Indio Solari: A Poet Who Broke Down Class Barriers

A mute with your voice / a blind person like me

Listening to Indio Solari, whether with Patricio Rey or Los Fundamentalistas, has always been a pleasure and a challenge. The essence of my experience doesn't come from one or the other, but from the conjunction, the space that connects that aesthetic enjoyment with discomfort, with the roughness of a fluctuating pleasure. I will try to talk a bit about that. Let me clarify: this is not a tribute, it's a memory for the future.

It was Christmas 1992, and under the tree, Santa Claus had left me Gulp. My house had been filled with Redondos for a few months because my sister, four years older than me, brought all the musical novelties from her friends: among other influences that marked me, in the CD holder, alongside Ramones Manía and the black album by Metallica, we had La mosca y la sopa, which played non-stop while in the dining room of our family apartment, I pretended to be the Indio with a broom, trying to imitate steps I had never seen performed but that Lucas, a schoolmate whose brother, a nearly mythical figure who had seen Patricio Rey live, had taught me. A few days later, Un baión para el ojo idiota and Oktubre joined the others.

In March, when classes started, a girl named Sabina, no more than twenty, began working at our house. She had already worked at an aunt's house and came to ours to do the cleaning. While I was getting ready to leave for school, Un baión was blasting, and Sabina told me she loved the Redondos, that she had seen them with her husband and that they danced to that music on weekends at a club. Before continuing, let me clarify a point: I was raised in a middle-class family in Parque Chacabuco that, while having traits of a progressive mindset (my first political gesture was to clasp my hands like Alfonsín on either side of my head, much to my grandmother's delight, who was then a radical), also gathered all the class prejudices you can imagine. Finding out that Sabina, who lived in a little house, as she called it, went to see the Redondos and danced to that music created an immediate bridge between us, opening a common territory over the abyss of differences, something we would continue to talk about in the days and weeks that followed. As someone raised in the comforts of that middle class, I didn't need to wait to see the interview in which the Indio immortalized that phrase; I think it was enough for me to listen to those records and open myself to the encounters that that music would bring me in the following years, no longer in the family apartment, but on the corners of the neighborhood, as I digested the first blows among the cobblestones.

Finding out that Sabina, who lived in a little house, as she called it, went to see the Redondos and danced to that music created an immediate bridge between us, opening a common territory over the abyss of the differences.

Today, looking back, I feel that something began to crack within me. Something about that education in private school and the warmth of the social class in which I was raised. How could that possibility have come about, one among many similar experiences for my generation? I won't delve into sociological reflections or the evident emotional magic of passion. Today, in the midst of mourning for such a powerful symbolic father, another path emerges. Because what stands out in this matter is the functioning of an aesthetic that arose from the underground of experimentation, in the writing of a guy who could have belonged to the cult of a reduced literary world, like that of poetry, or Revista Literal alongside Osvaldo Lamborghini or Luis Gusmán, rather than to the most significant mass cultural movement/bands in Argentine history (and, I dare say, Latin American history at least).

What is this aesthetic made of, a source or spring for expressing mute pains and, at the same time, a device for recognizing that pain in others, for those whose ailments were mere trifles compared to a stomach growling from hunger and a body suffering from racism? How is that shared territory constructed, always destined for a possible or desired future?

The work of the Indio is the highest expression of an aesthetic mandate that is generally foreign to the common sense of consumption: the effectiveness of form, against the empire of semantic imposition. This doesn't mean that certain recognizable significants don't flow through his lyrics, palpable to a national culture. Making language a zone of experimentation and making the tongue a flexible, malleable tool against the traps it can be subjected to due to the obligations it demands (to paraphrase Roland Barthes a bit). The Indio spoke to the ears of the mute and slapped the blindness of class prejudices. He proposed the illusion of a shared voice, a common space that became a catalyst for those pains hidden in the magic carpet of social oblivion, and a means of recognition to understand that between that pain and the world's indifference was precisely where the possibility of the common lay, what belongs to everyone without being anyone's but that acts in each one, like the force of gravity or the effect of alcohol. The work of the Indio, between Patricio Rey and the Fundamentalistas, invented that gesture of effectiveness for aesthetic form in Argentine culture.

The Indio (and here I try to avoid a cliché to give a different direction to the commonality of the places we traverse) did not give voice to anyone. The dogma of giving voice repulses me because it reproduces the unequal relationship of those who have and those who do not. The Indio made a huge mass of people find a voice. He didn't hand it to them prefabricated; they had to knot and unknot it among lyrics that floated with irregular significations, phrases for tattoos, and existences for that which is so often named and so rarely found: the Other. Each other. The Indio articulated something beyond words in those significants that floated like balloons to cling to in order to survive a shipwreck. Rationalization was not an option: neither those that, some years later, we would find in the reception as persistent metaphors of the drug in every verse, just to justify our presence there, those nights, sifting through the papers of urgency; nor the others we saw as instructions for surviving love's pains because we were neither clowns nor champions.

The Indio made a huge mass of people find a voice. He didn't hand it to them prefabricated; they had to knot and unknot it among lyrics that floated with irregular significations, phrases for tattoos, and existences.

The Indio's aesthetic was a way of telling those of us who were educated as special and unique that we weren't that special after all. And it was the common language of those who found there the promised but never fulfilled future. The future that never arrived, that which remains hidden in the reverse of an era that stretches for another time, always postponed, the longed-for life. Thus, those lyrics that, as Pierre Froidevaux says in another note from 421, represent “one of the greatest tremors we have known,” affirm themselves in a perspective on the aesthetic in which form becomes the creation of a meeting space that did not exist prior to the musical act itself. The Indio, between the Redondos and the Fundamentalistas, participated (and made us participants) in a Big Bang Bang! foundational that brought together the dispersed and invented the unexpected. A music that opened a gash in reality so that those mute voices could resonate and so that the blindness of so many could experience his poetics as a guide in the storm.

Because there lies another of the inexplicable knots of Solari's feat: how to link the Redondos, towards what more or less intelligible past to direct a genealogical understanding of their foundational explosion and their work? If we think about what happened after the Redondos, the musical lineage is clear: La Renga, Callejeros, Los Piojos, Los Caballeros de la Quema, the imitators of his voice tone: in all of them, we can recognize a resonance of Patricio Rey's spirit. But, being autonomists in the rock field, nothing anticipates the emergence of the Redondos. It is a displaced origin that must be sought in the culture of the underground, in the theatricality of the first concerts, in the ricotta fritters handed out by El Doce, in Monona's dance. All the scaffolding creates the illusion of a rise from nothing. Patricio Rey is born in a performatized mythology as ex nihilo for the world of rock.

That figure who appears on the stages of massiveness with four decades behind him and who does not conform to the eternal ground of rock youth, I saw in an outfit that was the same my dad could wear to go out to dinner with the family on a Saturday night, and the icon of the rock star look crumbled. What was there that did not conform to any parameters I had learned from the videos of Music21 or MTV? Solari commanded respect. Solari displaced me from Freddy Mercury, Axel Rose, James Hetfield, all those musicians who opened a door for me when I saw the tribute to Freddy. The Indio did not. And where to find the Indio? Where to see the display of that wildness that was painted in the language of school and adults when one misbehaved (you look like an Indian!)? Solari was the announcement of something else. Solari announced with that unique voice. Solari unsettled, opening the imaginary possibility of another world. With that voice. Solari was a lot.

How (the question remains or the symptom of something that pierces the words, that work so experimental and so radical in the evasion of direct meaning) could that space be created that first brought me closer to Sabina, that young woman who cleaned the dining room of my house while I listened to music and while our lives ran on parallel and untouchable tracks like any straight line projected into the infinity of its concept? It is not necessary, I repeat now that the insistence overwhelms me, to seek the precise answer. Because the answer does not exist. Now, I tell myself, it is better to think that the failure of that explanation does not lie so much in the perspective I adopt or in the data I could collect about our culture. Now, I convince myself, none of that is useful because if something imposes itself on me, if an idea prevails over any other intuition or deduction, it is that this possibility did not preexist the work of the Indio. That subjective fissure was inaugurated by that work. A work that invented that possibility, and that possibility, once opened, directed the destiny of that work. Perhaps the only similar phenomenon in the Argentine scene to think of is Leonardo Favio and the box office success of Juan Moreira, a great blockbuster of our cinema, only surpassed in massiveness by Relatos salvajes, by Damián Szifron, forty years later.

What was there that did not conform to any parameters I had learned from the videos of Music21 or MTV? Solari commanded respect. Solari displaced me from Freddy Mercury, Axel Rose, James Hetfield.

Returning to the previous point: to think about the before, one must step out of rock, go to literature, theater, cinema. In any case, we must also go beyond music and art, and shift to the communal, to the encounter of bodies and their mutual enjoyment, to the resonances of voices in song. Step out of the confines, uproot the aesthetic object in the territory of the common, of shared possession, of lack of ownership; distance it from the desire closed upon itself, suited for fun and permanence in the same: the private. The work of the Indio is a form of escape, of distancing from the known to keep the mood safe; with the caveat, allow me the redundancy, that this mood is no longer individual, but occurs when bodies know themselves more than their extremities and words appear as objects of passion that have lost their instrumental condition. Now, it is the subject itself, unleashed in interaction with the other, who becomes the instrument of a melody that reinserts him into life, costing only itself. In the life that thus installs itself, as an event, an unpredictable emergence, but always sustained in the passionate affections with which a common destiny is defended that is snatched away for inhabiting a horizon of unfulfilled promises, before a landscape surrounded by them: there we see them, those formidable warriors in a Jeep (Grand Cherokee, no doubt) preparing, like the titans they are, to defend the virile order of individual enjoyment, of white plumage, of property. The time that opens this work is one in which anyone can demand their turn to throw.

At first, then, there would be nothing. Nothing. And although Juan José Saer can provide a phrase, the history of the Redondos would be nothing more than an anecdotal datum in the book of the memories of the underground or rock if the inexplicable had not occurred, that which creates that space where pain and its recognition, the blind and the mute, voices and gazes, find a possible future, a common destiny that brings them together, and tells them: we are part.

The phrases of the Indio, spoken by the most heterogeneous sectors of society, are like the verses of Martín Fierro, wandering between an impossible authorship and the pure folklorization of the linguistic fact. In that horizon, my encounter with Sabina in the dining room of my house is re-signified: we are no longer two people of different ages and social classes and lifestyles in tension who met there. It was, better seen, the entrance to a language, to a tradition in the making, to a commonality that I cannot help but think of as a people to come, when I hear journalists revel in the rejection of the other who is suffering, now, in mourning (“those are not the people,” “those are lumpens, a zoological mob”), while they enjoy the ephemeral New Rome that shelters them in the fleeting moment of a transitory hegemony (as others have been before). A people that does not overlap with that of the nation but disputes a place, a possible way of being among wolves and lambs, all equally tied and untied. Seen this way, then, in the retroactive gesture that founds every meaning for human existence in this world, the work of the Indio modified the shared future or, even more: the very sensitive fabric that allows us to imagine it.

A million people visiting the inert coffin of a cold body attest to this.