The movida madrileña was an eclectic cultural movement that emerged in Madrid during the late seventies and early eighties. It started as a “fenómeno underground y minoritario surgido entre gente muy joven, con inquietudes artísticas e intelectuales”94 (Fouce, “El punk en el ojo de huracán” 58) but it soon became the predominant cultural movement throughout Spain thanks to “una serie de estructuras productivas, industrias culturales y medios de comunicación, decisiones políticas, que catapultaron al movimiento hacia la masividad.”95 (Fouce, “El punk en el ojo del huracán” 58). Referring exclusively to its musical strand, Fouce and Del Val go as far as saying that the movida “has been the most successful musical movement in Spanish popular music” (130). Its great success resulted especially from the PSOE’s commitment to financing a modern cultural movement that could “act as a metaphor of the changes that the country had experienced during the first decade after Franco’s death” (Fouce and del Val 130) and become “the image of the success of the Transition in Spain” (Fouce and del Val 133). The movida was the perfect choice for both since, while it celebrated the freedom obtained after Franco’s death by
“embrac[ing] all the previously condemned social taboos” (Rosi Song 2)—which gave it a
94 Underground and minority phenomenon that emerged among very young people, with artistic and intellectual inquisitiveness.
95 A series of productive structures, cultural industries and media, political decisions, that catapulted the movement towards massive popularity.
somehow radical and transgressive character—it lacked the critical attitude towards the Transición characteristic of punk bands such as La Polla Records or Eskorbuto.
The movida was highly influenced by two previous movements: the countercultural movement articulated around the Spanish “prensa marginal”96 in the early seventies and the glam, new-wave, proto-punk, and punk subcultural movements developed in the US and the UK during the sixties and seventies. The former was crucial in the emergence of fanzines such as La liviandad del imperdible or Kaka de Luxe, whose combination of comics, opinion articles, and drawings showed great resemblance with fanzines produced within the “prensa marginal” such as Premamá or Bazofia.97 The US and UK subcultural movements, for their part, had a deciding influence in the movida’s aesthetic and musical eclecticism. Early bands such as Kaka de Luxe, which many consider the initiators of the movida, attest to such influence. If we take a listen to Kaka de Luxe’s “La tentación” (The Temptation) or “La alegría de vivir” (The Happiness of Being Alive) we find songs based around a traditional rock and roll/doo-wop sound with almost no distortion. However, they also recorded numbers such as “Pero me aburro” (But I am Bored), which sounds more like The New York Dolls proto-punk, or “La pluma eléctrica” (The Electric Feather) which is literally based around the guitar riff of “Blitzkrieg Bop” by The Ramones. Additionally,
96 The “prensa marginal” was a collective that “mezcla a personal muy diverso para crear un nuevo tipo de publicación alejada no solo de las revistas comerciales, sino también del tipo de fanzine politico y comiquero que se había hecho hasta ese momento. Los fanzines de PREMAMÁ se van a centrar más en la música, en las artes plásticas y en la vanguardia en general y van a ser la fuente para muchos otros fanzines que seguirán apareciendo, viviendo y muriendo desde entonces hasta hoy” (mixes very diverse people to create a publication that differs not only from commerical magazines, but also from the political and comic fanzines developed until that moment. The fanzines from PREMAMÁ are more focused on music, plastic arts and on vanguardism generally speaking and they will influence many fanzines that will appear later on, that will keep being published and that will also dissapear since then until today) (José Manuel Lechado La movida: una crónica de los 80 170).
97 As a matter of fact, Premamá derived from the first syllables of “prensa marginal madrileña.”
Kaka de Luxe’s members mixed punk, glam, and new wave aesthetics in their own personal fashion style as well.
Yet, despite these early influences, the movida’s evolution was shaped by Spain’s specific socio-political context, and it soon acquired its own distinctive character. Fouce identifies three main defining characteristics in the movida: “a) Rechazo de la ideología de izquierdas y del compromiso político. Fin de la utopía y vivencia del presente. b) Nuevos referentes culturales, fuertemente internacionalizados. c) Nuevas estrategias y prácticas, marcadas por la amplia presencia de los medios de comunicación y las industrias
culturales” (El futuro ya está aquí 26).98 At this point, I want to stress the first and the third ones because they are both crucial to understanding the difference between the movida and the Spanish punk movement. Regarding the first characteristic, the movida established itself as a rejection of both Francoist and anti-Francoist movements, which tended to politicize most cultural manifestations. In this sense, people involved in the movida aimed to create art in the same way that Pedro Almodovar understood his films when he said that he made cinema “como si Franco no hubiera existido” (Fréderic 30).99 Speaking
specifically about music, the movida rejected particularly the extremely politicized music of anti-Francoist singer-songwriters such as Raimon, Lluis Llach, or Paco Ibañez. For its part, regarding the media and cultural industry, it is important to refer again to the
institutional endorsement from which the movida benefitted and in which punk bands rarely ever had any space. In 1979 Radio 3 was created, TVE1 aired cultural programs such as Popgrama (1977), La edad de Oro (1983), and La bola de cristal (1984), among others,
98 a) Rejection of the left-wing ideology and political commitment. The end of utopia and the importance of living the present. b) New cultural references, strongly globalized. c) New strategies and practices, characterized by a great presence of the media and the cultural industry.
99 As if Franco had not existed.
and the movida benefitted greatly from these and other media, which led to the
monopolization of the cultural production of the late seventies and the whole decade of the eighties.
Therefore, on the one hand, the movida presented an affirmative attitude that celebrated the recently acquired liberties, but, on the other, it became a fundamental part of the CT by contributing to making invisible the everyday problems that Spaniards were undergoing through its deliberate avoidance of political engagement and media
monopolization. As a result, the movida became an important vehicle to disseminate the kind of culture Herbert Marcuse referred to when he spoke of “affirmative culture:” culture whose most decisive characteristic is
the assertion of a universally obligatory, eternally better and more valuable world that must be unconditionally affirmed: a world essentially different from the factual world of the daily struggle for existence, yet realizable by every individual for himself ‘from within’, without any transformation of the state of fact. (70)
It is this “more valuable world” aloof of the everyday struggle that the movida is helping to construct during the Transición; a world in which sex, drugs, freedom of speech, and other individual liberties that were denied under Franco’s regime are now to be celebrated but always at the expense of making invisible other less positive factors that could spoil the movida’s illusion of plenitude—the general amnesty granted indistinctively to all crimes committed since 1936, or the economic crisis and high unemployment rates in Spain all throughout the eighties, just to cite a few.
In 2016, El País published an interview with Alaska, a classic icon of the movida madrileña still active today as the singer of Fangoria.100 In addition to the interview, Alaska
100 https://elpais.com/cultura/2016/03/23/actualidad/1458733323_500399.html
appeared on El País’s cover page next to the following statement: “Hicimos divertida la España de los 70 y los 80.”101 At first, it seems unclear who the subject of that statement is, but after reading the interview in the inner pages, one discovers that she is referring to her generation and those involved in the movida madrileña. A day later, Emilio Silva, founder of the A.R.M.H (Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica), published an article in the online newspaper, Tercera Información, responding to Alaska’s interview. In it, Silva questions Alaska’s celebratory attitude by reminding her about the governmental inaction with the still-missing 114,226 bodies of people executed during the civil war and the subsequent dictatorship, Tejero’s coup in 1981, and the general violence experienced by a great number of people—regardless of their political orientation—during the Transición, among other things.102 Additionally, he also refers to the movida madrileña specificially and states that “lo más conocido de ella, con todo su apoyo mediático, económico y político fue poco más que un disfraz, un gran disfraz para aparentar que en veinticuatro horas pasamos de un país en oscuro blanco y negro a una sociedad con el pelo de colores, y una especie de irreverencia estética que poco tuvo que ver con un cambio en la ética.”103 This clash between Alaska and Silva illustrates the antagonistic interpretations of the movida as a celebratory and revolutionary cultural movement that broke with the past Francoist culture, and the movida as a depoliticizing and evasive movement endorsed by the governments of the Transición in order to establish a reformist democracy with as little
101 We made fun the seventies’ and eighties’ Spain.
102http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:huMSvSVKp5sJ:www.tercerainformaci on.es/antigua/spip.php%3Farticle100974+&cd=6&hl=pt-PT&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari
103 Its most famous part, with all its media, economic, and political support, was little more than a costume, a big costume to pretend that in twenty-four hours we moved from a dark white-and-black country to a society with coloured hair, and an aesthetic irreverence that had little to do with an ethic change.
opposition as possible. The official narrative constructed by the CT presents the movida only as the former; punk culture, on the other hand, sees it as the latter and establishes itself as a countermovement that contributes to keep the CT and the movida from naturalizing their view—as we already saw in the introduction of this dissertation with the clash between La Polla Records’ concert in the Casa de Campo auditorium and its media coverage.