Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

(As I wrote this, the streets of Minneapolis were on fire—not always figuratively—because a white police officer had just killed a black man while he was in his custody, beginning a wave of unprecedented global anger, which has made more than one review —including symbols of the last century such as Coca Cola—, and now make me think of the sixties anthem that said: “How many roads must a man walk down before you call him 'a man'”).

I swear this is the record that plays. I had nothing to do with it. I have been rigorous in the order of the list, which is quite spontaneous. When I put it together, the idea was not to make these texts, I simply went on an excursion to the past and began to collect records and throw them in the backpack as they appeared in my memory. Before sharing the music and the words, I did give a general shuffle with the purpose of mixing the styles and not boring the public, otherwise they would have had to scare all of Spinetta and Charly first, but since then their disposition has not varied.

With everything that is happening in the United States, this is the one that plays today. This album, which begins like this: “I thought I was smart. I thought I was right. I thought it better not to fight. I thought there was a virtue in always being cool. So, when it came time to fight I thought I'll just step aside and that the time would prove you wrong, and you would be the fool”. The preterite of the statement leaves us waiting for a but; he anticipates that the narrator will change his mind very soon, and this is what happens in the second stanza: “To fight is to defend. If it's not now then tell me: When would it be the time that you would stand up and be a man?"

Fight Test ―That's the name of this first cut of the album― talks about one of the most beautiful chapters in anyone's history: the moment when it's time to decide whether to fight or not. “The hot, revolutionary hour of definitions”, as someone said that Lino Novás had said; when one can no longer “spillover over the edges, over the fences”. It is a variable period, depending on the circumstances, and naturally contradictory, because just when you are at your boiling point is when cold calculation is most required. It is the climax of the story; whoever is watching the episode will speed up the mechanical gesture of popping popcorn into their mouths and stop with a wave of their right hand, without making eye contact, whoever rushes in from the kitchen to ask a question. I will tell two of these scenes. One, the last one, has to do directly with the disc.

I passed the green in the entertainment area. He was the singer of a musical group that in turn was part of a multidisciplinary and amateur circus entourage, whose purpose was to entertain the nights of various military units in the area. We set up the tent almost every day in a different one. In addition to the group there were dancers and comedians. Sometimes we even took off our uniform and presented ourselves in the Houses of Culture of some towns. He slept at my house six days a week. You could say that my military service was quite Light, except for the fact that they put me in jail once; not because of what I am going to tell you now, but I am interested in knowing that, at the time of the action, there was a not remote possibility of going to jail.

In the circus there was a homosexual dancer. I don't know if he already knew, but in any case, he hadn't come out of the closet yet, and I don't know if he did one day because after the military experience I didn't see him anymore. I think he liked me, because he didn't take his finger off me. not in plan bullying, like a shy and in love elementary school boy. If they talked about music, he talked about me. If ball, he talked about me. Yes of it singao who was the politician, he from me. He didn't let me go. His excessive flesh bothered me. It was in a mongrel tone, and the truth is that I also gave leather to everything that moved, but I changed the peephole from time to time, like the rest of the group. He was single-minded.

Actually, it made me more self-conscious than it bothered me, because I hadn't come out of the closet yet either; from the closet of prehistory, the closet of believing that the only answer to homo flirtation was to shag me. He had already been plotting it, that he had to put a stop to it.

The place where we rehearsed was a small room that was always kept closed so that the noise could be heard as little as possible. One day we were putting together a song and I couldn't grasp the tuning, it always went sideways. I was given the deserved pooch, the one that was due. I laughed too, until the dancer started talking. I told him, seriously, what did he know about music? He answered something I don't remember. I put down the microphone and walked over. He was sitting on a desk. I stood less than a meter away and said: "Asere, come here, do you like me?" Communal, complicit and homophobic laughter broke out —because the dancer's homosexuality was also the subject of mutt. He laughed too, though with a less strident laugh, and said coquettishly, "Yes." And here is the instant; time to take sides.

I never knew how to wrap myself, and the dancer was taller and stronger. If I smashed his face in with my right it would have to be really hard for him to give me time to leave the rehearsal room and continue the fight in a place where some passing officer would stop it, because the sons of bitches in the group weren't going to stop him. do, I wouldn't have done it either; besides, there were too many objects in there: a trumpet, several guitars, a battery with its music stand; that couldn't be the sand. However, the officer who would save me, once I was out, was also going to send me to the brig. I had already been there. Going back didn't do me any good. If I didn't wrap myself up, the dancer was going to “take me down” and I would have to continue enduring his repressed madwoman's satiety. One is never more human, nor more beautiful, than at this crucial moment.

The other story, if you still feel like it, begins in Caimito, the current province of Artemisa.

In the third year of university I gave the trips every day from the town to the university and vice versa. It was an ordeal. I had to get up very early, and send me a tour of at least two hours that included, just to mention one element, taking the P9 to El Vedado at 7:30 in the morning. It was the year in which I had the most absences. Sometimes I would leave my house to go to school just to do the paripé. I'd wait around for the old folks to go to work and go back to bed. Then I arranged everything with detective skill, so that it seemed that I had returned before my parents.

The only good thing about the interprovincial trip was that I listened to music all the time. With luck and with enough concentration I could isolate myself from the molotera and the heat. I spent a good part of the university looking for excuses, both for not going to college and for not returning to Caimito once I was there. The theme was to avoid the crossing. It killed me, it depressed me; except when he had just discovered some sound of those assassins. Then the two-odd hours flew by. Sometimes the trigger to get out of bed was thinking that I was going to review this or that discography. The Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots It was one of these songs. The lab noise that runs throughout this album is one of the links I first click when I think of college.

That year, at the Criminal Law conferences, the two professors who taught them —a married couple of mediocre civil servants— established this tyrannical attendance control system, consisting of a form previously given to the students, which had to be presented at the entrance and off shift so that an ass-sniffing assistant student stamped the stamp confirming that, indeed, he had attended the conference. They only allowed three absences; if you passed you lost the right to the final exam and you went straight to "re".

I quickly consumed my three jokers. I don't remember how I got another sheet, three new opportunities that I also spent. The day of one of the last lectures of the semester, when I had no bullets left, was the day I heard the album for the first and second time, on the way up the Hill. He wasn't one of my best. It was blown for whatever reason. Everything bothered me. An hour and a half being held hostage in the Law School amphitheater seemed like too much this morning. An hour and a half in which my only hopes would be to smoke a cigarette and listen to the Flaming Lips.

I decided to do both, that is to say: fight. When the shift was over I was sitting at the monument to the victims of the Maine, smoking and listening to the fourth track of the album, the instrumental that gives it its title and narrates Yoshimi's battle against the robots.