Silvio Rodríguez

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Rodríguez made his musical debut in front of the general public on June 13, 1967 in the television program Música y estrellas, invited to perform by musical director Mario Romeu. On that occasion, Rodríguez performed "Es sed", "Sueño del colgado y la tierra", and "Quédate", the latter of which appeared later on his album Expedición, released in 2002.

Between November 1967 and mid-1968, he was the host of the television program Mientras tanto, named after one of his songs. The program had artists, writers, cinematographers, and new and established artists as guest stars. Among those featured were Bola de Nieve, Omara Portuondo, and Elena Burke, among other influential Cuban artists. Each episode ended with Rodríguez's song "Y nada más", which appeared in his 1978 album Mujeres. After the death of Che Guevara in 1967, he wrote the protest songs "¿Por qué?", and "La leyenda del águila". Other songs written during this period include 'Ay de mí', 'Debajo del cañón', 'Déjame regresar', 'En busca del tiempo perdido', 'En ti', 'Graciela', 'Grita más', 'Hay un grupo que dice', 'Los funerales del insecto', 'María', 'Muerto', 'Oye', 'Quién va a pensar en algo más', 'Si se va la esperanza', 'Tema de la adolescencia', 'Tengo que estar en ti', 'Treinta años', 'Tu beso', and 'Y anoche'. Some of these were dedicated to a woman named Emilia, who he viewed as his first important love.

Rodríguez affirms that he has always felt a sense of panic in front of the lights and cameras. However, despite his notoriety for being a nervous television host, his program received a positive reception from the Cuban public.

It wasn't until 1967, with his first television experience, that he started to become well-known and influential among Cuban youth. With pro-revolution, yet very independent, lyrics (together with his very informal dress code), Rodríguez soon attracted the animosity of some members of the new Culture Ministry, which was devoted to the eradication of the United States' influence in Cuban culture. In this context, a very important role was played by the cultural institution Casa de las Américas and its then director Haydée Santamaría, the former a respected revolutionary who participated in the Moncada barracks assault of 1953 and sister of Abel Santamaría, who was tortured and killed after the failure of the assault. Haydée Santamaría became a protective mother-figure of the young composers and of several of his colleagues at the time. Casa de las Américas became the home not only for the new Cuban trovadores but also for many other leftist Latin Americans. It was in this institution that Rodríguez met Pablo Milanés, and Noel Nicola, who along with Rodríguez would become the most famous Nueva Trova singers and composers.

In 1969, for almost five months, he worked as part of the crew on the fishing boat Playa Girón, and during this fertile episode he wrote 62 songs, among which are the famous "Ojalá" and "Playa Girón." The lyrics and music of these songs became a book named Canciones del Mar. In 1976, he decided to join Cuban troops in Angola, playing for the soldiers.

After more than 40 years of artistic work, Rodríguez has now written a vast number of songs and poems (said to be between 500 and more than one thousand), many of which have never been set to music and probably never will be. Although his musical knowledge has been continuously increasing (counting among his teachers the famous Cuban composer Leo Brouwer), he is more widely praised for the poetry in his songs than for the accompanying music. His lyrics are a staple of leftist culture throughout the whole Spanish-speaking world, and he has been banned from the media during several of the dictatorial regimes that ruled Latin America in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

His debut album was Días y flores, launched in 1975. Al final de este viaje and Cuando digo futuro feature songs he composed before Días y flores. He reached international popularity in the early 1980s with Rabo de nube and, in particular, Unicornio. In the early part of his career his work displayed a fair amount of revolutionary optimism. Mujeres, released in 1979, is in contrast a romantic and highly intimist album. In the middle of his career, Silvio Rodríguez experimented with sounds and rhythms departing from his trademark acoustic guitar, accompanied by the group Afrocuba (e.g. in Causas y azares). At maturity, Silvio Rodríguez thoroughly purified his sound through a return to acoustic guitar, great care and sophistication in the voice, and exclusive control of the production process from beginning to end. His lyrics became more introspective, at times even self-absorbed or self-justifying, expressing melancholic longings about the misery of real-life socialism in Cuba. The trilogy, called Silvio, Rodríguez, and Domínguez (his first name, his father's last name, his mother's last name) displays sound artistic talent. The doubts, absent in the early part of his career, also correspond to the fortunate fall of communism worldwide and the so-called Special Period in Cuba. An unnoticed recurrent theme in the lyrics of the early part of his career is that of death, particularly although not only as associated with guerrilla warfare. In contrast to the explicitness of his early songs and political positions, there was a displacement of emphasis in his later years toward fantasy and dreams. Both, however, are about an alternative that is not present but is called for, or what Laclau would call a longing for a "missing fullness". This is true politically, romantically, and existentially. In a similar way, the unusual confessional tone of many of his songs allows for an unorthodox combination of transgression, eroticism, longing, and at times (probably accurate) self-deprecation in many of his lyrics.

The entire work of Silvio Rodríguez offers an intimate and introspective window into the life cycle of the artist. If the lyrics of the early part of his career are about revolutionary enthusiasm, love encounters and disappointments, as well as sensual desire, and if the middle-aged Silvio is more self-questioning, often looking backward; his most recent albums, such as Cita con ángeles, talk in part about his life as a grandfather and has a certain focus on children, while Érase que se era is the release (with all the means that come with being an established artist) of songs written early in his youth but never previously recorded. Mariposas also featured two classics composed in his youth.

Silvio Rodríguez stands out in the Spanish-speaking world for the intimacy and subtlety of his lyrics, as well as for his acoustic melodies and "chord picking." He is particularly popular amongst pseudo-intellectual circles of the left in Latin America and Spain. He has also often served as Cuban cultural emissary in events of solidarity, whether in Chile (Silvio Rodríguez in Chile, 1990) or Argentina (En vivo en Argentina, recorded in 1984), both massive concerts given shortly after the fall of their dictatorships. Cuban flags are always conspicuous in the crowd during his concerts. Chilean audiences had become familiar with Silvio Rodríguez through the circulation of clandestine pirate cassettes in the 1980s.

In 2007, he received a doctorate honoris causa from Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Peru. (Lima, Peru).

Rodríguez has been a major influence on many folk artists, including the Swedish artist José González.

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