WE ARE FAR TOO YOUNG AND CLEVER

DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS 

COME ON EILEEN

1982

TODAY I AM KEEN TO WRITE IN English, a language I am so fond of, in which I attempted to write as a youth, but quit because I rapidly fathomed that, as J. L. Borges said, Spanish is my fate. I will have to toil and just hope that so many years have not taken their toll on me and that I will manage to lick this into shape.

So, what to write about? It most definitely had to deal with something related to English, and I just couldn’t find a better subject than “anglo” music, the denomination I prefer in Spanish (that very few use), because I think it is the umbrella that better encompasses popular music in English: it is not just rock ‘n roll, not only pop, not just soul, not just R&B, not only disco, not country, it is every popular genre whose songs are sung in English. I am well aware that it is a trifling matter, but first things first, and that was my inception in the English-speaking world. I pledge to write about significant topics in forthcoming articles. 

I do not want to bother the reader, so I will be very brief: as I have related many times, the actual takeoff of my English initiation was the discovery of anglo songs on Oro Stereo, a local radio station, at the suggestion of two friends in early 1988. It was an epiphany for a thirteen year old boy who had very little, or rather no interest in English until then, and, quite the contrary, liked French, Russian and German better. Initially, every time I listened to a song, I was completely unable to understand a single word, and I could barely translate written lyrics, which was even more frustrating since I studied in an unconventional school where English was a seminal subject matter. As I am not the sort of person that goes in for feeling sorry for himself and usually do not give in easily, I resolutely fell back on the grammars and the dictionaries I had at home given that my father had a Linguistics degree, so that bit by bit in a few months I got to understand most of a song when I listened to it, and was able to translate lyrics. I morphed into a complete anglo nut to the point that at night I used to fall asleep listening to the radio. The contact with the living language in a country where it is hard to interact with people who speak English, even more so in an era when there was no Internet, complemented my high school grammar studies, propelled my learning and greatly improved my listening and pronunciation. English like wildfire became my favourite foreign language. Intuitively, I also applied myself with zeal to reading simplified and abridged editions of famed books to strengthen my learning. One thing led to another; had I not run into anglo first, I would have never learnt the language as well as I did, or as I should have done. To this day, I still think of listening to songs as at least the most enjoyable manner to acquire a language, not to say the best. 

I was spellbound, after a fashion, for three years (1988-1991) listening to anglo until mediocre pseudo-artists such as Milli Vanilli, New Kids on the Block, Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul, and so-called “rock en español” burst in and hogged the limelight. I completely lost interest. Besides, my city’s sole anglo radio station, came to an end in 1991... and there was no Internet. During the rest of the nineties I occasionally learnt of some hits like Green Day’s Basket Case and Oasis’ Whatever, and additionally, to deepen my estrangement, my university studies and later my work occupied my time. I utterly lost track of anglo.

In the early 2000s, when first Napster and peer to peer communities, and later YouTube happily arose, I timidly reconnected with anglo and caught up on a number of epic superhits I had missed in the meantime, such as The Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony, Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn, The Cranberries’ Dreams, Meat Loaf’s I'd Do Anything for Love and many more from the ‘80s and ‘70s, chiefly. 

Film has also played a pivotal role not only in my improving of the English language but in my discovering of songs, for instance, Tony Orlando & Dawn’s Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree, Bob Seger’s Old Time Rock and Roll, The Righteous Brothers’ Unchained Melody, Tom Petty’s American Girl, Elton John’s Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters and Roy Orbison’s There won’t be many coming home.

At any rate, never in the weirdest of my dreams did I fancy that I would ever again listen to the same radio station I used to in 1988, now in its web version. Same songs, same jingles, same host, same voice, just like a time travel. I came across it by chance by mid-2020 while evoking its female host’s velvet voice and searching the net for her, and have been listening to it on a regular basis since. Many will think of this as just a nostalgic and worthless token of someone’s eternal returns, but to me it has been not only the unearthing of forgotten sounds and the discovery of ancient gems, but a homecoming, a recurrence to my roots, to something that stuck to me somehow, a restructuring of the essentials of my life, ultimately, a reunion that makes me brim over with joy.

‘Cause it all begins again when it ends

Roxette

Joyride, 1991

Barranquilla, 17 April 2021