Yo si lo recuerdo….
(Some thoughts about the prince of song)
Recently there has been a song in my head titled amnesia, a heart broken hymn performed
during the 1990s by Mexican singer Jose
Jose. This romantic song was one of the many hits achieved by him and whose career goes from the early 1970s until now. It is little known
that Jose Jose started his musical career
as a bossa nova double bass player before becoming the so called prince of song.
His big chance to start a solo career as a singer came with
the performance of El Triste in the
II Latin song festival, a performance that until now is remembered as one of
his most beloved ones. The song is also a perfect example of the Mexican imaginary
that these romantic ballads build during the 1970s and 1980s. The main themes
that these ballads deal with were about broken hearts and unfinished love that
ends with a lonely man staring at his tragedy with resignation but yet grief
and sorrow.
These ballads continue the folk tradition of Mexican
ranchera song that begun in the early 20th century and had its
origins during the revolutionary years with the corridos, a special kind of song played commonly with a solo guitar
and that was used to talk about some of the revolutionary heroes and their
ventures. Later during the 1940s some composers like Cuco Sanchez, Alvaro Carrillo
and Jose Alfredo Jimenez take the corrido
form to write love songs using the solo guitar style or arrange those for
the Mariachi aggrupation. Most of these
composers were self-trained musicians and to made the instrumentation many
times they used the help of formal train musicians like in the case of Jose
Alfredo and his collaboration with Ruben Fuentes, a classical violinist who
made his career working with mariachi music. His arrangements for Mariachi
still remains as some of the best ones.
With this historical background Jose Jose settled as a romantic ballad performer and became very
famous and recognized above Latin America because of his unique vocals and his
deep interpretation. It is curios how like many other musicians that worked
with this style of music, like some the ones that I mentioned above, he also
lived with the stigma of alcoholism and although he is a survivor of it, his
voice result really damaged because that.
Amnesia is one of
his many hits and the song reached the top ten of hot Latin tracks in the
billboard top of Latin songs chart during the 1990s. In 1998 a group of Mexican rock singers made a
tribute to Jose Jose’s music and released an album of covers with his major
hits, Amnesia was one of the covers
and it was performed by Hip Hop Mexican group Control Machete.
Control Machete was
a Mexican Hip Hop group formed the north of Mexico formed during the middle 1990s,
a time of important social movements in Mexico. The group helped raise Mexican
Hip Hop from an underground level to a mass one and the social content in their
lyrics positioned them as one of the most important and influential bands
of that time.
In the cover of Jose Jose’s song we heard a rhythmic base which
works as foundation for the original melody that is sung by a female singer. Above that Fermin
Caballero, one of control Machete’s former members, rapp using some of the
lyrics. The final result is a deconstruction of the original ballad,completely
transformed but without taking its beauty and its melancholy mood away. Certainly an
exquisite cover worth of dusted off and listening again.
