La Movida Footnote ¹ has been one of the most important cultural movements in recent Spanish history. In the 1980s, Madrid became the centre of a movement that found new ways of expressing the image and the energies of a country which had just returned to democracy. In the aftermath of Franco's dictatorship (1939–1975), indeed as it was drawing to a close, a new generation emerged to take the cultural leadership of what became new political and social times. The music of Alaska y Los Pegamoides, Kaka Deluxe, Nacha Pop or Radio Futura, the films of directors like Pedro Almodóvar, as well as graffiti, pictures and comics originally created in the context of the La Movida movement, came to define the times. They have been so central to the cultural scenario that recent years have seen a nostalgic Movida revival. For many people, the music of the Movida provided the inescapable soundscape of their formative years, memories strongly linked to songs like Los Secretos' ‘Déjame’ (Leave Me), Nacha Pop's ‘La chica de ayer’ (Yesterday's Girl) or Alaska y Los Pegamoides' ‘Bailando’ (Dancing).

In this beautifully illustrated book, El futuro ya está aquí (The Future Is Already Here), Héctor Fouce presents a well-documented and useful interpretation of this cultural movement, focusing particularly on the pop music produced and recorded during those days. Fouce's methodology is based in a socio-historical analysis of songs, biographies, autobiographies, newspaper articles, and specialised bibliography. This said, what comes over as especially important in the book's construction are artists' and eyewitnesses' contemporary or retrospective narratives. There is also a constant comparative ambition: between economic, political and cultural changes; between Euro-American pop and the Movida; and, most significantly, between a loose movement of cantautores (poet/singer-songwriters) and the Movida movement.

Fouce understands the Movida as a cultural expression of a time of extraordinary change, (post)modernity and hope. The main argument of his book is to see the Movida as a cultural movement from which a new and powerful youth culture emerged in the mid-1970s, the striking years of transition to democracy, empowered by the social and political changes which took place in the period. The decreasing importance of political engagement to change the present and future which had characterised the oppressive years of the Franco dictatorship was replaced by a new hedonism for living in the present. This saw the emergence of a new youth culture linked to the youth cultures of other Euro-American countries, particularly the UK and USA, key influences hitherto censored or difficult to access that became integral to the new movement.

In Fouce's analysis, the Movida is seen in opposition to the significant movement of singer-songwriters, known in Spain as cantautores. In my view, this reveals a weakness in Fouce's argument, because if we look beyond the artists' own narratives and obvious at-first-sight differences, it is not clear that there is a categorical opposition between the Movida and the cantautores movement. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the diverse expressions of these two cultural movements constitute two faces of counter-Franquist culture, one apparent and active in the different regions of Spain during the Franco period, the other emerging during the latter part of the regime, linking people of various generations. Both were fighting to recover freedom in opposition to the existing rigid and authoritative social order. All those involved in the Movida and the movement of cantautores were politically engaged but in different ways: for the new Movida generation, politics was more to do with freedom, hedonism and living rather than struggling for utopias or ideals. Both groups confronted a resistant political and social reality in very different ways.

The cantautores (musicians like Raímon, Lluís Llach, María del Mar Bonet and others involved in the intellectual movement Els Setze Jutges, and Juan Manuel Serrat in Catalonia; Luís Eduardo Aute, Joaquín Sabina and others in Madrid; Paco Ibáñez in Paris) sang their own compositions in their struggle for political freedom and freedom of expression: some musicians set the poems of key poets such as Antonio Machado, Miguel Hernández, Rafael Alberti and Blas de Otero to music (and have continued to do so). We cannot either forget the ironic critique of social life made by musicians like ‘La Mandrágora’, particularly the songs of Javier Krahe. In contrast, the musical groups involved in the Movida sang songs without any implicit or explicit political message (political here references governmental and political institutions and systems). If the cantautores were aiming to resist and defeat Franco's political regime and the society that supported him, the Movida can be seen to have aimed at radically changing the atmosphere in an effort to banish any rigid and authoritative remnants of the regime that still constrained everyday life in the mid-1970s and 1980s. The Movida can be seen as a cultural movement which built on the work of the cantautores to eclipse the ambience of that oppressive period of Spanish history.

This ‘new’ culture, as Fouce notes, although it began as an underground movement, became a mass culture because of the important changes that took place in the wider economic, political and cultural context. These changes were bound up with modernisation of the Spanish media; the increasing importance of international recording corporations in the Spanish musical field; and the political need for a new and modern image that could be used to present the new democratic Spain to the wider world.

According to Fouce, the songs of the Movida such as Kaka de Luxe's ‘Pero qué público más tonto tengo’ (My Audience Is So Stupid) or Mecano's ‘Hoy no me puedo levantar’ (I Cannot Get Up This Morning) were presented as play when performed. Thus, for those involved in the Movida, music was conceived as an end in itself rather than a medium with any message or political objective. It is this contrast which shows how Fouce's treatment of cantautores is rather limited, as he overlooks the suggestive metaphors and rich symbolism of their songs and the meanings that became apparent only in the often-censored context of performance. Many musicians composed songs with polysemic messages in which subjects and images – for example Raímon's ‘Al vent’ (To The Wind), Aute's ‘Al alba’ (The Dawn) – stand for freedom of spirit and of movement. These were songs working at complex levels in which metaphors could be interpreted politically in particular contexts and consequently live performances and recordings were formally censored during the years of the dictatorship.

In contrast, Fouce presents the Movida's music as sensual play, the reason to meet people, to dance, to celebrate hard-won individuality and hedonistic pleasure in the present. During the years of transition to democracy, freedom came at a price after the hard, dark times of oppressive dictatorship, and it was time to party. For this reason, music groups used parody, irony and all sorts of witty provocations in their songs in focused ways, as, for example, in Pedro Almodóvar and McNamara's song, ‘Suck It To Me’. Many songs idealised the lives of teenagers who lived for a present composed of partying, dancing and drinking. The Movida heralded the triumph of leisure time while celebrating Spain's capital city Madrid, particularly its night life: Madrid was the place where people could meet, have fun and experience new ways of interaction, free from the constraints of rigid social ties, removed from the formality of everyday social life. The Movida meant being together and having fun together. Songs like Alaska y Los Pegamoides' ‘Horror en el hipermercado’ (Horror In The Supermarket) or ‘Quiero ser un bote de Colón’ (I Want To Be Colón's Boat)Footnote ² showed the cultural references this ‘new’ generation shared with their equivalents in Europe and the USA, through such popular cultural forms as science-fiction books, films, and other mass-media offerings and commodities that had been difficult to access during the Franco dictatorship.

Fouce concludes that the Movida appears as a reaction to the politicisation of everyday life during the years of the transition to democracy and the result of dissatisfaction with the unfulfilled promises of that political process. He interprets the Movida as a postmodern cultural movement because of its emphasis on aesthetic play, its scepticism about ideas of progress and democracy, and because it saw the end of the formal limits which had hitherto separated popular from high culture. Following Fouce's argument, it is possible to conclude that Movida artists were opening up cultural and social spheres, embedding them in a new cosmopolitan, hedonististic and provocative youth culture, helping to banish the cultural residues of the Franco years.

Perhaps the best definition of the Movida movement is found in the lyrics of the song ‘Bailando’ (Dancing) by Alaska y Los Pegamoides: