The tango singer

Last night, via the TuneIn app on my Roku, I was listening to the French radio network France Bleu via a radio station in the overseas territory of St. Pierre-et-Miquelon, just off the coast of Newfoundland. Don't make me try to explain how I got to this place in my life, but if you've read this blog before, it all makes a weird kind of sense.  

Et voilà! This song by French singer and actor Vincent Niclo started playing, a recent release in France (May 2018 or so), which builds upon the tango track "Libertango" by Argentine songwriter and performer extraordinaire, the late, great Astor Piazzolla. So there's no escaping the importance and influence of the tango, a uniquely Argentine art form that has transported itself from the brothels and bars of 19th-century Buenos Aires, across continents and cultures, even to the present day.

Mural at the Carlos Gardel subway station, Buenos Aires

Monsieur Niclo is not the first to draw inspiration from the Astor Piazzolla original. There's this from back in the day, "I've Seen that Face Before" by Grace Jones, which converts "Libertango" into 1 part reggae, 1 part new wave, 1 part chanson.

Mon dieu/Dios mío. Shaken and stirred. I was tango before tango was cool (or 1980s cool rather than 2010s cool).

But not really.

I don't know that I've always appreciated tango music or tango style. Over the years, it has been fairly well neutered in North America for camp drama and comic relief. I remember taking my mother to a performance of the show Tango Argentino back in the day and once bought a Carlos Gardel CD but mostly I remember just being puzzled by the tango. Sometimes you have to grow up and grow into these things.

And grow I did on my recent viaje "Down Argentine Way," but not by hanging out at tourist trap tango performances on the streets of San Telmo or the concert halls of the Café Tortoni. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) Rather, tango is almost everywhere in Buenos Aires--in the monuments in the Abasto neighborhood, where Gardel grew up, to the memorials in La Chacarita Cemetery, where Gardel was laid to rest after the plane crash that took his and many others' lives in 1935, at the height of his popularity.

Details about the mural

But tango is not dead, a thing of the past, a historical note. It lives in the present day in Argentina. The streets and the Buenos Aires Subte are alive with tango. It lives in the recordings of the Gotan Project and Vincent Niclo. It is part of the visual and literary culture of the city, the country, and the world. And there seems to be no risk of its disappearance even in the fast-paced and rapid-fire life we experience--perhaps because tango represents a valued link to the past, to culture, and to an often unrecognized and unheralded heritage of African and Indigenous, working class and immigrant, sex and sexiness, Spanish and Sicilian and Serbian, that make up Argentina and the world, and that too often we try to plaster over.

Or maybe it's just fun. Remember fun? Nothing wrong with fun at all. I fully support fun's candidacy in all future elections.

As the saying allegedly goes in Argentina, "Gardel sounds better everyday." Such is tango. And gracias a Dios (o lo que sea) for that.