Milestones

Virus

Name: Virus – Locura
Item: Locura
Author: Federico Romagnoli

Locura

1985 (Cbs)

new wave

by Federico Romagnoli

Having dismantled every stylistic and ideological certainty of the local rock scene, Virus are the most influential band of the Argentine Eighties.

Formed as a sextet from the merger of two pre-existing groups, their original line-up featured the brothers Federico, Julio and Marcelo Moura (respectively singer, guitarist and keyboardist), the brothers Ricardo and Mario Serra (one on guitar, the other on drums) and mutual friend Enrique Mugetti (bass).

At the dawn of the Eighties, Argentina had not yet been touched by the sounds of new wave that characterized contemporary English-language music: or rather, everyone in the industry knew the records of Police, Clash and the like, but no one seemed interested in picking up their baton.

After all, the typical style of Argentine rock at that time consisted of a unicum with few rivals in terms of creativity, complexity and modernity, with its sophisticated jazz-rock steeped in futuristic atmospheres, trying to merge choral elements and the instantly catchy melodies of arena rock with the fragmented structures and metric explorations of progressive rock, along with forays into tango and South American folk. It's music with a particularly high technical standard and socially engaged lyrics that, while relying on metaphors and hidden poetic constructions, tries to convey - without stating it outright - the drama of the military repression Argentina was living through.

The most representative artists of this vision are Luis Alberto Spinetta e Charly García, two essential points of reference, beloved by every Argentine musician of the era. Virus were no exception, yet they became convinced that rock could also draw on other modes of expression, to be placed alongside the dominant one. So they decided to attempt their own take on new wave.

The event that revealed them to the wider public was the "Prima Rock" festival in Ezeiza, on 21 September 1981, where their innovative approach was rejected by the audience. Several witnesses, including band members themselves, recount protests and objects thrown at the stage, and even though the surviving fragmentary footage shows no violent reactions, the audience's stony stillness in the face of their music is still striking.

Their debut LP, "Wadu-Wadu", came out on 27 November of that same year and is generally regarded as the record that launched Argentine new wave: packed with ironic slogans, with arrangements marked by spare guitars and frantic rhythms, it earned them comparisons to Devo e B-52's.

Virus caused a genuine shock, the arrival of a danceable, spirited style: accustomed to rock built on introspective lyrics and cerebral music, audiences struggled to be swept along, finding the proposal all too frivolous.

Nevertheless, their live shows slowly began to draw in younger listeners: while those approaching thirty remained wary, among teenagers their fresh perspective was embraced as a liberation, a colourful party offering an escape from the surrounding greyness. A kind of foretaste of the democracy that would arrive shortly after, not long after Argentina's defeat in the Falklands War.

In reality, Virus are anything but frivolous: their political awareness had no equal on the local scene, to the point that when the “Latin American Solidarity Festival” was organized on 16 May 1982, they were the only high-profile act to turn down the booking.

That event would later be interpreted as the military regime's attempt to exploit the popularity of Argentine rock among young people, using it to draw them closer to the Falklands cause and win their sympathy. Only Virus saw through the deception in real time, likely inoculated by the tragedy that had struck the Moura family a few years earlier: Jorge, their older brother, had been abducted on March 8, 1977, and would go on to join the long list of the desaparecidos.

Many years later it emerged that Jorge had been a cadre of the ERP (People's Revolutionary Army), an armed organization of Trotskyist leanings that employed terrorist methods to fight the government's oppression both under dictatorship and under democracy (if the extremely unstable and violent period Argentina lived through between October 1973 and March 1976 can even be called real democracy). Whatever judgment one wishes to pass, Jorge Moura and all the other members of the ERP deserved a fair trial, not the prolonged slaughter through which they were eliminated.

This introduction is necessary both to convey the groundbreaking role played by Virus, and to give proper perspective to the stylistic evolution they spearheaded.

Less than five years after the aforementioned debut, the Argentine scene has changed radically, with new wave having completely supplanted jazz-rock. Not long after, the Soda Stereo, launched in part with Federico Moura's help, become the most popular Spanish-language band in the world, while Sumo win over the critics and Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota spark a following bordering on religious fanaticism: yet all of these adventures were made possible by the stylistic leap driven by Virus.

In 1984, amid the creative ferment following the return to democracy, Virus release “Relax”, an album that marks their reduction to a five-piece after the departure of Ricardo Serra. With one less guitarist, the sound changes drastically, and for the first time the keyboards become the pivot around which the arrangements revolve. The result is nonetheless excellently balanced, and even in this new lineup no member is left in the shadows.

A year later comes “Locura”, their fifth effort, which benefits from the addition of a new member, multi-instrumentalist Daniel Sbarra, employed mainly on synthesizers: the band thus finds itself with two keyboardists and one guitarist. The sound picks up, predictably, exactly where “Relax” left off, growing even more polished and layered.

Formed as a guitar-driven new wave band with jittery rhythms and skeletal riffs , Virus are now a lush, sophisticated pop-rock band, with features recalling new romantic, synth-pop and sophisti-pop. The cover art, designed by graphic artists Daniel Melgarejo and Peter Topp, bears witness to this new guise, depicting two androgynous, stylized faces with phosphorescent features that seem about to kiss. It would have made a fine cover for a Duran Duran.

The tracklist opens with the anthem “Pronta entrega”, which starts off on piano notes before breaking into a gallop of post-punk bass, synthesizers split between atmospheric pads in the background and chords mimicking the sound of a harpsichord, guitars that at times simulate off-beat strokes and at times settle gently into the groove (as in the solo), plus brief orchestral flourishes courtesy of early digital samplers. The general public's attention, however, is captured less by the meticulous craft underneath than by Federico Moura, one of the most fascinating figures in Spanish-language rock.

His elegant, sensuous voice delivers, in dandyish tones, a lyric charged with sexual tension:

Remembering your expression,

I'd still want those hot nights, full of anxiety.

Suffocated by sleep and by the pressure

I go searching for a body to love.

Distance loses its weight: express delivery, please!

I can get stimulated with music and alcohol,

but I get more excited when I'm with you.

Everything feels unreal when I'm with you

The word “entrega” translates literally as “delivery”, but it can also be understood as self-abnegation, openness towards others, and in a more slang-inflected, spicy sense, access to the lover's intimate requests during the sexual act.

These are lyrics whose freedom celebrates not only the return of democracy, but also the escape from the sexual constraint that Catholic culture still imposes on the nation, against which free elections have been powerless. It's no coincidence that, following in the footsteps of Virus, many other bands would insist on the concept, from Twist to G.I.T., not to mention the already-mentioned Soda Stereo.

That it's Federico Moura giving body to such words is no small detail: the figure he crafted during this period is magnetic. Elegant, willowy, he shows off long blond hair and graceful dance steps. Some point to him as "the David Bowie South American Bowie", but it's an inadequate definition: firstly because it risks reducing an original, instantly recognizable figure to a mere imitator, and secondly because Bowie always had an almost aggressive confidence and vitality about him, far removed from Moura's delicacy.

“Tomo lo que encuentro” moves along the same lines as “Pronta entrega”, adding a slappedbass. The lyrics are an ode to detachment:

I didn't imagine you were so lush,

your kiss on the glass left the trail marked.

I have no conflicts when it comes to love,

I take what I find, and I feel a little better.

The plane has already taken off, destination New York

The lyrics are in Spanish, except for the words “lussureggiante” and “corsa”, which are expressed in English: “lush” and “rush”. This allows for multiple wordplays: “le lush” sounds like “Lelouch”, thus referencing the French director Claude Lelouch and the romantic approach of his protagonists (e.g. “Un uomo, una donna”, 1966), passionate yet ritualistic, hardly spontaneous. “Rush”, on the other hand, is deliberately mispronounced and ends up sounding like “rouge” (lipstick).

Those isolated English loanwords display both a desire for cosmopolitanism and a kind of self-irony toward the aspirational provincialism such expressions betray.

In "Pecados para dos" the synthesizers reach their peak of timbral subtlety, generating sounds that are quite hard to tell apart: sitars morphing into harpsichords, metallophones fading into electric organs, arpeggios of uncertain origin drifting in the distance. Moura enunciates minimal concepts in a balanced, rhythmic form, yet they clearly hint at the stages and figures of a sensual, if not proudly libertine, ritual.

Fire, fire. Ours.

Serum, serum. Master, master. Ours.

We are sick. Fire, ours. Allies, hell.

Sins for two, washed in the dark,

reasons to confess, offenses in intimacy,

little things out of place

“Una luna de miel en la mano”, the most famous song by Virus, is one of the most improbable hits of that era: the hypnotic, obsessive rhythm that characterizes the track only kicks in at 0'52'', and the vocals don't arrive until as late as 1'14''. Timings that would be unthinkable for radio play, yet the introduction, built from keyboard tones and guitar phrasing, is evidently catchy enough not to put off the average listener.

A clear depiction of sexual self-stimulation, yet without taking on the character of either an ode or a satire on masturbation, it unfolds as a honeymoon through one's own fantasy:

La tua immaginazione mi programma dal vivo,

arrivo volando e mi lancio addosso a te,

salto nella musica, entro nel tuo corpo,

Halley's comet, copulation and dream.

Your mother won't be able to intercept me.

Perfect, wonderful, fast, bright.

Honey candies between your hands,

I promise you an ideal date,

adoring vitality

“Dicha feliz” is an ethereal ballad that develops a sharp piece of social analysis. The redundancy of the title – “Happy Joy” – introduces a text that layers a sardonic take on the aesthetics of advertising over an honest admission of the sense of well-being brought on by contemplative experience:

I change the channel and find the motorbike, the chocolate, the detergent.

The woman shows me her teeth, transmitting her love.

She makes me rejoice and the joy invades my happiness,

I begin to feel good in body and soul

“Sin disfraz” is the most visionary track on the album, a hybrid of pop rock and house music, not only years before any English band could even conceive of such a hybrid, but actually in perfect sync with the birth of American house, whose recorded output at the time amounted to a handful of singles (“On And On” by Jesse Saunders, “Music Is The Key” by J. M. Silk, “Mystery Of Love” by Mr. Fingers and little else). Even Frankie Knuckles, the godfather of house, though already active in Chicago's clubs, would not make his 12-inch debut until a few months later.

All the elements are there to mistake it for a track straight out of contemporary Chicago: the groove synth line that serves as the bassline, the atmospheric pads left to drift over it, the riffs syncopated electric organ (appearing several times, starting at 0'57'' – although in house music that role was more often given to a piano) and the high-pitched arpeggios placed as embroidery (from 2'01'').

Virus then add a substantial dose of elements previously alien to house music: guitar arpeggios jangle, post-punk guitar scratches with a funk pedigree, cowbell solos and assorted percussion.

Inspired by an episode supposedly experienced by Moura (a sexual approach with a Brazilian boy), here too the lyrics don't skimp on wordplay based on the pronunciation of near-homophones. For instance, in the line “A volte vado dove regna il mare” (“Sometimes I go where the sea reigns”), “mare” (sea) refers to the stimulating tropical setting of Rio de Janeiro, but also sounds like “male” (evil/pain), alluding to the setting described as a place of moral abandon, as made explicit right after:

It's my place, I go there without masks,

for a moment I set aside the tuxedo and open myself up to spirituality,

to love.

Another amusing phonetic ambivalence in the verse:

I take a taxi, Hotel Savoy, and we dance.

And I can no longer remember if it's today, yesterday or tomorrow.

It was yesterday, but the scent of that sensual, perfumed dark skin still lingers.

With “in taxi vado”, he literally means going to the hotel by car, but in Spanish the pronunciation of the letter v is technically identical to that of b, so “taxi voy” sounds the same as “taxi boy”.

This is one of the tracks in which Moura most openly pushes his homosexuality into the light: although he didn't hide it among friends and industry insiders, the conditions didn't yet exist for him to address it openly in a song. On the other hand, he always sang his songs in a neutral way, avoiding addressing female figures, and he never feared that his bearing and mannerisms might make him seem less than masculine: his audience was, in essence, already aware of it long before the matter was made official.

Even though it revolves around him, Virus is nonetheless a collective creature, with every member contributing creative input: the singer's signature appears most often, but it's never alone and never omnipresent.

Almost as if by deliberate intent to give ample room to the others, when one member writes the music for a track, he usually doesn't write the lyrics, and vice versa. For example, Federico Moura composes the music for three songs (“Una luna de miel en la mano”, “Dicha feliz” and “Sin disfraz”) and writes the lyrics for three others (“Pronta entrega”, “Destino circular” and “Lugares comunes”).

Julio Moura wrote most of the remaining music, while among the lyricists one figure stands out: an outside collaborator and close friend of the band, the sociologist and conceptual artist Roberto Jacoby, a member of the “Di Tella generation” (named after the institute and cultural workshop that was the hub of Argentina's artistic avant-garde in the Sixties. Juan Carlos Onganía's regime ordered its closure in 1970, fearing its subversive power).

Released on October 25, 1985, "Locura" is the album that detonated Virus's popularity: in Argentina it topped 200,000 copies sold (one of the highest figures recorded by the local rock market up to that point) and sold another 150,000 spread across Chile, Peru, Paraguay and Uruguay. Their impact was staggering: when they played live in Peru, at the Feria del Hogar, they drew 75,000 people over three days. From a band that, up to the previous album, spoke to an audience of devoted fans, they suddenly found themselves at the center of the universe.

The triumph, unfortunately, wouldn't last long: just long enough to work on another landmark album, “Superficies de placer” (1987), before Federico Moura learned he was HIV-positive. He lost his battle against AIDS on 21 December 1988.

The local media reported the news vaguely, speaking of illness and respiratory failure: like homosexuality, AIDS was another taboo. Only “Pelo”, a key magazine for the local rock culture, denounced the conspiracy of silence around the subject with a scathing editorial signed by Daniel Ripoll, titled “Dying Silenced”. The article's opening lines read: “Dying in silence is an act of dignity, being silenced to death is an act of repression. Federico Moura was sick with AIDS, and a good part of society decided that this should not be made public”.

In the years following Moura's death, his persona has been gradually picked apart by the attention of an audience that still, to this day, cannot come to terms with his absence, and the subjects once considered too delicate to discuss have fallen one after another, becoming public knowledge.

Virus carry on to this day, with Marcelo Moura as singer, but exclusively on the live circuit. Without Federico they have recorded only a couple of albums, whose disappointing results have probably discouraged them from trying again.

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31/07/2022

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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