The Man Who Hasn't Met Nacho Vegas

After much thinking, I dared. I had to vomit about this. I dare to talk about music, even though I don´t know much about it but what I get from my ears, brain (or whatever my skull is protecting in there), the heart and the guts. Aphex, whenever you feel it convenient, correct me in your blog. Tambor, Esquer, Karnal... I'm sorry if I fail you.

I think there are very few times in life when one comes front to front with revelations of any kind. In this case, the revelation happened some time ago... and it was musical. Especially in a generation like ours which, even if tried hard, cannot be classified or named, simply because there's no identity at all. In this generational crisis that steals, borrows, or simply recycles past cultural manifestations, sometimes the singer-songwriter (for me a necessary combo), comes out with a style frankensteinely unique.

That singer-songwriter, who emerged from the underworld of our generation, is not a Mexican and much less a gringo... he's from Sabina's land and his name is Nacho Vegas.

I first heard him in a gathering with my three brothers. The song: Gang Bang; the album: Enrique Bunbury's Freak Show. Really?! Accordion, waltz, the burlesque, the neon, the night. The song was a duet with Enrique Bunbury, who I also consider a totally underestimated monster.

And that contrast in their voices and the perfect match in the stanzas was gripping. It was a feeling similar to the first time I heard Esa Noche by café Tacvba, but also the fist time I heard Regan speak with her possessed voice in The Exorcist. It was my inner self of a character many times seen in big movies. Keeping on with the comparison with movies... Gang Bang is Music Noir.

Nacho Vegas is like Chavela Vargas' lost child. While she cries and suffers without hiding, with exposed flesh in a Mexican folk subtly deep, Vegas represses the yell and his voice comes out like a mild cry... like an spectral lament at night, in the distance, that is there for the simple reason of the inevitable... to see who listens.

Nacho Vegas is folk. Is returning to music for urgency. It's not ornamental music. He is a troubadour as much as Sabina is a rocker. His album shared with Enrique Bunbury, El Tiempo de las Cerezas, is a masterpiece of the bohemian, the cabaret, the sorrow, the alcohol... the night. A brother said, pretty drunk by then, that this album is so special and unique that if you put it against Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, you will not know which one to choose. At that moment, I suggested him to be more careful with his words... but drunk people and kids always say the truth, and my brother is both.

Vegas is so special and fucking crude that he resonates in different human fibers, making him shine with own light and never be eclipsed by anyone.

One of the things that calls my attention about Nacho Vegas is that his songs, like Sabina's, Cohen's, Dylan's, and Pink Floyd's, are movies by themselves. They tell stories, and in three to five minutes, they take you in a roller coaster of emotions that very few artists achieve nowadays. And the strongest thing about this is the amount of people that could identify with these monsters half song, half movie.

Nacho Vegas gets to the overwhelmed human passions like Cronenberg and Arnofsky in Gang Bang and Canción de Isabel; he gets to sexually and spiritually raped worlds like Almodóvar in the great Historia de un Perdedor and the hallucinating Mi Marilyn Particular; he gets to very deep human textures, covered by an exterior layer easily confused with banality, the same as Billy Wilder, in songs like El Cazador and El Hombre que Casi Conoció a Michi Panero.

I knew Vegas because of Bunbury, and when they did the album together, that album that will stay in my top 10 forever, I immediately fell in love for his creations. He's immediate, he's urgent, and he's weird, classic, and genuinely talented

"¿No veis que yo le rezo a un dios, que me prometió,
que cuando esto acabe
no habrá nada más?
¡fue bastante ya!"

-Nacho Vegas, El Hombre Que Casi Conoció A Michi Panero

Excuse Me, Sr

Excuse me, Sr, are you a cop? Pardon me, I've noticed your badge. I see you're traffic officer. Monterrey Traffic Department. You must feel extremely powerful, no? Important, maybe? Yes.

I see you don't feel like talking.

Remember that night? It was nearly 12:15am. Gray Toyota. Broken light. How do the transit regulations work? How does a person driving a car with a broken light ends up becoming, along lots of punches, into a drug dealer?

Do you know Kafka?

Of course not. How could you know him? Excuse me, Sr. I didn't intend to offend you. You only know about cowboy magazines, or joke books, maybe.

Do you know what happens to a person when, one night, after finishing his thesis... I'm sorry, do you know what a thesis is? No, of course not. A thesis is a final document that many universities require in order for someone to graduate. Graduate! From architecture, in this case.

Well, do you know what happens to a person after that, being punched and accused to be a drug dealer, and exposed to the media by a negligible being who feels powerful for being dressed with a uniform made out of second hand fabrics?

Did you listen? Kafka again.

Well it's good that a person like you is used to Kafkian processes. Your -how should I call it?- Expertise... would help you understand that a person in that scenery, exposed in the media, unfairly accused... a person like that looses much more than his family, title, or his reputation.

A person like that looses something unfixable in his essence. I don't know what it is. I just know that something disappears. A person like that has nothing to loose. A person like that transforms.

I'm gonna to take the blindfold off your eyes. Your sight's gonna take a while in getting used to the light. It's just a matter of seconds. Before that, however, I want you to bring to your mind the last memory you've got of your children.

Excuse me, Sr, can you see now?

Look at them... your kids.

I suppose those pieces of meat, guts, organs, and hair don't look a lot like the image you had in your little head. Do they?

Kafka!

In A Beautiful Pilgrimage

So yes. I saw her crossing the street and I immediately started chasing her.

There was no reason. Why do we insist on finding reasons for everything? I've always thought they're useless. Something that's completely logic and reasonable for someone (such abstract words!); could seem the most primitive, sickening, and dark thing to somebody else. I don't waste my time looking for reasons for what impulsively comes out from my heart. (does it exist?)

I chased her. Because I just felt like it.

I followed her along main avenues (I felt judged by the multitudes), along commercial streets (is it that people won't conceive anything else to do on weekends but consume?), along narrow and claustrophobic alleys (much better, now we have something in common), I followed her at a safe distance. And she kept walking, non-stop, without turning around, like if she had her eyes fixed in something that I couldn't guess.

And yes, I tried to guess: I imagined her arriving the kinder garden to pick her kids; or meeting her husband and have an improvised kiss in the middle of the street that would remind me to Doisneau; or even better, that she arrived to leave her kids at home with her husband, said goodbye, met with her young, beautiful, dominant lover, and had an improvised kiss in the middle of the street that would remind me to Doisneau.

Nothing, no husband, no kids, no lovers, no improvised kisses. Just her and her solitude ahead; I and she before me. Is it that she pursued her destiny? And I? I don't know. Three hours of quick walking make anyone tired, even a walk-junkie as myself.

But she kept walking at that fast pace. She, with her short dress that showed that sweet cellulite of a mature woman, of a woman who has lived, who has world, and above all who walks a fucking lot. She with her high heel shoes that made her show off that beautiful calf, as the lyrics of that Bronco song said. And I with those callosities that gave me the cramps like small electric discharges. Five hours and she wouldn't stop.

But, how could one let someone like her escape?! I saw her when she came out of that lingerie shop. I, who love, who fantasize with the women who enter a lingerie shop uninhibitedly and take their time picking thongs, hoses, garters, bras. Those women who raise the items towards the light, look at them, and imagine themselves wearing them. And while they do that, I, with my wrinkled cigarette, almost smoking the filter, imagine them.

I imagine their lives, their tastes... I think that a woman's underwear says a lot about her. I imagine everything about them before they decide to enter the shop. I imagine and never guess. But this time was magical. I did it, I saw the lost look of this beautiful forty-year-old and I imagined her in underwear.

I had that image in my head, mixing with the smoke of the tobacco and filter of my cigarette. And while the image focused, she picked those items which revealed before my fantasy. She chose everything that I imagined and put it in the bag.

How to let someone like that go away?

I don't know... it's been a day and a half, and I keep walking. She's still there, before me, at the same distance.

She walks and walks, and I follow and follow. The view of that human woman, without perfections, makes an eternity of pilgrimage worth it.