«The important thing is to transcend and that you can develop your art throughout your life. Many artists are the host for six months: the difficult thing is to have a career of 15 years. Anton Alvarez was expressed this way in this newspaper before being a winning horse at the racetrack during the Donostia Festival 2018. Almost three years later, everything points to the musician walking on the right path in his longing for transcendence and durability.
The artist formerly known as Crema y C. Tangana -o Pucho for colleagues– has just been reincarnated into a new character who, under the invocation of The Madrileño, has given a blow to the Spanish record industry. If we stick to the figures of digital reproductions, the success is unappealable: ‘El madrileño’ has achieved the best historical premiere of a Spanish album on Spotify with over five million views in a single day after it was posted two weeks ago. Curiously, the previous record was held Rosalía with the two million listeners that ‘El mal quiero’ (2018) had in 24 hours, an album that the Catalan diva composed precisely together with Tangana, her ex-boyfriend.
The criticisms have been unusual and mostly positive, and except for a few isolated comments -and perhaps because now he tries to avoid the controversies-, nobody seems to remember boycotts like the one he suffered in 2019 in the Aste Nagusia in Bilbao, whose City Council vetoed him for the alleged macho content of his lyrics. In any case, that of C. Tangana is a case worth studying: Today it triumphs before a global audience that encompasses different generations and social classes, but it was not always like that, since it came out of the ‘underground’ and at the beginning it acted for a strictly youth niche. In fact, before his concert at the racecourse in front of 6,500 people, the Gipuzkoan capital attended his first steps in performances -some with the Agorazein collective- for 150 and 200 kids at the Dabadaba or the small room in Gazteszena.
«I am always fleeing from the character or the artistic moment in which I am»
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Part of his current success is attributable to the all-powerful push of the multinational Sony, in which he has published his works in recent years, but above all, it is the result of an innate commercial flair and the effort of a team of collaborators in which There are more or less recent associates such as the musician Víctor Martínez or Santos Bacana, with whom he founded the production company Little Spain, in charge of his imaginative music videos, which mix cañí manners, religious imagery and a modern and careful aesthetic. But above all, Pucho is loyal to his longtime friends such as the producer Alizzz (Cristian Quirante) and his inseparable manager Iñigo Elosegui (alias Kigo), from Donostia and organizer of the mythical ‘Calor’ parties at Dabadaba.
With stumbling across the globe
But let’s dissect the little cocid that he has so cleverly prepared C. Tangana and that includes stumbling blocks and sacraments from all over the world. In fact, as the artist himself has confessed, ‘El madrileño’ was a project designed to be published in 2022. Before, a rap, reggaeton and R&B album in the vein of his previous works had to be released, but as these were beginning to seem like “a boring project despite their success,” he put the fifteen songs in the drawer. from that album that may never see the light of day. Although in ‘El madrileño’ there is autotune and electronics, urban rhythms appear relegated to the background and the protagonism reappears in the “more organic” sound of folk music and the root that interests him lately: «I am always fleeing from the character or the artistic moment in which I am».
The turning point came when at the end of 2018 he intervened in a gala of ‘Operación Triunfo’ in which he surprised with ‘A poison’, more or less canonical bolero sung with Niño de Elche, the most iconoclastic of flamenco singers. Later would arrive ‘I’m never’, in which Tangana adapts the female point of view for the first time and incorporates quotes from ‘As you want me to love you’ (Rosarío Flores) and ‘Corazón partío’ (Alejandro Sanz). Then I would finish with the singles ‘Too many women‘, a testosterone discharge that starts to the rhythm of an arrow and samples Joselito’s’ Campanera’; the superhit ‘You stopped loving me‘, a mix of rumba, bachata and flamenco with Niño de Elche and La Húngara (more than 100 million listeners on Spotify); Y ‘Eat you whole‘, in which he flirts with bossa nova accompanied by the Brazilian Toquinho. All these advances are included in the new album, although ‘Un veneno’ looks refreshed with the collaboration of another sacred cow of Latin music: the Puerto Rican José Feliciano.
Among the new songs stand out collaborations such as those of Kiko Veneno, which is carried out Tangana to his land in ‘The fools‘, or Gipsy Kings, who fill the rumba-pop’ Ingobernable ‘with chorus and clapping. But in essence, ‘El madrileño’ is conceived as a journey in search of “an ideal Pan-American and timeless sound” in countries such as Cuba (Eliades Ochoa participates in ‘Dying from envy’), Uruguay (Jorge Drexler sings in ‘Nominao’) , Mexico (Ed Maverick appears in ‘Párteme la cara’, Omar Apollo in ‘You forgot’ and Carín León & Adriel Favela in ‘CAMBIA!’) And Argentina (Andrés Calamaro closes the album with the irreverent rocker ‘Hong Kong’) .
«It is the best album I have written in my life; all of the above was just training »
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Special mention deserves’When I will forget ‘, with references to Argentine tango, Cuban guajira, bulería and current R&B resources in which a fragment of an eloquent speech by Pepe Blanco, copla interpreter who popularized the song ‘Cocidito madrileño’ in the mid-twentieth century, is inserted and who is heard saying: « The Spanish song belongs to the people, it is racial, it is racial. (…) An Englishman cannot sing a paso doble, neither a fandango nor a jota ».
That sentence recovered from an interview perfectly reflects Tangana’s desire to succeed with an album “of Spanish song”, of race and roots, with which he aspires to take over the world on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to very diverse collaborations that he they can open the door to a majority and transversal public. Its aim is to “broaden the spectrum” and, incidentally, make the classics known to its younger audience, as well as inspire them. “It’s an album to get old, to turn 30”, jokes the musician, convinced that he had written the best album of his life: “All of the above was just training.”
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