February 21, 2008 at 1:12 am · Filed under david lynch, life, movies, music and tagged: all about my mother, almodovar, courtney love, david lynch, drew barrymore, hugh grant, mulholland dr., music & lyrics, rebekah del rio, tajabone
I’m definetely not a Drew Barrymore fan, even when I do admire her party days with Courtney Love. But when I saw “Music and Lyrics”, I was hypnotized from the beginning until the end. I even ended up falling in love with Hugh Grant. And hating her more because she got him. The thing is, the movie made me think about the eternal quarrel between music and lyrics. I always defined myself as a lyrics person, even when I really enjoyed playing our intrumental songs with my band Juanito DVD. I used to think that I liked some songs so much because of the lyrics. But if I was such a lyrics person, why did I like Cranes, Cocteau Twins, and My Bloody Valentine so much? Why was Pavement’s song “You’re killing me”, my favorite one, when you can hardly understand what they say between all that distorted riffing?
But on the other hand, when you finally get to undertsand those blurry lyrics, everything makes sense. When you listen to the first track of “Loveless”, and it goes
Soft
As a pillow
Touch her there
Where she won’t dare
Somewhere
you feel again like a lyrics person. You feel like Rita and Betty listening to Rebekah del Río singing in Spanish, and still feeling the power of her lyrics through her a capella version of “Crying”. When I listen to “Tajabone” and watch the lonely prostitutes wandering between the cars in Amodóvar’s “All About My Mother”, I feel like crying even when I don’t speak wolof.
In the movie, Drew Barrymore says that music is like sex and lyrics, like the story of the person you’re with. And it makes sense. Sometimes I like the lyrics but I can’t feel anything with the music, like the people you like everything about….but you just don’t feel any attraction. Sometimes you listen to the music and your heart starts beating faster, and then you realise the lyrics aren’t that deep…so you forget all about it. And sometimes you are drawn by the music, but don’t quite get the lyrics. And you want to know more about them. What they mean, what they tell. Even when you need to translate them, read them over and over again. All you need is to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
December 23, 2007 at 12:03 pm · Filed under movies, music and tagged: david lynch, latin music, mulholland dr.
I remember this discussion with my band partners Carmen and Lotten about latin songs. They said that latin songs approached love in a very simple and obvious way, and that you couldn’t relate all the time to the “I love you, let’s make out and shake our bodies” line. I wasn’t sure if that was true or not, because I just wanted to believe that love was what the latin songs were talking about.
I just understood what they meant when I saw Rebekah del Rio, la Llorona de los Angeles, playing dead in Mulholland Drive, the dreamy-nightmare-to-become movie about these two actresses, lovers, who are victims and who victimize, trying to make their way in this “parallel dimension” kind of Hollywood. Rebekah del Rio, a San Diego girl who has been singing since the age of 11, makes Roy Orbison’s song sound even more dramatic than he did decades ago, a capella and in Spanish, the language of the soap-opera love.
Although Orbison’s backround was the country music of his hometown, Vernon, Texas, it fits perfectly well in this crazy odyssee created by David Lynch, in which cowboys meet filmakers in a desertic California in the middle of the night, and women find corpses of themselves in Melrose Place kind of condos in a dark L.A.
In this kind of setting, we don’t need riddles. We are already confused, lost and impatient. And somebody singing about a broken heart with a broken voice just opens this box inside our hearts, the box that we all have, closed and hidden, as silent as Rebekah del Rio’s band.
