Within the wave of recognition that popular music of the last decades has experienced in the last five years, one that has put albums like “The Madrileño”, that has rescued the rumba and the copla or that has managed to vindicate traditional Latin American music as one of the great pillars of culture in Spanish in the 20th and 21st centuries, voices have emerged within the national media ecosystem that knew how to see in the imaginary popular in recent decades –separated from criticism and, at the same time, from the mass products of the major labels– a reference with which to understand what was happening in the present. Of these authors, jondo goldthat in his book “Give me more gasoline” outlines the canon of this movement, he is perhaps the one who has been able to see this phenomenon from a more accurate contemporary perspective: without claiming the past for the past, looking at what it means today.
From his hand, and from another series of protagonists of the golden era of gas station music, which is nothing more than popular music that is not pop, and which we can date from the sixties to the first two thousand, the three episodes of “Greatest Hits: highway, gasoline and festival”the Movistar+ music documentary, review an autochthonous and special phenomenon that placed charismatic and memorable artists, far from the spotlight of fame but with an unquestionable presence on car radios and in the imagination of a society like the Spanish one that transformed into the second half of the 20th century at full speed to catch up with the rest of the western world but did not renounce its musical roots.
Of manolo escobar a camelof The ticks a The ketchup, many of the country’s best sellers have raised their careers in circuits that, as well commented in the documentary, it is not that they were foreign to the music industry, but that they formed a new industry. In this sense, the main downside that can be put to the program is the absence of actors from within the industry, the workers and headhunters who made possible a phenomenon that well deserves an encore. And it is that beyond the artists, there is a key fabric for their development that is not usually taken into account.
The three episodes of “Greatest Hits” They are light, entertaining and have an agile rhythm that makes the three hours they last a mere appetizer. The absence of a narrator, using only the voices of the protagonists themselves and the audios of the time as resources, endow a movement with a veneer of authenticity that, in fact, also lacked narrators, voices that mediated between listeners and viewers. singers. It was a spatial relationship, more than a narrative, that of the public with the artists who formed a movement that, lately, has been given recognition that no one ever thought it would have.
