Not Chilean Music

Thanks Argentina for referencing Chile but you couldn't have picked a worse, less authentic example of Chilean music in my humble opinion.



You might like it, and I'm not going to go on a tirade about what's "good" or "bad" in terms of musical taste because if I did I would rant for a while so I'm not going to peep a word about what I really think but rather focus on why it's not representative of Chile and what just doesn't have anything to do with Chile. In this post I'm not going to be a purist, rather than a zealot.

This "Los Mono" group has, I'm sure, a pretty ethnically Chilean cast of characters but the sound is like a cheap - sorry, no value judgments - but basically just a copy of the Caribbean sound, faintly echoing something by Venezuelan group Amigos Invisibles except that group was actually kinda good (that's a value judgment about AI, not Los Mono, so I'm in the clear).

The lyrics are completely vapid. That's not a value statement, that's an objective fact. The phrase dar gato por liebre is a pan-hispanic cliche and mula is Andalusian slang, the last time I checked. Me mula = me gusta. What do I know about the context maybe it's a big Chilean thing so if someone knows better I'm happy to stand corrected. It'd be the only Chilean thing about the entire song.

UPDATE: Thanks to readers Alex and Tomás it's all coming back. In Spain it's me mola and in Chile mula, well, I remember up to a few months ago using it is the best translation I could come up with for the English word "cheesy" but decided the English was much better in that instance so I never developed a strong emotional connection to the word and it slipped out of my vocabulary.

Still using one Chilean word mula in an otherwise homogenous context is like living in white suburbia and having one black friend. Although read Tomás' comment below, in my view he exposes something very Chilean about the artists' hypocrisy, and provides an international analogy. Can you give them credit for something that was probably unconscious? Was it unconscious?

As for the dancing and video production - again, no value judgments (man, this saves me a lot of time!) but what does it have to do with Chile? Except for the austere boredom effected by the unchanging angle and background which gives the sense you could be anywhere in a horrible way, which actually to their credit does summarize much of Santiago, still overall nothing. Nothing to do with Chile, really.

Chilean group Sinergia would be much better to reference and despite what you say I kinda like them. The first time I watched this video I found it to be very funny because it captures the fascist tendencies of bosses and bad working conditions in Chile. Yeah, I know, it's like "Would you like a little bit of salad with that populism-dressing?" they lay it on thick and obvious but I'm just showing you this video because it's got Chile written all over it and I appreciate that. Not one of Chile's better groups, by far, but very Chilean that's what's important here.