SwR Presents: Chilean & American Choreographies
music
Welcome to SwR’s music section. From time to time, we post playlists of what we’re listening to, compiled by the editors, our favorite writers, or guest DJs. For this edition, author Carlos Labbé has put together a playlist of Chilean and American songs to go with his newly translated novel, Spiritual Choreographies. Special thanks to translator Will Vanderhyden for assisting with this feature.
When you struggle with a split day-to-day—a working life versus a creative life, for instance—you dream of pairing distant realities and making all borders fluid, like the looking glass that’s carefully and playfully passed through in either direction without being broken.
No, I am not, once again, criticizing The Wall, or ranting against some entitled person who segregates the chosen few from the builders of their pyramids. When you love and dance in one language, but sing and earn a living in another, you dream in a third and far more inclusive way of speaking. An interaction that resembles music, a heightened dance—a choreography.
Southwest Review has asked me to write a score to that dreaming: to create an introduction to Chilean music as it relates to my new novel in English, Spiritual Choreographies (Open Letter Books, in bookstores on May 21), where each Chilean song is matched with some kindred tune from the U.S. Hopefully, this playlist will have the flow of a peculiar bilingual conversation between two strangers, in bed together after having met on the dancefloor.
—CL
1. Epigramas Mapuches (Ensemble Bartok)
Chile, like the names of most countries, is the label given to an arbitrary national construct, written over diverse ancient peoples, who will forever resist and never be included by Western capitalist culture. Their world is a living mystery, always glimpsed and impossible to share. Spiritual Choreographies opens with a voice that sounds atonal and old at the same time: the narrator is a former pop star with neglected indigenous roots. In this opening song, the haunting lead melody of Carmen Luisa Letelier, her lyrics in the Mapuzungun language backed by the string section of this composition by Eduardo Cáceres, is a reminder that cultural appropriation may be a chilling call for understanding.
2. Tukiliit (Lisa Moore, John Luther Adams)
Just a slow piano over silence to convey the same problem of origin in “American” culture. Tukiliit is an Inuit word that means “the stone people who live in the wind.” In the same way that, for the Mapuche people in the Southern Cone of the continent, the world is plural and never singular, for the Inuit of the North, the wind has a voice, a chorus of many mineral creatures. How can we understand an origin beyond the enigmatic and the elegiac? How can we move with grace to the tune of our misunderstandings and appropriations?
3. Sacar la Voz (Ana Tijoux)
Spiritual Choreographies is an account of pop music as an emotional overcoming of the everyday divide, at the risk of appropriating and allowing just one great voice to speak for a million different identities. In my novel and in Chilean music, women—the current, ongoing Feminist revolution that I hope will change modern social structures at their roots—have the main role. Ana Tijoux is a Chilean rapper who grew up in political exile in France and then became a pop star with her young band Makiza. In 2011 she delivered a game-changer and simple proposal: raise your voice (“sacar la voz”).
4. Sorry (Beyoncé)
Ana Tijoux’s and Beyonce’s stories are similar, only that the latter grew up in the most developed pop-star system in the world. Destiny’s Child and Makiza, their teen groups, empowered them collectively to lead a defiant takeover of their industry, just as the female percussionist in my novel is the most important character in the otherwise all-male band, because she surpasses it. Those powerful voices of sorrow and anger are a transformative wind—not stone people in the wind anymore—that will keep blowing until the game is fairly arranged.
5. Él Es Mi Ídolo (Los Prisioneros)
The focus of Spiritual Choreographies pans from the old vocalist in his wheelchair to the percussionist who, along with the guitarist and their son, formed a non-monogamist family with him. It’s not the story of the fall or redemption of a music idol, but the narrative of his replacement in the preeminent place by the collective. Los Prisioneros are the most famous Chilean band ever, not just because of their ironic anti-/pro-Pinochet cultural anthems in the 1980s but also because they showed how a working-class hero, their vocalist and composer Jorge González, seemed tamed during the decades following Pinochet’s coup, only to become the model for the Chilean pop renaissance of the 2000s and also, to some extent, for the initial voice of my novel.
6. What Have I Done to Deserve This (Pet Shop Boys)
The Pet Shop Boys are from England, and so is their wit. But, as a well-known part of the dance and LGBTQ scenes in the United States, they serve as the perfect parallel for the ego-fantasy reflection of the previous song. The unexpected turns in its infectious rhythm and chorus sound a lot like the imaginary early hits of The Band in Spiritual Choreographies sounded in my head.
7. Y Volveré (Los Ángeles Negros)
This song from 1970 became ubiquitous throughout Latin America. It’s a frequently covered song and a major influence on the Onda Grupera, a music scene that flourished around the US–Mexico border during the 1990s. It will always stand as a deep source of the melancholy of exile. The first Chilean band to become internationally famous leave the country and lose themselves to globalism, only to rediscover what they meant to one another after breaking up and coming back together as an immigrant community—one of the themes of Spiritual Choreographies. Formed in San Carlos, deep in the Central Chilean countryside, Los Ángeles Negros now play regularly in Mexico City, New Jersey, and Southern California.
8. Make It Easy on Yourself (The Walker Brothers)
This song debuted in 1965 in the US, and became a hit as big as “Y Volveré.” The Walker Brothers, like Los Ángeles Negros, performed songs written by other artists (Bacharach & David in this case), just like an author-in-the-making obsessively reads the work of others before penning her own very different books. “ ’Cause breaking up is so very hard to do,” sings the late Scott Walker about no longer being in a collective of artists. In that way, he’s another obscure model for the vocalist/singer who starts out as the main character in my novel.
9. Otra Era (Javiera Mena)
In the chapter 0 of Spiritual Choreographies, the standard rock and roll boy-meets-girl stories that come and go during the first part of the book are replaced by the love story of two people who are not attracted to each other because of gender differences, but for other reasons. Javiera Mena, the Chilean dance-club superstar, sings in this 2014 queer hit that falling for someone special is to meet a body from the future, from a different age—which is not speculative fiction at all, but a fact, if you stay with that person long enough.
10. Seasons (Future Islands)
The reverse of Javiera Mena is this song from an “American” male-only band, released the same year. Just as imaginative in the use of keyboards and synths, the song showcases through its lyrics the other side of this different age of gender inclusion and feminist socioeconomic justice: people who do not raise their voices, who just observe and wait, and wait, for the next change to come, never understanding that their role is always fundamental.
11. Arriba Quemando el Sol (Violeta Parra)
Indeed, when you leave others to make the decisions, people like Piñera or Trump get elected president in Chile or The United States. In 1962, Violeta Parra, the most important Chilean singer–songwriter, performed this lament about the woes of mine workers in the sun-drenched deserts and mountains of northern Chile. The rhythm has appropriate echoes of Quechua and Mapuche music. Her vocals call for justice for the miners, and in the final lines she recognizes that, when she tells people in the city what she saw in the north, they think it’s all a fanciful story. As an homage, the middle section of Spiritual Choreographies is a children’s tale about social injustice with an epic resolution.
12. Lonesome Valley (The Fairfield Four)
Yes, it’s not right that somebody like me only heard this ninety-year-old Tennessee gospel group for the first time in a Coen Brothers’ movie. That fact demonstrates the racial disparity that, for years, kept them from becoming a classic music act at the center of the “American” canon. Just like Violeta Parra, these musicians research, perform, and re-create music found in the depths of their homelands. But that homeland is not ours, because some have been forced to come, and some—too alive to belong—may not be welcomed in the valley of the death.
13. Vete Dolor (Los Jaivas)
Continuing in the vein of “Lonesome Valley,” this track is about chasing away grief and loneliness with music and dance—something both rock and indigenous ceremonial music can achieve. And that is what Los Jaivas, the great Chilean experimental band and family-collective, do with grace on this track from 1972. In that same sense, I tried to do my part for Chilean literature in Spiritual Choreographies: to dispel melancholic themes by recalling the electricity and the percussion of a socially just erotic encounter, therefore echoing the wonderful spirit of my country’s Unidad Popular exuded by this song.
14. Friend of the Devil (The Grateful Dead)
This Faustian track from 1970 has a more cynical approach to the one it is paired with, but The Grateful Dead are in many ways as beloved in the US, grassroots, and arcane, as Los Jaivas in Chile. The horrible first-person narrator must be a minor demon lost in the Lonesome Valley, shouting “Vete Dolor” in his own way over a delightful country tune—to me this was the inspiration of the men who spit on the windshield of The Band’s minivan in the fifth Chapter 7 of Spiritual Choreographies.
15. Historias Verdaderas (Rebel Diaz)
Aptly titled, and built over a loop of an Andean wind instrument, this last year’s poignant hip-hop narrative is dedicated by the Bronx Chilean-Americans of Rebel Diaz to all their relatives and friends in Chicago, Toronto, Central America, the Caribbean, Chile, etc. Spiritual Choreographies follows the band members to so many locations that the “Corrections,” or chapters rewritten to build a sort of memoir, had to remove the place names to align them with three political regions, the Empire, the Central Empire, and the Anti-Empire. It shouldn’t be hard to guess the locations in my novel, though. I should add that even though the members of Rebel Diaz live in NYC, given that they sing about the Latinx diaspora, they belong to the realm of the Anti-Empire.
16. DUCKWORTH. (Kendrick Lamar)
So, the two previous songs can be mirrored by this Pulitzer winner’s contemplation of damnation and karma, and what happens when, just five minutes ago, somebody was shot in the same intersection where you are now, and you were trying to leave home five minutes before to get to work on time—but what if you don’t have a job, or if you live in a fairly rich neighborhood and you’re the only Latino on your street? You can even replace the names of Anthony and Ducky from this 2017 Kendrick Lamar song with el Rodri and el Julito from the Rebel Diaz song.
17. Latinoamericana (Alex Anwandter)
Many macho shootings and Faustian Lonesome Valleys later, let’s go back to Violeta Parra and her everlasting presence in Chilean music. The title track from last year’s album by Alex Anwandter, the other current diva of our dancefloors along with Javiera Mena, is a conversation around what national inclusion means in this new era where all kinds of identities are demanding participation and that their voices be heard. What does it mean when a Latin-American song, novel, work of art, must be validated by “America” or Europe in order to be considered from a wider perspective? The second and the second-to-last chapters of Spiritual Choreographies are set in a reality where Anglo food, Spanish music, Hindi meditations, and Qullasuyu movies mutually cannibalize one another instead of separately appropriating and exploiting every single origin for marketing purposes.
18. Is It Cold in the Water? (SOPHIE)
Dancing across from Alex Anwandter on this dancefloor, SOPHIE brings electronic introspection to the last part of the list. This song from last year inspires me to defend the most experimental chapters of my novel—roughly the last part of the book—where you don’t know who’s doing what. Instead, it should only matter that three individuals are sitting naked around a bonfire, that they feel cold after night swimming in a lake, and that, at the same time, they feel connected when they start singing in unison at dawn.
19. Diamantes (Princesa Alba)
Spiritual Choreographies is a populist novel, so it calls for the inclusion of one of the greatest performers in today’s most democratic music genre: Feminist Trap. Princesa Alba’s voice is as appealing as the liquidity of her production, mostly for the gentle ferocity of her lyrics, where she reclaims the autonomy of her dancing. If you find yourself aroused by the movement of her body, it’s you who must deal with it, not her as an object. That establishment of the agency of all bodies during the process of desire is something I wanted to document by shifting focus between characters.
20. Con Altura (Rosalía, J Balvin)
Reggaeton is another very popular genre, but nobody could say it is democratic, with its traditionally misogynistic and unfeeling lyrics. Until now, in this new era, when women take control of the narrative. In this 2019 song, the Gypsy-Spaniard Rosalía uses the Colombian-American J Balvin’s production to elevate the genre and infuse it with pride, gravity, and inclusivity. Something I constantly wondered when writing Spiritual Choreographies was how believable it was that a musical act with depth and social awareness could become the most famous band in the world. Now, it seems, it might not be too wild an imagining.
21. Es Tan Difícil Reconocer A la Gente en Traje de Baño (Carlos Labbé)
I must be a fool for including one of my songs on this list. Anyway, this one is from my album “Mi Nuevo Órgano” (2011), and I would like it to be the final 2’48’’ page of Spiritual Choreographies, when the four-membered Anti-Imperial family that used to be a famous band go to the beach and ask themselves: Should we go forward into the sea, or should we go back?
22. Strawberry Cookies (Julian Lynch)
The rhythm machine from the previous song slowly fades into this track from 2019, entering into a deep state of bliss I wish would never end as we dance, read, and listen to one another—as if we might still find time and the right pace to do everything. The final voice is gentle, brief, resolute: one last great correction to the separation.
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