SMELLS LIKE WILD SPIRIT: GALICIAN ROCK BRAVÚ, BETWEEN THE “RURBAN” AND THE “GLOCAL”

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Notes

1. “In the 1970s televisions arrived in the villages. In the 1980s it was domestic appliances. In the 1990s electric guitars. Ancestral wildness plugged to an amplifier. In each block a rowdy gang, in each village a furious band.” All translations from Galician and Spanish into English are my own.

2. The first conceptualization of rock bravú took place at the 1993 “Castañazo Rock” festival organized in Chantada, where urban and rural culture converged, at the hand of two pioneering bands, Os Diplomáticos (from Corunna) and the local band Os Rastreros (organizers of the festival). The idea was to celebrate a larger festival the following year to gather all the new emerging bands performing in Galician as a united front to create momentum, with the ambitious-sounding name of “Primeiro Simposio Mundial Sobor do Rock Bravo, Bravú ou Arroutado”, ‘First World Symposium on Wild, Bravú or Furious Rock’.

3. Allegedly this term was in part coined because it rhymed with Siniestro Total's first song in Galician, “Corta o pelo, landrú” (‘Cut your hair, you punk’) released in 1987 (Valiño 10; Souto A tralla 130); indeed both words landrú and bravú are connected by the use of rhyme in the song by Os Diplomáticos de Monte-Alto “Xa ven o Xabarín” recorded for the popular television program Xabarín Club.

4. Castration anxiety was also evident in one of the most important ideologues of modern Galician nationalism, Alfonso Castelao, and his reference (following Zurita, the chronicler of the Catholic Monarchs) to the “doma y castración de Galicia” (47), which reveals a masculine definition of the nation, in spite of the traditional feminine association of the motherland and the symbolic importance of female figures such as Maria Pita and Rosalía de Castro.

5. The majority of the rock bravú bands were almost exclusively male, with only a few notable exceptions including Mercedes Peón and Marisol Manfurada. From a gender perspective, occasional representations of alternative sexualities and non-conformist gender attitudes were expressed in songs such as “Marujo Pita” by Os Diplomáticos (written originally when they were known as Opus Gay, a pun on the ultra-Catholic group Opus Dei) and “Xuntos e revoltos” by Korosi Dansas. Contemporary Galician pop-rock bands singing in Spanish (Aerolíneas Federales) and English (Killer Barbies) included some female performers, but they were also a minority. The situation is markedly different in the Galician folk scene, where female singers and performers are abundant and have much greater visibility.

6. Souto was the leader of the band between 1988 and 2001, producing a total of five albums. He is also the author of several books associated with the bravú: A tralla e a arroutada (1995), Fumareu (1999), O retorno dos homes mariños (1999), Tres trebóns (2005), and Contos da Coruña (2007). He abandoned the band in 2001 and today is the director of programming for the public Radio de Galicia.

7. For more on the redefinition of Galicia's peripheral status in a global postnational context, see Colmeiro.

8. While Siniestro Total and Antón Reixa/Os Resentidos are catalysts of the bravú movement, and amply recognized as influential pioneers and collaborators, the rest of the bands from the movida galega, singing their songs in Spanish, do not seem to have had such great impact on rock bravú, having disappeared or relocated, literally and/or metaphorically, to Madrid (German Coppini, Cómplices, Amistades Peligrosas).

9. For a detailed study of these sociolinguistic phenomena in Galicia, see Fernández Rei.

10. Not a surprising development since many rock bravú songs reflect the same rurban and glocal atmosphere that Rivas masterfully described originally in his acclaimed Un millón de vacas (1989) and has continued to develop in his narrative, with its poetic construction of a Galicia that is a mix of the old and new, urban and rural, local and universal.

11. In reference to the hybrid high–low mixing of poetry and popular song in Galicia, as well as books and CDs, bookstores and taverns, Rivas explained in an interview with Xosé M. Pereiro: “La cultura está viva en las librerías y en las tabernas. Lo que funciona en Galicia es lo indómito, lo bravú (sin castrar).”

12. Other cultural Galician magazines created in the heyday of movida galega in the 1980s included La naval in Corunna and Tintimán in Vigo, which in some ways preceded and prepared the way for Revista Bravú. The magazine Animal + (“Revista cultural para todas as especies”) was another publishing venue for the bravú movement.

13. For an overview of the mix of ludic creativity and political contestation in relation to Nunca Máis see Xurxo Lobato No país do Nunca Máis.

14. The acknowledgement and vindication of the Galician rurban reality, and the ludic and confrontational spirit of the bravú can also be noticed in the creation of the Festival de Cine de Cans the rurban counter-response to the Cannes Film Festival, with its “agroglamour” and actors and directors parading in tractors, and film shows, press conferences and presentations taking place in farm estables and granaries. See Pérez Gil.

15. I would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance gathered from conversations with Xavier Viana, Isa Salgueiro, and Damián Villalaín.