The SoapVox

Well, it seems like this is the week of the meme…but I promise is the last one for this week, if anybody gets me pulled into one, I’ll just hold it off for a week :)

Anyway, Rich decided to tag me after Kristen, of Think Positive! tagged him on the latest poke-a-neighbor game that Hilda Carroll started, about Songs that make your heart sing

(BTW, Rich…I’m old enough to understand…yes, KatW’s song is silly, but it’s a happy silly that always brings a smile to my face :) And, btw, the albums on the sidebar are the ones I’ve been listening to for the last week, not exactly my favorite ones)

As for what song is the one that makes my heart sing….man, my Mexican friends are gonna make fun of me for a long time for this one…and my ‘merkan friends will go “uh?”, because it’s a song in Spanish, which was very popular back in the mid-to-late 80’s here in Mexico.

It’s an extremely silly song (yes, even sillier than Rich’s selection), about a “magazine” of extremely dubious (hell, not even dubious, really crappy) quality, called Alarma!, which specializes in showing the world the worse of human nature…yellow journalism at its worse.

And as every other ‘zine of the kind, it’s been an important part of Mexico’s low class culture for decades….and one of my favorite mexican bands of the 80’s, Botellita de Jerez, who specialized in writing very weird lyrics that always made you laugh, decided to do a homage to it, called Alarmala de Tos (I couldn’t find a video with Botellita playing it…that video is Cafe Tacuba’s version of the song). You can actually legally get the song here, from the site of one of Sergio Arau, who wrote many of the biggest hits of the group, played by Botellita.  As I said, the lyrics are silly and crazy, talking about the story of a poor hunchback girl whose father pimps her out, whose mother was also a prostitute and then the poor girl gets raped…it’s a crazy crazy story, told in such a way as to make it funny…and it’s a story very much like the kind of thing that Alarma! would publish :)

The reason that song makes me smile and be happy is most probably the memories it brings….back when Botellita was one of the greatest groups in the country, I had a lot of fun with friends going to their concerts, enjoying the music and laughing out loud at their silly lyrics and their on-stage antics…musically, that was one of the best times of my life :)

The rules of this tag-game are simple:

1. Post about the one song that makes your heart sing, and uplifts your spirit every time you hear it.
If you can provide a link to lyrics and/or audio that would be
fabulous. But it’s not essential, so don’t worry about it if you can’t.

2. Include a trackback to this post

3. Tag three others and ask them to include a trackback to your post and this one when they post.

Since Rich tagged Handy and the two of them are the ones I usually tag in this kind of thing, I’ll have to come up with three other blogs off my list, see if it works :)

The three would be:

1. Pearl, at Interesting Observations, who always has something intriguing to post.
2. The Geek Goddess, cause she’s fun and interesting, and she seems to need some fun thoughts while she decides what to do with her job life.
3. And Susie Bright, because good music always makes sex and culture better :)

Technorati Tags: botellita de jerez, music, memes

Tags: Thoughts

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