Episodes
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The song Vuela, vuela was released by Mexican boy band Magneto in 1991. It’s still the group’s most remembered song, and the one that propelled them, rocket-like, into international stardom.
The song was a version of the French original Voyage, voyage, by the singer Desireless. The French lyrics were loosely translated into Spanish (‘loosely’ is to put it mildly, but the new words worked nicely enough) for Magneto's version.
En ambas versiones, se trata de una canción escapista, que en ese aspecto nos recuerda al Don’t Worry, Be happy de Bobby McFerrin, que aparecía unos tres años antes, en el 88.
Vuela, vuela se convirtió en un éxito internacional en 1991 durante 14 semanas en 20 países, incluidos España y Estados Unidos, donde ya en los años 90 había un importante mercado latino (o, como nosotros preferimos llamarlo, hispanohablante).
Parte del éxito radicaba en la coreografía de la canción, de movimientos simples y memorables que recordaban a las artes marciales; como si el coreógrafo hubiera sido Daniel LaRusso o el señor Miyagi, otros grandes iconos populares de la época…
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Hoy hablamos del tema Comunión de Señor Chinarro, la banda de rock indie del sevillano Antonio Luque. La canción pertenece a su disco Cal Viva, publicado en abril de este año.
As the story goes, Antonio was one day looking at some old family photos and he came across a picture of his First Communion. The sacrament of la Primera Comunión is a ceremony often carried out collectively, so in the photo he could see not only himself but many of his schoolmates, too.
This takes our singer into a bittersweet trip through memory lane. As he reminisces about his childhood friends and wonders whatever happened to Consuelo, Amparo, María del Mar or that big crush who for some reason is not in the picture, a song starts taking shape in his head. It will be a melancholy rumination, very much in the Chinarro vein, on the passage of time, loss, oblivion and possibly the ultimate futility of life.
Para el episodio hemos invitado a mi prima Martina, que en el momento de la grabación está a punto de hacer su Primera Comunión. Martina nos habla sobre el significado, a su entender, de este importante evento en la vida de los niños españoles.
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Missing episodes?
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Las letras de la formación madrileña Un pingüino en mi ascensor (A Penguin in my Lift) exploran temas y elementos de la vida cotidiana con un tono satírico, mordaz y (como sugiere el nombre de la banda) a menudo con un marcado punto surrealista.
Nuestra canción para este episodio es Los malos te gustan más (You Like the Baddies Better). En ella, el cantante se lamenta de que su chica siempre le deja por “malotes” – o sea, chicos malos o “canallitas”: scoundrels, rascals, louts. Very bad men indeed.
El cantante-narrador hábilmente establece un paralelo entre los “malos” que le gustan a su chica y una serie de villanos famosos de la historia, la literatura, la televisión y el cine. Así, por la canción desfilan "baddies" antológicos como Darth Vader, Plancton, John Silver el Largo, Magneto, Shere Khan, Caifás y un cierto dictador austriaco.
Watch out for some idiomatic expressions in the song’s lyric - such as dar plantón or saber a ciencia cierta - and some reflexive and phrasal verbs, like esforzarse en or convertir en. Also, the title and chorus provide a useful illustration of that simple yet most grammatically awkward of verbs: gustar.
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With Fernando Márquez “el Zurdo” as vocalist, the Spanish band La Mode made only two albums. The first one came out in 1982 and is a masterpiece called El eterno femenino. The album’s title was apparently a quote from Goethe’s Faust. Lofty art references abound in La Mode’s lyrics.
El tema número 3 de El eterno femenino lleva por título Aquella canción de Roxy. That Roxy song.
En la canción se nos cuenta una historia; una historia de amor. Como se anuncia ya en el título, la ficticia banda sonora corre a cargo del grupo británico Roxy Music, uno de los más influyentes de la segunda mitad de los años 70, y referencia explícita en el presente tema de La Mode.
No sabemos qué canción de Roxy exactamente es la que suena en “el transistor” durante el encuentro amoroso narrado por el Zurdo. ¿Quizá Love is the drug? Es muy posible… Pero eso queda para la imaginación de cada oyente. Each listener is to decide which Roxy song precisely is the one that the singer-narrator is telling us about.
Aquella canción de Roxy is a treatise in some punk and New Wave’s recurrent themes: the night, the thrill, the sleaze, the cruising for a bruising, the fleetingness of love and of youth itself... And there is Mr. Roxy Man himself, Brian Ferry, giving his blessing to our two young lovers, as well as providing the incidental music to their torrid affair.
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Nins fue uno de varios grupos infantiles que tuvieron una gran popularidad en España entre finales de los años 70 y principios de los 80. Otros grupos de este estilo fueron Regaliz, (Liquorice), Botones (Buttons) and, most popular of them all, Parchís (Ludo).
Today many probably remember Nins for performing the opening theme song of the animated series Sherlock Holmes, which aired in Spain in the mid 80's.
La serie de dibujos animados fue una coproducción italo-japonesa. Los seis primeros episodios los dirigió Hayao Miyazaki, quien poco después sería el fundador, junto con Isao Takahata, de Studio Ghibli, uno de los mejores estudios de animación del mundo.
Para Sherlock Holmes, Miyazaki y sus animadores se basaron en el célebre personaje de Arthur Conan Doyle, y crearon un total de 26 episodios. En los países de habla inglesa, la serie se tituló Sherlock Hound – a play on words with the detective's surname: in the show, all characters were anthropomorphised dogs.
Nins’ opening theme managed to include in its lyrics quite a few highly recognisable Holmes attributes - su lupa, su pipa, su gabán, etc. - in a song that is not even 2 minutes long, and that is also very catchy.
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It’s 1942 and it’s a grim time in Spain. An atrocious civil war has ended just three years ago and the country is mired in poverty and misery.
En un país en tal situación, una canción sobre cadáveres y esqueletos no parecía tan lejos de la realidad de cada día como nos podría parecer hoy.
Aun así, nuestro tema musical para este episodio pronto se hizo tremendamente popular en España, un país donde un poco de humor negro nos ha ayudado siempre a soportar las adversidades. La canción consiguió viajar a través de las décadas, y hoy es ya parte del folclore musical español.
Hablamos de Rascayú (o Raska Yu), del cantante mallorquín Bonet de San Pedro.
A pesar de su popularidad (o a causa de ella), el régimen del general Franco censuró el divertido tema: se prohibió su emisión por la radio. Esto puede ser difícil de entender (o no) cuando miramos un poco la letra. ¿Por qué se decidió censurar una canción aparentemente banal e inofensiva? ¿Podría ser que el Rascayú del título, “el viejo enterrador de la comarca”, fuera una referencia velada al dictador?
Las respuestas, en el episodio.
Art by Valentí Castanys, from the comic book El caso de Raska Yu.
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Entre la numerosa población mexicana de Yakima Valley en el estado de Washington (EEUU), hay una gran afición general a la música tradicional de su país, lo que se denomina hoy el género regional mexicano. You could say that music is in the air there, a fundamental part of life in the community. Two young siblings, Mando and Jairo Martínez, inspired by some of their musician relatives, got good at their guitar playing, and decided to form a band. They called themselves Esencia Privada. Soon after, their then 13-year-old sister Yahritza surprised everyone in the family with her vocal talents, and the two musical siblings became three. Now they were Yahritza Y Su Esencia.
Yahritza Y Su Esencia became viral when they posted on TikTok a video of themselves playing Soy el único, a song Yahritza wrote when she was 13.
Soy el único es una balada de ruptura amorosa - it’s a break-up ballad. Yahritza, a sus 13 años, nunca había experimentado una ruptura amorosa. La cantante se inspiró en vídeos de TikTok donde chicos y chicas jóvenes hablaban de sus amores y desamores. Concretamente, escuchó a alguien decir la frase “no encontrarás a alguien mejor que yo” - ‘you won’t find anyone better than me’ -, and that phrase gave her the idea for the song.
Soy el único pronto se convirtió en el primer gran éxito del grupo. Este mismo mes de septiembre, los tres hermanos Martínez han recibido un Disco de Oro en México por la canción y uno de Diamante en los Estados Unidos. El vídeo oficial en YouTube lleva ya más de 81 millones de reproducciones… And counting.
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Nuestra canción para este episodio es del año 1989 y se titula El límite. Es un tema de La frontera, un grupo de rock madrileño de gran éxito en España durante los años noventa.
Javier Andreu, Tony Marmota y los otros miembros integrantes del grupo se conocieron a principios de los 80 en la Facultad de Ciencias de la Información - Media Studies - mientras Andreu estudiaba publicidad (advertising) y Marmota y los otros periodismo (journalism). Todos ellos tocaban la guitarra, they all played guitar, so they decided to find a place to rehearse, instead of going to classes, and to form a band. Eventually they called themselves La frontera, after the title of one of their songs.
El límite es probablemente la canción más icónica del grupo, su tema más recordado - their most remembered song - y uno de los clásicos del rock español de los años noventa.
The song was a massive hit in the early 90’s and it really helped to put the band in the map of mainstream Spanish rock. Andreu has indeed claimed that he practically owes his career to this one song.
El límite es la primera canción de La Rosa de los vientos, un álbum de 1989 que incluye otros clásicos del grupo como Nacido para volar (born to fly away), La reina del ragtime o la ya citada Juan Antonio Cortés, que es el tema que cierra el disco.
El límite, de La Frontera: curiosamente, el nombre de la canción y del grupo en este caso son casi iguales – both words mean practically the same thing. El límite: the limit, the border, the boundary, or even the edge. La frontera: the frontier, the borderline, also the edge.
We can see the association with life on the edge, or living dangerously - a theme common to many of their songs.
The name La frontera makes us think also of frontier life and the far west, which has also been a great inspiration for the group, in terms of their aesthetics and the country and western flavour of much of their music, including their lyrics.
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Two strangers meet each other by chance and have a passionate affair. At some point the man has to move on, leaving his lover feeling abandoned and wounded, like ‘a cat under the rain’… But she accepts her fate with grace and dignity: both of them knew that it was never meant to last.
So goes the story told in La gata bajo la lluvia, Cat Under the Rain, an enduring classic from 1981 which was popularised by one of Spain’s great musical legends: La Señora de la Canción. La Novia de la Juventud. La Reina de las Rancheras. La Española más mexicana. ¡La gran Rocío Dúrcal!
In the mid 70’s, Mexican singer-songwriter Juan Gabriel convinced Dúrcal to perform some of his rancheras. She did so, and with such huge success that she became associated with the genre ever since. The singer became known then as La Reina de las Rancheras – Queen of the Rancheras and La Española Más Mexicana: the Most Mexican of All (female) Spaniards.
La gata bajo la lluvia is now considered to have been the turning point in the transformation of Dúrcal’s music – from ballad singer to Ranchera performer.
Desde su aparición en 1981, la canción ha tenido numerosas versiones. La más reciente es de junio de este año, de mano de la cantante mexicana-estadounidense de 19 años Ángela Aguilar. Al igual que Dúrcal, Aguilar trabaja con géneros de la “música regional” (tradicional, folklórica) del mundo hispano. Aguilar interpreta La Gata bajo la lluvia en colaboración con el DJ y productor de música electrónica Steve Aoki.
La gata bajo la lluvia es una de esas canciones que cuentan una historia. O, mejor dicho, describen una situación con mínimos detalles, y uno se imagina el resto. El oyente tiene que conectar los puntos - the listener joints the dots to make sense of what the full background story might have been.
The melody is rich with unresolved notes that are left there hanging - just like the female narrator -, compelling the listener to pay attention until the very end, when the melody finally settles on its ‘home chord’ with the words “por ti”.
Ilustración del episodio: Nuestro Stories - nuestrostories.com
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Today it's all about coffee. How to order it (formally and informally), ways to have it... Plus two epic Cuban smash hits featuring this greatest of all beverages.
Just as importantly, in this episode I get to ask you to buy me a coffee. ¡Invítame a un café!
I have just opened an account at buymeacoffee.com that will allow listeners of Qué Pasa Raúl to make one-off small donations to support the show.
It will be great to know that there are some of you who like the show enough to want more of it. This is one way for you to let me know. Click here and easily make your one-off donation. Your support will encourage me to continue creating many new episodes.
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¡Dame un café con leche, mami!
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In this episode we talk about actions that involve parts of the body and clothes. Putting on clothes, taking off clothes… Especially the latter.
Taking off one's clothes became a big trend in mid-to-late 70’s Spain. With dictator Franco finally dead, it was a turbulent time of change as a heady sense of liberation descended upon Spanish society. It’s the period that we know as la transición – the transition, from el franquismo to la democracia.
‘Las tetas y la política’ (boobs and politics), as some have put it, became the two great preoccupations of many Spaniards during this sort of adolescence in our recent history, in a social phenomenon that became known as el destape (the 'uncovering').
Model, actress and singer Susana Estrada became one of the biggest stars in a new subgenre of destape raunchy comedies, which often blended heavy-handed erotism and (mostly female) nudity with political satire.
In 1981, Estrada released Amor y Libertad, a ten-song album of disco music. The title says it all: Love and freedom. Not just romantic or even sexual love but, more broadly, self love, self respect. Amor por uno mismo o, más exactamente, por una misma. Respeto. Autoestima, as we’d call it today.
The album is a true call to arms. Out of the ten song titles, no less than four are commands told in the imperative sense. Hagámoslo juntos. Let's do it together. ¡Ven! Come! ¡Gózame ya! Enjoy me now! And then, our song for this episode: ¡Quítate el sostén! Take off your bra!
¡Quítate el sostén! is a rap song, inspired by the disco scene of the time and early hip hop. Estrada had a lot to say, and rapping was the ideal medium for her to deliver her message.
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Every once in a while, a pop song comes up that plays around with religious imagery and metaphors. Think Like a Prayer or There Must Be an Angel (Playing with my Heart). In this episode we will learn about one such song: Experiencia religiosa from Enrique Iglesias' eponymous debut album from 1997.
The lyric of Enrique's ballad is really a collection of romantic cliches, sprinkled with some vocabulary connected to the Christian religion (éxtasis, ceremonia, resucitar, infinito or aleluya); but sometimes, big fat cliches are exactly what makes a song work.
In Experiencia religiosa, the often twin languages of romance and religion combine together to create a classic romantic power ballad, one that has animated many a karaoke night in Spain since it came out back in the late 90's.
The song is best enjoyed whilst also watching the official video. It shows us Enrique standing alone in a empty church, with candles all around, a gospel choir there just for him, and those bluish beams of light that seemed to be everywhere in the 90’s. Experiencia religiosa is the 1990’s on steroids!
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La Polla Records, known by fans simply as La Polla, emerged from Álava, in el País Vasco (the Basque Country) right at the end of the 70’s. In a strictly punk sense, the group were to Spain what the Sex Pistols were to England.
The song No somos nada, their 1986 eponymous record's opening track, is a sort of manifesto for the group: 'so this is who are are'. And what is that? Well: somos los nietos de los obreros que nunca pudisteis matar. somos los nietos de los que perdieron la Guerra Civil. No somos nada. No somos nada.
This was scathing, take-no-prisoners protest music for Spain's fledgling democracy in the early 80's. The stuff that Evaristo, the band's lead singer, was saying in his lyrics - with subjects ranging from Spanish party politics to the Catholic church - was a bit too much for most people at the time to handle. Mainstream radio wouldn’t touch La Polla with a bargepole, so it enjoyed a truly cult status amongst fans. Which was, of course, part of the fun of it all.
Listen to the episode to learn more about La Polla Records, los cómics de Astérix el Galo, el rock radical vasco, the art of Spanish blasphemy (and bad language in general), and why in our language 'ser la polla' is a very desirable thing.
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During the 60’s and 70’s, pop artists would often record their most popular songs in multiple languages. Such was the case with Dalida, an Egypt-born Italian-French singer who became a huge star in France and much of the Middle East throughout the second half of the 20th century.
For this type of artist it was - it still is - common practice to have songs written for them that echo real events from their life. In 1967, at the age of 34, Dalida became pregnant by an 18-year-old Italian student. In 1973, a song was written for her with the title Il venait d'avoir 18 ans, (‘He had just turned 18’).
The song illustrates the subject of the mature woman who falls for a much younger man - a theme that we’ve seen often in films and books (most famously perhaps in The Graduate, a title referenced in the Spanish version of the song), though mostly from the young man’s perspective, as a coming of age story or a tale of initiation. In this song, however, we have a female narrator, and she is telling us her story. Dalida recorded a Spanish version of this mournful ballad with the title Tenía 18 años.
Tune in to this episode to know more about this fascinating artist and her song Tenía 18 años.Sign up here for the show's free Newsletter.
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Paco Ibáñez en el Olympia was a double album recorded live at the famous Parisian theatre in 1969. It has since become one of Spain’s great classic albums, and a window into a very particular time and place in the country’s recent history.
Ibáñez (b. Valencia, 1934), had been banned from performing in public in his country of birth, due to his openly oppositional stance to the Franco regime. The gig at the Olympia was full of young Spanish dissenters, mixed with many of the same feverish French university students who had been at the era-defining May ’68 Paris riots (seen Bertolucci's film The Dreamers?).
As a musical artist, Ibáñez was greatly inspired by the chansonnier George Brassens, a truly influential figure for several generations of Spanish cantautores (politically minded singer-songwriters), who adopted his style of acerbic social commentary in songs that were also witty, humourous and catchy.
Ibáñez gave Spanish lyrics to some of Brassens' tunes, and also set to music the work of many classic Spanish poets, both old and contemporary. Among the latter was Gabriel Celaya and his powerful poem La poesía es un arma cargada de futuro (Poetry is a weapon loaded with future), a title that could sum up Ibáñez's whole attitude to music and song: "Poesía para el pobre, poesía necesaria como el pan de cada día...".
Listen up for some vivid poetic language and for Ibáñez's own voice reminiscing on his childhood among cows - his first ever audience - in the Basque countryside, his discovery of Brassens and that famous night at the Olympia.
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Juntos is an uplifting, life-affirming love song. In recent years, the 1982 hit from Madrileña singer Paloma San Basilio has come to be seen as something of a gay anthem, and this has helped to keep the song alive and relevant for new, younger audiences.
It is very much a ‘gay’ song in the old sense of the word as well. There’s also something slightly subversive in the tune, as we’ll find out, though it all sounds so pure and naive that you might not even notice. Loosely based on Bye Bye Blackbird, an old jazz standard popularized by Miles Davis among others, the song does sound like something coming from a gentler, more innocent era.
In the lyric, the singer enumerates all the day-to-day little things she shares with her darling one. He is a unique wizard – un mago diferente – who can turn the quotidian into magic. The two love birds are actually living together – viviendo juntos. With no mention of them being married or even engaged, this strikes one as a touch risqué for 1982 Spain, with Franco’s cadaver still looming in recent memory and the old Catholic world maintaining much of its centuries-old grip on society’s morals.
In 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, Paloma San Basilio went back to her old hit to make a new version, with changed lyrics that made indirect references to a much grimmer reality - lockdowns, restrictions, face masks – in a yearning for all of it to be over soon, so that we could again be como nos gusta estar: juntos. Thus, the song finally becomes a celebration not just of free love but of togetherness itself.
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Chico conoce a chica. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl stop seeing each other. Boy and girl bump into each other in a club after one year. Timidly, they start chatting and… Well, you guessed. What had to happen, happened. The song is called El encuentro (The encounter), and is track #4 from Tiene que haber algo más, the 2021 debut album by Alizzz.
Alizzz’s Wikipedia entry describes him as músico, compositor, cantante, DJ, productor musical y representante artístico (artistic agent). So, he’s one of those people who does lots of things, and he’s good at all of them. Arrggh, how annoying!
Upon quitting his day job as an IT programmer and in the span of just a few years, Alizzz produced a string of musical hits for emerging bright new stars such as Rosalía, Aitana, Amaia and, perhaps most famously, C Tangana, whose Alizzz-produced album El madrileño became a sensation in 2021, only months before the producer started releasing his own singles.
A track both atmospheric and light-hearted, El encuentro includes in its lyrics colloquial expressions such as el curro, más de la cuenta or nuestros líos, all delivered in the kind of soft, laid-back accent typical of much of the current Spanish urban scene.
Alizzz sings with Amaia, duet-style. Back in 2018, the Basque singer-songwriter had been the winner of Operacion Triunfo, Spain’s famous talent show. But we won’t be holding that against her. Just for now.
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Argentinian singer-songwriter Facundo Cabral was a true bohemian. He was taught to read at fourteen by a Jesuit teacher and met his father at forty-six. These and other experiences - his wife and daughter died on a plane crash - came to shape his outlook on life and his music.
His signature song, No soy de aquí, ni soy de allá (I'm neither from here nor there) has become something of an anthem for the Argentinian people - and, by extension, all Latin people. In the lyric, Cabral paints a self-portrait where he embraces the idea of a simple life, living the present moment - the old carpe diem - and finding happiness in life's small, sensual pleasures: el vino, las flores, el pan casero, el buen cigarro, las malas señoras...
The song has been covered by multiple artists, including Jorge Cafrune, Chavela Vargas, Julio Iglesias... and a very renowned cartoon character.
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José Ángel Espinoza, better known as Ferrusquilla, was a Mexican songwriter and actor. Early in his career he became known as El Hombre de las Mil Voces, for his ability to play multiple characters for radio drama productions and for (allegedly) being able to impersonate God himself!
One of Ferrusquilla's most recorded songs was El tiempo que te quede libre. The version to top all others would be that of María Dolores Pradera, one of the most elegant performers to ever have come out of Spain. With her beautifully clear phrasing style and deep voice, she was known as La Gran Dama de la Canción Española.
The song is also a perfect illustration of how the present subjunctive works. In its lines we find no less than four different uses of this tense. We take a close look at each through the episode, as well as hearing the story of how the song was conceived. ¿Estáis listos?
*****
Sign up here for the show's free Newsletter.
You can give us some love with a one-off donation at Buy Me a Coffee. Your support is much appreciated and will help me keep creating new episodes.
Check out also my Instagram for comments, news and to see some of my artwork. (Yes, I do that too).
Finally, follow and rate us on Spotify (press that button!) or whichever platform you use to listen to the show.
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Brace yourself: it’s Putochinomaricón! And he’s not amused! And he’s using the subjunctive!!
“Yo creo que la buena música surge de los intestinos y del odio extremo”, says Chenta Tsai, born in 1990 of Taiwanese parents. ‘I think Good music springs from the guts and from extreme hatred’. Here's one of the key tenets of the punk ethos: anger is an energy.
Chenta, aka Putochinomaricón, makes ‘the kind of music that would sound in a Chinese bazaar of the year 3000’. His songs explore the neuroticism and banality of modern culture, whilst slipping in some caustic messages around race and sexuality. He also touches on our ever-increasing obsession with social media and his own generation’s struggles with the burdens of young adulthood.
The song for this episode is Ojalá (te murieras) – I wish (you would die), from Tsai’s sophomore album Miseria Humana. In it we will see some wicked uses of that wickedest of tenses: the imperfect subjunctive.
So, brace yourself... ¡Es Putochinomaricón! ¡Y está cabreado! ¡¡Y está usando el subjuntivo!! You have been warned.
*****
Sign up here for the show's free Newsletter.
You can give us some love with a one-off donation at Buy Me a Coffee. Your support is much appreciated and will help me keep creating new episodes.
Check out also my Instagram for comments, news and to see some of my artwork. (Yes, I do that too).
Finally, follow and rate us on Spotify (press that button!) or whichever platform you use to listen to the show.
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