Víctor Terrazas says that he discovered Basque radical rock in the 15M. At that time he was a teenager, but he remembers the songs from Kortatu or La Polla Records as his own soundtrack from that moment of collective and personal turmoil. Since then he has been thinking about the relationship between music and politics, to the point of having dedicated a book to this idyll. In Politics in C major (Libros.com, 2020), the young researcher traces the political dimension of songs, and how they cross contemporary history. In other words, what makes men and women, using words and melodies, manage to condense the feelings of their time, how the peoples appropriate this music and what they do with it in political terms.
Is all music political?
I think that, on the one hand, protest music is a way of doing politics, of maintaining a discourse. But there is also music that is created without a fundamental political intention, and it is from how people, groups or communities appropriate it that it can assume this political condition. Thus, what makes music political is its intentionality but also its capacity for representation in political terms.
In your book you defend that music is a fundamental tool to understand the times in which it is created. Do you think the history of the last century could be told through songs?
I think that we lack a sound perspective of knowledge, we do not see the potential that cultural elements can have to explain politics. I’m not just talking about music, literature is another example: if you want to study tsarist Russia, or the Russia of the revolution, perhaps by reading Dostoyevsky you can understand many things. Music is created in a cultural context that we cannot dissociate from the political, social or economic context.
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Song
Where do you hear the protest song of the 21st century?
They are no longer written with a corduroy jacket and guitar on the shoulder, but in 2020 there are still songs that protest against the established order from a personal voice. And thank goodness. In this century, technological changes and in the way of consuming music have transformed the established canon of what a protest song should be, but the concept is still valid.
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In your perspective of political music, you start with “Strange Fruit” as a milestone. What does this song tell us about the context in which it was created and performed?
It is one of my favorites, I am fascinated by its hardness. A teacher who put it to us in class told us that we not only had to look at the voice or the melody but also at the silences themselves, it is a song that becomes uncomfortable because of these silences. I don’t know if it is the first political song, but it is the first song that was recorded and can be considered a protest song. The fact of being recorded in 1939 made it have a huge impact. It generated something very strong: a person like Billie Holiday, black, left, singing such an openly critical song, was a real revelation in the United States at that time.
Do you think there are common elements between blues and rap, as a form of denunciation by black populations in the United States?
The blues was born in a more oppressive historical period towards black people, although racism manifested itself harshly also in the 80s or 90s. The blues was born from a context of conflict, arising from slavery, forced migration, jobs of 12 hours with practically no salary …
Something that interests me about rap is that, like the blues, it was reinterpreted and territorially transformed: if in the blues there was the Chicago blues, for example, or that of the Mississippi delta or Texas blues, in rap there is also the West Coast, the East Coast, the SouthSide of Texas, or the North of Detroit with Eminem.
I believe that both styles – Angela Davis said – are elements that are born from individuality and reach the collective, and transform it from the story. They show how the personal and private can also be political and arises from the social encounter. I would very much like to delve into rap in the future.
You rescue in your book the debates around the blues that addressed whether this musical genre represented a form of resistance on the part of the subalternized black communities or moved towards a form of adaptation and accommodation to the system. Isn’t this debate recurrent every time a vindictive genre emerges that ends up having massive success?
The blues is not only political music because of the lyrics of the songs but because of the people and the moment in which they developed them. Music arising from the conflict, as I said, which in other genres may not be so clear. I think that in the blues that debate arises because many of the songs are about love, they are about sexuality, they are about spending all the money drinking a beer. But here the political is in who does it, how he does it, in what times he does it. Many of those songs were songs that were sung at work, or created in a short time, in breaks, with very simple instruments that could be kept on hand like a harmonica.
This is what the debate refers to: if there is resistance in the fact that people who without having anything continue to make music, or if this represents an accommodation, they are not talking about their eternal work days, but they are talking about having a beer. That is the debate, and in this debate I believe that yes, it is a music of political resistance and one of the strongest there has been. And also the blues will be one of the main genres: most of the others come from there. I could not tell you many genres that are not influenced by the blues.
Elvis has some songs that we could consider political, but already Elvis, moving his hips on stage, is a tremendously political image
Moving on in the story, you also explore the correlation between rock and youth.
Rock arises mainly after the Second World War in the postwar generation. They were people who were already living in better conditions: in France the glorious 30 years began, in the United States, in the 50s, a boom time began. We are talking about an emerging middle class, which is neither very poor nor very rich, white people, of course, who populate the universities.
It is the first time that youth have enjoyed adolescence, a phase of the life cycle that emerges in the 1960s. What happens? That these people are open to emotions, they want to party, they want to dress differently, they want above all to break with the traditions of their parents. It is a youth that focused on its emotions, that questioned its identity and, above all, its place within society itself. The process started in the 1950s, but we see it materialize in the 1960s, with the hippy movement: a youth that confronts and despises the moralistic heritage of the United States. Elvis has some songs that we could consider political, but already Elvis, moving his hips on stage, is a tremendously political image.
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But it can also be interpreted as a challenge or a demand for change, which is more cultural or social than political.
I do not like to say that everything is political, but I believe that it is, that this cultural revolution has a political basis. And I interpret this stage, from music, from this political reading. For example, with funk in the 80s, in Nigeria, young people set up a disco scene in Lagos that had nothing to envy the American or the Italian. He drank from antecedents such as Fela Kuti and Afrobeat, which were already political, but it was also generated by a youth – middle class – who enjoyed the benefits of a certain economic strength. American cultural products arrived, they began to listen to Michael Jackson, etc.
These people began to reinterpret these sounds and transfer them to disco music. For me it is something political, because we are talking about people whose country had suffered a war that had left three million dead. Wanting to enjoy life, go out to party, in this context, for me is political.
“Al Alba”, by Aute, for example, which comes out in ’75 and talks about the latest executions of an agonizing regime, passed as a subject of unrequited love for the censors
Music, in wars and dictatorships, generates a different connection with the listener. What role does this experiential component have, that being traversed by what is denounced in the songs?
In my opinion it is when it reaches you most directly because it is touching you in existence. In the case of Spain, this happened with people like Paco Ibáñez, Luis Eduardo Aute, or Joan Manuel Serrat, people who risked their lives and their freedom. It is not just about making music that denounces fascism, it is sometimes a communicational instrument that tells what is happening, often with intelligent or subtle metaphors, capable of avoiding the censorship of Francoism.
“Al Alba”, by Aute, for example, which comes out in ’75 and talks about the latest executions of an agonizing regime, passed as a subject of unrequited love for the censors. Serrat did not go to Eurovision, because they did not let him sing in Catalan, his song won the festival for the first and only time. In short, they are people who took risks. Something I also find very interesting is the central place that they gave to poetry. In Spain the protest song could not be understood without social poetry. They took texts by Rafael Alberti or Federico García Lorca and put them to music. They suppose for generations like mine, the way to know those poems for the first time. I find the theme of the song protest in dictatorships so interesting that I have made it the subject of my doctoral thesis.
The songs, in fact, crossed borders and were reappropriated by people from countries other than those where they had been created. Can we speak of a kind of musical internationalism?
I am studying a series of contemporary dictatorships —which are the ones that fall into the third democratizing wave—, it is the case of Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, in Latin America, and Greece, Portugal and Spain, in Europe. In Chile, for example, music was one of the main vehicles of opposition to the regime. Songs that were created in Chile or Argentina such as “Todo Cambia”, by Mercedes Sosa, or “The united people will never be defeated, by Inti Illimani, they crossed the borders of their own dictatorship and arrived in Spain. I see that all these musics were connected due to some factors, sharing a common language, the ties between the Latin American and Spanish left, and the very contemporary dictatorships. In the end they all belong to the same historical moment, or they end in a very similar way. They also share an ideology of the extreme right: so this ideology is constituted as a common enemy.
There is no shortage of voices, although perhaps it is not the same type of man with a guitar and a beard playing a political song
Luis Pastor composed a poem called “What was the singer-songwriter”, in which he talks about that time but also claims the new voices. What would you answer to that question?
In the 80s in Spain there was a very strong break with the past, especially on the part of young people. I think those who were 20 years old at that time did not identify with singer-songwriters, nor with beards, nor with political activity. The country is going through a moment of freedom in which everything that has not yet arrived arrives. In my opinion, what they wanted was to break with the above, and there the figure of the singer-songwriter was associated with past times that people wanted to leave behind. They pulled towards other rhythms, but that does not mean that they are not political. Leño, for example, with his street rock, also has political lyrics.
In the 90s there is a resurgence of singer-songwriters with Ismael Serrano. And now there are singer-songwriters like Andrés Suárez who can fill the Wizink Center for you three times. I think there is no lack of voices, although perhaps it is not the same type of man with a guitar and a beard playing a political song. But there are various groups nationwide, such as the Maravillosa Orquesta del Alcohol, which have lyrics that could well be material from a singer-songwriter.
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