La Vida Es Un Carnaval — Celia Cruz (1998)

Why this song

Most songs have an ending written into them. This one does not.

Its last stretch works like a game you already know. One person says something short. Everyone else answers with the same fixed line, every single time, never changing it. The first person can say anything; the others have one line only.

Play it for thirty seconds with the class and nobody has to explain it. It runs by itself, and it can keep running. That is call and response, and it is far older than recorded music. It also has a strange consequence: while it works, the song has no reason to stop.

Historical context

Start with the part almost nobody knows: the song is not Celia Cruz's. An Argentine wrote it, Víctor Daniel, and he wrote it out of a massacre.

On 18 July 1994 a bombing destroyed the AMIA building, a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires. Eighty-five people were killed. Víctor Daniel was working in Venezuela and saw a woman on television who had lost everything. He later said he spoke to the screen: "You mustn't cry, señora." That is where the line everyone sings comes from.

He kept the song for two years. When somebody from Celia Cruz's team asked him for something special for her, he sent the demo. She was not convinced by the introduction, but she recorded it as written. It came out in 1998 on the album Mi vida es cantar.

By the time she recorded it she had been unable to live in her own country for 38 years. She was born in Havana in 1925 and became famous there singing with the Sonora Matancera, the band in the cover photograph. In July 1960 she left Cuba for a few months' work in Mexico and was never able to go back.

Celia Cruz en La Habana, 1957, en una copia que firmó para una admiradora. Foto: Narcy Studios (Ibrahim Arce), dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

Her mother was dying and the Cuban government refused her permission to visit; her mother died in 1962 without seeing her. Cruz set foot on Cuban ground once more, in 1990, at the United States naval base at Guantánamo. On her way out she took a few grams of soil in a bag. When she died in 2003, that soil was placed in her coffin.

With that behind it, "no hay que llorar" stops sounding like a party line.

Musical characteristics

For the first three minutes the song moves forward like any other: verse, chorus, an instrumental stretch, verse again, chorus again.

Then it stops moving. A section begins in which nothing new arrives: a group of voices repeats one short line without ever altering it, and Celia sings different lines over the top. That is the montuno, and it is where the song is really decided.

The two jobs are opposites. The coro holds everything fixed — same words, same pitch, same place in the bar. Singing coro in this music is closer to playing an instrument than to singing.

Celia does the reverse. She makes up words and melody as she goes, in the gap the coro leaves her. That is called soneo, or pregón, and a singer who can do it is a sonero. Here it turns into a list: for those who complain, for those who only criticise, for those who mistreat people, for those who pollute. Every line lands in the same gap, so the list can run as long as she likes.

Inside those improvisations she drops her own word: "¡Azúcar!" It is not decoration. In this music the lead singer is allowed a personal mark inside the song, and that one is hers.

This explains the running time. The album cut is 4:37 — the official channel's upload reads 4:39 — but the live performance linked below runs 5:31. Nobody is padding it out. The montuno simply has no written ending; it stops when whoever is leading decides it stops.

Celia Cruz en un concierto en París, 11 de abril de 1980. Foto: Lionel Decoster, CC BY-SA 3.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

Underneath, almost nothing happens. Three chords going round, no surprises, so the only thing worth listening to is who sings what.

Hard facts: C minor, 4/4, 208 BPM on the class chart, 4:37. The three chords are Cm, A♭ and G7; in the version you play, transposed to A minor, they are Am, F and E7. Form: intro · verse · chorus · interlude · verse · chorus · interlude · montuno · interlude.

One warning about the 208: the chart counts at twice the speed of your foot. Tap the pulse the way you would in any other song and you get about 104. Salsa is fast on the inside and slow on the dance floor.

Trivia and curiosities

• Her father wanted her to be a schoolteacher, and she did enrol at the teacher training college in Havana. The person who talked her out of it was one of her own teachers, who pointed out that a singer earned in a day what a teacher earned in a month. The decision was not romantic. It was arithmetic.

• Cruz did not write it, and she did not write other songs just as closely identified with her: "Bemba colorá" is by José Claro Fumero. In this music the performer weighs as much as the author, because what a sonero does over the coro is written down nowhere.

• The song travelled a long way from a Buenos Aires bombing. It appears in the Mexican film Amores perros (2000) and the American film Antwone Fisher (2002); Daniela Mercury recorded it in Portuguese and Angélique Kidjo, from Benin, recorded her own version in 2019.

• The tidy story about her — she left Cuba and became a symbol of exile — is true but trimmed. In 2004 the Miami Herald published declassified US government files: she had been refused a visa in 1952 and 1955 over suspected communist links, and was only taken off that list in 1965. Her husband said she never talked politics. Famous people's biographies almost always arrive ironed flat.

• At her funeral in 2003 the singer Víctor Manuelle sang this song unaccompanied, unplanned, and that is how the service ended. A song written to console a stranger ended up doing exactly that.

Classroom activities

• Play: the three chords in A minor — Am, F, E7 — on a loop. With ukuleles, guitar, bass and drums all going at once, the test is not playing the song. It is keeping the loop alive for three minutes without it collapsing.

• Sing: build the montuno. Half the class is the coro, with one fixed four-syllable line they never change. One person sings different lines over the top, no repeats. Swap the soloist every minute so several people try it.

• Analyse: a closed question. Play the studio track (4:37) and the live performance (5:31) in Resources. Which section is longer in the live one, and how many times does the coro come round in each? Count them.

• Create: write a four-syllable coro about something in school, then a list of ten lines that fit the gap it leaves. Steal the procedure, not the song.

Key vocabulary

• Call and response — llamada y respuesta
• Montuno — montuno: la sección final que deja de avanzar y gira sobre sí misma
• Coro — coro: el grupo que repite siempre lo mismo
• Soneo — soneo: lo que el solista improvisa encima del coro
• Sonero — sonero: el cantante capaz de improvisar así

Resources

In Year 3 — this song also works for the unit ¿Cuándo empieza una melodía a decir de dónde eres?, from the theory and history book.

Official audio — the artist's channel has no music video for this song; this is the album cut.

Live, on Colombian television — 5:31, almost a minute longer than the record. Here you can see who sings the coro.

Ukulele tutorial — JCL Guitar. Chords, strumming and tab.

Guitar tutorial — JCL Guitar, same channel, same approach.

Bass tutorial — Tablaturas y Partituras, step by step.

Drums — Mónica Esparza. Thirty seconds: just the pattern, with the notation on screen.

The montuno on piano — Alex Rivas explains the figure that turns underneath the whole final section. It is this article's concept, played.

• Tab — https://www.songsterr.com/a/wsa/celia-cruz-la-vida-es-un-carnaval-tab-s737478 (drums, bass and two guitars)