Spiteful

It is significant to note how, over the last five years, Barcelona (and the comment could be extended to all of Catalonia) has not been able to create a media, commercial, and I would even say cultural brand capable of competing with the planetary impact of the marriage-divorce between Gerard Piqué and Shakira. Indeed, there was a time when our beloved city was known everywhere for its proven excellence in giving birth to Olympic Games; with the turn of the 21st century, the dynamic began to degenerate with the Fórum de las Culturas chiringuito, only to later be somewhat limited to the commercial universe of telephony congresses. Whether we like it or not, Barcelona currently only attracts the world's attention for being the neuralgic point of an idealized marriage between a football great and a splendid artist who, like any spicy romance, can end up glorified in tremendously mediocre music.  

The conjugal history of these protagonists shows a part of what, with a certain cynicism, we amend from our present when we act as philosophers of music and cultural critics over a carajillo or at a cocktail bar. Certainly, Shakira's song with Bizarrap tells us about a world that has renounced the universe of privacy and in which emotional fodder has become a normalized drug. In turn, the appearance of this hit full of resentment also explains the delirium of a present where what we called current events emerges like lava from a stressful accumulation of references, visualizations, and, above all, opinions about a specific event. If you want it explained in a less abstract way, the important thing about the Shakira-esque song is not its musical form or its sound quality, but the product itself inasmuch as it demands positioning oneself on a certain moral team. It doesn't matter if the music is good or not; the important thing is which team you are on.

We also have to talk, of course, about the curious universe of what we have called fake news (for fear of referring to something as old and perennial as lies). Indeed, shortly after the famous song was released, one could already find Shakira-ologists and Piqué-ologists under every rock. Some of them opined, for example, that the singer had every right in the world to unleash resentment against the footballer because he, they knew for sure, absolutely for sure, had repeatedly consummated adultery with Clara Chía in the marital bed more than a year ago. There are also some females who, admitting that Shakira has gone too far, believe that Gerard Piqué very much deserves all of this, because kissing a younger girl (without a recognized and minimally decent profession) is almost comparable to being a sexual harasser. The problem, therefore, is not fake news, but our unhealthy addiction to judging other people's lives.

From the more corporate perspective of the matter, the scorned song by this adopted Catalan (whom we all loved when she exported Boig per tu all over the planet) certifies the death of an essential journalistic notion such as the necessary waiting time to verify a piece of news and the mental digestion required to write about any newsworthy phenomenon. By now, everything has already been said about the song, the marriage, and the subsequent musicalized divorce. It has already been said that poor Clara Chía does not deserve to be singled out in such a clumsy way by a global superstar, it has already been said that, no matter how much a mother always ends up taking in her cub (male) after a separation, Gerard Piqué's mother is not to blame for the money Shakira owes to the tax authorities, and it has also been said that in this story of hypothetical adultery everyone is a bit cheeky, because both Piqué and the singer were properly coupled when they decided to share fluids in the past. 

A world where we are always late to write and no one will ever have the last word in a conversation; a universe where, before you can digest something, everything has already been said, evidently, ends in a babble of words where the important thing about facts is only their ability to stress us for a few hours while waiting for the next volcano. In this sense, the world of before (when newspapers explained yesterday's events and we chroniclers had to digest the news for a few hours before writing about a topic) turns out to be uselessly slow and heavier than Wagner's operas. Songs don't have to be good; it's enough that they provoke comments and, in turn, hook you for the first twenty seconds. Now what's needed is to take advantage of the fire of a superhuman cascade of messages, and if not, ask the marketing managers of Rolex and Cassio, who must have arrived home late yesterday. 

You will ask yourselves, dear readers of La Punyalada, how can we counteract this dose of frantic news where everything is said and everything burns deliriously? I advocate returning to something as ancient as the proverbial and sane advice of a grandmother. "Queen, when you are heartbroken… breathe several times before you start composing." And also for something even more ancestral than the wisdom of our ancestors… such as hope; that is, the hope that one day we will be universal and planetary again for something with a little more category than a divorce. We are left with a country that is too yellow, in every sense.