Music and identity, a mirror, is a call for attention. I thought it important to tell you that Jorge Drexler presents at some point in his talk the tracing back of the history of ‘la milonga’. This is not to speak about cultural appropriation, but rather to emphasize how music is a good example of the natural way cultures grow, mutate and spread around the world. In this particular case of “la milonga’, presented here, we are offered a wonderful metaphor of what we are. How, like music does, we travel as individuals over time, countries or different contexts that eventually shape decisions we make about who we are and who we would like to be.
What is there to be learnt about ourselves? I would dare saying that the story that Drexler tells us about should make us look at ourselves in a mirror. It should also make us look at others as if in a mirror, paying real attention. “Looking” meaning here learning about the person, about his or her history, about his or her stories. Trying to understand how these histories and stories intertwine and transform who people are as they go through their lives. If we pay that much attention we will eventually see ourselves as well, as made of that very same changing material.
Drexler points out, in a gentle yet revealing way, how we are made of shifting identities, hybridization and transformation. “Things only look pure if you look at them from far away”.
The human common substratum remains, and the surface dazzles in its complexity, only when we come closer to learn about it. As Jorge Drexler tells us: “the more you get closer to people the more complex their identity is, and the more nuances and details there are. I understood that identity is infinitely dense”.
Listen to Jorge Drexler’s talk with subtitles in thirteen different languages, if you need a bit of support with your Spanish. Food for thought!
And just to pick up on one of the references that are brought up in his talk, here it is Astor Piazzola and “Adiós Nonino”, a milonga. You will learn that despite being considered the ultimate Uruguayan type of song, it comes from very far away indeed, both in time and space.
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