The time has come for Coque Malla to collect awards such as the Ondas la Trajectory, a reflection of a long career that began when he was only 15 years old at the head of Los Ronaldos. Almost four decades on the scenarios that have led him, past 50, to reflect on the end of the road in Aunque estemos muertos (Warner), in which he talks about physical death, but also about relationships, dreams and hopes . Ten stories to the rhythm of rock about a stage of life that society ignores when it doesn’t ban it directly, as it does with music when it censors artists, or with pop when it is ignored on the radio formula.
Although we are dead, after almost 40 years of career it sounds a bit like an epitaph.
We artists make our works with four things, one of which and a very important one is the fear of death, always present in our culture: wars, illness, accidents, mystery, religion, everything revolves around the around death I didn’t make anything up.
why now
The pandemic brought death very close to us, and this record has a bit of a post-pandemic feel to it. When we experienced covid we were in full fire, it was not the time for artistic reflections, but now it is, and death and the feeling of fragility have crept in. On the other hand, there is my fatherhood mixed with the death of my parents in a few years, you stop being a son and become just a father, this makes you see everything in a different way. In addition, there is the age itself, you don’t consider the end at 56 as at 40, I’m not telling you at 30. And death as a metaphor for things that end, relationships, friends that move away, stages of life ending, moving.
Everything has an end.
Paradoxically, it has resulted in an album with a lot of vitality, it is not a festive album, but neither mortuary, pessimistic, dark. It has dark and mysterious parts, but at the same time it has a lot of vitality.
A I dance with the dead diu “nothing matters anymore, soon I will leave my body.”
I become aware of death in a very real way and different from how I had considered it until now, when it seemed like something that didn’t go with me.
Currently the presence of death is hidden.
At a record company, a woman told me that her husband had died years ago and was in a very bad mood, but she listened to the record and it gave her peace. There is not always hope and you have to accept it, things end, whatever it is, life or a relationship.
He tells Místico that he doesn’t want to be a fake hero anymore.
Fame has a bit of false heroism, you get photographed and you appear on TV, but heroism is something else.
Have there been times when fame has gone to your head?
The funny thing is that this reflection has come at an incredibly bright moment in my life. I have an amazing relationship with my partner, amazing children and I love my job. The fear of losing it generates dark thoughts, we are machines to have problems and to solve them. We are designed to solve problems and when we don’t have any we invent them.
In the speech he gave at the Ondas awards gala, he called for more presence of pop music in the media.
I feel like it’s a national problem, you go abroad and you hear pop and rock on the radio, in bars, everywhere. This summer I traveled with my family around the United States, and we didn’t hear any reggaeton songs. Everywhere there was good music playing, in a supermarket in a town in Arkansas, Blondie or Bowie was playing, it’s their folklore.
What is it due to?
I don’t know, I think it’s a problem of how the average Spaniard relates to culture and its artists. Art and culture in Spain are located in the space of leisure, and not in the box of spirituality, culture or personal growth, as I think they intuitively do in Latin America, Europe and the Anglo-Saxon countries. Here a concert or a movie is placed in the same box as a dinner. People want to laugh, have a good time, and this creates a small and somewhat mediocre relationship with culture and art.
In Bla, blah, blah he criticizes censorship in music.
It comes from the impotence caused by this moralistic wave that is attacking art. They want to impose moral and ethical rules that work for civilian life, but that make no sense in art. Art must be wild territory because it is abstract by definition. Taking it literally and denouncing songs, films, books or wanting to amputate them for being racist or fascist is absolutely stupid, medieval and useless. Censoring art does not improve a society morally, it reflects what is happening there, it does not influence it.
There is a musical continuity that includes multiple sonorities.
When a record works best, when it’s more believable, it’s when the concept appears as you’re making it, and not when you intellectually, coldly, consider the concept, direct yourself to it and enslave the entire musical process and organic I didn’t think about making a record about death, I started writing and connected with something that had been bothering me for a while.
It ends with Como la mañana, a happy song.
But then it gets twisted in a bad way, in the end it goes to minor tones and ends almost like a horror movie. I composed the song for the musical Clara y el abismo, a terrible story about a woman who is diagnosed with cancer and ends up dying. It felt like the perfect epilogue for this record, a reflection on death with ups and downs, and we end with a lullaby that seems hopeful, but suddenly twists.
