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In the illustrious branch of lyricists in force, from Silvio Rodriguez a Joaquin Sabina, we always misplace Juan Luis Guerra, which has less writing than the previous ones, but which curdles some texts of neat daring that we never knew in Latin bachateros or artists. What Guerra’s lyrics lack to address the poem directly is corrected by him with an undulating voice and the melody fleeing at will from the classic forms of folklore, which is where he has the first protein. So some solid, suggestive and far from innocuous pieces come out where he dares to include “my bilirubin goes up”, or “looking for a visa for a dream”.
It is difficult to bet on these verbal somersaults, mostly in his own thing, which has the purpose of dancing, or the jarana of dancing, with which we are in the port contrary to thought or poetry, whose best molds occur in the ballad, or in the bolero or the copla, even .
We would not risk that Guerra writes literature, because he is a breath away from that miracle, but he has raised the achievement of placing stylistic desire in some genres where the word is only a careless resource of reiteration of easy choruses, under the servitude of pushing a bachata, or a merengue, which are just the other alcohol of tropical revelry.
He says in some song, appealing to a psychoanalyst: «Hey, doc, I’m calling you because of a friend I met on some web sites / I ask you to give me a solution / because you have the key to my heart». And in another album, looking for the portrait of unequal loves, he concludes: «I fall in love with her. / He has a sauna, a swimming pool in his residence. / In my pension two buckets to wet my life». Sabina taught me, pulling Javier Krahe, that we have to choose between «Borges or danceable», for the race, but behold, between one thing and the other, we get a guy named Juan Luis Guerra, a «danceable poet», according to coinage that I remember of himself .
I know that he is a man with a passion for metaphor, who read from a young age to Neruda, Vallejo and Garcia Lorca, who are not the bachelor of administration of the bachateros, precisely. Guerra is an enlightened man who works on the repertoire of moving his hips, but he leaves the word with the delay of a singer-songwriter. He is not a poet, because he makes direct songs, just as he is not a bachatero, because he reinvents that genre, seen as obscene, or vulgar, for so many years. But everything crosses it to give a rare work of imagination. In the dressing room he has a collection of poems by Borges to relax.
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