Soda Stereo & Gustavo Cerati

On the first album, the biggest influences are the Police and XTC I think, but after they drop the goofiness, it's harder to point out direct influences. "No Existes" kinda sounds Cure-like but the voice is quite different. A few songs throughout their albums sound like INXS ("Nada Personal", "Doble Vida", others I can't remember) and I think Cerati's voice is a little similar to Michael Hutchence's in the louder moments

By the time Unplugged came out Cerati was on another level as a guitar player and he has a very distinct sound of his own - tends to play chords with the same “figure” in his hand, and also variations of the same chord (songs that go Em - E7 - E - Em per example) - you can hear how the album version of “un misil en mi placard” kinda sounds influenced by The Police and the Unplugged version sounds like a more “Cerati” version… playing the same figure from F#m7 to Em7 almost throughout.

Interesting.

Came to post yet another parody.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yFc6jbMcmQ

Feel like Dynamo suffers from the same comparison problem of every other shoegaze album that isn’t Loveless of not being Loveless. It sounds too slick and too pretty by comparison. As I listen to some of the individual songs outside of the album and return to listen to the album as a whole again I am starting to get into it but can still see why it was flop at the time and then Sueño Stereo was a smash. The latter is heavier and proggier, darker and more distinctive, at least to my ears.

I bought the bio and read the beginning which is really good and makes you feel like you are there with Gustavo and his friends as suffers his stroke and falls into the coma, which of course is also a bit hard to take. This Billboard article summarizes that part in English so I don’t have to.

https://www.billboard.com/music/latin/gustavo-cerati-biography-juan-morris-6656854/

Seems like everyone from Argentina is quite familiar with “Llamen a Moe.”

Hoy regresé temprano a mi saca
Y a Larry encontré en plena resaca
Esto ya pasó, ya no tiene excusas
Larry es vicioso, bidé de partuza
(chorus)
Llamen a Moe, que Larry está en cualquiera
Anda con gatos, le da la ginebra
Llamen a Moe, que Larry está en cualquiera
Anda con gatos y le da la ginebra

Dynamo came after “Cancion Animal” which was a massive hit in latinamerica, so instead of trying to meet the unrealistically high expectations of a sequel that sounded like more of the same, they went with the career move of sending a curveball that most people felt lukewarm about.

That said it did have three “hits” that you can still overhear on latin rock stations or bars: “primavera 0” “ameba” and “luna roja”.

“Primavera 0” sounds way too influenced by MBV and I don’t care much about it. Cerati did better versions of shoegaze on his solo album “cancion amarilla” imho

Ameba is inspired by Iggy Pop’s “Mass Production” and is a better fit.

“Luna Roja” is one of my favorite Soda Stereo songs, the lyrics are interesting and might be either about the end of the world or AIDS or both… and the guitar does that economical thing that I mentioned Cerati’s style is known for… it’s completely done as a one chord song with variations… iirc the whole song is mostly an A chord and I think there’s a section where a second chord (D?) enters. I’m not sure if it’s the simplicity behind the composition but it’s one of the songs in Dynamo where the shoegaze “wall of sound” works for me.

It’s been years since I heard Dynamo I should probably give it another try

Ah yeah looking at the tracklist, here’s a piece of trivia: U2’s Lemon - which we all know is the best U2 song - is allegedly inspired by Claroscuro. The story is that Bono heard it on a radio station while doing ZooTV in Mexico and asked for a copy. The dates don’t quite match and I can’t find a good source to confirm this isn’t just an urban myth made popular by the blogosphere. That said, both Dynamo and Zooropa share a famous audio engineer called Arnie Acosta so there’s at least one confirmed connection between both.

Good stuff. Enjoying the turns this thread is taking. Woke up with more to say but have to do some stuff so will have to save it for later. Will only note I just observed the transition from “Toma la ruta” to “En remolinos” is pretty effective. In fact the whole sequence of those two and “Primavera 0” is pretty cool.

Still down know how I feel about “Camaleón.”

Hmm. Liking that too today.

I feel this guy is hard to wrap one’s arms around because he is so famous in Argentina and Latin America, probably a not-so-distant third, not counting the Peróns, to Maradona and Messi, but there is not much discourse about him in English or on the continent. Whereas Serge Gainsbourg and Françoise Hardy, say, are well-integrated into certain areas of Anglo music appreciation of foreign language pop music. Which is probably a recap of whatever Moka said in the original post.

tbh I also think some Argentines can get a little sick of him, but then they still seem to know all about him. Maybe they just don’t like some gringo talking him up.

Bio says something which can also be read here that Dynamo was originally going to be called Gol until Daniel Melero came by and said something about bicycle dynamos, something I am mostly unfamiliar with and had to look up.

https://indiehoy.com/noticias/soda-stereo-y-los-30-anos-de-dynamo-el-disco-que-inicio-el-rock-sonico-argentino/

Oh hi, look what I found.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EQoLaJMbgM

That was better than expected. And there seem to be many more out there.

Think I will stop there, although this particular guy seems okay. Watching his “Du Hast” video now.

Thanks for reviving this thread and seeing finally some
Interest on Cerati over here. I value a lot the input on this board and I love reading takes from people outside of latinamerica on him.

The biggest Soda Stereo fan I ever met irl was a friend from Slovakia and it made me appreciate them in a different way. I wasn’t even that much into songs like “hombre al agua” or “un millon de años luz” until I heard them drinking with her and seeing her singing them in broken spanish passionately and they’re now my two favorite songs on that album.

Non-english acts are a blind spot in many music forums, it’s fascinating to me how acts like yes, Serge Gainsbourg or Sigur Ros or whatever are known worldwide and acts that are huge on certain regions are virtually unknown.

Anyways this thread revive has me relistening to Cerati and Soda Stereo after years of not hearing them and I’ve been loving it.

¿Qué otra cosa puedo hacer?

^Más que una pregunta, una respuesta.

Sad to say, I know next to no Spanish and haven't really paid attention to their lyrics at all. Despite that, I got pretty into them, Café Tacvba, and Caifanes in the last couple years

― Vinnie

Spanish is my first language and I don’t understand 90% of their lyrics. Cerati was good at writing vague lyrics that somehow resonate with a lot of people. You’ll see people in latinamerica shouting the lyrics by memory of songs like “de musica ligera” and if you ask them what the lyrics mean you’ll get different interpretations.

Cerati himself kept changing versions on what they meant. He would explain a song and say things like “this is what it means to me now; but it might have meant a different thing when I wrote it”

Luna roja” would be explained depending on the year as inspired by a soldier in the gulf war or a song about musician Federico Mouria dying of AIDS, or about menstruation, or about the end of the world as inspired by the book of revelations.

“Ciudad de la furia” is about the 1989 crisis in Argentina, or Icarus or finding refuge in sex.

OTM. Some songs have some themes that can be gleaned at least, like the Icarus motif in “En la ciudad de la furia” that I mentioned or “Crimen” of course, but even in those cases there is no clear cut meaning. The video for “Crimen” is a lot more obvious than the lyrics.
(xp)

I wrote something to a friend recently about what I thought about Gustavo’s lyrics and why I thought they worked so well. I can cut and paste it here if you want.

I tend to like lyrics that open to interpretation, so that's interesting. I just looked up a translation of “En la ciudad de la furia” and I can see what you both mean, but I also wonder if any ambiguity gets lost in translation. Lyrics (and poetry) seem like they'd be very hard to translate sometimes, because it helps so much to know the author's intention, and there's not always a clear one with these

On top of not knowing what the 1989 crisis in Argentina was, heh

There's even more to the story in the bio but I can't go into it now.

Going to give Ahí Vamos a listen now, as it has some big hits. Upon first listen the opening track is bugging me.

Second track picking up.

No

Don’t know where that last post came from

Meant to type “nada,” Gustavo’s favorite word.

Not really, it was a pocket post.

New screenname based on some recent thread-related viewing.

Listening to an electronic New Wave album called Silencio by Daniel Melero’s group Los Encargados, the one that got all the fruit thrown at them by the audience. Pretty cool.

Despite the cheesy sax.

Nobody throwing any fruit here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdzxjvwvCms

***SPOILER ALERT***
The lyrics of “Crimen” are actually the plot line of the film DECISION TO LEAVE.

j/k

https://www.latercera.com/culto/2020/08/06/el-crimen-sin-resolver-de-cerati/

Says “Crimen” was inspired by “Jealous Guy” and he was originally going to give it to Shakira.

Gustavo Cerati y Zeta Bosio en la Universidad del Salvador estudiando publicidad antes de formar Soda Stereo

Buenos Aires, 1980

Foto inédita que dieron a conocer sus compañeros de facultad Oscar René Cisneros y Fabiana Frayssinet

La historia aquí: https://t.co/h86jCUqg2V pic.twitter.com/doCwEuBPBz

— FlacoStereo (@FlacoStereo) November 16, 2020

Anyway, enjoyed the run of this revive which seems to be running down. Have learned a lot about Gustavo & Co and their world, and have been nerding out and doing one new Soda song a week at karaoke which has been really fun, especially since people in my neighborhood seem to know every song quite well, sometimes every word.

Maybe this is overreacting, but feel like trying to sing his songs gave me an extra appreciation for his gifts for melody and lyrics. He wrote the lyrics in such a way that he could sing them, not just scribbling down any old stuff he came up with and then sort of force his way through.

Meant to type overreaching not overreacting

I kind of got into some of his tics and tricks a little bit, such as when he likes to go “whoo whoo whoo whoo,” or when he likes to use the vowel “aw.”

Whatever you do, do not click on any video of Chris Martin and Coldplay doing their tribute cover versions.

I am intrigued, despite your warning

Go ahead and click and report back, maybe you will like more than me.