Josep Valtonyc / Self-destruction and its advantages

[September 2021. Home admission. 3:30 p.m. My bedroom]

Now I play music. My sister and I are sick and there are not many things that calm us down. Putting on songs is the only thing that gets us out of the room. 

I check the Hip Hop folder. I put Valtonyc. I already know their themes by heart and I still like them a lot, they cause me the same beautiful horror. As I organize its songs, I remember the first time I heard it and now I miss the friend who played the whole album for me at once. I miss the feeling of sitting in a cafe while a song is playing. It made me happy that the afternoon took on the colors of what I was listening to. Those afternoons that now pass much less. Romanticisms that one misses because yes, because they are necessary.

I walk away from the computer and let the music walk to the bed, lie down between me and my sister, talk to us. And Valtonyc talks to us, or sings to us, and I look at the ceiling, with my sister's foot leaning against mine. We fall silent and the room turns a different color. It's not a good color, it's a dense color, but it calms us down. Today they put that device on my finger, one that measures saturation. I really liked—perhaps because of my absolute technological ignorance—that something told me how I was breathing. Valtonyc also breathes heavily and speaks of difficult loves. They should put a device on his finger. I think all this as I listen. I think of that coffee, and of the record that my friend and I listened to after an uninterrupted series of small interjective wonders. 

Memory. I always remember. Remembering is light. Remembering is a song I put on. Remembering is another time. It is being happy from another time.

I like it when music takes me back to certain years. That record throws me against 2015.

I think I feel fine. I'm saturating at 98.

[Six years ago. Coffee. 3:30 p.m. Any day from Monday to Friday. 50 cents]

Sitting in a cafe, my friend puts on my headphones. He puts them on me and looks at me expectantly, he looks at me as if waiting for me to say something, but I don't say anything. Yes. I ask who is that. I ask what is the name of the song. and the song is called and there is no more and that is Valtonyc, a Spanish rapper who was in trouble for insulting the Crown; for shitting on the king of Spain, I don't know; for saying two or three truths against monarchical power. But my friend plays me a song that has nothing to do with that, it is a song that protests against something else, against an escape, in favor of certain rebellions of the spirit:

Teach me to fail, and not to live, / that of the latter I will always be on time.

That day we had time. I had gotten off work early and my friend had a few more songs. We had a cell phone and we mixed with the same coffee, taking small sips so that we would not be kicked out or told that we had to consume more. We listened to the whole album that week. Self-destruction and its advantages it was called 

Never again have I seen the small plastic cups that we bit off the edge while the song walked on its own.

Nothing livable.

[My house back then. Balcony. A swivel chair. An autistic cat. Earphones]

A few afternoons later, on the balcony of what was then me home, I heard this is not my place, and gave me a crying fit. I never knew if I was crying because that house was anything but a place of my own, or because I felt that the cat (Nina) was the only thing truly mine there, or because the subject seemed extremely sincere to me. It could also have been an outburst of tragicism, although I don't think so. The point is that I cried—as girls in movies cry—with the little cat on my lap, with enormous sighs. The difference was that the girls in the movies ended up being paid for all that plantain.

I do not. 

I had Nina when I got home, and had recently felt that birthday without anyone lighting the matches for you. 

There was something slightly hopeful in that song, the same small hope that I saw in Nina and that Nina saw in my lap as a girl from a bad movie:

Luckily I have my dog, / even though my clothes smell like crime / he always looks at me with the same eyes.

Nina went missing a few months later. 

I was already lost.

[September 2021]

Valtonyc is very young. At the age of 28, he has 17 albums (most of them in Catalan). Almost all of his themes are deeply political. He was already arrested in 2012, he was already involved in scandals and in supreme courts, he already had to flee to Belgium. 

In the midst of all this political chaos —surely the product of an extreme internal chaos—  self destruction… it has been an oasis: a tormented but refreshing place: a necessary place. 

Not even on this album —which is made and unmade in what has been romantic love— Valtonyc can separate himself from political evocations; the album revolves around the loves that happen in the midst of oppression and war, and silence, and mutilated freedoms. 

Come on, come to bed and tell me that story / where republican militias crossed Madrid / and raised our flag to the wind.

My friend drew small waves in his notebook. My friend was already in prison and I already cried a lot and I already prayed for him. He had not listened to Valtonyc since then. Listening to it now reminds me of the sadness with which I listened to it then.

[1917, a century later]

And I haven't heard from my friend in a while, he hasn't called me in a while to listen to rap on a beach. I would like to say that things do not change, that we are the same as a few years ago, that we are the boys who sometimes shared the same coffee, because between the two of us there was no more than 25 cents. But I have never thought that a cat is my own. My friend must be in trouble, I guess. Or calmer. writing quietly Subsisting. In your drama. 

I don't know if we could afford, in those days, more than four coffees in the same afternoon. I think not. Of course not. 

We could afford to turn on the mobile, share the headphones, ring from the bottom of a room so that one of the two would arrive with new music, always contained in the same mobile, always slipping through the same little white cable. We had anything but misery, and we were as miserable as we were happy. We could give ourselves the tremendous luxury of sending a message with a piece of song, destroying ourselves over and over again with the same fragments. 

[My friend was a most beautiful failure. And I didn't even want to see him in painting, and I gave him my coffee, and he gave me more songs and more headaches. And I told him there is no more. (At least when I follow you I still smile).

Y If you don't come I'll stay in 1917.].

That friendship (almost disastrous) had in the background a beat from Valtonyc; and today I listened to the whole album again, suddenly. It made me nostalgic. I looked at the phone. Made me want to send a message. I feel like telling my friend that I feel good.

That I was very happy going down the stairs and listening to that music.

Which I surely learned to saturate at 98 in those days.

That love is a song at 3:00 in the afternoon, a record now gnawed by time. 

And there is no more.

Love is 25 cents. 

And point.