When in fifty, a hundred years, some sensitive soul goes looking for Argentine history in our art, or Latin America, it will inevitably have to go through the poetry of Pity Álvarez, who fixes with love and mercy images of our time. Pity lovingly showed the kids that they see no other future than that of delinquency to access what they all offer us, he spoke of child or adolescent prostitution in the neighborhoods, of the worker who arrives with a tired body and gives him a currency to the kids who are on the corner, of the police who always bother them for smoking what nature gives us and how intoxication manages to take us out of one world, to get us into another from which we may not be able to get out, looking for satisfaction that it is not going to arrive, that we know that it is not going to arrive, but once again we are going to look for it. Pity Álvarez's work shows a person of immense sensitivity, who perhaps simply needed to appease so much pain that an extraordinary artistic work left us.
Viejas Locas shows us the decade of the nineties, the consequences of the destruction of the productive matrix, the consequences of which we still suffer to this day, even more so that its destruction was sought again. Pity warned those who might listen that when you see a lot of unemployment in the streets, "the children see their father and together they murmur / they don't want to be a "working fool" / because the one who works here never progresses." Those who walk through poor neighborhoods or interact with teenagers who live in those neighborhoods know that what Pity sang to us is a great truth. Faced with a certain future of rubbish, fences or lead, why not take the risk of guaranteeing at least for a while the life that they propose as an ideal. Álvarez painted her village for us and with it the world. The increasing unemployment in the neighborhood, the drunken man who cannot stop drinking, the mother who, although she is a good woman, does not take care of her children, and the kids who are "lying in a ditch, inhaling what life did not give them ”. The same is found in Lugano and the Bronx.
While one of the programs with the highest audience on Argentine television was “The Simpsons”, Álvarez sang to our workers, to those who still managed to be hooked into the labor system and wondered how much more suffering, how much longer they will continue without valuing the pain that the effort of the poor produces. And while the father, between the newspaper and mate with a lot of sugar, expresses with his head lowered the suffering of not being able to give his children what they deserve, because the effort of the Homers deserves more, the children ask themselves: work for what? To arrive and have your wife reproach you for once again leaning your elbow on the station bar to embolden yourself to face the orders that you won't be able to pay? Banking that a cheto in a pink shirt and light pants, who in her life lifted a brick, yells at you because the plaster turned out bad? Why go through that to buy, if getting a good scare and running fast in an afternoon they can do the same as the old man in a fortnight. When parents don't have anything to grasp the illusion that they propose to their children, it is easier for the kids not to believe what they are proposed. Few are the ones who are going to get away, it is like that, the life of a worker is like that.
And when shortages are increasing in popular neighborhoods, corchazos increase on both sides of the avenue. On one side the kids fall, on the other they send "those parties that are all rats drinking champagne, they pay dearly for a woman and then they laugh at society." Between the nineties and 2015 some things changed, others never change. Nor did the songs on which Álvarez sang throughout his career change, either with Viejas Locas or with Intoxicados, a band he created after the separation of the first musical formation with which he obtained artistic recognition. In "Good day", his first album with Intoxicados continued to show the social reality in which we live, although his letter of introduction is his difficulty in quitting drugs. As he told us in Puente La Noria, a song from “Hermanos de sangre”, the second album by Viejas Locas, “I prefer to flash and not see this anymore and after they say that you dope yourself, you kill yourself without taking the rest”
When in fifty, a hundred years, some sensitive soul goes looking for Argentine history in our art, or Latin America, it will inevitably have to go through the poetry of Pity Álvarez, who fixes with love and mercy images of our time. Pity lovingly showed the kids that they see no other future than that of delinquency to access what they all offer us, he spoke of child or adolescent prostitution in the neighborhoods, of the worker who arrives with a tired body and gives him a currency to the kids who are on the corner, of the police who always bother them for smoking what nature gives us and how intoxication manages to take us out of one world, to get us into another from which we may not be able to get out, looking for satisfaction that it is not going to arrive, that we know that it is not going to arrive, but once again we are going to look for it. Pity Álvarez's work shows a person of immense sensitivity, who perhaps simply needed to appease so much pain that an extraordinary artistic work left us.
Viejas Locas shows us the decade of the nineties, the consequences of the destruction of the productive matrix, the consequences of which we still suffer to this day, even more so that its destruction was sought again. Pity warned those who might listen that when you see a lot of unemployment in the streets, "the children see their father and together they murmur / they don't want to be a "working fool" / because the one who works here never progresses." Those who walk through poor neighborhoods or interact with teenagers who live in those neighborhoods know that what Pity sang to us is a great truth. Faced with a certain future of rubbish, fences or lead, why not take the risk of guaranteeing at least for a while the life that they propose as an ideal. Álvarez painted her village for us and with it the world. The increasing unemployment in the neighborhood, the drunken man who cannot stop drinking, the mother who, although she is a good woman, does not take care of her children, and the kids who are "lying in a ditch, inhaling what life did not give them ”. The same is found in Lugano and the Bronx.
While one of the programs with the highest audience on Argentine television was “The Simpsons”, Álvarez sang to our workers, to those who still managed to be hooked into the labor system and wondered how much more suffering, how much longer they will continue without valuing the pain that the effort of the poor produces. And while the father, between the newspaper and mate with a lot of sugar, expresses with his head lowered the suffering of not being able to give his children what they deserve, because the effort of the Homers deserves more, the children ask themselves: work for what? To arrive and have your wife reproach you for once again leaning your elbow on the station bar to embolden yourself to face the orders that you won't be able to pay? Banking that a cheto in a pink shirt and light pants, who in her life lifted a brick, yells at you because the plaster turned out bad? Why go through that to buy, if getting a good scare and running fast in an afternoon they can do the same as the old man in a fortnight. When parents don't have anything to grasp the illusion that they propose to their children, it is easier for the kids not to believe what they are proposed. Few are the ones who are going to get away, it is like that, the life of a worker is like that.
And when shortages are increasing in popular neighborhoods, corchazos increase on both sides of the avenue. On one side the kids fall, on the other they send "those parties that are all rats drinking champagne, they pay dearly for a woman and then they laugh at society." Between the nineties and 2015 some things changed, others never change. Nor did the songs on which Álvarez sang throughout his career change, either with Viejas Locas or with Intoxicados, a band he created after the separation of the first musical formation with which he obtained artistic recognition. In "Good day", his first album with Intoxicados continued to show the social reality in which we live, although his letter of introduction is his difficulty in quitting drugs. As he told us in Puente La Noria, a song from “Hermanos de sangre”, the second album by Viejas Locas, “I prefer to flash and not see this anymore and after they say that you dope yourself, you kill yourself without taking the rest”
I hope it helps you <3