let us get Eurocentric for a moment. THIS is what made critics put Moris in the canon. "Sábado Noche" a/k/a "Sábado a la Noche" is probably the only song of Moris that most people have heard, whether the original, the cover by Miguel Ríos in his "Rock & Ríos" live album or the version that Los Rodríguez did in their early shows. And yes, the lyrics are partially, ahem, "inspired" by "Rip It Up", but to hell with it. If you're not feeling it you're hopeless for 70s rock'n'roll. Don't be deceived by the slow intro.

He had been first heard here with a stylistically similar cover of "Blue Suede Shoes" that was also retrospectively included in Fiebre de Vivir, where his guitar pedals are heard in all their glory. Here we have him appearing in "Aplauso", a late 70s music show from Spanish TV. Those fluent in Spanish will dig the announcer commenting in how rock'n'roll is not dead but very much alive and in Spanish... while the soundtrack plays the typical string-laden MOR pablum of the era.

During the 80s Moris continues to record in Spain, but although he makes a deliberate effort to modernize his sound (as we can hear in the clip below), the rise of the new generation of New Wave influenced artists obscured his contributions. In a relatively small span, his sound was not anymore the hot thing; his ballads were too personal and his rock songs were too raw. So, faced with diminishing success and marginal support from his record label, he decides to pack up and return to his home country.

Back in Argentina, Moris keeps recording infrequently. His latest project of note is Familia Canción (2011), a collaborative album with his son, the successful singer and songwriter Antonio Birabent. Here we have them in a "live in the studio" special from Argentinian TV.

My verdict: Now this artist is more up my alley, although he might not be one I'd really go out of my way to dig deeper into. Sometimes one gets the impression that his doubly patriarchal figure overshadows his actual accomplishments, but there are jewels hidden throughout his output if one cares to find them. So, a general kudos for his career, and thanks for the adrenaline injection in the country. Rock on, Mauricio.

THE SPANISH PURPORTED CANON META-LIST. RANK 50: MIGUEL BOSÉ

Style: Mainstream pop.
He's in the list because... Rolling Stone magazine put his album "Bandido" at #20, which in my opinion is overrating it a bit.

The most salient characteristic of Miguel Bosé is that while his records might not be revolutionary, his persona is downright fascinating. Here we have the son of a bullfighter who had affairs with Ava Gardner, Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth and an Italian actress and former Miss Italy, who had Luchino Visconti as godfather, who grew up around Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso (who were friends of his father) and who had Andy Warhol do one of his album covers.

Musically Bosé started doing typical late-70s teen pop, later drifting to a more adult pop with Italianizing tendencies, to later become some sort of mainstreamized mixture of David Bowie and Peter Gabriel (in his good days).


Here we can see Miguel in his earliest days, when his output was more or less divided between incredibly sappy ballads and poppy uptempo numbers. The first one, sung in English is pure Europop - somebody was listening to Abba, I think. The second one was a massive hit, or at least so it seemed to me in my elementary school days.

Then, after several albums in this vein, and having reasonable success in Latin America and, especially, Italy, Miguel reinvents himself as a modern pop artist. He learns to sing in a deeper voice, grows a stubble, commisions Andy Warhol to paint him for a cover obviously inspired by Alladin Sane (thus jump-starting the Bowie comparisons, which probably was the intended outcome), and gets a former Premiata Forneria Marconi keyboardist to handle the production duties. With all these ingredients, he releases Bandido which gives the impression of Miguel Bosé getting serious on us:

So, if previously, the vapid teen idol had been a frequent presence in the media, the now young man who uses his adult and more controlled voice to sing carefully labored, sometimes cryptic, lyrics while surrounded by an aura of ambiguous sexuality is now everywhere. While the Italians are underwhelmed (even if the album was released there in their language), the Spaniards embrace this new version of Bosé, who follows with a couple of albums in the same vein. Salamandra and XXX are new exercises in sophisticated glossy modern adult pop, and this time, instead of focusing in the Italian market, the international version is recorded in English, with XXX even being a (failed) attempt to assault the American market. Meanwhile he maintains a parallel career as a movie actor (which had already started in his teen years).

A song each from the mentioned two albums. For Salamandra I could have chosen any song, since I have memories of most of them, which means that either the album was played everywhere or that it was spewing singles all around (probably both). "Duende", the XXX selection, is probably the Bosé song I prefer over the rest of his output.

Since this trio of albums, his career has been steady but without many surprises, although as pertains to these kind of restless souls, he has had a couple of curious experiments worth mentioning; his 2004 and 2005 albums, Por vos muero and Velvetina are, respectively, an orchestrated album of imaginary movie songs and an electronica and trip-hop influenced affair. The weird thing here is that apparently the initial concept was to release both as a double album. After this his more successful venture has been the obligatory duets album, Papito, which of course became his best selling album ever. So it would be wise to stop the exploration with the aforementioned two albums. Warning: the video for "Down with love" from Velvetina is very probably not suitable for work.

My verdict: Miguel Bosé is not quite my cup of tea, although I don't mind him when he comes on the radio. To begin with, I think he is one of those artists more interesting in theory than in practice. Still, a nice enough beginning for this series. We'll have time both for raving and for disparaging later...

THE SPANISH PURPORTED CANON META-LIST: Introduction

Not long ago, the Centre for Sociological Research (a Spanish government agency) published a study called "Autonomy, Submission or Sound Hybridization? The Construction of the Aesthetic Canon of Spanish Pop/Rock", by Fernán del Val, Javier Noya and C. Martín Pérez-Colman, which claims to be based in Pierre Bourdieu's theories of sociology of art, and with the goal of determining what is the current aesthetic canon of Spanish pop/rock music. Their stated objective was to find out to what extent the Spanish canon is influenced by the international one, if the Spanish prefer artists that are unmistakably "Spanish" or the ones who follow the trail of the Anglosphere, and so on.

I won't comment on that objective, or their conclusions. But the thing that has been rather controversial has been that to construct their "canon", they have been based on a meta-list compiled from magazine-published lists. More precisely, four such lists. From 2004-2009, taken from the magazines "Efe eme", "Rock de Lux" and "Rolling Stone (Spanish edition)". Of course, this means that with so few data points the list reflects the preferences of these particular magazines. By limiting themselves to 50 artists - and to 50 entries for each one considered, just because that's the length of the shortest list, when we know that in lists of 100 or 200 entries the middle and lower ranks are usually among the most interesting - the artifacts are even more apparent. Artists of tremendous success like Mecano, Barón Rojo, Amaral or Siniestro Total don't appear anywhere on the list, while a band like Solera - which, their quality notwithstanding, were an one-album band usually considered a transitional stage towards Cánovas, Rodrigo, Adolfo y Guzmán - is included on the strength of just a high rank in one of the lists - by a magazine heavily biased towards the "undersung" heroes of the 60s and 70s.

And later they also comment that entire genres have fallen out of the canon due to being quite in a world of their own, with dedicated audiences and snubbed by the critics. But how could they not, when the magazines that focus in those genres have been systematically excluded? Or when for the lists they use they have cut off the list before the point where these artists appear? The article mentions specifically rumba, heavy rock and punk. Other genres like hip-hop apparently don't even exist. In any case I don't understand why a publication like Ruta 66 is dismissed because they focus on "classic garage rock" and Rock de Lux is considered part of the wide ranging critics when the compilers mention their "strict criteria which occasionally lead it to be labelled snobbish or elitist" and that they "focus on alternative bands". 

Maybe it's just laziness and they simply picked the magazines that attempted to make big, comprehensive (but biased) lists. Far be it from me to cast the first stone, as I personally have used Efe Eme's list as my personal guide in the past, but the difference is that I'm not trying to make a scientific study.

In any way, this list does reflect a big part of which artists are or have been important, although some of the omissions are so glaring that one is tempted to declare it invalid. Still, as a first guideline for people from outside of the Spanish sphere it might suffice. But as I mentioned elsewhere, I won't consider it the final word, just a beginning, and I'm very interested in covering some of the most undeserved (in my opinion) exclusions.

The Blog's Purpose

Welcome to "No sólo de rumba vive el hombre", a Spanish pop and rock blog. "Spanish" in this here case refers both to the blog and to the music covered in it. If you're here, I imagine it's because you want to know something more about the blog's background, who's behind it, what it will cover, and such, and I imagine one of your first questions will be...

You are Spanish and the artists covered are Spanish too. Why are you writing this blog in English?
Well, to begin with, sites about Spanish music for a Spanish audience are plentiful, and I don't think I'm the most accomplished music journalist in existence. In fact, I'm probably a lousy one. What I have not seen often (or ever) are sites about Spanish pop/rock music intended mainly for a non-Spanish speaking audience. Which is the niche this blog seeks to... um, not cover, since that would be pretentious. If my work here inspired someone with better qualifications or skills to pick up the job and make a better site, I would consider it a good outcome.

So is Spanish popular music your favourite music, then? As a matter of fact, no. The ratio in my music collection between English and Spanish language recordings is unmistakably unbalanced and tilted towards the English portion, and not a single soul from my top ten favourite artists or bands comes from within the borders of the Iberian peninsula. But rock, pop and blues are my favourite music genres (and jazz, and classical, and flamenco, and...), and in the same way that I love when somebody makes me discover an exciting record from Nigeria or Mexico, it makes me sad that some excellent music is destined to never get outside the confines of a local market for purely commercial and/or linguistic reasons.

But I'm not interested in ethnic music / But why would I want to listen to a bastardized version of my country's music. The two mutually exclusive stereotypes about Spanish pop and rock music are that it either is just flamenco-style songs with a band playing behind or that it's just like American / British pop only with the words sung in a differentt language. Actually many of the artists do take the middle route, besides, American pop/rock is not the only influence, with French or Italian pop and Latin music being also part of the melting pot. And yes, bands approaching their music pretty much in the way of the two stereotypes mentioned do exist. Which doesn't mean their output is not enjoyable.

So what do you plan to do? At first my efforts will be directed to write about the 50 artists appearing in the latest attempt to establish a Spanish pop "aesthetic canon", an initiative that has its strong and weak points, which I explore in the introductory post to the series. Later, I will most certainly write about noteworthy artists that didn't make the list, and after that I might freeze the blog in its state or I might expand it with album reviews and such goodies. It will depend on how well I feel about the thing; this is a hobby and I like to keep up with hobbies for as long as they give me more pleasure than stress.

Unless somebody decides I should be paid for this. Then I'll listen ;-)

Finally, what does the blog's name mean? It's a play on Matthew 4:4, and so the translation would be something like "Man shall not live by rumba alone". But more importantly it is the title of the album by Catalan alternative singer songwriter Albert Pla which gave him his place in the meta-list. Not that I'm very knowledgeable about Albert, although I'm very aware of his public persona; but the name of that album struck me as a particularly appropriate title for a blog which tries to show that there's more to the popular music of Spain than the Gypsy Kings (who, as everybody knows, are French anyway).