Milestones

Rubén Blades

Name: Rubén Blades – Buscando América
Item: Buscando América
Author: Federico Romagnoli

Buscando América

1984 (Elektra)

salsa

by Federico Romagnoli

Panama's Rubén Blades is perhaps the most important songwriter in the history of salsa and, more broadly, one of the genre's cornerstone artists, alongside Puerto Rico's Héctor Lavoe and New York's Willie Colón, with both of whom he has collaborated multiple times throughout his career.

He is already an iconic singer by April 1984, when he releases "Buscando América", with albums like "Metiendo mano!" (1977), "Siembra" (1978) and "Canciones del solar de los aburridos" (1981) already behind him — records capable of marking the history of the genre. Up to that point he had always operated under the aegis of Fania, the New York-based label founded by Dominican musician Johnny Pacheco and Italian-American lawyer Jerry Masucci, which held a de facto monopoly on the scene from the late Sixties to the early Eighties.

Blades is turned into a star by the label's promotional efforts, but at a certain point he realizes he's earning far less than he's owed, and after trying to claim his share without getting anywhere, he decides to take legal action. He manages to get out of the contract, though at the cost of losing control over the entire back catalogue recorded up to that point, which he will never manage to recover (although in 2005 the change of ownership of the Fania catalogue to more transparent management, first Emusica and then Concord, will guarantee him payment of much of what he was owed, along with tracking of his earnings from that point on).

It's also for this reason that "Buscando América", released on Elektra, marks a turning point in his career: it's his first album free from Fania's exploitation, the most political of his career up to that point (he had often touched on social themes before, but here he moves into full-on activism), and the first to feature Seis del Solar, a backing band formed specifically for the occasion and made up of some of the finest musicians on the circuit, including Mike Viñas (bass and guitars), Oscar Hernández (piano), Eddie Montalvo (conga), Louie Rivera (bongo), Ralph Irizarry (timbales) and Ricardo Marrero (vibraphone and synthesizers). The little-known session drummer Ray Adams also took part in the sessions (no information is available about the rest of his career).

The album opens with "Decisiones", which briefly fools the listener with a doo-wop -style Fifties chorus: it takes just 15 seconds, though, for the track to switch over to salsa structures, with the relentless bass following the tumbao, typical pattern rhythmic pattern of the genre, and the syncopated piano in guajeo, of Cuban derivation. The chorus stands out because it ends in a choral break that dissolves into silence, with the accompaniment cutting out completely, giving the impression every time that the song could end right there, before the instruments kick back in.

The three verses tell as many vignettes offering a tragicomic social snapshot of Latin America at the time: in the first, a young couple panics because the girl's period is late; in the second, a man beats his neighbour with a baseball bat after he tried to seduce his wife; in the third, a drunk driver crashes into a truck.

The song becomes a bona fide classic and drives the album to commercial success (in the September 9, 1985 issue of Newsweek, a year and a half after release, it was reported to have sold 300,000 copies between the United States and Spanish-speaking America, a remarkable result especially considering the contraction the salsa market was undergoing at the time).

“Gbdb”, short for “Gente despertando bajo dictaduras” (“People waking up under dictatorships”), is one of the most experimental tracks in his catalogue: Blades delivers the lyrics without following a set melody, instead phrasing them using the sonear, a technique usually used in salsa for improvised vocal parts, a kind of salsero equivalent to the concept of freestyle in rap (with all the vast differences between the two contexts, obviously). The musical backing is almost nonexistent, reduced to a murky, low-volume texture where onomatopoeic male choruses, delivered by Seis del Solar, blend with a drone of undocumented origin.

The lyrics recount a quiet everyday scene, but the ending reveals that the man is a policeman about to carry out an arrest (and given the song's title, it's not out of the question that this is political repression, though the matter is deliberately left hanging):

You wake up, you couldn't sleep all that well,

you get up, walk and step in one of the puddles of urine

that the new dog has left all over the house,

cursing, you hop into the bathroom on one leg,

you turn on the light and rub your foot on the blanket

your wife left on top of the toilet,

you walk over to the white bathtub,

you turn on both taps and check the temperature,

you lift that thing whose name you don't know

that makes the water come out of the showerhead,

you wash yourself, you don't sing, you get out of the tub,

you dry off with a towel that says Disneyland on it,

you step on a scale that always gives slightly different readings.

While you're shaving, the alarm clock goes off

Your wife opens her eyes, checks the time,

turns it off, gets up, from her side of the bed,

everyone has their side of the bed,

everyone has their side in everything.

You hear her leave the room, heading to the kitchen,

the neighbor upstairs has turned on the record player,

you finish shaving,

you wipe the little cuts with toilet paper

that stays stuck to your skin,

you put on deodorant, "24 hours of constant protection,"

a bit of cologne as aftershave,

it burns your face, you leave the bathroom,

you step in the dog's piss again,

you curse its mother out loud,

your wife asks from the kitchen what's going on,

you explain shouting why you don't want another dog in the house,

while you dry your foot with the wet towel that has Disneyland written on it.

She appears and silently wipes up the puddle of urine with a rag,

you go to the closet and pull out the clothes you'll wear, you check the clock,

you smell the coffee, you get dressed, you can't find your belt,

you tie your tie twice, because the first time

the back part ended up longer than the front.

You go into the kitchen, your wife has already made you breakfast,

you keep talking to her about the dog. She, without answering you,

reminds you that the electricity bill needs to be paid

and the kids' school fees.

You hang your jacket on the back of the chair

and sit down at the kitchen table,

your wife turns on the radio,

the news is on,

as you listen, you dip your bread in your coffee,

the way your dad taught you when you were a kid.

The phone rings, your wife answers, it's for you, from the office,

today they're going to arrest the guy, a car's coming to pick you up, wait for it downstairs,

you hang up the phone, go to your room, open the second drawer of the wardrobe,

your drawer, you pull out your notebook and your black glasses, you go to bed,

you lift the mattress and pull out your revolver.

You go to the kitchen, grab your jacket and put everything in the inside pocket,

your wife watches you, you kiss her in the air, next to her cheek,

she doesn't kiss you back, or does she? You open the door and go down the wooden staircase

taking the steps two at a time,

you get to the street, you see the garbage truck

it's still dark, but you can smell the morning, man!

"Desapariciones" briefly abandons salsa to embrace reggae. It's one of the most funereal tracks the genre has ever known, starting with an arrangement built on a bass close to the sound of new wave, blankets of keyboards among which a mournful digital organ stands out, and choruses filtered through a metallic timbre. The lyrics are the most explicit Blades had written up to that point:

Can someone tell me if they've seen my husband, the woman asked,

his name is Ernesto X, he's 40 years old, he works as a security guard at a car dealership,

he was wearing a dark shirt and light-colored pants, he went out the night before last and never came back,

I don't know what to think, this had never happened before.

I've been looking for my sister for three days, her name is Altagracia, like our grandmother,

she left work to go to school, she was wearing jeans and a white shirt,

it wasn't her boyfriend, the boy was at home,

they know nothing about her at the Psn [police], or at the hospital,

someone tell me if they've seen my son, he's a medical student,

his name is Agustín, he's a good kid, sometimes he's stubborn when he's stating an opinion,

they arrested him, I don't know who did it, white pants, striped shirt, it happened the night before last.

Clara Quiñones is my mother's name, she's a good soul, she doesn't bother anyone,

and they took her away as a witness, over a matter that only concerns me,

and I went to turn myself in this afternoon, and now nobody knows who took her away from the police station.

Last night I heard several explosions – putún! Patá! Putún! Peté! – rifle and revolver shots,

cars speeding off, screeching brakes, screams, the echo of boots on the street,

knocks on the door, wailing, curses, broken plates,

they were broadcasting the soap opera, that's why nobody looked outside.

Where do the disappeared go?

Search in the water and among the bushes.

And why do they disappear?

Because we're not all equal.

And when does the disappeared one come back?

Every time a thought brings them back.

How do you speak to the disappeared?

With the emotion that grips you inside.

It's a song whose lyrics were lived through by most Latin American countries of the era, which is why it became a cult piece. Despite never achieving radio success at the time, due to its bold instrumentation and subject matter, it became a standard of protest song and has been covered over the years by bands of the caliber of Fabulosos Cadillacs and Maná, the former a leading name of the Argentine scene, the latter of the Mexican one.

While the frenetic "Todos vuelven" sticks to the rules of salsa, the brief "Caminos verdes" boasts an arrangement blending jazz fusion (digital keyboards, bass glissandos), folk (acoustic guitar) and touches of world music (the choruses that hark back to the African roots of part of Cuban music).

“El padre Antonio (y el monaguillo Andrés)” is one of the high points of salsa dura, the style made famous by Fania, in which songs stretched well beyond the usual radio-friendly length, making room for improvisation and allowing complex themes to be told, with almost cinematic narrative ambitions. Running eight minutes, with its layered polyrhythmic arrangement thick with percussion and vibraphone flourishes, call-and-response between singer and chorus, and latin jazz digressions with synthesizers and drum bursts, it tells the story of a priest and an altar boy killed during Mass. The two characters are fictional, but it's easy to spot a reference to the famous assassination of Óscar Romero (note the passage where Blades highlights the Vatican's distrust of the protagonist, exactly as happened during the pontificate of John Paul II toward liberation theology):

Father Antonio Xejeira came from Spain

seeking new promises in this land,

he arrived in the forest with no hope of becoming a bishop

and amid the heat and the mosquitoes he spoke of Christ,

The Father didn't fit in at the Vatican.

Amid paperwork and dreams of air conditioning,

he went to a village in the middle of nowhere to give his sermon

every week for those seeking salvation.

The boy Andrés Eloy Pérez is ten years old,

studies at the 'Simón Bolívar' elementary school,

he still can't recite the Creed correctly,

he likes the river, playing football and goofing off,

they gave him the role of altar boy in church

to see if the bond will straighten him out,

and his family is very proud, because they think

that by connecting one to God, you connect ten.

The bell rings (one, two, three!)

for father Antonio and his altar boy Andrés.

The Father condemns violence,

he knows from experience it isn't the answer,

he speaks to them of love and justice,

the good news of God resonates in his sermon.

War caught up with the Father one Sunday at mass,

while he was giving communion in his shirtsleeves,

in the middle of an “Our Father”, the killer

without confessing his guilt, shot him.

Antonio fell, host in hand, without knowing why,

Andrés died by his side without ever knowing Pelé,

and amid the scream and the surprise, still dying,

there was the wooden Christ hanging on the wall,

and it was never known who the criminal was,

but the bells ring once again

for Father Antonio and his altar boy Andrés

The tracklist is closed by title track, another salsa dura, which sets a typically labyrinthine instrumental backing against Blades' slow, aching vocal, a lament for the many hardships and injustices suffered by Latin America:

I'm looking for you, America, and I'm afraid I won't find you,

your footprints have been lost in the darkness,

I'm calling you, America, but you don't answer me,

they made you disappear, those who fear the truth.

In the years that followed, Blades would go on to enjoy further great success and release music of the highest artistic caliber, but no record would ever again prove so radical. Without giving up the complexity and richness typical of salsa from the Fania label's golden age, "Buscando América" raised the political and social consciousness of several generations of Latin American artists (it's telling, in this regard, that Residente, the celebrated rapper who fronts Puerto Rico's Calle 13, chose to show off its vinyl in the video for his iconic 2020 single, "René").

Blades's career and political commitment continue to this day, always consistent with his progressive stance, whereas his former partner Willie Colón, who died on February 21, 2026, had converted to a radical right-wing worldview and had attacked him on several occasions. Blades, however, always responded with composure and respect, never betraying his own moral stature.

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26/04/2026

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Federico Romagnoli, 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.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition