¿Por qué en 1980 las canciones dejaron de sonar a traducción?

We ask ourselves

• Why is almost all the music you like in English?
• Is it actually harder to sing rock in Spanish, or does it only seem harder?
• Who decides which songs get heard at all?
• How much does it cost to record a record, and who puts up that money?
• If a band in your town does something good, how does anyone elsewhere find out?
• Why does almost no song name the place where you live?

Don't answer yet. We come back to these at the end.

The fragment

Before playing any song, we build a four-bar loop. Five people is plenty.

• Drums: kick on 1 and 3, snare on 2 and 4. Nothing else.
• Bass: the root of the chord on every beat.
• Guitar 1: two bars of A minor, two bars of G, in quarter notes.
• Guitar 2: the same, no decoration.
• Voice: silent for now.

Now the rest of the class joins in. Everyone writes one sentence of their own, six to ten syllables: a street, a time of day, a habit. They say it over the loop with one rule: the strong syllable of the last word must land on the snare, on beat four.

To manage that you have to decide which syllable you start on. That decision, and nothing else, is what a lyricist does.

Then try the same sentence in English. It will fit almost by itself: English swallows weak syllables and stretches them at will. Spanish pronounces nearly all of them. That is the problem these bands had to solve.

Now play Chica de ayer, all of it, with nobody talking over it.

What changed

The first change cannot be heard: it is who gets to record. Before 1980, a Spanish band without a major-label deal had a demo tape and little else. In 1982 Servando Carballar, of the band Aviador Dro, set up DRO to release his own records, and it ended up being the country's first independent label.

With a small label behind you, a song can be recorded in two afternoons and be out in weeks. That allows mistakes. It also allows releasing things no multinational would have considered worth the money.

The second change is that places to hear it appear. Radio 3 went on air on 1 July 1979, first as a late-night slot and from 1981 as a full station; Diario Pop started in 1982. On television, La edad de oro held a slot on La 2 from 17 May 1983 to 2 April 1985, presented by Paloma Chamorro, putting bands who sold almost nothing in front of a national audience.

And now the part you can hear. Before this, a Spanish band wanting to sound modern either sang in English or sang Spanish over melodies designed for English: long phrases, swallowed syllables, stresses in the wrong place. From 1980 the records that work do the opposite. The melody is written along the stress of Spanish, not against it.

The effect is specific. Phrases get shorter. There are more syllables per bar and nearly all of them sound. The text sits closer to speech, and that is why the lyrics start naming local things: Chica de ayer mentions El Penta, a Madrid bar, and Más Birras called a record Al este del Moncayo, after the mountain north of Zaragoza. The music stops being set in an imaginary America.

My own view, and I say it so you can argue with it: a lot of what was recorded in those years is clumsily played. What matters is not that it sounded good. It is that it sounded like 1982 and like Spain, instead of like 1972 and somewhere else.

Hard facts: DRO, 1982, absorbed Tres Cipreses in 1983 and bought GASA in 1984. Radio 3, 1 July 1979; a full station from 1981. The Canito tribute concert, 9 February 1980, at the Madrid school of civil engineering, is taken as the starting gun. The Spring Concert, 23 May 1981, drew more than 15,000 people at the school of architecture.

The same device elsewhere

Fitting your own language into a bar of music was not invented in 1980. These three solve it in different ways, and they are worth hearing back to back:

• La Gozadera, Gente de Zona and Marc Anthony (2015) — the chorus is a list of countries. Each name has to fit a fixed slot, so the names work as percussion.
• La verbena de la Paloma, by Tomás Bretón (1894) — in the habanera "¿Dónde vas con mantón de Manila?" two characters argue. The text runs close to how Madrid actually spoke, and the music bends to it.
• Konnakol, from southern India — the syllables do not accompany the rhythm: they are the rhythm. You learn a cycle by saying it aloud before you play it.

None is better than the others. In all three the stress of the language is in charge, and the music goes where the language leaves room.

Foto: Goldorak, CC BY-SA 4.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

And here at home?

Start with the honest part: "movida aragonesa" is a label applied afterwards. The Aragonese curriculum uses it, but the sources from here talk about the bands and, above all, about the Muestra. Spanish Wikipedia has an article on the Madrid movida and none on the Aragonese one.

Before any of this, song in Aragón was something else. The Nueva Canción Aragonesa, led by José Antonio Labordeta: a guitar, a text and almost no production. Canto a la libertad is from 1975. The Aragonese parliament rejected it as the official anthem on 15 September 2011, by 36 votes to 26.

Foto: Gregorio López, CC BY 2.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

The date that matters here is a different one. From 23 to 25 March 1984, in the French Pavilion of Zaragoza's old trade-fair ground, the I Muestra de Pop, Rock y Otros Rollos was held: around fifty Aragonese bands and more than 25,000 people over three days. It was organised by the GOM, a group of young people, with the city council's youth department.

It was not only music. Five of the city's free radio stations made their first joint broadcast there: Radio Antena, Radio La Sabina, Radio Cero, Radio Dharma and Canal 13. It is the same machinery as in Madrid, built by different people.

On that bill, separately and without knowing it, were the future Héroes del Silencio: the Valdivia brothers played in Zumo de Vidrio and Enrique Bunbury in Proceso Entrópico. They joined forces that same year, 1984. The band's name appeared in 1985, on the way to Radio Zaragoza with their first demo.

Also on the bill were the Golden Zippers, a rockabilly band who became Más Birras. Their singer was Mauricio Aznar. In 1987 they released Al este del Moncayo, and "Apuesta por el rock and roll" got out of Zaragoza because it was played on Diario Pop, on Radio 3. A Madrid radio show took a local band out of its neighbourhood: that is how the machine worked.

The venues arrived after the bands. En Bruto opened on 4 September 1986 on Calle Comandante Santa Pau. The council shut it four days later for lacking permits, and it reopened after public protest. That street is now called Calle Héroes del Silencio.

And there is a bridge between the two cities that hardly anyone mentions: Santiago Auserón was born in Zaragoza on 25 July 1954. He sang and wrote in Radio Futura, the Madrid band often called the creative peak of the movida. The voice of that peak was from Zaragoza.

A warning about the sound. Here the guitar, rockabilly and urban rock counted for more than the synthesiser. If you expect the Aragonese movida to sound like Mecano, it will not.

And one thing we do not hide. Heroin took many people of that generation across Spain. Mauricio Aznar died in Zaragoza on 2 October 2000, aged 36, of an overdose. It is not the subject of this unit, but it is part of its history, and leaving it out would be a lie.

Classroom activities

• While Chica de ayer plays: raise a hand every time the lyric names something concrete — a place, a time, an object. Afterwards we count the hands and say what each one was for.

• While Enamorado de la moda juvenil plays: half the class keeps the pulse with a foot. The other half counts how many times the title comes back. Compare the two numbers.

• While Apuesta por el rock and roll plays: clap along with the snare and notice whether the voice comes in before, on, or after that hit. There is no single right answer; the interesting part is that it does not always do the same thing.

• Play: build the four-bar loop from "The fragment" with the five of you, while the rest of the class throws their sentences over the top. Then La Gozadera: its full-band chart and tab are attached to its own article in the library, and it is the same problem solved in a different Spanish.

• Create: write eight lines about a street in your neighbourhood, with one condition: the last word of each line must be stressed on its final, penultimate or antepenultimate syllable depending on where you want the hit to land. Steal the procedure, not the song.

Key vocabulary

• Stressed syllable — sílaba tónica: la sílaba que se pronuncia con más fuerza y que debe caer en el golpe
• Snare hit / backbeat — golpe de caja: el acento en los tiempos 2 y 4
• Loop — bucle: una figura corta que se repite igual y hace de suelo
• Demo — maqueta: grabación barata que se manda a radios y sellos, no se vende
• Independent label — sello independiente: compañía pequeña, sin multinacional detrás

Resources

The songs in this unit are in the library, each with its own article, full-band chart and tab: Maquillaje, by Mecano.

The song of the unit — Chica de ayer, Nacha Pop (1980), written by Antonio Vega.

The other side of 1980 — Enamorado de la moda juvenil, Radio Futura, from their first album, Música moderna (1980).

What came out of Zaragoza — Apuesta por el rock and roll, Más Birras (1987), from the mini-LP Al este del Moncayo.

What followed the Muestra — Héroes del Silencio, Entre dos tierras, live in 1993 for RTVE.

Before the movida, in Aragón — Canto a la libertad, by José Antonio Labordeta (1975).

The same problem in Cuban Spanish — La Gozadera, Gente de Zona with Marc Anthony (2015).

The same problem in 1894 — "¿Dónde vas con mantón de Manila?", from La verbena de la Paloma, by Tomás Bretón.

Syllables as rhythm — an introduction to konnakol, with B. R. Somashekar Jois.

• More from this era — "The 1980s Musical Revolution: Synths, Screens and Sequencers", in the library.
• The other Madrid of 1982 — "Maquillaje", Mecano, in the library.
• Twenty years later, in Spanish — "Jesucristo García" and "La vereda de la puerta de atrás", by Extremoduro, in the library.