I hate you (open thread) | Culture

1 A music journalist (Carlos Marcos) write about a song that has been number one in the world for weeks: the session of the Argentine producer Bizarrap with the Canarian singer Quevedo, popularly known as ‘Quédate’. He attends a concert, explains the genesis of the phenomenon and collects various opinions, including that of a critic who harshly analyzes the subject. It doesn’t take long for those who explain the same thing to appear, but using the crutch that the hit of summer bothers “some”. Of course, saying that it bothers “one” would not serve to justify a trend.

two Saving the distances, the episode is reminiscent of that television program that, to cement its ideas about citizen insecurity, asks a judge to confirm its theory live: evicting a squatted house is very difficult because the law does not protect the owner. When the magistrate dismantles such a hypothesis (who would think of consulting an expert?), the balloon deflates. Momentarily. That is, until the next alarm announcement.

3 Don’t let reality spoil a good headline, said the old school of cynical journalism. Don’t let it weaken your prejudices either. It turns out that there are many more people who don’t mind that the Tanxugueiras sing in Galician than those who do. They said it themselves last week in a wonderful interview by Raquel Peláez for this newspaper. What is the most offensive thing you have been told? “You sing too much.”

4 Public criticism has given way to private hatred. That is bad news. The worst, however, is the ease with which we pass the megaphone to the loudest. The disastrous news, which is often shouted from anonymity. Opinions that would not meet the minimum requirements of the letters to the editor section become credible. Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa he usually says that, in his country, you have to subtract a third from those attending the funeral of a rich man: they are bodyguards. Perhaps it is convenient to apply a similar criterion to the numbers that feed the trending topics.

5 In As long as the gods do not change nothing will have changedPerhaps his best essay, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio affirms that the “outbursts of defense of technology” remind him of the anecdote of a speaker who approaches Alexander the Great to tell him that he has written a long speech in defense of the god Mars. Alejandro’s response: “Well, who messes with him?” Ferlosio, of course, also says it in Latin (“Quis eum uituperat?”). Then he adds: if there is something that does not need defense today, it is technology. Nor, shall we say, the one used to make songs. At the close of this article, Quevedo’s session with Bizarrap had 367 million views on Spotify and 227 million on Youtube. Who messes with them?