MUSIC: ARGENTINA SINGER REVIVES TRADITIONAL FOLKLORE

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Nov 4 1997 (IPS) - The singing sensation of Argentina today is 17-years-old Soledad Pastorutti who, dressed in traditional ranch garb has a message that is old-fashioned and conservative – according to her own definition.

From an ideological standpoint, Soledad cannot aspire to the po[pularity of Mercedes Sosa, the singer whose membership of the Communist Party cost her many years of exile – and who incorporated the bolero, rock and roll and tango into her repertoire.

Orthodoxy is more the feature of Pastorutti’s singing and, while she has found her way to a market that rejected Sosa’s “heresies,” she also has cultivated a love of the land and tradition.

“I don’t listen to popular music very much. It’s another message, which I don’t understand,” says, the 17-year-old, who was born in Arequito, a small town in the northern Argentine province of Santa Fe.

For Pastorutti, the names of Fito Paez and Charly Garcia – the two stars of Argentine pop music – are almost unknown. She only has heard of them because of her friends.

While critics try to analyze the Pastorutti phenomenon without knowing exactly what to make of it, the singer has already staged 580 performances, and has a full schedule until the middle of 1998.

Her voice – at times a bit forced – will give life to the song that will represent Argentina next year at the World Soccer Cup in France. Since she won the Consagracion prize this year at the Cosquin Festival – the most famous traditional folklore event in Argentina – Pastorutti has sold more than 300,000 compact disks and has sparked more than 45 fan clubs across the country. Her face – free of make-up – is on the T-shirts of thousands of young people.

After her, the most popular young folklore singers is a group called ‘Los Nocheros’ – but their sales have not even reached 50,000 copies, even though they mix traditional music with some pop and other genres in order to attract the same generation.

It is among this generation of younger folklore followers that Soledad is so popular.

She began singing at ‘penas’ – folkloric events in the provinces – for free, accompanied by her father, her main promoter. “I am what he wanted to be. He always dreamed of being Horacio Guarany,” says Soledad in reference to her father, a great admirer of the Argentine singer.

Soledad not only forgoes makeup, she dresses like a man, hates make-up, jumps up and down with her legs widespread, and shakes her gaucho’s poncho as if she were in a soccer stadium, rooting for her favorite team. Her 15-year-old sister accompanies her in some presentations, but its is Soledad projects real charisma.

Mercedes Sosa, on the other hand, dislikes traditional penas, and believes that folklore can only survive today if it is renewed.

Sosa is the singer who has sold the most records in Argentina – more than two million since she began her career — in addition to those she sells abroad. She has sold more than the hugely popular singers Garcia and Paez, as well as the group Soda Stereo.

Until recently, Soledad’s popularity was concentrated in Argentina’s interior, where she sings in each of the provinces every week. There, her popularity can be explained through young people’s identification with her simple image of a small-town girl. But she has just been to Buenos Aires, and her four scheduled performances had to be increased to seven in order to satisfy the demands of a public of all ages that filled the theater every night, selling out more than 20,000 tickets.

Critics see her as atypical.

She captivates audiences with a traditional repertoire of folk music – including chamames, zambas, valsecitos and chacareras — and an aesthetic which belies her age and her gender.

“She has a powerful voice, and she sings in tune, but she prefers to shout. She is very cute – almost demagogic – and there is something histrionic about the way she carries herself on stage,” said critic Rene Vargas, who argues that she should lower her volume and broaden her repertoire.

Soledad is strongly influenced by her father. He gave her a blue and white ribbon – the colors of the national flag – that he bought in a military supply store and which she fastened onto her gaucho outfit. This month, a magazine that published a story about her came with a poster and a blue and white headband with her name on it.

It was also her father’s idea to incorporate into her repertoire a song dedicated to the soldiers who fought in the Falkland Islands in 1982 in the war with Britain over sovereignty of the archipelago the Argentines call the Malvinas. “I have a special feeling for those people and their families,” says Soledad, who was one-year-old when Argentina took over the islands.

When she defines herself more intimately, she says she is “old- fashioned,” and thinks that she should have been born in another era.

“I am very Catholic and I practice my religion,” she says and she observes a kind of “degeneration” of young people, who become involved in fleeting relationships.

“I like the era when couples treated each other formally; love was different back then…” she says, as if she herself had known it in another life. Soledad also criticizes divorce, especially when there are children involved, and comes down hard on single mothers because – she says – “their children grow up with a lot of resentment.”

But when it comes to defining her own style, she admits that it seems contradictory for someone so young to sing such an orthodox repertoire.

“My goal wasn’t to renew anything. The only thing I did was to water a plant that was little dry”. And judging by her sales, the plant seems to have flowered.