From C. Tangana to El Madrileño: being a man in the popular art scene

The singer and composer from Madrid C. Tangana it slipped into our lives without singing or tuning. With hitazos What “Bad woman»(2017) conquered the majority trends and his name began to be related to various controversies that transcended the merely musical. Since his official presentation in society as C. Tangana, both the image that surrounds him and his musical interests have undergone an evolution. The cadence of the new times seems to have required him to review the role adopted until then, materialized in his public and artistic image.

Now, under the character of El Madrileño, which also gives its name to his last album (2021), revisits his journey to result in a work of restful maturity that reveals some cracks of our present time.

The origin of the character

Beneath the masks of all his pseudonyms is Antón Álvarez (1990), Pucho para los amigos, a boy whose aspirations coincide with those of the generation millennial.

The created character is shown from the beginning as a perfect product of its time. Surrounded by hodgepodge and nostalgia, his figure links with the idea promoted by neoliberalism that anyone can achieve what they want. Thus, his aesthetic imaginary is configured through the appropriation of classic references that come from different environments, but all with a suburban character typical of urban and popular culture. With these premises a alter ego It contains a whole catalog of what can be defined as the eternal masculine.

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In 2017, C. Tangana presented Idol, an album that illustrates the contradictions of achieving success in today’s society. In the visuality that accompanies this work we found the whole repertoire of clichés that have laid the foundations of what is known as hegemonic masculinity.

Before delving into it, it should be pointed out that the construction of modern masculinity responds to a historical process linked to the rise of the middle class. In this context, the body acquires symbolic meanings that specify agents such as gender or social class through appearance. The virile aspect of the man is consolidated based on qualities such as heterosexuality, economic self-sufficiency, risky behaviors and constant public demonstrations of power.

In the video clips that illustrate the artist’s most popular songs, many of these clichés are present and are repeated as recurring elements in the construction of the character. The singer often appears driving recklessly, in a state of dismay due to a lack of love, dressed in luxury coats and gold accessories, having sex with women, drinking or consuming other types of substances. In fact, journalist Alan Queipo summed up his artistic universe with what he called the three F’s: “Fuck, Fardar and Farlopa.” At the time, C. Tangana identified with the motto.

When the character’s destiny seemed to be exhausted and the public got used to identifying the rapper’s name as a synonym for controversy, machismo and cheap culture, the artist reinvented himself to appear as El Madrileño. His most recent work shows the attempt to offer new paradigms around masculinities, and among the many statements that accompanied his presentation, there is one that draws special attention. To the slogan of the three F’s coined in 2017, the artist would now add one more: Scrub, to start cleaning up everything that got dirty.

The Madrileño (2021) is a work composed of as many visual pieces as songs in which we reflect from contemporaneity on the meaning of being men, among other things. In an explicit way, he seems to want to question masculinity of a more classical cut to embrace some questions of the modern world. Specifically, it is through two songs included in the album that this idea appears in the foreground. On the one hand, “I’m never», Song sung from the female point of view. On the other hand, “CHANGE!”, Which directly talks about issues around the ideas of masculinity, what it means historically to be a man and the repercussions and personal limitations that end up forging the masculine gender socially.

Testosterone … calculated?

Despite the desire to deconstruct the male figure, it is evident that everything that surrounds El Madrileño continues to exude an aroma charged with testosterone. The most recent controversy has come with “Atheist” (2021), a bachata in collaboration with the Argentine singer Nathy Peluso, whose video clip, written and directed by Antón Álvarez himself, takes place in the Cathedral of Toledo. It is precisely one of the frescoes in the chapter house of this place of worship that inspires the work: a beast grabs a woman by the hair who seems to want to escape being judged by God. Where are the borders between the collective moral debate and the violent spectacle that this generates is the idea that he plans in this video clip.

Far from the original intention developed by the clip, everything the artist does continues to raise endless controversies around his person that, in a way, put issues that force feminisms to rethink the pillars at the center of the social debate classics to adapt and intervene in the neoliberal context. It is clear that today we have different tools to warn of the ideological power of images and to denounce those that on a pedagogical level do a disservice to new generations.

In the contemporary world, so marked by disparity, miscegenation and confusion, we are continually witnessing revitalizations of these classic concepts without our being aware of it. In this way, men and women repeat and assimilate behaviors that are then transferred to an entire visual universe, executing a formula that works.

The strategy pursued by the pop artist is to embody in his characters what he wants to criticize so that society is the one who completes the work. its modus operandi It seems to be to force the audience to rethink and debate, almost unconsciously, about discourses anchored in the normative.

In this regard, we believe it appropriate to close with two questions regarding the transition from C. Tangana to El Madrileño. On the one hand, to emphasize that images are always a modeling of the real, imagined worlds that sometimes simply parody the space and time in which we live. On the other, to point out that perhaps one of the most effective ways of the art scene is to visualize the past in such an exaggerated way that it forces us to rethink it. Thus, instead of erasing it, it will be necessary to place it in its rightful place to, in this way, begin to heal wounds.

Raquel Baixauli Romero, Researcher in Art History, University of Valencia and Esther González Gea, Research staff in training in Art History, University of Valencia

This article was originally published on The Conversation. read the original.