Irony In Spanish Eighties Pop

Discussed in this article:

Almodóvar y McNamara
Alaska
Hombres G
Los Zombies

In England and the United States, the 80s marked the rise of the Reagan/Thatcher Revolution, when the last nails were hammered into the coffin of the new social freedoms gained in the 1960s. In Spain, on the other hand, the 1980s were akin to the the American sixties. It was a period of wild new freedoms unheard of under the fascist dicatatorship which was in power until 1975. At a time when music in the U.S. and the U.K. were plunging headlong into fiercely capitalist markets dominated by big labels, Spain had little money and lots of freedom to experiment with.

In the words of director Pedro Almodóvar, “We didn’t know the price of things, and we didn’t think about the market. We didn’t have memory, and we imitated everything that we liked, and we had a good time doing it” (1). It was a time of experimentation with music, parties, sexuality, drugs, and a new social order. Out of this ferment emerged artists, actors, and musicians whose creativity was silenced under Franco, but who, from the eighties on, would become big names in Spain and even on the international stage: Pedro Almodóvar (director), Antonio Banderas (actor), and Joaquín Sabina (musician), to name a few who are likely to be familiar to an American audience.

This social movement was known as La Movida, and had its nexus in Madrid. While not all of the artists popular among the Spanish youth in the 1980s fit neatly into the core of La Movida, this was the dominant youth cultural movement of the day, and as such it was the backdrop for most youth culture from the late seventies through the mid-eighties.

Spanish eighties pop has many of the features associated with eighties music around the world, such as synthesizers, electronic instruments, certain modes, etc. However, there is something special which sets it off from the eighties music which came out of England and the United States. Whereas the electronic-based music coming out of these countries could be characterized as overly serious and melodramatic, the eighties pop music coming out of Spain is more often than not characterized by an irreverent irony.

The serious sound of the eighties pop genre is often combined with ironic, humorous, or even completely absurd lyrics, laughing at itself in a way that the American glam rocker didn’t know how to. This irony often takes the form of a dissonance between the sound of the music and the music’s lyrics. By singing about things not usually sung about in standard commercial eighties pop, the musicians manage to both participate in the genre and take an ironic distance from it.

Almodóvar y McNamara
Almodóvar y McNamara was a group headed by director Pedro Almodóvar, and the interested reader can see them perform in Almodóvar’s Laberinto de Pasiones. This group is the epitome of the absurd in Spanish eighties music. Their lyrics were based largely on ridiculous rhymes and word play. As is typical of the Almodóvar of the eighties, the songs are full of humor, non sequitur, and ribald irreverence toward all dominant social norms. Take, for example, the lead of "Monja, Jamón" (Nun, Ham) based on a potentially endless looping of the words for “nun” and “ham” in Spanish:

What made Almódovar y McNamara a success? Why is this so funny? A key part of this humor is the dissonance between the lyrical content and the musical genre. Almódovar y McNamara and others play with a more or less serious-sounding genre, but they themselves don’t take the genre at face value. The humor comes not just from the content of the lyrics, but from the fusion of the lyrics with melodies and instrumentations (synth, electric drums, dance rhythms and beats) associated with kitsch sentimentalism or postmodern frivolity.

Another Almodóvar y McNamara song, titled "Suck It To Me," creates a word play on the English phrase “sock it to me” and the Spanish colloquism chúpamela, “suck my dick.” Instead of using English as a language of prestige in order to reach a wider market, they make fun of this very function of English by using only words and phrases the common Spaniard is likely to know, along with word plays the average English speaker wouldn’t get. Both the music and the "call and response" form of the song are believable and familiar, but the absolute and deliberate silliness of the lyrics mocks more serious songs after which it is modeled. As the song collapses into the ridiculous, it drags the genre down with it:

Hombres G
Hombres G (G Men) was a sort of boy band. They were the object of teenage girls’ adulation, they starred in a cheesy movie based on one of their songs, and, along with other lighter pop groups like Mecano, they were viscerally hated by the punks and followers of more heavy or risqué groups like Almodóvar y McNamara, Alaska, and Los Suaves. Such was the animosity felt by some anarchist punk friends of a friend of mine that when Hombres G came to their town they cut the electricity to the concert..

Nevertheless, when compared with the American equivalent of the period, the New Kids on the Block, the intelligent listener will find little to complain about with Hombres G. While the New Kids were shaking and dancing like degenerate postmodern Elvis impersonators in fancy suits and designer overalls singing "Step by Step," Los Hombres G were playing their own instruments in jeans and t-shirts singing lyrics that show a significantly deeper consciousness of the genre. Take, for example, their hit "Devuélveme A Mi Chica" (Give Me Back My Girl). The opening verse sounds melancholy and heartfelt, with singer David Summers crying out these words:

Then the pace picks up and Summers starts to sound angry:

Then there is a slight pause. The listener expects to hear that David Summers is going to fill the guys neck with lead, but then we hear that he will fill it:

Then the chorus:

Typical of the irony of Spanish eighties music the group never drops its guard. If you didn’t pay attention to the lyrics it would sound like any other pop song. However, instead of following a cliché model of tough and aggressive masculinity by singing about beating up the guy who steals his girl, Summers makes fun of this cliché by dumping itchy powder down the shirt of his rival.

Another Hombres G hit, "Marta tiene un marcapasos" (Marta Has a Pacemaker), sounds like a happy and carefree 50s rock/pop-style tune. The distracted listener might gather that it is about a woman, Marta, who gives birth to a beautiful baby boy. But let’s take a closer look at those lyrics:

In these lyrics there is a direct and conscious rejection of kitsch, or, rather, the self-destruction of kitsch: the music is kitsch, but the lyrics twist the banal sentimentalism of the music into something both grotesque and funny.

Alaska
Alaska, who had a leading role in Pedro Almodóvar’s first full-length film, Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón, was known as “The Queen of La Movida.” She sang in many groups (including back-up vocals in Almodóvar y McNamara): Alaska y Los Pegamoides, Alaska, Alaska y Dinarama, as well as Kaka Deluxe and Los Pegamoides. She also hosted the children’s show La bola de cristal, in the personage of a young witch with an immense head of dreadlocks. The show was a quality children’s show à la Pee-wee Herman show, and mixed social criticism, humor, and culture in a variety of puppet shows and skits. Alaska’s music is very 80s, and very danceable.
The song below is titled "Bailando" (Dancing), and is almost a regular club song about dancing. Alaska says over and over that she spends her days dancing and drinking, but then there is some dissonance as she starts to talk about the effects of this social life on her body:

No one would be surprised to hear phrases like, “I’m sore all over,” or “I move my hips, I move my legs” in a song of this nature, but the fact that she names parts of the body that are never named in this sort of song makes us laugh. This incongruency also pokes fun at the limited scope of singers that seem to be blind to all body parts beyond boobs, butt, legs, hips, neck, and lips. Of course when you dance you move your tibia and your fibula, so why not say it? Irony and implicit criticism may be directed not just at not naming body parts, but at a growing culture of drugs and partying that ignores and disregards the needs of the body.

Los Zombies
Los Zombies were something of a one-hit wonder. Their one hit, "Groenlandia" (2), plays with the Yeyé style of 1960s and 1970s Spain, a style influenced by the surf, soul, and Mod music of the Anglophone world. Yeyé lyrics buttressed the dominant repressive social norm of Spain under Franco in the 1960s, and tended toward the soft and kitsch, as in "Los chicos con las chicas," by Los Bravos (3), whose catch line goes, “Boys have to be with girls, girls must live with boys.” "Groenlandia" tells how the singer will follow his love to the ends of the earth and even into outer space. On one level it is a sweet and catchy love song, and of all the songs reviewed in this article, it is probably the least funny. Yet, it takes advantage of the same sort of dissonance employed by Alaska in "Bailando" in the places in which the singer pledges he will search for his love.

The places are not at all what you would expect in such a song. In Lee Hazlewood’s (author of "These Boots are Made for Walking") "I Move Around," for example, Hazlewood recounts all the places he’s been to since he saw his lover with another man: San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, Barcelona, and several exotic /distant places such as Zanzibar, Singapore, and Alaska. The Zombies, on the other hand, name Peru, Greenland, the jungles of Borneo, Tibet, Japan, Easter Island, outer space, and the rings of Saturn. This list of places is just as logical and is even more near and far than Lee Hazlewood’s exemplary list, but they are not the sort of romanticized places you would ever expect to find in such a song. This lends a joking, playful air to the song, but at the same time makes the song sound smarter and more real than Hazlewood’s.

The beauty of La Movida's ironic approach to pop music is that it critiques the eighties pop genre while still actively engaging it. Simple ironization of commercial pop music can leave a genre lifeless. Take Wierd Al Yankovic, who satirizes popular songs for comedic affect without engaging an actual genre. What we are left with is comedy, not actual music. None of these groups set out to lampoon the genres they worked within. Instead, they used them as a platform to create a music which captured the bucolic and irreverent spirit of the transition to democracy. This was a music which could animate the night lives of thousands of young people who were exhalting in their newfound freedom to have fun, without insulting their intelligence or selling out completely to the commercial music industry. It must have been one hell of a time while it lasted.

Note to the interested reader: I recommend viewing videos of all of these groups on YouTube. Recordings of all these groups and most of these songs are readily available. I also recommend watching the video of "Step by Step." If you understand Spanish and want still more Spanish eighties culture, take a look at episodes of La bola de cristal, hosted by Alaska, which is also available on YouTube. If you are a terrible person who wears a patch over his or her eye and forces innocent sailors to walk the plank into the stormy seas, you might try your hand at downloading these songs and more from any of the internet’s fine filesharing sites

Nicholas Callaway has a B.A. in Linguistics from Reed College and currently lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he has most recently been teaching courses in Spanish and Printmaking. He is editor of Poetry 'n' Prints magazine, published monthly in Boulder.

(1) Pedro Almodóvar, Patty Diphusa, Anagrama, Barcelona, Spain, 1998, p.7. (This and all other translations in this article are by the author.)

(2) Los Zombies once played this song live with back-ups provided by Almodóvar, McNamara, and Carlos Berlanga (longtime collaborator with Alaska).

(3) Los Bravos, whose lead singer was the German Mike Kogel, are best known in the English-speaking world for "Black is Black [I want my baby back]."