MUSIC-ARGENTINA: Underground Rock Group Stays on Top

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Dec 30 1997 (IPS) - The venerable underground rock group “Los Redonditos de Ricota” still packs in the fans around Argentina despite the fact the band eschews the hype, .MDNM/sponsors and commercial deals generally associated with the music business.

Fans often sleep outdoors just to be able to secure admission to a concert featuring “Los Redonditos (little round cheese-balls)” – originally formed by a group of “hippies” in the 1970s. Since then, members of the band have changed, with the exception of two who are now more than 40-years-old, although their style – characterized as “underground and totally independent” – remains the same.

They have sold more than one million records, with no more than 4 concerts a year in different places across the country – but never in big cities. Each performance attracts about 10,000 people – most of them young.

The ritual surrounding the group involves them arriving early in cheap buses, or old cars carrying up to seven or eight people, camping out or sleeping outdoors in a town square or at the concert site, and to eating meat cooked on outdoor grills.

During the concert, members of the audience drink lots of alcohol and dance the “pogo,” forming a large mass of bodies stuck together, with elbows downward, jumping up and down and letting themselves be carried by the avalanche from one side to the other.

“Either you jump or you get out because, if you don’t you can get killed,” says Catalina, a Redondos fan who decided to stop attending the concerts when she became pregnant. Now, she only buys their CDS.

The avalanche is not always welcome. This year, the mayor of the city of Olavarria in the province of Buenos Aires suspended a Redondos concert, alleging that the city was not prepared to receive so many visitors.

The mayor got a unique response from the Redondos. They appeared on television and gave a press conference in which they condemned censorship.

The culture of those who follow the Redondos has been associated with violence and chaos since an incident in 1991, when a fan died as a result of a beating by police after being at arrested at a a concert.

From that moment on, arrests and injries have abounded at Redondos concerts – despite the efforts of the band’s singer ‘Indio’ Solari to clarify that violence is not in the spirit of his sometimes cryptic lyrics.

Songs, with titles like “That Solitary Cuban Cow”, “The Fly and the Soup”, or “My Dynamite Dog”, are often incomprehensible, but they refuse to analyze their content with rational explanations.

“The poetry of a rock song is made to pass through you, not for one to explain what one means by it”, said Solari in a magazine article.

Some critics have attempted to decipher the messages in the lyrics, but the band discourages them. “They thought that the idea of the Cuban cow was an allegory about Fidel Castro, but we were talking about a cow in Cuba that was hit by a satellite”, they joked.

Regarding their name “Redonditos de Ricota” (little round ricotta cheese balls), they explain that at the beginning, a university professor cooked for them and distributed fried ricotta balls among the concert goers. There is no metaphor. They were made of ricotta and they were round.

The Redondos almost never grant interviews or appear on television. Their concerts are announced through terse advertisments – enough to rally legions of the faithful.

They do not want agents. They rely instead on the wife of one of the members – the group’s ‘mother’ – and all cooperate in designing the covers of their albums. They never accept to play at benefits or solidarity concerts, nor do they endorse protests, much less political parties or ideologies.

They never share the stage with other groups, though in some of their concerts they are accompanied by a model, Monona, who undresses for the delirious young crowd. On certain occasions, the nude performance ends with the irruption of the police and an abrupt end to the concert.

Since they began, they have made several hit records, such as ‘Gul’ and ‘Oktubre’. “If you don’t sell like Julio Iglesias, the money is very little, and that forces you to sell yourself like a product and do things that we don’t want to do.” Solari explains.

Their records sell very well in Argentina. Thousands of pirate versions of the group — which continues to expand in its own, home-grown way – circulate all over Latin America. They rent the venues, and tickets to their concerts are not cheap: at least 22 dollars.

“We were invited to the United States to sing for Latino fans, but we don’t want to go,” they say. “How can we go the United States, when we still haven’t been to Corrientes, to Mendoza?” says one of the older members, Skay, referring to some of the Argentine provinces.

They haven’t performed in the capital for three years. They prefer that the fans travel to the provinces. The last concert in Buenos Aires attracted some 80,000 people, and brought in more than one million dollars at the box office.

Nevertheless, the most memorable incident remained a stabbing during the perfomance.