Qué Pasa, Raúl: Spanish Thru Songs

Juntos is an uplifting, life-affirming love song. In recent years, the 1982 hit from Madrileña singer Paloma San Basilio has come to be seen as something of a gay anthem, and this has helped to keep the song alive and relevant for new, younger audiences.

It is very much a ‘gay’ song in the old sense of the word as well. There’s also something slightly subversive in the tune, as we’ll find out, though it all sounds so pure and naive that you might not even notice. Loosely based on Bye Bye Blackbird, an old jazz standard popularized by Miles Davis among others, the song does sound like something coming from a gentler, more innocent era.

In the lyric, the singer enumerates all the day-to-day little things she shares with her darling one. He is a unique wizard – un mago diferente – who can turn the quotidian into magic. The two love birds are actually living together – viviendo juntos. With no mention of them being married or even engaged, this strikes one as a touch risqué for 1982 Spain, with Franco’s cadaver still looming in recent memory and the old Catholic world maintaining much of its centuries-old grip on society’s morals.

In 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, Paloma San Basilio went back to her old hit to make a new version, with changed lyrics that made indirect references to a much grimmer reality - lockdowns, restrictions, face masks – in a yearning for all of it to be over soon, so that we could again be como nos gusta estar: juntos. Thus, the song finally becomes a celebration not just of free love but of togetherness itself.

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Chico conoce a chica. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl stop seeing each other. Boy and girl bump into each other in a club after one year. Timidly, they start chatting and… Well, you guessed. What had to happen, happened. The song is called El encuentro (The encounter), and is track #4 from Tiene que haber algo más, the 2021 debut album by Alizzz.

Alizzz’s Wikipedia entry describes him as músico, compositor, cantante, DJ, productor musical y representante artístico (artistic agent). So, he’s one of those people who does lots of things, and he’s good at all of them. Arrggh, how annoying!

Upon quitting his day job as an IT programmer and in the span of just a few years, Alizzz produced a string of musical hits for emerging bright new stars such as Rosalía, Aitana, Amaia and, perhaps most famously, C Tangana, whose Alizzz-produced album El madrileño became a sensation in 2021, only months before the producer started releasing his own singles.

A track both atmospheric and light-hearted, El encuentro includes in its lyrics colloquial expressions such as el curro, más de la cuenta or nuestros líos, all delivered in the kind of soft, laid-back accent typical of much of the current Spanish urban scene.

Alizzz sings with Amaia, duet-style. Back in 2018, the Basque singer-songwriter had been the winner of Operacion Triunfo, Spain’s famous talent show. But we won’t be holding that against her. Just for now.

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Argentinian singer-songwriter Facundo Cabral was a true bohemian. He was taught to read at fourteen by a Jesuit teacher and met his father at forty-six. These and other experiences - his wife and daughter died on a plane crash - came to shape his outlook on life and his music.

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José Ángel Espinoza, better known as Ferrusquilla, was a Mexican songwriter and actor. Early in his career he became known as El Hombre de las Mil Voces, for his ability to play multiple characters for radio drama productions and for (allegedly) being able to impersonate God himself!

One of Ferrusquilla's most recorded songs was El tiempo que te quede libre. The version to top all others would be that of María Dolores Pradera, one of the most elegant performers to ever have come out of Spain. With her beautifully clear phrasing style and deep voice, she was known as La Gran Dama de la Canción Española.

The song is also a perfect illustration of how the present subjunctive works. In its lines we find no less than four different uses of this tense. We take a close look at each through the episode, as well as hearing the story of how the song was conceived. ¿Estáis listos?

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Brace yourself: it’s Putochinomaricón! And he’s not amused! And he’s using the subjunctive!!

“Yo creo que la buena música surge de los intestinos y del odio extremo”, says Chenta Tsai, born in 1990 of Taiwanese parents. ‘I think Good music springs from the guts and from extreme hatred’. Here's one of the key tenets of the punk ethos: anger is an energy.

Chenta, aka Putochinomaricón, makes ‘the kind of music that would sound in a Chinese bazaar of the year 3000’. His songs explore the neuroticism and banality of modern culture, whilst slipping in some caustic messages around race and sexuality. He also touches on our ever-increasing obsession with social media and his own generation’s struggles with the burdens of young adulthood.

The song for this episode is Ojalá (te murieras) – I wish (you would die), from Tsai’s sophomore album Miseria Humana. In it we will see some wicked uses of that wickedest of tenses: the imperfect subjunctive. 

So, brace yourself... ¡Es Putochinomaricón! ¡Y está cabreado! ¡¡Y está usando el subjuntivo!! You have been warned. 

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“Yo quería hacer un disco que le gustara a mi madre y a mi padre”, said Bunbury in 1999 while discussing Pequeño, his second solo álbum, released later that year.

‘I wanted to make a record that my mum and my dad would like’. Sure enough, the album became a major departure for Bunbury in that for the first time he embraced traditional sounds and rhythms from the Latin American and Mediterranean worlds. Infinito, our song for this episode, sees the Spanish singer-songwriter diving into old-school Mexican ranchera territory, one chupito de tequila at a time.

In the song’s lyrics we’ll find a variety of verb tenses, including the preterite, imperfect, future and some sneaky subjunctives… Oh, and also a couple of imperatives, when the singer commands his ex-sweetheart, in true Johnny Guitar fashion: “miénteme un poco al menos, dime que me quieres aún más…” A statement of melodramatic self-pity which is text-book ranchera.

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“Todo el mundo sabe que es difícil encontrar en la vida un lugar…” Thus goes the opening line of Camino Soria by Spanish band Gabinete Caligari, the song we’re discussing in this episode.

By the river Duero, the town of Soria (North of Madrid, in Castilla la Mancha) becomes here an almost mystical place where one is to find peace and healing from the pains of heartbreak, betrayal and the restless hustle and bustle of Madrid during the heady years of the Movida.

We will hear nouns evoking nature, autumn and feelings of melancholy, such as: el sendero, las hojas secas, la ribera, el tiempo, el dolor, el olvido, la soledad, and verbs like caminar, pensar and descansar. 

Watch out also for shoutouts to two egregious Spanish poets, both associated with the region of Soria and the river Duero.

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We’re on a trip to Disneylandia!

Today we learn about the dubbings of Disney films for Spanish and Latin American audiences. We then go on to study Lady and the Tramp’s infamous Siamese Cats Song.

Listen to Si and Am singing in a suspicious Thai accent, with a genuine Mexican flavour and a touch of Yodish for good measure. Through their song we get to explore reflexive verbs, demonym adjectives and a suffix without which Ned Flanders could not utter a complete sentence. So: just the purrrfect number for our podcast.

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So you still don’t know what being in love is like? Stress no more: Spanish crooner Raphael gives you no less than twelve different definitions of such a state in Estar enamorado (To be in love), a song from 1981 written by the singer’s habitual partner in crime, Manuel Alejandro.

Together, Raphael and Alejandro have formed one of the great partnerships in music, bringing scores of brilliant romantic classics to the Spanish songbook over the 1960’s and 1970´s. Estar enamorado is one of their last and most powerful creations.

The song is a festival of infinitives, a real bacchanal of verbs in their -ar and -ir forms, matched with an array of big, primordial nouns such as el día y la noche, (day and night), el mundo (the world), el tiempo, (time), la vida (life), la muerte (death), el mar (the sea), árboles y rosas (trees and roses) or tu voz (your voice).

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In this episode we learn about Los Nikis, an 80’s band from Madrid, and their song from 1986 Diez años en Sing Sing.

The song title and chorus reference a classic prison drama from 1932, 20000 Years in Sing Sing, starring Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis. It was not unusual for Spanish bands of that period to quote old books and movies in their lyrics or even in their album covers.

In a letter to his sweetheart Margaret, the narrator reminisces nostalgically about his past life as a baseball star with the Detroit Tigers and imagines a blissful future playing banjo at a farm in Colorado, both vignettes set in harsh contrast against his present-day reality as a convict in the infamous New York prison.

This set-up is ideal for a useful examination of the imperfect, future and present tenses. Expect also a brief essay on that Swiss knife of a verb, if there ever was one: llevar.

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