It is not acceptable that, today, in a democratic state, singers are imprisoned for their lyrics, no matter what these lyrics say, including bad taste things against any of us. The president of the Community of Madrid, the frivolous Isabel Díaz Ayuso, says, to excuse it, that Pablo Hasél has less art than "any of us in a karaoke after two cubatas." By her way of saying it, I understand that the cubatas she imagines are in a highball glass, like those of Eugenio, in the eighties. A Raf, a Screwdriver, a Cointreau with pineapple... Is it that now we are all art critics? If he had written a minuet, would things be different?
While Pablo Hasél's songs will not make it onto Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 best, the author should not be imprisoned for "insults to the crown." That this crime exists is only a magnifying glass, a firewall in the middle of the fire. When Suetonius says "It is necessary that my people be exempt from both suspicion and crime" (it's the "Caesar's wife" thing, which is always attributed to the husband, Julius Caesar) he is not thinking of achieving it through inviolability. He is thinking that inviolability, precisely, should not be necessary.
The protests, these days, have ended with a nineteen-year-old girl injured by a foam bullet. She has lost her eye and much more. Containers have been burned and we have seen how, very close to the newsroom of The New Barcelona Post, clothing stores were looted. The videos of burning containers and thieves taking shirts with hangers included denigrate any cause.
Now, from each of the many parties involved in this debate, Google's predictive texts can be written. "They are capitalists and it's okay if their shop window is broken," "Containers are replaced, this girl's life is not," "When there is no police, demonstrations proceed without incident," "How strange that the police prevented the passage of demonstrators and did not prevent, precisely, them from robbing this store." And also: "Pablo Hasél is no angel." And also: "These protests are not just about Pablo Hasél, they are a sign of general discontent, young people have no future," "Don't tell us to be peaceful; you have taught us that being peaceful and letting ourselves be beaten is useless," "If we don't burn containers, you won't look at us," "If the police don't know that foam shotguns should aim from the waist down or cannot guarantee, for whatever reason, that they will aim from the waist down, they should not use foam shotguns."
I don't like to see motorcycles burned, containers, shop windows broken. I like less the original reason for the demonstration: that the lyrics of a song can deprive you of freedom. I think, of course, of other songs from before that, following this criterion, could also be "a crime" today. Mata hippies en las Cíes, by Siniestro Total, called for torturing to death this peaceful minority in favor of free love who used to camp on the islands at the mouth of Vigo, in Galicia. ("I take him out of the tent, I cut off an arm..."). Anyway, not to mention El preso número nueve, which has even been performed by the pacifist Joan Báez. Prisoner number 9 is in jail accused of murder and the song begins on the day he is going to be shot. Since the song was composed by the Mexican Cantoral brothers, and in Mexico the last execution was in '57 (in the Hermosillo penitentiary) it is easy to place it there.
The lyrics say:
"And before dawn his life they must take Because he killed his wife and a disloyal friend He says, thus, confessing I killed them, yes sir And if I am born again, I will kill them again.
Father, I do not regret, nor am I afraid of eternity I know that up in heaven the supreme being will judge us"
Then comes the "Ay, ya, ya, ya ...".
"On Mario face down, three crosses One on his forehead, the one that hurt the most Another on his chest, the one that killed him And again on the news
Two drug addicts in full anxiety Rob and kill Mario Postigo"
And you, readers, will wonder for what very strange reason the author of the lyrics, one of the Cano brothers, gives Mario a surname ---this very uncommon surname, Postigo. For the rhyme. With his name being Mario Postigo, Ana Torroja could sing, as if nothing:
"While his wife is a witness from the doorway"
If his name were Mario Pérez, his wife would do it with an "alférez" (ensign).
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