The music of Gustavo Cordera (Avellaneda, 61 years old) has become a catharsis in itself. Gone are the Bersuit Vergarabat years, the days of “non-stop partying, chaos and madness”. The “character” who was considered “the savior, the heroic, the pastor of the progressive left” has died. Now resilience and work drives him. He performs as a soloist and is accompanied by a group of musicians that includes his wife Estela Céspedes in the choirs. In recent years, he has focused on his own resurgence after facing social rejection for a statement he made in 2016 about rape against women, for which he was prosecuted in Argentina, and “apologizing for crimes and inciting violence.” ‘ was accused. Four years later, in 2020, the case was dismissed.
His career, which ended shortly after the scandal and resulted in him throwing back forty concerts in Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, takes on a more introspective splendour. He has stopped impersonating others to spread his own story. Thus, in one of his acts at the end of the documentary The Fable of the Scorpion, he can be seen with his head bandaged, reciting, interpreting and intoning his pain as he unravels: “I harden the sword in the cauldrons of love and I fight again. Here I am”. His song How to face fear? Music as a remedy. “I love my wounds and do you know how I heal? Share,” he says.
His latest creation is Libres, a trilogy consisting of the EPs Cuerpo – very danceable -, Mente – very rocky – and Espíritu, which he will release soon. With this album and his personal repertoire, which includes some songs by Bersuit – the band he left in 2009 after 21 years of experience – he toured six cities in Mexico in the last days of April: Toluca, Guadalajara, Texcoco, Puebla, Mexico City and Ciudad Juárez, and in October it will be presented in Spain: Valencia, Malaga, Seville, Madrid and Barcelona.
Gustavo Cordera lives in the present, in the here and now. His gaze is the same that at least two generations of Latin Americans met between the late 1990s and early 2000s, that of Pelado in Bersuit, direct, wide-eyed. He walks down Cuauhtémoc Avenue in Mexico City smiling after speaking to an employee at the hotel where he is staying. Your journey ends at the outdoor table of a neighborhood cafe, where you sip coffee with almond milk and eat sweet bread. Sitting in this place, he buys a bunch of Dominican bananas from one vendor and a lottery ticket from another vendor. Dressed in a black T-shirt, shorts and tennis shoes – shoes – he will also receive EL PAÍS there one afternoon in April.
Questions. Has a trip to Brazil changed your life?
Answer. 1982 my first trip to Brazil. I realized that I lived in a very oppressed society. We came as a culture from a military government where the body was taboo, where sex was taboo, and when I got to Brazil I found a lot of nudity, a lot of contact, a lot of sex, and at that age — I was 23 years old — that was a revelation for me. At that moment I felt that I could bring this joy to my country, I wanted to bring the joy of Brazil to my country, I wanted to bring it to me.
Q Did you decide to become a musician?
R It wasn’t a decision. Most things that have happened in my life have found me, seduced me and even made a song. I make a song out of necessity at the age of seven, it’s a sting that came out as consolation for the death of a canary I had, Amarillita. I couldn’t explain what was happening to me, what was happening to me, and I wrote him a song and played it to him at his funeral. That was liberating for me. I felt the comforting and healing power of a song. Since then, every time I’ve been plagued, every time something has caused me an imbalance, an affliction, an injustice, I’ve made a song to balance myself, to fix myself.
Q How do you deal with Pelado de la Bersuit being disrespectful and filling stadiums?
R Very good. Grateful to have experienced myself in this place, to have felt energy flowing through my body, to have experienced this intensity, this cheek, this freedom. Very happy.
Q What was the main urgency that made you leave the band?
R Get out, get out of this place. Flee. At that moment it was a death trap for me because the path was over for me, my personal path to success, to consecration, and I had realized that although I had great social success and had come very far, internally was sad, it didn’t make me happy to tell this story, that it was no longer necessary, that it was time to let go, to flee, to leave Buenos Aires, to leave Bersuit, to leave this place. I had lived it intensely, but I knew that if I continued in this place I would die. I felt it perfectly in my body.
I would invite any human being to live a weekend with just the bersuit and you can’t even imagine him living. It was crazy; Party, party, killing spree, madness without end. Remember what those shows were. You went home to sleep, you went to work during the week, and I went to parties in other parts of the world almost every day.
Gustavo Cordera during a photo session in Ramón López Velarde’s garden in Mexico City’s Aggi Garduño
Q Gustavo Cordera after the Bersuit, does he unfold inward, towards himself?
R Yes, it was another search, another path. I used to look outside and describe it. When I started my solo career, I started looking into myself as descriptions. I started writing on my own, the letters were in the first person. I am what I feel, what happens to me. This is my temple, this is my house,” he points to himself. You see Murguita from the south, Amores perros [Perro amor explota, grabada para la banda sonora de la película de Alejandro G. Inárritu], The Fat Scooter, every song, they talk about the character that I could be, but they talk about characters. They were painted from another place. After I became a soloist, the texts took on a different character, they began to be told from personal experiences.
Q On this new journey, he crashed in 2016 with a cancellation episode. How did he get up?
R Let me die, don’t resist. The character dies, which doesn’t mean I died as a being, and with a lot of resilience and a lot of work, not just personally but as a team, we’ve rebuilt the bits and pieces of what existed elsewhere and so much more freer, because when we died, as a socially supported character, I didn’t have to reconcile with anyone, not even please anyone or anything. I truly created myself free, I liberated myself.
Q Didn’t the character die when he left the bersuit?
R Despite this, the character continued. The savior, the heroic, the pastor of the progressive left, the one who takes up arms against the system, dies.
Q Are you a resilient rocker?
R Naturally. My planet is Chiron, the planet of resilience. And what about my resilience? I have my wound, I show it, you see me hurt because I express myself in each of my songs, at no point do I deny my wound or my pain, but you know what? When I share it with you you begin the healing process and I mean in a transpersonal event where the authority that my wound and my fragility give me connects you to the work and that is resilience. I am not a guru who has conquered the disease and healed and then I speak to you from a pedestal and tell you how to heal. I am a man who is wounded and I show you my wounds in songs, I love my wounds and do you know how I heal? Sharing them with you and you heal, you know how? you share with me. That’s what resilience is for, that’s what art is for.
Q He worked on the “Libres” trilogy: Body, Mind and Spirit.
R We thought after making Entre las cuerdas, an album that kind of painted a little bit of social behavior, which is cancellation, which was the only obligatory thought, the arrival of extremist feminism with all that that meant, misanthropy, the contempt for the child, all the hate programs that were generated in society, somehow invited me to put into words and put into music everything that we were experiencing at that time, all this hate, all this law of attraction, generated by your judgment, trying to hurt you, not understanding, programmed empathy, ideological empathy, not true heart-to-heart empathy. All this programming is told in songs like Ya no quiero punishment, Un abuso, Ese mundo, Lo verdad, including Devolución, which is a punk plea against these groups… a very brighter, more loving one, which has a bit to do with it to celebrate the body, to celebrate freedom of expression, to celebrate abundance.
A song like El baile del error draws attention to the programming of scarcity and poverty, to the state of fear, of war, this place of retreat in which we humans are, where out of indignation we cannot touch, cannot look at ourselves, because it hurts us. All those things that denatured us to educate us. What does this disc have [‘Libres’] it’s blood, body, love, hugs, dance, conscience, animal spirit, a return to nature and somehow a liberation from this cultural degradation, from my point of view, and I say this out of my feelings, out of my freedom of speech. I don’t want anyone to think like me. just that [la gente] Be inspired when you see a free man who says what he feels, what he thinks.
Q What does Mexico mean to you?
R I’m sitting here in the corner, the weather is nice, see all the people on the street, alive, connected, vibrating, the street is vibrating. It’s telluric, it’s a telluric country, in perpetual flux — a night before a magnitude 5.8 tremor was felt in the Mexican capital. You can feel this vibration in every corner. There is a lot of spirit, in your blood there are shamans, there are healers, there are healers. In this place is the memory of humanity. All this food that is there, the amount of food variety speaks of diversity, of a city that hasn’t been able to penetrate it culturally yet. It is a people who have risen up against the Unicis cultural hegemony of the West. It’s a rebellious people, with a silent rebellion, a rebellion that will put your head down and say “order”, but who can shoot you, that guy who puts your head down and says “order” when his balls are swelling. There is temper, there is spirit. I love this city.
Gustavo Cordera is touring Mexico and will be performing in five cities in Spain next October Aggi Garduño
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