Chan Chan

Buena Vista Social Club

Chan Chan by Buena Vista Social Club

There’s a remarkable beauty in the enjoyment of songs sung in a foreign language. The often useless and overly-simplistic narrative journey of lyrics doesn’t get in the way. The melody, which in this case includes the rhythm of the singer’s indecipherable voice, is there to be felt, in my opinion, even more viscerally than normal. 

What little I know about Buena Vista Social Club includes factual details that anyone can find on Wikipedia. Wim Wenders made a documentary about them. They’re not a longstanding band, but an ensemble of ‘legendary’ Cuban musicians that Wenders helped assemble to record a few albums. I won’t bore you with any more details. I also won’t attempt to bore you with any information about Cuba, Cuban history, or Cuban music, because I don’t know anything unique about those three things that anyone couldn’t research and figure out with the click of a button. A common misconception about writers is that they’re talented, adept researchers. Writers, at least the good ones, are fantastically curious. They are also, very often, languorous and indolent, i.e., lazy bastards. Meticulous research of the highest level is a skill that lies far beyond many of the best authors (Houellebecq often cites Wikipedia in his acknowledgments). And it is this fact, anyway, that musicians share with many novelists. The work, if it should even be called that, and the result of the work, is guttural and emotional, not, never, ever!, cerebral. Otherwise the reader or listener will get bored, like you might be right now. So, to liven things up a little bit again, enjoy Buena Vista Social Club’s most famous song, Chan Chan, and take a listen to some of their stuff (ways to avoid the noun work) if you have time. 

Maybe another day, I’ll talk about how with Google, the word research has lost all meaning. For the same reason, a lot of other words have lost their meaning, their depth and complexity, their signification of connotation and thought. Probably, though, that essay will never be written. I think this is the most I should waste my energy saying on that topic. Unless, of course, in the rhythm of a great novel I hope to one day write, when the topic of words, semiotics, and emotional sensibility comes pouring out of a digressive character’s mouth in the middle of a scene enlivened by something more interesting than theory alone, something better, something fun.