Gustavo Cerati & Soda Stereo - The Art-Rock Mirror of Buenos Aires
A multi-talented artist, a refined vocalist, a manipulator of sound capable of tackling multiple eras of rock, Gustavo Cerati is one of Argentina's national heroes. Two years after his untimely death on 4 September 2014, we retrace his career, first at the helm of the legendary Soda Stereo and later as a solo artist
It's May 15, 2010. Gustavo Adrián Cerati is in the midst of his new tour and has just finished a concert in Caracas when he's struck by a stroke. Rushed to hospital, he never recovers. Four years of coma follow, with half of Latin America clinging to the faint hope of a miraculous awakening that will never come. The curtain falls on September 4, 2014, from respiratory arrest. He had just turned fifty-five.
In Argentina especially, the loss is felt as immense, given that he is, in every sense, a symbol of the country's culture and national identity. Even though everyone is aware that he had been in an irreversible state, the grief is palpable in every newscast, radio program, TV special and newspaper article.
It doesn't help that, just two years earlier, cancer had claimed Luis Alberto Spinetta, the elder statesman of Argentine rock and Cerati's mentor. In a fairly short span of time, the nation found itself without two figures who had seemed eternal, yet who instead faded away while still quite young.
In the winter of 1982, the war for the Falkland Islands is by now lost, and Argentina is about to enter a new phase of its history. Gustavo is twenty-three, works half-heartedly at an advertising agency, and in his spare time pursues musical projects of little consequence. It's during a concert that he comes into contact with bassist Héctor "Zeta" Bosio, whom he knew by sight from his university days. The two hit it off and decide to form a new band, convinced they can break free of the amateur cover-band circuit they'd been confined to up to that point.
Charly Alberti they meet in a completely random way. The young drummer is, in fact, infatuated with Gustavo's sister, who is anything but inclined to return his interest. Acting as the dutiful brother, Cerati answers a phone call from the lovestruck admirer to try to talk him out of it, and in the course of the conversation discovers that he's the son of jazz musician Tito Alberti and is himself a musician. They decide to meet, and a few days later the core of Soda Stereo is complete. For a brief period, Cerati's guitar is joined by that of his friend Richard Coleman, who leaves after just a few months once he becomes convinced his contribution is superfluous to the success of the songs. He nonetheless remains on good terms with the trio, later crossing paths with them again on several occasions.
The band's name changes almost immediately from Los Estereotipos to Soda Stereo. It's meant as a provisional label, but after the first gigs, interviews and posters, it's never changed again.
The striking name is not to be underestimated when analyzing the trio's iconography. "Soda", as is fairly obvious, evokes a pop culture that's fizzy and light, perhaps tied to the American Graffiti-style mythology of 1950s drive-ins. In Argentina, the same word is also used for the seltzer syphon, used not just at bars but at the table, in every home. Despite the three young men's refined aspirations, the name ends up becoming a nod to the everyday habits of the local middle class, and the word "stereo" seems to point at the same target, being cutting-edge technology that was in some way a symbol of economic growth.
For Argentina, the post-Falklands period is something akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall. First timidly, then with growing courage and popular support, bans, blacklists, official censorship and, in a more psychologically profound sense, self-censorship all start to crumble. Artists in exile, sometimes forced and sometimes self-imposed, return to the country; names, faces and values unknown to the new generations are rediscovered. The new Latin American song, folklore-oriented but in a more elaborate key, and above all free of genre or national boundaries, starts to cause a sensation, in a climate of brotherhood with other nations that share, beyond language, so many cultural, political and social traits. "Canción con todos", sung by Mercedes Sosa on the historic album "En Argentina", recorded live in Buenos Aires in February 1982, seems to sum up the spirit of the moment well. In those days and months of democratic transition, the wider public (not just insiders or left-wing militants) discovers and falls in love with, for instance, the Cuban nueva trova of singer-songwriters like Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés.
Before returning for those historic dates at the Teatro Opera, Mercedes Sosa had gotten in touch with figures from the rock nacional scene, recognizing the originality of their forms and the urgency of their language. And even facing the reticence of her fellow artists from the canción social and proyección folclórica movements, she wants to collaborate with rock musicians and promote them, understanding that they too represent a new, dynamic form of Latin American popular song. The hoped-for transition, from the darkness of dictatorship to the bright horizon of freedom, also requires overcoming internal barriers of prejudice, and Argentine popular music, in its various generic facets, manages to do just that.
It should be said that up to that point the audience for Argentine rock had been a metropolitan middle-class phenomenon, concentrated mainly in Buenos Aires, La Plata and the surrounding area. And that it was snubbed or viewed with a certain suspicion both by militant leftists, who mostly considered it silly and backward-looking, and by conservative populism, scandalized by long hair, electric "stridency" and the music's foreign aura.
The Argentine nueva ola, at least initially, besides the obstacles already mentioned, also had to contend with a further dogmatism: that of the roqueros who already had some fifteen glorious years behind them. Artists attempting a change of style in those years generally had to endure the indifference or outright rejection of large swathes of the audience.
The most striking case is Virus, one of the most important bands in the history of Spanish-language rock. Led by the elegant, brilliant figure of Federico Moura, they stoically withstood repeated commercial flops, critical attacks, even having oranges thrown at them (as happened in 1981 at the Prima Rock festival in Ezeiza), before achieving major success a few years later. Among other things, they exerted the first clear local influence on the music of Soda Stereo.
It's likely that the similarity between the two bands stems from shared listening habits (progressive rock, Anglophone new wave, local singer-songwriters) and from the fact that the two bands socialized with each other, to the point of forming a bond outside of work as well. The fact remains that by the time Soda Stereo, discovered by talent scout Horacio Martínez, were getting ready to record an album for Cbs, Virus had already released three, and Federico Moura stood as a beacon for anyone interested in sounds other than the dominant jazzy pop-rock of the local scene.
Moura is soon drawn into the project and ends up producing the band's historic debut album, simply titled Soda Stereo. It's a respectable new wave record, but it matters more as a turning point than as an achievement, more significant than fully realized.
Moura makes the mistake of overrating the trio, believing their obvious, enormous potential already amounts to full stylistic maturity. His direction is uncritical; Soda Stereo are indulged without anyone pointing out the album's structural flaws. It should also be said that, as always, only those who were there can truly judge how much of that completely flat-sounding production was due to miscalculation and how much to the limited capabilities of the studio made available by Cbs, which by all accounts was rather outdated. Still, the monotony of certain passages and the excessive deference to their models (Virus, Specials, Police) can't be blamed on a lack of budget.
It's no coincidence that the album's best track, “Trátame suavemente”, is a loan from his friend Daniel Melero, an amateur musician who, thanks to his remarkable intuitive talent, would soon go on to become one of the grey eminences of rock nacional.
“Trátame suavemente” is Soda's first masterpiece. Partly because it showcases Cerati's vocal talent, able to fuse rock energy with crooner-style romanticism while maintaining a crystalline tonal purity (he almost never sounds rough or hoarse); and partly for the arrangement, which breaks away from the overexcited, ska-derived tones of the rest of the tracklist to create an archetype of atmospheric rock, with the bass up front, incessant guitar harmonics, and decorative synth.
In the lyrics, Melero taps into the intimate vein that has always been typical of Argentine rock: “You behave according to the dictates of the moment, and this inconstancy isn't something heroic, it's rather something sick. I don't want to dream the same things a thousand times, or contemplate them wisely, I want you to treat me gently”.
Cerati's lyrics, on the other hand, carry a sarcastic charge that was a sign of the times, itself another trait shared with Virus, replacing the naive, fairy-tale vein of the previous decade. The post-hippie yearning for a bucolic refuge, somewhere to escape the harrowing reality, gives way to the description of raw, realistic metropolitan landscapes, at once alienating and alluring.
The trend comes through both in the titles, genuine modern manifestos (“Te hacen falta vitaminas”, “Sobredosis de T.V.”, “Dietético”), and in the lyrics, among which the verses of “Un misil en mi placard” stand out: “Qualcosa è successo, una strana sensazione, un presentimento. Ho dovuto smettere di fare l’amore all’istante. Sono andato alla ricerca di un riparo/cappotto*, faceva freddo. Accesi una sigaretta, avevo paura. E lì l’ho visto, un missile nel mio armadio, un modello da costruire, ma mai da disarmare” (*Doppio senso della parola “abrigo”).
This is also Cerati's first literary quotation: the “modello da costruire”, i.e. “modelo para armar”, is in fact a title by Julio Cortázar, who died that very year.
A classic case of the right band at the right time, Soda became famous almost overnight, immediately selling 60,000 copies in Argentina and around 100,000 between Chile and Peru. Their strong showing beyond national borders would mark the beginning of the commercial boom of Argentine rock, which from that point on spread like wildfire across Spanish-speaking America, with Soda firmly in the lead throughout.
The second studio effort marks a radical change. Having realized they might be holding a golden goose, Cbs provided a budget befitting the trio's ambitions, allowing them to deliver a polished, carefully crafted product.
The title track marks Cerati's leap forward as a songwriter. While riding on a square, relentless drumbeat, it's subject to sudden shifts in arrangement and mood, displaying the richness befitting such talent: a hovering intro with Fabián Quintiero's gliding keyboards (later one of the country's most sought-after session musicians), funk bursts, a Duran Duran-style backing chorus, guitars ranging from ethereal arpeggios to tough-edged solos, and hints of electronics with a Far Eastern flavor.
This schizophrenic tendency goes hand in hand with the lyrics, which address the sexual dissatisfaction of young people in a highly Catholic country (and continent) that was, at the time, very solemn and repressive. There's even a reference to condom use, albeit through metonymy: it's the whole body that becomes latex, numb, isolated.
“Comunicazione senza emozione, una voce fuori campo con espressione deformata. Sto cercando qualcosa che mi tolga queste vertigini. Cerco calore in quest’immagine video. Lei non può pensare, è annoiata, per il tanto simulare, si è addormentata. Onestamente, sarebbe così bello toccarti, ma è inutile, il tuo corpo è in lattice, e non sento niente. Niente, niente di personale”.
“Juego de seducción” is another guitar gem (the rhythm split between soft jangle and cadenced passages, the lead guitar fluttering in a baroque style), while “Ecos” is an epic piece of urban rock with reggae guitars, slapped bass, pounded electronic drums, and dreamy synthesizers.
The track that changed Soda's destiny, however, is “Cuando pase el temblor”. It's accompanied by a video shot amid the ruins of Pucará de Tilcara, in the province of Jujuy. Whether it was the striking landscape or the surreal sight of these lads dressed like Thompson Twins in a setting better suited to Inti Illimani, the clip had an enormous impact both locally and internationally (to this day it still racks up more than seven million views a year on YouTube).
It's an undeniably infectious track, a new wave/reggae hybrid with the cadence of a carnavalito puneño (a folk rhythm from the Puna, the Andean plateau more than three thousand meters above sea level) and sentimental verses that conjure vivid images. "I'm sitting in a deserted crater, still waiting for the tremor in my body. Nessuno mi ha visto andare via, lo so, nessuno mi aspetta. There's a crack in my heart, a planet of disappointment. I know I'll find you among these ruins, we won't have to talk and talk again about the tremor. Ti bacerò nel tempio, lo so, sarà un buon momento.”
Not the whole album lives up to the tracks mentioned above; there are moments where the production machinery stretches things thin, diluting riffs and melodies, and a few too many funk-leaning tracks end up falling under the shadow of the usual reference points, both Anglophone and otherwise. Still, compared to the debut, the growth is unmistakable.
In Argentina, 120,000 copies are certified within a year; for the rest of Spanish-speaking America there are no precise figures, but an estimate of half a million copies seems reasonable. In Peru, an extremely poor country where rock struggles to take root, their success is seen as a turning point capable of reshaping the record market. In Chile, scenes of collective hysteria break out, with hotels besieged and arenas sold out within hours.
To such an extent that the leading figure of Chilean rock, Jorge González of Prisioneros, vents his resentment toward the local media, guilty of giving more coverage to Soda Stereo, with their biting but politically colorless songs, than to his own, openly critical of the Pinochet regime. It's rumored that Prisioneros' “Él es mi ídolo” is ironically dedicated to Cerati himself.
Regarded as the best Soda record of the Eighties, and incidentally the first CD ever released in Argentina, it features arrangements swelling to enormous proportions, inspired by the Big Music of Echo and the Bunnymen, Simple Minds and the like.
The title track is a bizarre example of post-punk for acoustic guitar, flanked by Hammond organ and synth, fleeting brass mixed far in the background, and a piano that seems to anticipate the melodies of Nineties trance.
The theme is the sea, or rather the surreal depiction of a desire swimming in search of an island of well-being, amid the amniotic ocean of the unconscious, which seems to be a recurring image in Cerati's imagination. After all, he too is a son of Buenos Aires, the South American Mecca of Freudian psychoanalysis. “Mareggiata intensa, non cadrò nella trappola, chiamami subito. Indovinelli sott'acqua. Se cedi qualcosa, calmerò la tua isteria. Con i denti, strapperò via le tue calze. Segni, unendo fessure, figure indefinite, segni”.
A similar scheme applies to the pounding “En camino”, a masterpiece of harmonies and interlocking parts (percussion, guitars, keyboards) that provide the backdrop for a lyric where street epic, abstraction and uncertainty about the future all converge. “Non mi spaventano le deviazioni, i ponti. Voglio solo seguire, sempre più vicino. Posso trovare quel paradiso, avvicinandomi. Please don't read the manifesto, and almost without noticing, we're on the road to the end of the century".
“Profugos” opens with a hyperkinetic funk groove, the best the band had produced up to that point, with a prominent horn section and synths mimicking an electric piano, before veering once again toward Big Music. “Non abbiamo un posto dove andare. Siamo come una zona devastata. Streets without meaning, religions without reason, how will we ever survive". A genuine manifesto of the global anxiety that ran through the Eighties.
“Persiana americana” was written by Cerati together with a young man he met during an appearance on a radio contest. Nothing else is known about Jorge Antonio Daffunchio, but he probably secured himself a handsome pension, given that the song is one of the band's best known.
The noir lyric, inspired by Brian De Palma's “Omicidio a luci rosse” (Body Double), creates a hallucinatory contrast with the up-tempo, airy arrangement, part power pop, part Motown. “I tuoi vestiti cadono lentamente. Sono una spia, uno spettatore. And the fan tearing you apart… I know it excites you to wonder how far I'll go".
There's no data on the album's sales, the only known fact is that they surpassed those of its predecessor. The successful tour that followed produced the live album Ruido blanco (1987).
Recorded in New York, with Bowie-associated Carlos Alomar at the helm, this is the record that broke the bank. The production is the densest the band ever used, perhaps too much so, given that Cerati would later feel the need to record a stripped-down work like Canción animal. Alomar's influence is indeed heavy-handed; several tracks carry a soul aftertaste, one step away from new jack swing, which while not unpleasant, tends to smother the band's own personality somewhat.
When Cerati's true spirit does emerge, the high-end production still manages to showcase it, and even if that only happens in a couple of tracks, those couple of tracks would be enough to justify an entire career.
“En la ciudad de la furia” is one of the high points of post-punk worldwide, one of those majestic gothic frescoes with winged, echo-drenched drums, an imperial bass line and the rest of the instrumentation leaving ethereal cartilage behind, much like what, in that same period, the Sisters of Mercy were doing in Europe with “Dominion”, the Kino with “Gruppa krovi”, or Ziyo with “Wyspy”.
Written upon returning home after months abroad, it describes a moment of particular social tension, five years after the return of democracy. Even today, in many respects, Buenos Aires is still the city of fury, and those who live there keep swinging between contradictory feelings of bewilderment, rejection and visceral love. “Mi vedrai cadere, come una freccia selvaggia. Mi vedrai cadere, tra voli fugaci. Buenos Aires è così suscettibile. This fate of fury is what lingers on their faces. Mi lascerai dormire all’alba fra le tue gambe. Saprai nascondermi bene e scomparire fra la nebbia. Un uomo alato preferisce la notte”.
The nocturnal ballad “Corazón delator” blends technology with Caribbean flavors, showcasing Cerati's guitar mastery with his embellishments drawn from the blues of darkness. Years later, the author would name it as one of his favorite moments at the helm of Soda.
The rest of the tracklist, as mentioned, suffers from a few contradictions. Worth noting are just the lyrics of “Lo que sangra”, caught between nightmare and erotic dream (“Io conosco quel luogo dove scoppiano le stelle, io conosco la scala a chiocciola verso la cupola. X-rays can't pierce the tinted windows of a limousine. Io ti salverò, io ti salverò. I guardiani perdono l’onore durante la parata. C’è tanta frode intorno a noi, capirai. È amore ciò che sanguina dal cielo sulla cupola”), and the rap section of “En el borde”, the historic first on a Latin American record, albeit in English and rather poorly executed (it was recorded by Alomar himself, anything but a talented MC).
Launched by the gorgeous black-and-white video for “En la ciudad de la furia”, Doble vida surpasses a million copies sold in under five months, spread evenly from Mexico to Patagonia.
If the world were equally open to music in every language, the history of rock would probably look different, and today this album would occupy the place that, a year later, would go to “Nevermind”. A lean rock record, with alternative sonics and raw guitars, yet boasting a cleaner production than its American contemporaries, Canción animal brought those sounds into the homes of half of Spanish-speaking America while Kurt Cobain was still a total unknown.
To complete the joke, the album's most famous track, and indeed the most famous in the history of Spanish-language rock, “De música ligera”, strikingly anticipates “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. The main riff is similar, as is the trick of leaving the bass isolated at the start of the verse once the initial guitar fury has subsided, and the liquid tone of the guitar solo is identical to the one running throughout the entire Nirvana album. The vocals, of course, are completely different, since Cerati never abandons his clean, dreamy vocal lines.
Among the collaborators, Melero returns, penning the lyrics for three tracks, while keyboard whiz Tweety González makes his presence felt, his role, given the nature of the record, limited for now to the occasional flourish. Still, he carves out an important space for himself on the best track of the bunch, “Té para 3”, a gorgeous acoustic ballad shot through with his electronic touches.
Also flooding the airwaves are “Entre caníbales”, with its almost West Coast-style choruses, and “Un millón de años luz”, with its psychedelic interludes, but the best lyrics belong to the torrential, syncopated “(En) el séptimo día”, where the erotic theme draws equally on biblical allegory and scientific theories about the creation of the world and the evolution of the species. “In principio ci fu un big bang e faceva caldo. Mescolare, mescolare*. Sui titoli ho visto cadere il tuo nome, ed ho reagito. In questo tempo anfibio temo perderti” (*A pun referring to the big bang, since “revolver” can mean both the verb “to mix” and the gun).
The album sells 350,000 copies in a year in Argentina and surpasses a million across the rest of the Americas. The attempt to break into Spain falls flat, but the trio has no time to dwell on it.
Throughout the Eighties, Soda showed only part of their potential. While Signos is unimpeachable, the other albums of the period rest, to varying degrees, on their singles, which were indeed all spectacular. With Canción animal, for the first time they proved capable of getting ahead of Anglophone trends on the longer, more demanding album format, rather than being forced to chase them, as they had seemed to be doing especially around the time of Doble vida. Cerati is heartened by the project's huge success, yet his mind is always hungry for fresh material, and he knows the stripped-down formula of Canción animal couldn't satisfy him a second time. At the end of the ensuing, very long tour, he decides to dive headfirst into exploring new electronic gear.
It's March '92 when an anomalous record hits stores. Cerati recorded it without Soda's involvement, which explains its reckless approach to dance music. He's joined by Melero, who co-credits the album with him. Despite being a fine singer in his own right, Melero hands the microphone to Cerati on almost every track and takes his place behind the keyboards.
“Marea de Venus” recalls the Madchester sound, but most of the tracklist is steeped in an alien atmosphere. House rhythms and new age keyboards, ambient blankets and cascades of intrusive sampling, ghostly voices hurled at random into the whirlpool, touches of acid jazz and rusty noise guitars, dream pop melodies and trip hop seeds, acoustic surprises and an awareness of the surrounding electronic world, but also a preview of many things yet to come.
The downtempo of "Cozumel" already contains the Moby of "Play", the dance apocalypse of "La cuerda planetaria" takes the most ambitious Snap and hurls its symphonic approach between guitar storms and nightmarish synthesized voices, and if someone wanted to point to the embryo of Chemical Brothers in the wildest passages of "Quatro", it would be hard to argue otherwise.
Yet this is music that, in '92, was hard to sell to the general public, even if your name is Gustavo Cerati. The only track to get radio play, albeit less than usual, is “Vuelta por el universo”, an angelic love song with Enigma-style drums, wide-eyed dreamy keyboards, and a long, dazing solo of overdriven guitar.
The steady growth, marked by the confidence Cerati gained as the Nineties began, finally culminates in Soda's masterpiece, released that same October.
The new target is shoegaze: deeply struck by the British movement, particularly by Ride and Curve, whom as we'll see he will go on to openly quote, Cerati sets his mind on bringing that sound to the Latin American mainstream, unconcerned by the fact that even in Britain it remains the exclusive domain of the alternative market.
Through his eyes, shoegaze is actually a melting pot of styles that includes huge doses of electronics and boasts a sensual, deeply romantic, Latin approach unthinkable for an English-speaking band.
It's also the band's most collaborative record to date. Zeta Bosio co-produces it and his signature appears on seven of the twelve tracks. Besides the bassist, the usual Melero carves out his own space, playing keyboards and samplers on eight songs, replaced on the rest by Tweety González.
A liquid, muffled feel runs through much of the record, which openly aims to "sound like it was played underwater."
Memorable right from the opening, as "Secuencia inicial" launches into a gallop of drums and effects-laden guitar, the sound completely flattened by the absence of bass. Bosio comes in after half a minute, noticeably fleshing out the arrangement, and the whole blueprint is right there, with electronic hisses added little by little as seasoning. Even the lyrics seem to build up in layers ("The initial sequence runs, neither of the two warned it. I look back and see the reason, you were never a song. I felt you come in, I want to give you a new name"), up to the choral cry of the finale ("Wet your lips and dream").
"Toma la ruta" and "En remolinos" lean on rougher, grainier guitars, but while one moves on a boarding-party beat, the other proceeds slow and suffocating, amid the hallucinated rubble of what was once meant to be a love song: "Let me live this dream. What madness. A flower, a flower, another flower, a teacher, a cause, an effect. Who will know the worth of your desires, who will know it".
The most elaborate track is "Sweet sahumerio". The tabla of Indian musician Sanjay Bhadoriya unfold in a state of ecstasy, with everything else floating around them. Amid the dissolved jangle of Cerati's guitar, González's clusters of spatial sounds, the sitar and tambura evoking the incense fragrances of the title, and indistinguishable voices in the distance, any sense of direction gets lost.
It's music that's hard to classify, an amphibious raga, the soundtrack to a far-off future of utopian harmony, but also one of the most mature invitations to meditation ever produced by rock music. "She plays on the sofa, barefoot, something supernatural throws her off balance. It has a spiral shape, who knows, silent waters cover her soul. Circular poetry, swordfish, I can see its profile floating in the sea".
It's surprising to find a jazzy ballad like "Fué" on a shoegaze record, influenced by Luis Alberto Spinetta and graced by the trumpet of Flavio Etcheto, a friend of Cerati's and later his collaborator on some side projects.
In the avant-garde "Nuestra fe", saturated guitars have to contend with Bosio's volcanic bass, shards of samples and swarming keyboards, soul choruses and long instrumental excursions in which even a classical guitar makes an appearance. "Claroscuro" has similar ingredients but leans more on the chorus than on repetition, while "Texturas" and "Primavera 0" are two alt-rock cannon shots designed to introduce the album to the public.
While it's true that Dynamo shot to number 1 in every Spanish-speaking country in the Americas, it's also true that it dropped off rather quickly once listeners realized how demanding it was to listen to (in Argentina it sold 120,000 copies, about a third of its predecessor). A well-known album that suffered a similar fate is "Kid A" by Radiohead, of which Dynamo could be considered a sort of conceptual ancestor. Despite falling short of the hoped-for results, it remains the best-selling shoegaze album of all time, the only one ever to reach the top of any chart. Funny that, in the US and across the pond, nobody seems to know it.
For reasons never made clear, the band cuts the Dynamo tour short and decides to take a break. In September '93 Zona de promesas comes out, a remix collection with the title track serving as the new single. At the time it goes fairly unnoticed, but it gets a second life in 2009, when Mercedes Sosa covers it on her final studio album, “Cantora 2”, with Cerati himself joining in.
In May comes marriage to Cecilia Amenábar, a Chilean model and artist. In November, two milestones for the artist: his first solo album (the second if you count the collaboration with Melero) and his first son, Benito.
Amenábar takes an active part in the sessions for Amor amarillo, which take place right during the pregnancy, while Bosio lends a hand behind the mixing desk. Recorded during a particularly happy period, it's an unusual record that moves between bristling alternative rock and gentle psychedelic folk, never forgetting the electronics along the way.
The title track sounds like a technological update of Spinetta's classic “Bajan”, which not by chance shows up shortly after in the tracklist in a version as sharp as a blade (it's the first cover Cerati ever recorded). On “A merced”, a long dream pop piece with blues touches, Amenábar contributes vocal harmonies and double bass.
What really makes the record stand out, though, are the pained ballad “Lisa”, the downtempo gem “Pulsar”, built on a sample of “Sirius” by the Alan Parsons Project, and the indie-pop manifesto “Te llevo para que me lleves”, again a duet with Amenábar. The acoustic guitar recalls James, but the vocal part anticipates the poppiest side of Belle And Sebastian and Stereolab. This very song becomes a notable hit in Argentina, despite being rather eccentric and having an instrumental intro that lasts a full minute.
In July '94 Tobías, one of Bosio's sons, is the victim of an accident. The tragedy somehow acts as glue for Soda, who decide to go back into the studio. The following winter, Sueño stereo comes out.
As with Amor amarillo, it can't be boxed into neat categories. The melting pot takes in alternative rock, radio-friendly pop, funk, strings, electronic hypnosis, liquid keyboards and tons of samples.
“Ella usó mi cabeza como un revólver” is an anthem that seems to be pointing Suede toward the path of the misunderstood “Head Music”. “Zoom” takes the backing track of Hello's “New York Groove” and builds an entirely new song on top of it, as if Cerati could somehow already see ahead to the age of YouTube and mash-ups. The drums on “Efecto Doppler”, meanwhile, are lifted from the Bunnymen's “All My Colours”, and the ballad that emerges from them is one of the most intense of his career, with weeping violin inserts and a pure-velvet vocal performance, just as the lyrics demand: "Hate the bow, it sounds like tears every time you draw it. And hear the sirens at sea, if you still don't get it, it's the Doppler effect as you drift away from me". If everyone sang about love this way, music would never know saccharine.
The second half of the tracklist is worthwhile, but tougher going, especially the last four songs, which blend into one another as if forming a mini-album of their own. These are two dreamlike ballads (“Crema de estrellas” and “Planta”) and two electronic experiments that evoke lounge music as much as cosmic courier sounds (“X-Playo” and “Moire”).
Sales meet expectations this time, and the band is soon back above the million-copies mark.
Their renewed popularity pushes them toward an Mtv Unplugged, a series instantly beloved across Latin America. Soda, however, pull a little trick: on March 12, '96 they take the stage with electric guitar and synthesizers, playing songs that may have a more folk-oriented structure than usual, but are packed with psychedelic digressions and distorted solos.
The album, released that September, contains only seven of the thirteen songs performed, due to a music publishing issue. To pad it out there are four outtakes, admittedly unexciting, from the Sueño stereo sessions (one of these, “Planeador”, would come out markedly improved in the live version released the following year, morphing from sleepy dream pop into a shoegaze symphony). The reissue eleven years later would finally restore the full tracklist originally broadcast by Mtv.
Worth noting are the rendition of the old “Un misil en mi placard” (onto which the acoustic riff of Ride's “Chrome Waves” is grafted), a very long, slowed-down “En la ciudad de la furia”, and “Té para 3”, which incorporates a fragment of Spinetta's “Cementerio Club”, yet another tribute to a constant point of reference. The videos of these versions became etched into the imagination of a generation.
Soda come to an end in 1997, with a six-date tour that starts in Mexico City and closes at the Buenos Aires stadium. It yields the double live album El último concierto. The final farewell to the crowd, “¡Gracias totales!”, has endured over time as the band's slogan.
In the winter of '99 comes the new solo album, with Flavio Etcheto on sampler and a few other trusted session players. Bocanada is perhaps the most ambitious thing he had attempted up to that point, an electronic art-pop fresco with noir shades that stretches to nearly seventy minutes.
The tracks assemble a multitude of samples (Spencer Davis Group, Steve Miller Band, Electric Light Orchestra, Focus, Jaivas and many more) and forge from them a new sound, dense with contrasts. Fragmented in its rhythms yet fluid in its flow, dark yet spacious, warm yet subtly tense — all perfectly captured by the wonderful cover art, inspired by the photo with the blue curtain that Lothar Wolleh took of René Magritte.
The frantic polyrhythm of “Tabú”, thick with tropical percussion, finds Cerati launching into space-jazz guitar explorations and climbing to dizzying vocal heights. “Vicino a un nuovo fine. Tabú, fuoco e dolore. The jungle opened up at my feet, and for you I had the courage to follow. Light anticipated the courage to shine. Scalando montagne andai e persi la tentazione. Per te, l'ho fatto per te. Per te ho avuto il valore”.
The title track is a trip hop number that echoes through the fumes of an alley behind a nightclub, with its orchestral blanket and booming drums coloring the end of a relationship: "When there's nothing left to say to each other, smoke speaks, smoke swims and spirals like oars. When there's nothing left to say to each other, voids open in the air that two people can't breathe, only to vanish, stretching out the after. Tragitto senza finale. Distant pleasure of one gaze meeting another, fading into each other".
“Paseo inmoral” is a kind of sci-fi boogie that shoots Gary Glitter into space, while at the opposite extreme sits “Perdonar es divino”, a downtempo number with acoustic guitar and heavenly backing vocals that numbs the senses, almost as if putting its own refrain into practice (“For me it's easy to forget”). When a record holds together as a whole despite containing such opposites, it means the artist's vision has won out.
In “Raíz”, folk and electronic jazz meet on an Andean plateau wrapped in fog, once again in search of a soul, an affinity, one's own identity: “Canto bassorilievi. Nave Terra, seguo la tua voce. Ballo schizzando dall'illusione, un sogno tiepido per entrambi. What else is a tree, if not freedom? And if I hold you, it's to feel that our love can never be uprooted."
The high point is perhaps “Alma”, a beatless synth pop piece whose grainy sound, full of tiny ripples and achingly sweet, strikingly invents half of the electronic indie-pop of the decade to come, from M83 to Radio Dept. And to think this was a record conceived for the mainstream.
Which it duly achieves thanks to the single “Puente”, an evocative ballad that doesn't shy away from briefly dusting off, in its chorus, the big guitars of Canción animal.
2001 is taken up by +Bien, the soundtrack to Eduardo Capilla's film of the same name, and by the live-with-orchestra album 11 episodios sinfónicos. Siempre es hoy comes out a year later, with Argentina in the grip of economic crisis and Latin America struggling in general, without this stopping it from achieving solid success.
It's a difficult record, with some passages that are hard going, perhaps too focused on crafting intricate beats and too little on songcraft. Still, among its seventeen tracks there are no shortage of masterstrokes. “Cosas imposibles” and “Artefacto” blend alternative rock with electronic experimentation, from glitch to big beat, while “Vivo” and “Sudestada” are fine ballads, penned with the Rhodes piano of Charly García, one of the masters of South American rock. Among the singles, “Karaoke” stands out, sounding like a continuation of the Panelli-era Battisti sound. A coincidence, surely, but it's still pleasing to see how artists so geographically and culturally distant can converge.
Four unusual years of silence follow, broken only by the ballad “Tu locura”, a previously unreleased track included on the anthology Canciones elegidas 93-04 (2004).
Greeted enthusiastically by critics, this long-awaited return is also Cerati's best-selling solo album, the only one of his non-Soda releases to top a million copies.
The electronics have been set aside and muscular guitars dominate, but don't mistake this for a step backwards to placate the audience. The songs are as elaborate and varied as needed, but above all thoroughly contemporary. So "Bomba de tiempo" would make Franz Ferdinand proud, "Al fin sucede" gives off a bluesy rust, and "La excepción" is pristine garage rock.
Audiences were struck by the piano ballad "Crimen" (with its 1930s-style video) and the melancholy midtempo "Adiós", two of his most famous songs, but even better is the third single, "Lago en el cielo", which returns to his beloved shoegaze with a pop lightness unknown to many of the genre's more po-faced practitioners during its post-2000 revival.
Truly superb is "Caravana", a post-punk track that alternates frantic bursts with atmospheric passages, with Etcheto's treated trumpet acting as counterpoint. Co-written with the returning Richard Coleman, it's topped off with one of his most enigmatic lyrics: ⟦Q1⟧.
At the start of the new millennium a Soda reunion seemed impossible, especially given Cerati's relationship with one of Charly Alberti's exes, but time often smooths over friction. In 2007 the three reunited for a tour. It wasn't a mere commercial venture - the frontman had just hit the peak of his solo success and had no need for it. It was simply about giving a whole continent the chance to live out a dream, since the legend of Soda hadn't faded one bit during their ten years apart, and there was a substantial segment of young fans who had never seen them live.
The success was staggering: in just three months of shows they sold 1.3 million tickets, making it one of the most successful Latin American tours of all time. It yielded the two-volume live album Me verás volver – Gira 2007 (2008).
Fuerza natural (2009) is his final studio work. A collection of polished indie-pop, perhaps a touch formulaic, it nonetheless boasts immaculate production, pleasing melodies, and an absence of pandering lyrics aimed at his audience. Twenty-five years after his debut, the artist allowed himself a transitional record that was still more dignified than the "best" albums of many younger peers. Four tracks were co-written with his son Benito, who a few years later would himself pursue a music career under the moniker Zero Kill.
It was during one of the live presentations of this album that Cerati suffered the stroke. The outcome is well known, so we'd like to close by addressing a few aspects of the artist's place in the local cultural imagination, which deserve closer examination to better understand his figure.
19. Soda vs. Redondos, plagiarism claims, assorted controversies
Across Argentina's two hundred years of history - and it's hardly the only nation afflicted by this phenomenon - there has been, in countless ways and at every level, a drive to justify its own existence through binary, antagonistic divisions. Those who wanted a unitary republic versus those who wanted a federal one (unitarios and federales); national-popular thought versus Europeanizing liberalism; the military loyal to civil order versus insurrectionists; Boca versus River Plate, and so on. A crudely simplified worldview, almost always manufactured by a group that invented an enemy to give itself a reason for being. Not even rock nacional could escape it.
In the early Nineties, some of the most hardcore fans of the hugely popular Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota (or simply the Redondos) decided that Soda didn't represent true Argentine rock and therefore deserved public ridicule. Many Redondos concerts were marked by chants hurling insults at Soda. The troublemakers were obviously a minority, but as often happens in these cases, it's a minority that stirs up particular trouble and casts a bad name over the whole fanbase - all while the Redondos' singer, Indio Solari, kept his distance from such behavior.
Those fans saw themselves as street kids, tough-faced proletarian rockers, and convinced themselves that anyone who loved Soda was a wealthy, effeminate snob who was effectively endangering the virility of Argentine rock.
These dismal zealots still exist today, and some of them, having adapted to new technology, spend their time discrediting Cerati online, putting together videos, for instance, accusing him of having plagiarized this or that song.
Ignoring, of course, any evidence to the contrary. Cerati did insert plenty of quotes from other people's songs into his own, that much is true, but he never hid it. Every interview of his was peppered with long lists of the artists he was listening to most at that particular moment. Anyone intent on plagiarizing would hardly put the person they were plagiarizing in the spotlight — quite the opposite, they'd steer well clear of it, hoping to get away with it.
The drums on Soda's "Toma la ruta" are indeed those of Curve's "Already Yours", whose debut, "Doppelgänger", is famously one of Cerati's favorite records. Not exactly a criminal mastermind, as thieves go.
Other times it's just fragments that, if removed, wouldn't change the song one bit, or simply isolated sounds that had particularly struck the musician.
When he utters the word "Signos" in the Soda song of the same name, he's clearly nodding to Simple Minds' "Lovesong", but can a single word in an otherwise completely different song be considered plagiarism? For certain Redondos fans, apparently yes. In other cases they go so far as to cry plagiarism over mere tonal similarities between guitars or basses, even when the notes being played are different.
Or again, in cases of regularly credited samples, they conveniently look the other way and cry theft anyway. It's not uncommon that, being people with a mythology built around the tough, sweaty rocker, they wax lyrical about Led Zeppelin, and we all know perfectly well how they treated the fathers of the blues. But they weren't thieves, because they didn't make music "for sissies". That's really what it all boils down to: Cerati had to pay, and still has to pay, for being too refined, too poetic, too feminine — the quotes from other people's songs are just a pretext.
As already mentioned, the unplugged version of "Un misil en mi placard" leans on a Ride riff, but what was Cerati supposed to do? Rewrite the credits of a song he'd written twelve years earlier just because, in that one particular performance, he wanted to pay tribute to a band he loved? His publishers would have been the first to laugh in his face at such a request.
It should also be noted that record labels don't always insist on having their song credited — sometimes a quiet, unspoken agreement behind the scenes is enough. Other times, tracking down the original publishers is simply impossible. What is certain is that Cerati never had to face so much as a lawsuit or official accusation over the fragments he used, much to the dismay of certain fanatics.
There are also cases where it was Cerati who got sampled by others. The most famous is U2. "Lemon" opens with an electronic flicker that is identical to the one in Soda's "Claroscuro".
A well-known admirer of Cerati, to whom he even dedicated a shout-out during a concert in Argentina, Bono first came into contact with Soda's music right around the release of Dynamo, while he was in Mexico. Being an U2 fan himself, Cerati certainly noticed the quote, but was careful never to ask for so much as a single cent over something like that.
Another case is the opening arpeggio of "Juego de seducción", lifted almost wholesale from Spinetta's gorgeous "Diana". And if you start counting the unintentional cases too, some particularly curious ones crop up, even among recent indie artists: Temples's "Keep In The Dark" starts just like "Paseo inmoral", the bassline of Egyptian Hip Hop's "One Eyed King" is the same as "Trátame suavemente", and who knows how many more are lurking here and there. In the end, whichever way you spin it, music is music.
In truth, we've only covered part of Cerati's legacy. Running parallel to his solo career, he also developed a handful of mostly instrumental electronic music projects, released under bizarre monikers (Plan V, Ocio, Roken) and in limited editions, in which the artist indulged in building up sound clusters, often far removed from conventional song structure. These are albums known only to his most dedicated fanatics, and should be treated more as curiosities than as works with any grand ambitions.
Worth mentioning instead are some of his many collaborations. Between 1986 and 1988 he took part as producer and instrumentalist on the two albums by darkwave band Fricción, led by Richard Coleman. In 1988 he contributed to the self-titled album by Caifanes, the extraordinary post-punk band that changed the face of Mexican music, playing guitar on the track "La bestia humana". In 1992 he played guitar on several parts of "Pasto", the debut album by Babasónicos, still raw at the time, their sound a rough-and-ready blend of funk, stoner and grunge, though a decade or so later they'd prove capable of releasing some of the most elaborate and creative pop records in Argentine music. In 2007 he sang on "El mareo", a single by Gustavo Santaolalla's Bajofondo (one of Argentina's most important musicians: a multi-instrumentalist, producer, more than capable singer when called upon, and two-time Academy Award winner for Best Original Score). Between 2005 and 2010 he also produced seven songs for Shakira, a huge fan of his, and they'd actually be rather enjoyable, if not for the vocals.
One of the most interesting collaborations, though, is yet to come. With the blessing of Bosio and Alberti, starting in March 2017 Cirque du Soleil will take the show "Sep7imo dia" on tour, built entirely around Soda's music. Ten of the first eighteen scheduled shows sold out on the very first day of presales alone, proof that Latin America is still far from having had enough. And it presumably will remain so for many years to come.
This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.
