The singer Mery Bas, vocalist of the duo Nebulossa and now known for her interpretation of the song Zorra, was 15 years old when some girls from Bilbao, of the same age, occupied the media’s front page after her interpretation, on TVE, from the topic Me gusta be une zorra. It was around 1983 and the most conservative sectors of post-Franco Spain reacted by unleashing a real witch hunt against the presenter of the program and against those girls: the Foxes. Four decades later, the author of that letter, Loles Vázquez, witnesses a controversy in disbelief, following the Zorra theme, which she considers “prefabricated” and hardly comparable to the one they suffered.
The coincidence between the titles of the two subjects, the fact that they are performed by women, their popularization through TVE and the controversy, very uneven, that they have aroused, have led to some parallels being drawn between the two situations. Who was the guitarist for Les Vulpes, however, denies the evidence and launches a reflection that invites, on the one hand, to remember the magnitude of that controversy, now 41 years ago, and, on the other, to analyze the use of controversial or apparently rebellious discourses as an instrument to achieve notoriety, even in contexts as attached to the system as Eurovision.
“Ours was something else. The first difference is that it was not prepared. We didn’t make that issue looking for controversy. Ours was a youthful explosion in the context of a bad transition. It was a spontaneous thing. I was 15 years old, I liked Iggy Pop and he sang I wanna be your dog. I studied Latin, we were the Vulpes, which means ‘vixen’… because ‘I like being a vixen'”, explains Loles Vázquez to La Vanguardia.
The song was performed on April 16, 1983 in the TVE program Caja de ritmos, presented by Carlos Tena. At first, he avoided the controversy, until two weeks later the newspaper Abc published an editorial in the opinion pages that included the lyrics of the song. “The constitutional limits of freedom of expression have been widely transgressed by Televisión Española in the program Caja de ritmos, which is watched especially by teenagers and which is broadcast after a children’s area on Saturdays, the children’s day off”, he said the text
“It was a political campaign orchestrated by the sectors that came from the Franco regime, a campaign against TVE and against the government. We were in the middle. It didn’t even occur to us that that would happen. I remember that Carlos Tena thought to whistle for the word bastard, nothing more. On the other hand, it was not a program for children, as it was said: the cartoons for children ended in the previous program”, he explains.
As a result of that controversy, Carlos Tena was forced to resign and the Vulpes faced a three-year court process, until the state prosecutor filed the case for alleged public scandal. In the case of Zorra, meanwhile, the controversy has been limited to the criticism of commentators, artists and famous people from Manu Tenorio to María Pombo, who have considered her “rude” or who have questioned that the term zorra be “empowering for women”. Eurovision, meanwhile, understands that it is “fit”, through the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which does not see the use of “unacceptable language”, an issue that could have excluded it.
Loles Vázquez attends this controversy with some weariness and, very kindly, although with a certain visceral, concludes his position by alluding to the “artificial” nature of it all: “Eurovision seems to me like a carca festival that was over and that they have found the vein to resurrect it by linking it to the LGTBIQ movement and, to a certain extent, to feminism. Every year they look for a different controversy and this year it has been around Zorra”, he concludes.
At this point, paying attention to Loles’ statements, it is necessary to ask to what extent certain apparently rebellious or relatively controversial discourses are today more at risk of being used or phagocytosed by marketing strategies linked to purposes far removed from the apparent purpose of these messages. The doubt remains, likewise, whether this trend is not also expressive of the success of certain social movements, something a priori positive or, finally, whether Spain has changed, after seeing the reactions that Zorra has provoked in areas conservatives
