I have told it before but, like all good stories (at least for me), I think it deserves to be told again, because it was something too transcendent that, in a very precise way, would mark the beginning of a sentimental education.
It happened one night in 1964, when I was about nine years old, and a relative of mine showed up at my house with a friend because our old family record player still worked. And in Cuba at that time, where this or, I think, any other household electrical equipment had not been sold for years, having a television that could be watched or a record player that worked was a treasure.
My cousin and his friend honored me that night with the privilege of attending a miracle: because they wanted to try out a “record” before paying the fortune they were supposedly asking for it. A record, it is necessary to explain, was a cardboard circle, the size of a 78 rpm record, on which a magnetized sheet was adhered, on which, by alchemical procedures, music could be recorded. Don’t ask me how, the fact is that it worked. And the record in question contained, just arrived in Cuba, two songs by some English boys who were stirring up the world. Those four young men had formed a group called The Beatles and the record had two of their most recent hits printed on it: A Hard Day’s Night and And I Love Her.
That night, as we listened to those songs, I was experiencing one of my most memorable shocks. A true epiphany. Because that music became not only a notch in my sensitivity, but above all, an indelible acquisition, creating an addiction from which I would never recover.
It was also during those years that I had begun to outline my literary tastes. It was that time when we lost our intellectual virginity reading novels by Jules Verne and Emilio Salgari. However, it was when I read The Count of Monte Cristothe novel by Alexandre Dumas, and I suffered each of the vicissitudes of its characters, the moment in which I discovered the power of seduction and manipulation of good literature.
In that same country and time when we often accessed music and books through alternative routes, my friends from the neighborhood and I used to go to Havana movie theaters and, without having a clear idea of the privilege we were beneficiaries of, we were able to see films by directors such as François Truffaut, Luchino Visconti, Akira Kurosawa, Andrzej Wajda, Stanley Kubrick, Carlos Saura or Federico Fellini, and we added to our possessions the stories of The Leopard, of Rocco and his brothers, of the perverse but likeable Ripley of Full sun.
We were growing up, we were almost adults when we were able to experience the no less illuminating moment when, like an explosion with noise and everything (boom!), Almost by generational mandate, we had to read some writers who became fashionable, because the risk of not doing so was that you could lose references, be excluded from conversations. And we became faithful readers of Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Juan Rulfo, Alejo Carpentier, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who added the morbidity that we had to read his work with the cover covered to hide the fact that it was Three sad tigersAnd we would take those books out, I think, from under the rocks, perhaps from the same ones from which we took the cassettes of that salsa music that was not broadcast in Cuba and that made us dance, while we learned the songs of Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés and the interpretations of Joan Manuel Serrat that led us to read Antonio Machado… And with that soundtrack, those moving images, those books, we became adults and owners of artistic preferences that gave us a privileged sentimental education.
Each era, as we know, has its own cultural expression. And the one that my generation was lucky enough to have in its formative years happened at a time when no one even dreamed of the existence of personal computers and mobile phones or means of communication and information such as the Internet, email or social networks. The technological revolution that began a few years later, that leap that meant the transition to the digital era, has surely been one of the greatest social and cultural revolutions that humanity has ever experienced. Access to information and artistic consumption is becoming cheaper and more democratic, the paths to knowledge and aesthetic enjoyment are multiplying, and young people growing up in the 21st century could consider themselves much more privileged than those with such rudimentary possibilities as those of my formative years.
But something has happened in societies, or something has been made to happen in them and this process has a lot to do with the sentimental education that those who are now living the fullness of adolescence and youth are receiving. To begin with, the references have changed and, for example, many of the Best sellers that they read are signed by influencers either youtubers recyclable.
And, well, we already know that culture is a living organism, that evolves, and we should not be conservative when judging the preferences of the present, because it is likely that we do so from our prejudices as beings who came from the past. Let us admit that today, as a reflection of the times, the youngest inhabitants of our environments may prefer musical modalities such as reggaeton or dembow adopted by Hispanic musicians from the Caribbean, and cultivated by megastars such as Bad Bunny, Karol G., Yailín la Más Viral, or the Dominican Tokischa.
That angelic Tokischa—she claims her name means “an angel fallen from heaven”—, shining star of the dembowhas had notable successes with pieces such as Offenderwhich he performs with his colleagues Anuel AA and Ñengo Flow, a creation whose video reached nearly 100 million views and in which the artists deliver a whole vision of the world. The song, melodically elemental as corresponds to the genre, goes beyond the vulgar to peek into porn, verbally expressed and illustrated with scatological and sexist images of buttocks and pelvis in movements that seem more zoological than human, while focusing on someone defecating. So explicit in its messages is Offenderlike the collaboration between the very famous Rosalía and Tokischa, the super hit Beautifulin which one of them claims that she is late for the gay date because she was having sex (in other words) with another voracious lover… The most striking thing about the performances of several of these artists is that their work is supported by large entertainment and business conglomerates. In other words, their origins as “urban” and nonconformist are often forgotten. dembow and their relatives today form part of the mainstream cultural.
It is already known that juvenile fevers can have extreme expressions. But it is also known that the traces of a sentimental education greatly mark the destiny of people. And if manifestations such as dembow It is a reflection of the art in vogue at this time (in reality it is a consequence of certain causes), because I am going to rescue my old record player to listen to it for the umpteenth time. A Hard Day’s Night.
