All We Are Saying

There's a lot to write about the last month I've spent here in Argentina. Overall, Catharine and I have been very happy here: good food, nice weather, the people are friendly (though they generally speak in a variety of Spanish that is still fairly incomprehensible to us), and there are a ton of concerts. In fact, somewhat to my surprise, there are a TON of tribute bands in Argentina. No doubt you'll all hear me spin out some eleaborate pontifications about tribute bands in Argentina for my dissertation (especially since I've been able to do interviews with three tribute band musicians over the last week), but I just wanted to mention a couple of things now.

Last week, I saw The Beats at the Teatro Gran Rex. Lots of interesting things happened at the concert (again, which you'll get to read about in my dissertation), but one particularly interesting thing happened during the performance of "Imagine" at the concert. First of all, this is not technically a Beatles song, but it is performed fairly often at Beatles tribute band shows, so I wasn't too surprised to hear it. More interesting was the manner of its performance. The "John" in the band was onstage alone, not playing any instruments, and accompanied essentially by a karoake tape background. I don't quite know why he just didn't have his bandmates accompany him, but the background sounded pretty good, in fact, it could have just been Lennon's recording with the vocal stripped from it. While he was singing, they showed video images on a huge screen above the stage and had Spanish subtitles for the lyrics. This was interesting, because while the audiences here are really into tribute bands and usually sing along quite strongly, I have suspected for a while that most of the audience doesn't actually understand the English lyrics in these songs (and Alex, the bassist I interviewed yesterday from the Pink Floyd tribute band Umma Gumma, seconds this view). (We'll also pass over here what "understand" means--clearly different things to different people.) But, evidently, The Beats decided that the lyrics were too important just to wash over the crowd, so they provided a translation for the non-English speakers in the audience. And they showed video images of--to put it plainly--deprivation, hardship, and misery: refugee camps, starving children, war footage, and a video of one of the planes hitting the World Trade Center. Mostly, the crowd was silent or singing along softly. For myself, I still don't really know what to do when I see video from 9/11. Usually, I just sort of stare at it unblinkingly with my mouth half open. 9/11 is probably the most talked-about event of the last 50 years, but what can you say about it? I think Vonnegut had it about right when he says in the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five that in fact there isn't anything to say about a moment like that. All that's left is for the birds to sing, "Poo-tweet-tweet."

But anyway, they also showed some video of, if I remember correctly, the IRA, Israeli settlers, prison camps, people throwing rocks at tanks: relatively standard stuff. They also briefly showed someone holding a sign that read: "Las Malvinas son Argentinas." (The Falkland/Malvinas Islands are Argentinian.) And inxeplicably, the crowd, which had been silently contemplating or singing along, gave out a hearty cheer for that. Now, I assume that the image was chosen to go along with the line in the song, "Imagine there's no countries . . . nothing to kill or die for," and that the picture was supposed to represent the sort of doomed, futile, and destructive nationalism that caused two countries to go to war and lose many lives over a few sparsely populated islands. "Las Malvinas son Argentinas" is something of a rallying cry here, but Lennon's song, and the performance of it in this context by a tribute band with all of these other images, seems to be directly against the usual sentiment that "Las Malvinas son Argentinas" carries. I don't quite get how people could be so receptive to the song and its performance here (which, let me assure you, they were) and yet applaud a symbol of jingoistic nationalism. "Strange days, indeed."