‘The Tango: The Discourse of Nation I- Masculinity in the Lyrics of the Argentine Tango’
Tango Dancing in San Telmo Plaza Dorrego, Buenos Aires. Own work of Helge Høifødt. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Soraya Shakibi introduces us to the importance of the Tango’s lyrics in the first instalment of her column: ‘The Tango: The Discourse of Nation’, which deconstructs myths about the Tango, through exploring immigration, nostalgia and Lunfardo (Buenos Aires vernacular) in the light of lyrics from the Golden Age of the Argentine Tango. This particular article focuses on the complexity of the Tango’s lyrics, and investigates its masculine roots.
The construction of a nation takes many forms and there is no doubt that in the popular British consciousness, Argentina is synonymous with football, the Falklands War and the Tango. The word ‘Tango’ connotes many meanings; from a Latin dance to a melody accompanied by a bandoneón (a tango specific accordion), to a brand of fizzy drink. It is primarily associated with dance, which does it a great disservice, as this overlooks the lyrics and the characters of the song, and fails to recognise its socio-historical and ethnographic importance which traces the development of the Argentinian nation.
Of particular interest, is the emergence of the male figure of tango - the compradrito, both as character and disaffected narrative voice. This ‘whiny ruffian’ can be traced back to the rural gaucho of the 19th century through the urban payadores (gaucho troubadour) or singer-songwriters from the 1880s to the late 1910s, and represents an attempt to define argentinidad, or the essence of being a man in Argentina in the first half of the twentieth century. The predominance of men in Argentine society at the turn of the century gave rise to a growing gender imbalance clearly articulated in the lyrics themselves.
Like immigration to the United States, European migration to Argentina was pivotal in the creation of the modern nation of today. By the start of the First World War, a third of the Argentinian population was foreign born and in Buenos Aires, that climbed to 70%. The Argentinian writer Ernesto Sábato states that the millions of immigrants ‘engendraron esos dos atributos del nuevo Argentino que son el resentimiento y la tristeza’ (‘gave rise to these attributes of the new Argentinian, resentment and sadness’). The political elite’s desire to create a modern (European) society through the maxim of ‘gobernar es poblar’ (‘to govern is to populate’) , thus problematised the status of indigenous people and gauchos. By 1900, the rapid modernisation of the countryside stripped the gaucho of his nomadic autonomy, relocating him to the slaughterhouses of the arrabales (where the plains meet the city). It was here that the urban compadrito emerged and the gaucho became the marginalised underbelly of urban society.
Gauchos in a rodeo at Estancia Santa Susana in Argentina. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The step from emasculated gaucho to disillusioned urban compadrito which is so central to the Tango, can be traced to Pascual Contursi’s 1917 tango, Mi Noche Triste:
Percanta que me amuraste
en lo mejor de mi vida,
dejándome el alma herida
y espina en el corazón…
Para mí ya no hay consuelo
y por eso me encurdelo
pa’ olvidarme de tu amor.
[Woman, you who abandoned me
in the prime of my life
leaving me with a wounded soul
and thorns in my heart…
There’s no consolation for me
and for this reason I get drunk
to forget about your love]
The gender discourse of ‘Mi Noche Triste’ positions the male voice as betrayed by a percanta – Lunfardo* for woman – who abandons him in favour of material gain in the milongas (dance halls). Oscar Conde describes ‘Mi Noche Triste’ as the ‘radiography of a loser’ ,but tango writers positioned themselves as sentimental failures in a world where traditional gender models are unravelling. In Contursi’s Champán Tango, the male voice laments the disappearance of ‘decent’ women in a patriarchal and misogynistic discourse:
Se acaban esas minas
que siempre se conformaban.
Hoy sólo quieren vestido
y riquísimas alhajas,
coche de capote baja
pa’ pasear la ciudad.
[Gone are those broads
who always conformed.
Today they want dresses
and very expensive jewellery,
a convertible
for driving around the city.
Rapid modernisation and economic growth, which made Argentina amongst the tenth richest countries in the world by 1914, was destabilising. Many male migrants struggled to reconcile urban female emancipation with a received notion of feminine ‘decency’ (the vast majority of immigrants were of Spanish or Italian Catholic origin). Carlos Gardel’s famous rendition of José de la Vega’s tango, Madre hay una sola (You only have one mother), illustrates the popularity of a quasi-religious reliance of the victimised compadrito on his pious mother as an antidote to the vicissitudes of love: ‘Madre hay una sola, […]que a ese amor hay que volver’ (‘You only have one mother, […] one has to return to this love’). The tango offered a space through which to explore social and political content as immigrants adjusted to life in the ‘unprecedented crucible of the modern city’. However, at the same time, the stoical gaucho morphed into a self-indulgent materialistic whiner who holds the world responsible for his woes.
From this, it is clear that tango lyrics are invaluable socio-historical documents, which reveal that nostalgia and existentialist angst are central to the shared narrative of popular song. Therefore, the gaucho, the compadrito and the tango, are inextricably linked to the Argentinian nation, for as Borges comments, ‘estudiar el tango es estudiar las diversas vicissitudes del alma argentina’ (‘to study the tango is to study the various vicissitudes of the Argentine soul’). Without the complexity of its lyrics, and their history, the tango would not be the rich art form that we know it as today.