Flamenco and ideology

The late Félix Grande, flamenco critic and poet, has very aptly described the contents of flamenco as the combination of two equally important components, which he calls the metaphysical – present through the constant allusion to life, love and death – and the historical or material, which involves a permanent conversation with history and is based on commonality and solidarity (Grande Reference Grande and Carmona1999, pp. 30–31). Of these two elements the former certainly points to the well-known Freudian struggle ‘between the life drive and the drive for destruction’, from which flamenco's expression of pain arises (Freud's ‘humanity's struggle for existence … [as] the essential content of all life’; Freud Reference Freud2002, pp. 74–5). The latter, on the other hand, rather suggests a more socially, or politically, oriented dimension of flamenco, one that seems to contradict what some critics have traditionally presented as flamenco's escapist inclination.

Although it is impossible to date with any certainty when the first flamenco cantes were heard, I believe that José L. Ortiz Nuevo is correct in stating that the first songs that could actually be considered flamenco in a true sense – the so-called tonás – probably date as far back as the late 18th century, and they were ‘expresión de soledad, del yo que sufre e interpreta y asume las amarguras de todos los otros’ [‘an expression of solitude, of the suffering self that embodies and accepts the bitterness of all the others’] (Ortiz Nuevo Reference Ortiz Nuevo1985, p. 8). The radical protest was there, if only of an individual nature and indirectly political, and had stemmed from the centuries-long systematic repression of Moriscos and, especially, of Andalusian peasants and Gypsies.Footnote ³ If flamenquismo (a Romantic offshoot of flamenco which succeeded between 1910 and the late 1940s) ‘huye de la realidad sin ánimo de transformarla’ [‘evades reality, showing no intention of transforming it’] (Ortiz Nuevo Reference Ortiz Nuevo1985, p. 10), true flamenco – I want to argue – has always manifested a concern for the outcasts of society, a social sense of the wrongs of the world, and of the injustices suffered by Gypsies at the hands of gachós (non-Gypsies), even if these expressions of anger and frustration were not, until the mid-20th century, given clear political form.

As Michelle Hayes has argued, ‘flamenco activity in Spain very nearly halted during the [Spanish Civil] war and in the first years of Franco's regime’ (Hayes Reference Hayes2009, p. 40); indeed, according to writer and cantaor Juan Pinilla (Reference Pinilla2011), almost 95 per cent of all flamenco artists supported the democratic Republican government against Franco's quasi-fascist coup at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and consequently most left Spain either during the war or right after Franco's victory.Footnote ⁴ However, only a few years after the war flamenco was soon appropriated as a central element in the Francoist essentialist project of construction of a national-Catholic Spain, a process that, at least during the 1940s, nothing seemed to disrupt. It was the era of the juergas de señorito, private parties to which flamenco singers, guitarists and dancers would be dragged, all night long, by some wealthy aristocrat, and which provided many flamenco artists with their basic income in those post-war years. However, it is generally acknowledged that there appeared some form of political flamenco by the late 1950s (through the popularity of the then-recently created Festivales del Cante). It denounced, basically, the marginalisation of Gypsies (both individually and as a community) and, in a more general sense, the history of dispossession and poverty in Andalusia; however it did not do so in an overly denunciatory manner, owing to Francoist repressive censorship. In this sense, and in connection with the evolution of flamenco in the 1960s and 1970s (that is, by the end of Franco's dictatorship) José Martínez has explained:

Martínez mentions cantaores such as José Menese, Manuel Gerena and the late and extremely influential Enrique Morente as 20th century representatives of an overtly political dimension of flamenco, which he reduces, though, to only some performers in a very specific historical context (Martínez Hernández Reference Martínez Hernández and Carmona1999, pp. 63–70).Footnote ⁵ Indeed, influential authors of the 1950s such as González Climent (the author of the seminal but also elitist Flamencología, published in 1955) denied the existence of any political content in flamenco, a popular art form which in his view always avoided the expression of conflict or social dissent; furthermore, González Climent explicitly denounced what he perceived as an attempt to put flamenco at the service of some (anti-Francoist) political agenda (González Climent Reference González Climent1988, pp. 16–22). However, it has become clear, since the late 1970s at least, that flamenco has undergone a complex process of appropriation by opposing political camps:

A few authors, such as José Luis Buendía (Buendía Reference Buendía, Navarro and Ropero1996–2002, pp. 223–65) and Cristina Cruces Roldán (Reference Cruces Roldán, Navarro and Ropero1996–2002, pp. 323–77), have studied flamenco as an historically conditioned cultural practice with an obvious socio-political concern. Indeed, Buendía argues that through their flamenco coplas Andalusians transmitted ‘los primeros signos de insumisión de nuestro pueblo’ [‘the first signs of subversion of our people’] (Buendía Reference Buendía, Navarro and Ropero1996–2002, p. 223). Cruces, who is even more clearly concerned with approaching flamenco from a political and ideological perspective, states that through flamenco Andalusians (Gypsies and non Gypsies) reproduced:

Furthermore, whereas Cruces admits that flamenco does not necessarily attempt a revolutionary transformation of society, she also claims that it certainly articulates, through the flamenco outcry, a social, collective protest against injustice: ‘la conciencia de explotación de los pueblos sometidos y de las dificultades de transformar las estructuras’ [‘the awareness of the ongoing exploitation of subjected peoples and of the difficulties that transforming structures involve’] (Cruces Roldán Reference Cruces Roldán, Navarro and Ropero1996–2002, pp. 281–2). More explicitly, Cruces argues, flamenco expresses open complaints against the unequal distribution of wealth, the notion of surplus value or the partiality of the judiciary system (Cruces Roldán Reference Cruces Roldán, Navarro and Ropero1996–2002, pp. 283–304). It must be noted that, like other authors (see Washabaugh Reference Washabaugh1996, pp. 25–6), Cruces suggests that this politicisation is not to be found in the lyrics of flamenco coplas alone (although, she claims, it is certainly there), but also in what she poetically calls ‘el desgarramiento melódico expresivo’ [‘the expressive and melodic anguish’] (Cruces Roldán Reference Cruces Roldán, Navarro and Ropero1996–2002, p. 323), that is, in all those expressive, non-verbal forms that help articulate the flamenco discourse.

Similarly I believe that the existence of political flamenco cannot be put into question. As I have briefly mentioned above, a number of cantaores and to a certain extent tocaores started, from the late 1950s and especially the 1960s onwards, to develop a political voice within flamenco music, including the articulation of a protest against the marginalisation of the Gypsy community. To mention only some keynote cantaores, José Menese, Manuel Gerena, Paco Moyano, Enrique Morente, Paco de Lucía, José Domínguez ‘El Cabrero’, Carmen Linares, Estrella Morente, or Juan Pinilla, among others, all distinctly developed their cantes with a clear and explicit political intention, which mostly addressed the issues of inequality, land redistribution in Andalusia, workers’ (especially miners’) rights, the ‘III’ Republic, the somewhat fraudulent transition from dictatorship to democracy and Andalusian freedom from landlords and Castilian centralism.Footnote ⁶ The intensity with which these political messages were uttered, and how they were received, varied, but these voices were loud and clear.Footnote ⁷ More recently, the flamenco collective Flo6×8 have used flamenco as a peaceful vehicle for their anti-capitalist statements: they have a clearly Socialist agenda that includes both historical Andalusian vindications regarding land redistribution and recent ones such as the call for a democratic reconstruction of Spain or denouncing the responsibility of the banking system for Spain's current economic crisis.Footnote ⁸

However, and as already stated, the most widespread view among flamencólogos and the general public is that of López Ruiz, who is himself very critical of political flamenco. Focusing on flamenco lyrics, he reluctantly admits that, around 1975 (the year of Franco's death), various politically and socially committed flamenco coplas were composed and sung, although he betrays his anxiety about this by considering this politicisation of flamenco a danger (‘peligro latente’) to the art of flamenco, a danger that, he regrets, still exists today (López Ruiz Reference López Ruiz2007, p. 24).Footnote ⁹

The problem, of course, is that flamenco cannot be ‘politicized’ because in a certain way it has always been ‘political’ through and through. In his now seminal Marxism and Literary Criticism Terry Eagleton retold a famous remark by impressionist French painter Henry Matisse which expresses Eagleton's belief in the inevitable presence of ideology within all kinds of cultural artefacts: ‘all art bears the imprint of its historical epoch, but … great art is that in which this imprint is most deeply marked’ (Eagleton Reference Eagleton1976, p. 3). This belief is at the heart of Eagleton's ‘ideological perspective’, a strategy for reading cultural texts that could be defined, in very general terms, as the ability to penetrate ‘the realities of men's experience in a certain situation’ (Eagleton Reference Eagleton1976, p. 8). Ideology, in this approach, is not, then, a more or less discrete element within the work of art – that is, something that could be analysed in isolation, in a ‘this-is-the-ideology-of-this-work’ manner. For Eagleton, the bearers of ideology, or of the political subtext of a given cultural construct or work of art, ‘are the very forms, rather than abstractable content, of the work itself’ (Eagleton Reference Eagleton1976, p. 24). In a similar manner, Raymond Williams explained in Marxism and Literature how ideology can actually be read in the ‘structure of feeling’ of a given historical period or work (meaning by this the ‘set of received ways of perceiving and responding to reality’; Eagleton Reference Eagleton1976, p. 25), that is, ‘meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations’ (Williams Reference Williams1977, p. 132). Williams perceives his ‘structure of feeling’ as ‘social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available’ (Williams Reference Williams1977, pp. 133–4). Following Williams's chemical metaphor, one is persuaded that this being ‘in solution’, as opposed to being ‘precipitated’ and ‘more evidently available’, is what makes the politics of flamenco more difficult to grasp for some external observers.

In Ideology. An Introduction, Eagleton expands on this issue by explaining ideology, in an Althusserian manner, as ‘not primarily a matter of “ideas”’ but as ‘a structure which imposes itself upon us without necessarily having to pass through consciousness at all’ (Eagleton Reference Eagleton1991, p. 148); in other words, not so much an articulated system of conscious beliefs (already ‘precipitated’, in Williams's formulation) but ‘a set of images, symbols and occasionally concepts which we “live” at an unconscious level’ (Eagleton Reference Eagleton1991, p. 149). Eagleton then endorses a notion of ideology as habitual behaviour rather than conscious thought, which serves to explain the kind of political and ideological discourse that much popular and folk culture, flamenco music at large, and La leyenda del tiempo in particular, produce.Footnote ¹⁰

In other words, the politics of flamenco need not be located exclusively in the ideas articulated through the lyrics of the cantes, but also in the meanings (re)produced through the expressions and behaviours that flamenco singing and dancing convey, and in the processes of material production and reception of this music, namely, the cries of pain and despair, the indignation and the horror perceived in the dancing and the quejíos, ayes and jipíos, and also in other even less obvious – apparently marginal – vehicles, like the venues, the recordings or the way in which other discourses (other musics, different audiences, etc.) are engaged. This characterises flamenco by means of a certain vacillation, a lack of centredness, which may be identified with Bakhtinian heteroglossia and dialogism. Washabaugh has brilliantly argued that flamenco rejects – in a typically Bakhtinian manner – monological responses to power (the kind of monological responses articulated through explicitly political lyrics), lest they may become part of the ‘homogenizing centripetal forces that Mikhail Bakhtin feared so deeply and resisted so ardently’ (Washabaugh Reference Washabaugh1996, p. 155). Monologism, it should be remembered, is to be rejected even if it is employed to resist the forces of oppression: ‘politics – Washabaugh claims – is always carried on by heteroglossic bodies, and not by monologic minds’ (Washabaugh Reference Washabaugh1996, p. 137). Even if he may be wrong in failing to ascribe to many flamenco compositions the actual political and ideological weight that they do have, Washabaugh seems to be right when he puts in the forefront the uncentred, vacillating and somehow heteroglossic nature of the subversive nature of flamenco as a whole.Footnote ¹¹

To be sure, flamenco had been used, at least since the beginning of Franco's regime, with overt institutional and political purposes. For one thing, Francoist ideologues consistently tried, between the 1940s and the 1970s, to empty flamenco music and dance of their specifically Andalusian (political and cultural) content,Footnote ¹² forcing their Hispanification and turning flamenco as a whole into an international banner of all things Spanish (Aix Gracia Reference Aix2014, pp. 23–31); this process, which could be described as ‘Franco's creative reinvention of Spanish national identity [through] Andalusian cultural practices’, eventually involved ‘loathsome processes of cultural homogenization and social centralization’ (Washabaugh Reference Washabaugh1996, p. 46), which still haunt Andalusian culture as a whole (very notably bullfighting and flamenco music and dance). For all the above, it soon became clear that – with the advent of democracy in 1975 and the 1978 Constitution – flamenco had become, for any Andalusian nationalist project, a strategically important symbolic artefact in the construction of a distinct Andalusian identity (Aix Gracia Reference Aix2014, pp. 16–17, 24–7).

It in this context that I consider it relevant to examine how La leyenda del tiempo participates in the political discussions of 1970s Spain (and Andalusia), and how it dialogues with both tradition and modernity in post-Franco Spain. And, to this end, I will take into consideration (as mentioned above) not so much what this collection of flamenco cantes says (significant as it certainly is), but how its message is uttered, i.e. the flamenco expression, and what the material and ideological conditions and context of the production and reception of these cantes were.

The evolution of flamenco

Flamenco is a rigidly codified cultural mechanism, although ironically enough it has consistently refused to accept academic (or ‘official’) regulations; consequently, this strict codification has always been unofficially established and implemented by practitioners and aficionados.Footnote ¹³ For decades, flamencologists have tried (and not too successfully) to disambiguate such specific terms as pellizco, duende or cante jondo,Footnote ¹⁴ and changes in flamenco's unwritten rules have been slow and not without controversy and opposition. Thus, to mention just one case, when tonás (unaccompanied cantes of pain and solitude) were followed by siguiriyas at the beginning of the 19th century, several changes were imposed: the hexasyllabic four-line stanza was replaced by the syllabic pattern 6–6–11–6, where the third line was turned into an hendecasyllabic one; and the primal sense of anguish and sadness expressed by the unaccompanied voice was toned down (or ‘sweetened’) through the introduction, for the first time, of the guitar. These changes were not easily accepted, but they eventually became an inherent part of mainstream flamenco (Ortiz Nuevo Reference Ortiz Nuevo1985, pp. 49–51).Footnote ¹⁵

More to the point, García Gómez has explored, at some length, the epistemological change that took place within flamenco when the old waysFootnote ¹⁶ experienced the radical transition from the so-called Revolución Cultural Jonda to the Revolución Instrumental Flamenca, which, according to this critic, took place between 1950 and the end of the 1990s (García Gómez Reference García Gómez and Carmona1999, pp. 24–5). The Revolución Cultural Jonda, encouraged by the important intellectual support provided by Federico García Lorca and Manuel de Falla's Primer Concurso de Cante Jondo, held in Granada in 1922, attracted Spanish (and many European) musicians and intellectuals towards flamenco.Footnote ¹⁷ Later, this newly gained prestige also made possible the explicit political turn of the 1950s and the 1960s, especially through the proliferation of Festivales flamencos in Madrid and all through the south and east of Spain (mostly in Andalusia).

However, both the Festivales and the Peñas flamencas (flamenco clubs) only appeared and developed fully during the 1960s and 1970s as a consequence of the two influential and closely related movements that took hold of flamenco as a whole between the mid 1950s and the 1980s: the so-called revalorización (revaluing) of flamenco and mairenismo, named after Antonio Mairena, one of the leading cantaores in the history of flamenco and – together with his life-long partner Ricardo Molina – one of the most influential flamencólogos. Aix Gracia has recently examined these two movements at length in his excellent Flamenco y poder (2014). According to Aix Gracia, flamenco revalorización is the set of specific flamenco features that made it possible, on the one hand, to consider flamenco in isolation as a cultural and aesthetic endeavor in its own right; and, on the other, to discriminate between what is, and what is not, flamenco, introducing a canonical concern that had been, so far, absent from flamenco interests (Aix Gracia Reference Aix2014, pp. 131–47). These notions were the result of a historical cultural accumulation that led to the appearance of flamencología as a paradigm that – in the hands of González Climent, Ricardo Molina and others – not only dignified the study of flamenco but also mystified its origins and eventually – through the combined efforts of Molina and Mairena, and later Grande and Caballero Bonald – imposed a narrative of gitano origins, the so-called gitanismo, an example of what Hobsbawm and Ranger termed the ‘invention of tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger Reference Hobsbawm and Ranger1983, pp. 1–15). In other words, gitanismo, and mairenismo at large, tried to co-opt flamenco as, basically and almost exclusively, a Gypsy art form (cante gitano andaluz was the term coined by Molina and Mairena to refer to flamenco).

Theorised by Molina and Mairena in their extremely influential Mundo y formas del cante flamenco (Reference Mairena and Molina1963), this narrative of Gypsy origins has been in the past 20 years seriously questioned by many artists and intellectuals (like Fosforito, Carmen Linares, or Aix, to mention just a few) but during more than two decades it went basically uncontested. Hence, both mairenismo and gitanismo (what Aix calls ‘gitanofilia mairenista’, p. 167) offered a reconceptualisation of flamenco that provided, on the one hand, an opportunity to redress the centuries-old history of oppression suffered by the Gypsy community in Andalusia (articulating some form of ethnic solidarity within a historically depoliticised community) while simultaneously appropriating flamenco music and dance as an exclusively Gypsy art form excluding all non-Gypsies from a leading role within flamenco. Mairenismo (and gitanismo at large) started to lose steam in the 1960s, but managed to remain prestigious and influential through the work of Caballero Bonald and the late Félix Grande.

Yet flamenco has experienced, for the past 100 years at least, a tension that involves more forces than those that advocate an exclusively Gitano nature, most importantly a tension between cante jondo (deep – meaning ‘pure’ – flamenco singing) and opera flamenca, or flamenquismo (as exemplified by Pepe Marchena, or Manolo Caracol, for instance). However, within cante jondo, we also have – as we saw – another conflict between mairenistas/gitanistas and those who expand flamenco to include non-Gypsies. Political flamenco is another element that has introduced, during the last half a century as we suggested, an additional controversy among aficionados.

Indeed, the more recent Revolución Instrumental Flamenca involved some of these tensions by introducing a deviation from the traditional path of cante jondo while simultaneously making an implicitly political statement. Already in the 1960s the flamenco world witnessed an extraordinary event: the Spanish Gypsy guitarist Sabicas (stage name of Agustín Castellón Campos) recorded with rock guitarist Joe Beck the now seminal Encuentro con el Rock/Rock Encounter (Polydor 1966). This was an arguably unprecedented flamenco–rock crossover, composed and recorded in the middle of the psychedelic age that, as could be expected, no flamenco purist in Spain (apparently including Sabicas himself) enjoyed. It, however, signalled the beginning of a revolution in the way flamenco was starting to be perceived both within Spain and also outside the country.Footnote ¹⁸

By the late 1960s another similar project was launched: the Spanish progressive rock band Smash started to experiment with a fusion of flamenco and progressive rock, to the extent that well-established flamenco singer, guitarist and composer Manuel Molina joined in 1971. Interestingly, some of their 1970s compositions were produced by Ricardo Pachón, a flamenco producer and composer who would prove a cornerstone of La leyenda del tiempo, in more than one way. Following the relative success of Smash, there were two seminal recordings, both produced by Ricardo Pachón himself: Lole y Manuel's Nuevo día (1975), and very notably the groundbreaking Veneno (Reference Veneno1977, to this day considered by specialists one of Spain's five best popular music recordings everFootnote ¹⁹ ) by Rafael and Raimundo, the Amador brothers and Kiko Veneno (themselves core members of the Leyenda del tiempo team). These recordings, together with earlier compositions by Sabicas and Beck, paved the way for Ricardo Pachón and Camarón's groundbreaking recording of Reference Camarón, Monge and Pachón1979, La leyenda del tiempo.

Camarón, La leyenda del tiempo and the politics of flamenco

While, as I have shown, La leyenda del tiempo (1979) was preceded by significant earlier musical texts, it introduced a radically new perspective into one of the most ancient styles of Spanish – and world – music. The reason was that La leyenda not only involved an arguably logical evolution of Spanish flamenco and pop music (years before the notion of ‘world’ or ‘ethnic’ music became a fashionable tag) but it also brought various popular musical genres (such as electronic music, pop, blues, rock or jazz) into the very heart of flamenco.Footnote ²⁰ To be sure, Sabicas, himself a non-Andalusian Gypsy, was a leading figure in the flamenco scene by the time he recorded with Joe Beck, but he did not have the huge influence outside that world that Camarón had acquired. Also, the fact that Sabicas was living outside Spain at the time of the recording of Encuentro con el rock further diminished both the visibility of this record and its controversial effect within the flamenco world.Footnote ²¹ That La leyenda involved no other cantaor but Camarón, who was himself both an Andalusian Gypsy and an actual legend,Footnote ²² increased immensely the visibility and musical and political relevance of this work, which became a landmark .

On 20 November 1975, after 39 years of dictatorship, General Francisco Franco died, and in a few months Spain was already on the road to democracy. Although the deep economic implications of this change were not easily or quickly perceived, the political and especially cultural consequences of this transition from a national-Catholic extreme right dictatorship to a European-like parliamentary democracy were obvious enough for both Spaniards and foreigners alike. One immediate cultural transformation had to do with the progressive end of censorship, especially that controlled by the Catholic Church. Together with the emergent sense of an entrance into a new, modern and free era, this disappearance of censorship produced, from the late 1970s and well into the 1980s, an explosion of creativity and freedom that came to be known as the Movida madrileña (the Madrilenian scene).

Unsurprisingly, the 1970s Movida’s evident dismissal of flamenco for its supposed connivance with Franco's regime and its more obvious hearkening back to an eternal, essentialist version of Spain, persuaded flamenco aficionados to make a defensive move. Thus, they tried to safeguard the purity of the music from new cultural and musical trends, and consequently rejected the innovations that the new times seemed to bring. Many flamenco practitioners and aficionados seriously believed that they were fighting for the survival of flamenco in the midst of the most hostile of environments, defending it from accusations of being subservient to Francoism. Sadly, that these accusations were clearly ignorant of the heteroglossic and polyphonic nature of this music passed unnoticed. It is in this heavily charged social, cultural and especially ideological context that the most provocative and controversial flamenco recording ever, by the (arguably) most prestigious flamenco singer of all times, was produced.

Camarón de la Isla, stage name of José Monge Cruz (San Fernando, Cádiz, 1950; Badalona, Barcelona, 1992),Footnote ²³ simply known as Camarón since the recording of La leyenda, is undoubtedly the single most influential flamenco artist since the beginning of the 20th century (in 2000 he was awarded posthumously the fourth Llave de oro del cante).Footnote ²⁴ With the possible exception of a few seminal figures from the 18th and 19th centuries such as El Planeta, El Fillo, Silverio or Pastora Pavón, nobody has proved to be as important for the evolution of flamenco as José Monge, both as an extremely talented cantaor (arguably the most powerful and best tuned of the last 100 years), and also as the (somewhat reluctant) leader of a revolution that made it possible for flamenco to become a ‘world’ music. Paco de Lucía saw it clearly when, as early as 1976, in an interview with Jesús Quintero he stated that ‘Camarón es un revolucionario, es el símbolo del flamenco joven’ [‘Camarón is a revolutionary, he's the symbol of young flamenco’] (‘La hora de … Paco de Lucía’, 25 February 1976, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzstsFQ6xsw).Footnote ²⁵

That revolution started with La leyenda, which subversively and boldly broke with traditional flamenco ties in order to produce a new musical style for a new country, a style so far only timidly glimpsed. In other words, La leyenda del tiempo became the legend of that time. Thus, La leyenda turned upside down the historically rigid codification of flamenco by introducing a number of revolutionary changes that, following Raymond Williams, were linked to the prevailing structures of feeling or, in other words, responded (as we saw) to the ‘set of received ways of perceiving and responding to reality’ (Eagleton Reference Eagleton1976, p. 25) in late 1970s and early 1980s Spain. It is one of the main characteristics of flamenco that it is precisely its rigid structures (established by centuries-long tradition) which allow room for creativity, and that – paradoxically enough – artistic inventiveness only begins when abiding by the strict compás. In this same line, it is by introducing flamenco to a non-flamenco audience that La leyenda re-built and simultaneously subverted the genre.

Furthermore, flamenco, which was a residual cultural element by the end of Franco's regime (especially for the younger generations), became an emergent one precisely through the transformation that Camarón and Pachón made possible. And this radical transformation involved, in short, adapting extraordinarily valuable lyrics by non-flamenco writers (Fernando Villalón and Omar Khayyam), introducing rhythms and instruments never heard in a flamenco recording (namely, electric bass and guitars, percussion and drums, keyboards, and even a Moog synthesizer) and privileging palos which had traditionally been considered as ‘minor’ or secondary (i.e. cantes chicos, the lighter and happier palos), such as bamberas, bulerías, tangos or even rumbas (as opposed to the hitherto three predominant ones, i.e. seguiriyas, soleás and tonás, i.e. cante jondo).Footnote ²⁶ Together with other less evident and minor changes – like the groundbreaking cover picture by Mario Chacón, Camarón's new look or the change of his stage name – all these elements not only signalled the beginning of the transition to a new flamenco but also addressed, from their revolution, the new scenario of democratic Spain.

Such was the nature of the changes that Camarón himself seems to have harboured doubts and fears about this groundbreaking move; indeed, he apparently indicated to Ricardo Pachón that he would never do something like that again (‘el próximo disco vamos a hacer un disquito flamenco’ [‘our next record will be real flamenco’]; Clemente Reference Clemente1999). Furthermore, only a few months after the controversial release of La leyenda, Camarón felt compelled to explain to flamenco critic and writer Fernando Quiñones his move towards what he timidly called ‘flamenco pop’, which he defined as ‘Flamenco, pero no flamenco puro, porque eso son dos cosas distintas’ [‘flamenco, but not pure flamenco, as those are two very different things’], claiming nevertheless that he – Camarón – always sounded ‘muy flamenco’ (interview with Fernando Quiñones, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84FnjhIZE0o). For his part, flamenco guitarist José Fernández Torres ‘Tomatito’, who had replaced Paco de Lucía as Camarón's tocaor during the recording of La leyenda, explains that, upon first hearing Veneno's now iconic rumba Volando voy, he asked Camarón ‘How are we going to record this!?’, to which Camarón allegedly replied: ‘Don't worry, when I sing it, you'll see, it will sound flamenco’ (Gamboa Reference Gamboa2014 n/p).Footnote ²⁷

Yet if La leyenda del tiempo (through the introduction of non-flamenco rhythms and themes) and everything surrounding its composition and recording was interpreted by many aficionados as some kind of primal crime committed against the purity of cante jondo, the choice of some of the lyrics also implied a bold move, as it included not only various texts by Federico García Lorca (the most flamenco of all Spanish poets), but also one by Fernando Villalón (a barely known surrealist poet from the group of poets known as Generación del 27, to which Lorca himself belonged) and some rubaiyyat (quatrains) by Persian poet Omar Khayyam. The presence of these poets is significant, as García Lorca was by far the most iconic of all those artists and intellectuals assassinated by Franco, and Villalón, a noteworthy but half-ignored poet, was a close friend of Communist and anti-Francoist poet Rafael Alberti.

To be sure, some of the lyrics are overtly political and openly subversive, especially considering that Spain was only in its fourth year of democracy after Franco's fascist dictatorship. Khayyám's poetry appears in Veneno's bulería entitled ‘Viejo mundo’, in which Camarón sings a very free version, by Kiko Veneno, of some of the Persian poet's rubaiyat, addressing and interrogating established values and the current structure of feeling:

Also, and more importantly, frequent flamenco motifs like sorrow, love and death are abandoned in favour of a more cryptic Lorquian narrative of dreams, time and nature, and the creative and simultaneously destructive relations that exist among them, together with Villalón's deep andalucismo, a poetry of history and time, as Jacques Issorel has defined it (Issorel Reference Issorel and Villalón1998, p. 53), that combines the historical and social with the personal and emotional. Thus, in ‘La leyenda del tiempo’ (bambera),Footnote ²⁸ through a text with the same title taken from the third act of Lorca's little known play Así que pasen cinco años, Camarón sings:

The lyrics of the Lorquian songs in La leyenda are intelligently combined from various, sometimes very (chronologically and thematically) distant, poems by Lorca, to the extent that even experienced Lorquian readers were at pains to locate the sources of these lyrics. Thus, the ‘Romance del amargo’ (bulerías por soleá) is almost directly lifted from the third stanza of García Lorca's poem ‘Romance del emplazado’ (which belongs to his book of poetry Primer romancero gitano, of 1924–1927), then ‘Mi niña se fue a la mar’ (cantiñas) is one of the Canciones andaluzas from 1921–1924, and ‘Homenaje a Federico’ (bulerías) is mostly taken from the also little known puppet play Tragicomedia de don Cristóbal y la señá Rosita, which García Lorca wrote in 1930 (García Lorca Reference García Lorca1998). However, Camarón closes this copla with the tercet: ‘Muerto se ha quedao en la calle/con un puñal en el pecho/y no lo conoce “a naide” [nadie]’. [‘Dead he was left in the street/with a dagger in his chest./Nobody knew who he was’] (García Lorca Reference García Lorca and Bauer1987), which is an almost literal reproduction of the opening and closing lines of another very different poem, ‘Sorpresa’, taken, significantly, from Poema del cante jondo (1921), Lorca's most explicit poetic tribute to flamenco (García Lorca Reference García Lorca and García-Posada2005). In all these lyrics, mostly chosen, combined and partially adapted by Ricardo Pachón, Camarón sings to the Andalusian (vaguely surrealist) world of poverty and death, violence and passion, and life and hope, so central to García Lorca's poetic world.

More clearly political messages of resistance and opposition to established values can be found in ‘Bahía de Cádiz’ (alegrías), a copla that consists of a complex combination of various pre-texts from Fernando Villalón's little known book of poetry Andalucía la Baja (1926) and Romances del 800 (1929).Footnote ²⁹ Villalón was a poet who, although a contemporary (and friend) of Juan Ramón Jiménez, belonged with the Generación del 27, and acted as an elder-brother figure to Lorca, Gerardo Diego and Rafael Alberti. An aristocrat but a leftist, his poetic work was rejected by the left on account of his noble family origins, and by the right for his progressive, socialist-inspired, political ideas, to the point that it has been ignored until very recently, and hence the relevance of its inclusion in La leyenda (Ortiz Reference Ortiz2007, pp. 77–93). The celebrated opening of La leyenda’s ‘Bahía de Cádiz’ is taken from another flamenco copla, ‘Caracoles’, the lyrics of which Villalón included, as a preface, in his poem of the same name, included in his 1926 book Andalucía la baja (Villalón Reference Villalón1998, p. 170):

The rest of this copla comes from three other poems by Villalón, namely, the aformentioned ‘Caracoles’, plus ‘Garrochistas IV’ and ‘Marineras III’, both from the book of poems Romances del 800 (1929). In short, the second and third stanzas of ‘Bahía de Cádiz’ are lifted from the second and third stanzas of ‘Marineras III’ (Villalón Reference Villalón1998, p. 239), the fourth and sixth correspond to the second and last stanzas of ‘Caracoles’ (Villalón Reference Villalón1998, pp. 171–3), and the fifth comes from the first stanza of ‘Garrochistas IV’ (Villalón Reference Villalón1998, p. 244). This sophisticated (somewhat confusing) combination of various texts by Villalón suggests how Pachón, and Camarón for that matter, struggled to capture the poet's concern with a number of motifs, recurrent throughout his poetry, that they wanted to (re)produce in La leyenda: the history and the people of Andalusia together with what may be called the ‘politics of geography’ of Spain's south (Cádiz was, significantly, Camarón's ‘country’) – and all this in order to embody an approach to the Spanish and Andalusian history of the 19th century that Villalón imagined to be based on ‘[el] pueblo, que vive día tras día los acontecimientos, y vibra con ellos, sin disponer de la perspectiva ni de la cultura suficiente para valorarlos’ [‘the people, that lives through the day-to-day events, and feels them, lacking enough vision or knowledge to evaluate them] (Issorel Reference Issorel and Villalón1998, p. 60, our emphasis).

Interestingly, Kiko Veneno's rumba ‘Volando voy’ not only introduces polyphony and anti-monologism (‘por el camino yo me entretengo … Volá, volando voy’ [‘along the way I entertain myself … Fly, flying I come’]), but also a certain approach to postmodern self-referentiality through its address to boundaries and frontiers (‘y los cariños en la frontera me van’ [‘and I dig loving in the frontier’]), which would eventually become the defining feature of the whole record. Indeed, La leyenda del tiempo seems to put an emphasis on crossing frontiers and dissolving boundaries (both at geographical and symbolic levels), an interest that goes beyond the typically flamenco concern with the Andalusian Moorish heritage (Washabaugh's ‘andalucismo’; Washabaugh Reference Washabaugh1996, pp. 15–16). Thus the link between Moriscos (the 16th century baptised Muslims who were eventually expelled from Habsburg Spain) and Gypsies is made apparent in the abovementioned ‘Bahía de Cádiz’, through the reference to that most iconic of Spanish rivers, the one that the Arabs called Guadalquivir (‘ouad al-kabira’ or ‘the big river’), a clear representative of Andalusian liminality: ‘Isla del Guadalquivir/donde se fueron los moros/que no se quisieron ir’ [‘Guadalquivir island/where the Moors stayed/who did not want to leave’] (this can be likewise appreciated in Pachón, Velázquez and Casas's ‘Tangos de la Sultana, tangos). Eventually, this Lotmanian approach to frontiers and boundaries as a productive and liminal (i.e. symbiotic) cultural artefact rather than as a limit to the individual is best described by Veneno's ‘Volando voy’ through its utterly unambiguous refusal to accept any identity as an imposition, both in a personal – i.e. human – and an artistic way: ‘yo no sé quien soy/ni lo pretendiera’ [‘I don't know who I am/Nor do I try to’].

However, it is not only in the more or less subversive messages transmitted by these lyrics – which, to be sure, are not as overtly political as those by, say, Menese, Pinilla or Gerena – where the ideological content may be found. As suggested by Cruces Roldán (1996–2002, pp. 323–24) or Washabaugh (Reference Washabaugh1996, p. 25), among others, political significance in flamenco can be found in the form (meaning by this all musical and paramusical elements) as much as in the content, or in the expression and physicality as much as in the immediately semantic meanings conveyed. John Street has very aptly argued, in this same line, that ‘resistance through music does not have to be given verbal form’ (Street Reference Street2003, p. 120). To be sure, La leyenda introduced its now celebrated subversive challenge through a number of non-verbal means (some clearly visible, others less so), some of which I have already dealt with, namely: the introduction in the recording of what, for puristas, would be very marginal cantes; the cooperation between true flamenco artists (like Tomatito or Camarón himself) with non-flamenco (rock) performers (Alameda, Raimundo Amador, Jorge Dantas or Kiko Veneno), and of Gypsies with non-Gypsies; the record's cover pictures (with Camarón in a not very flamenco attitude); Camarón dropping his typically flamenco stage name (‘de la Isla’); the mixing of flamenco elements like Spanish guitar and palmeos (claps) with Moog synthesizers, electric bass and guitars, and synthesized percussion; and the introduction of lyrics (leaving aside for now their social and political significance) by politically significant authors in Spanish contemporary history, such as García Lorca or Fernando Villalón, etc.

Furthermore, Francisco Aix has suggested how much of the political content of flamenco can also be found in its most clearly physical dimension. For Aix, it is in what he calls the politics of corporeality (his genealogy of body politics, ‘genealogía de la política del cuerpo’) that the politicisation of flamenco resides, and he argues that it stems from its allegedly African origins (Aix Reference Aix2010). Interestingly, it was through a radically new form of flamenco dance, the so-called ballet contemporáneo, that a (politically) subversive new approach to flamenco appeared in the early 1970s, exemplified by dancers such as Antonio Gades, Mario Maya or José Granero (Aix Reference Aix2010, p. 405). To be sure, mairenismo, through the artistic essentialism already examined, actually neglected the corporeality of flamenco and ignored flamenco dancers as central parts of the flamenco experience. This undoubtedly had to do with flamenco dancing historically coming last of all flamenco forms, and being perceived not the least for its association with the opera flamenca, with the corrupted flamenco forms that the advocators of the revalorización tried to do away with. This glaring omission, though, has already been – at least partially – amended by flamencologists of the last two decades, like Aix (Reference Aix2014) or Hayes (Reference Hayes2009). According to Aix, the contemporary paradigm of flamenco has decidedly recovered its scenic components through a revaluing of dance, stagecraft and musical promiscuity (p. 408). Interestingly, one of the defining features of the cantes contained in La Leyenda, the characteristics which distanced this recording from Camarón's earlier ones with Paco de Lucía, were that most of the cantes could be danced to (very notably the jaleos and the rumbas, the lowest of all flamenco offshoots for puristas, and to the dismay of many of Camarón's followers then). As Washabaugh and others have suggested, dancing may help reconfigure boundaries, and specifically within flamenco it allows for an interrogation of the alleged essences on which it was said, by Mairena and Molina, to be built (Washabaugh Reference Washabaugh1996, pp. 110–12; Herzog Reference Herzog2010, p. 8). Through this corporeality (dancing as a way to disrupt the solemnity of the flamenco singer) the body politics of flamenco can be reached.

Arguably, the cantaor is the most important (certainly the oldest) figure in flamenco, and it is from the cante that everything else, both guitar (toque) and dance (baile), grows. However, it is the combination of expression, dancing, guitar playing, palmas and cante itself that provide the flamenco experience with its political content. In the words of Rosamaria Cisneros-Kostic:

There is also a non-semantic component in singing and in the rhythmic patterns of music which can ‘energize our moral sentiments’, conjuring up ‘new meanings, identities and collectivities’ (Street et al., Reference Street, Hague and Savigny2008, p. 276). This, which is especially so in flamenco, becomes central in my approach to La leyenda: if flamenco is characterised by cultural fluidity, Camarón's cante in this recording produces for itself a place at the intersection of cante jondo, new flamenco, Spanish transition to democracy and Camarón himself as a symbol of that ‘revolution’. As Manolo Rosa from Andalusian-rock band Alameda has explained, ‘He [i.e. Camarón] was aware that he was breaking almost insurmountable barriers for those times’ [‘Él era consciente de que rompía barreras casi infranqueables para aquel tiempo’]. In a way, La leyenda anticipates what Washabaugh has called ‘reterritorialization’ and has exemplified with Enrique Morente's last recordings, which – Washabaugh argues – are not an example of ‘traditional flamenco puro’, yet they ‘draw on, refer to and extend flamenco traditionalism’ (Washabaugh Reference Washabaugh2012, p. 140), just as, 20 years earlier, La leyenda del tiempo did.

In the case of La leyenda everything surrounding its inception has been, from the onset, heavily ideologised; in other words, it has been embedded in – as much as it has (re)produced – a given ideology of discontent. In this sense, the political significance of this collection of cantes dialogically transcends the purely verbal – that is, explicit, articulations of a given viewpoint, be it against Francoist Spain or against purism in flamenco, to offer an apparently improvised act of defiance in the face of post-Franco Spanish popular culture. La leyenda del tiempo, in our view, produces, through the combination of musical, textual and especially para-aesthetic elements, a criticism of Spanish society that addresses the traditional role of flamenco as the music of the have-nots, while it introduces a new and revolutionary perspective within the already heavily loaded ideological episteme of post-Franco's Spain.