Fito Páez: ‘There Is Nothing More Important Than Love’

Final August I used to be transferring to Line 7 at Bellas Artes station on the Mexico Metropolis subway once I noticed the flyer. Fito Páez, Zócalo, 7 Septiembre, 2024, Entrada Libre. The legendary Argentine rocker was set to participate within the iconic free live performance sequence within the Mexican capital’s well-known central plaza. I acquired on my prepare again dwelling and marked my calendar. A number of weeks later, one other announcement: The present could be rescheduled as a consequence of a well being emergency.

Finally introduced for January, later that month I transferred to Line 2 towards Zócalo station. There have been delays. By the point the throng of followers on the late prepare made it up the steps into the evening air, the Zócalo had already been shaking for Fito Páez, in a flowing multicolor gown that swayed as he sang generational hit “Mariposa Tecknicolor,” the group leaping and hanging off his each phrase.

The Zócalo reveals—which have seen acts like Paul McCartney, Shakira, Cafe Tacvba, and Interpol grace the long-lasting sq.—maintain a particular place in Mexico Metropolis’s cultural programming, as occasions that deliver musicians who may often play at prohibitive costs at arenas straight to the folks. The reveals are an equalizing area, one which briefly subdues the jarring distinction between a love of music that drives us to observe an artist and the often-vicious trade our favourite artists exist in. 

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“It’s particular, particularly attending to a metropolis the place a historic revolution was deliberate, and seeing that very place celebrating you—nicely, the artwork, not particularly me,” Páez gushes, from his house in Buenos Aires. “What you see at work, there’s a true trade between nations, between music, phrases, and their worth. You see how a rustic so musically shaped—and one as wealthy [as Mexico]—embraces others who come to share their very own richness, how on the finish we’re all speaking about the identical factor, which is spending time collectively whereas this journey of life lasts. Essentially the most thrilling factor about connecting that approach is the way it exists exterior of the mainstream, exterior of the technological revolution and the main labels, and continues to be a parallel channel [to the music industry] that also features with good well being.”

The Zócalo present was part of a grand restoration for Páez, whose larger-than-life songs and heartfelt lyricism have made him one of the vital revered musicians on the earth. Quickly after, he performed reveals throughout Mexico, Spain, and his beloved Argentina, in addition to giving talks within the U.S. He’s certain for Spain this July to play his formidable new literary-minded album Novela. 

Páez began laying down demos of what would turn out to be Novela in 1988. He was in search of lightness following the extreme recording course of that birthed Ciudad De Pobres Corazones, arguably his darkest album. Ey! adopted, together with a sequence of albums that may go on to outline the ’90s in Latin America and solidify his place as a defining voice in rock en español, together with ’92s El Amor Despuéss Del Amor, the best-selling album within the historical past of Argentine rock. The ultimate work is dizzyingly expansive, an hour-long idea album that imagines a fantastical world of witches, circuses, and Argentina’s Santa Fe province, close to Páez’s native Rosario. 

“The unique album format was based mostly off of Quadrophenia, the Who’s album from ’73; it was a narrative instructed within the type of an album, accompanied by images and a textual content,” says Páez. “It was an immersive expertise the place you would learn, have a look at images, observe lyrics, and hearken to these albums, which to me are so key. It excited me, and that format was undoubtedly one of many catalysts [for Novela]. The track just isn’t a solemn style in the way in which that literature or movie—perhaps not comedies—may be. I had one sort of language prepared for the script, and needed to write in one other altogether whereas adapting it to music, which is extra florid and speaks in a extra universally understood approach.”

Novela is a sonic stretch towards theatricality for the Argentine icon, a bonafide rock opera leaning towards a musical. This isn’t to say the album sacrifices a rock sound or stays in a single place, with Páez veering throughout the spectrum of cinematic anthems (“El Vuelo”), piano ballads (“Cruces de Gin en Sal”), and unabashed funk rock (“Modo Carrie”). The  psychedelia of its cowl calls to thoughts surrealist artists Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, an ideal storm of technicolor visuals well-suited to the free-wheeling story Páez weaves.

For all its floaty storybook qualities, Novela is grounded in Páez’s actuality. Standout observe “Superextraño” sees him shade the music of right now and raise up friends (learn: rock gods) Charly Garcia, John Lennon, and Spinetta to the tune of chugging guitar, an ode to odd ones out in a world anticipating us to fall in line. He makes it a degree to deliver up artists that he finds enduring: filmmaker Adolfo Aristaraín (who coined the title “Argentina Es Una Trampa”), musicians Joni Mitchell and George Gershwin, Jack London (who he’s at the moment studying), and legendary Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’ brief story The Aleph, which contemplates infinity in a single level.

Outdoors of Novela, Páez has been busy with literary pursuits. Presently ending two books, amongst them his first poetry assortment and a book-length essay entitled “Music within the Instances of Mass Dementia” about what precisely the hell occurred to music between the twentieth and twenty first century. The latter was lately learn to college students at Boston’s celebrated Berklee Faculty of Music. Written in fragmentary statements as irreverent and slicing as they’re instructive, the essay calls to thoughts John Cage’s “Ten Guidelines For Lecturers and College students” and Oscar Wilde’s “Phrases and Philosophies For The Use of the Younger.” It’s his approach of attempting to ensure the following era of creatives goes in untainted, proposing an antidote to the ever-more-curated digital panorama. Páez has quite a bit to say, perhaps an excessive amount of.

“It’s a kind of issues the place the essay is so dynamic that as the times go by I wish to add one thing else; I’m lastly at a degree the place my editor is getting it out of my fingers,” he admits. “A deadline the place I don’t have to put in writing anymore would assist me a ton, as a result of that is the sort of work you would preserve including to simply. The [essay form] has that high quality. There’s no component the place you possibly can say ‘interval, completed.’ It simply merely should be deserted so one thing new can occur.”

In Argentine director Eliseo Subiela’s El lado oscuro del corazón, principal character Oliverio—vaguely based mostly on the poet Oliverio Girondo—takes the subway. The title observe of Páez’s Ciudad de Pobres Corazones performs, and the poet finds himself face-to-face with a kind of tragic figures of town, pushed mad by Buenos Aires and singing a campy karaoke of the track to his face. Páez admits to detesting the album, however what he managed to do in capturing that bitter rage was broaden upon his personal concepts of emotion. With out that darkness, the witches attempting to craft “good love” on Novela don’t exist.

If one strips away the magic and literary idea of his newest, Páez stays obsessed along with his major theme: love. Whether or not he explores the darkness it might probably plunge us into as in Ciudad de Pobres Corazones or the methods we are able to study to like once more as in his world hit “El amor después del amor,” Páez is an artist that has made a mission of exploring each ridge of the center. Even the apex of Novela, “El Triunfo Del Amor,” is an upbeat, spacey funk rock observe about how love conquers all. It’s a becoming sentiment to precise, each because the “fortunately ever after” fairy story ending of his newest, and as an optimistic grace notice in a profession that has conquered the world with the sort of transferring madness that may solely come from an actual lover.

“There may be nothing extra vital than love,” he says. “Love in all its varieties is the one theme that pursuits me as a result of it’s so broad: love for our kids, romantic affections, pity, compassion, the hug, solidarity, tenderness, eroticism. It’s a theme that spreads itself over what most issues to me, which is folks on the fringe of the cosmos, which is the true actuality, and all of us are there: the multi-millionaire and the youngsters dying of starvation. That is the place we see one of many nice chasms of our age, which is the place all of us are positioned with regard to like, what love means to every of us, and the way we are able to present it to others.”

This interview was performed in Spanish, with quotes translated and edited for readability.

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