The Private Canon: Two Deep Cuts From Blades

This post is part of a series.

Among the artists I taught myself about during my self-directed music journalism apprenticeship in the mid-1980s was Rubén Blades, the Panamanian American polymath known for his literate lyrics and music that artfully blended salsa, jazz, and pop, who was touring to Phoenix in June of 1987 in support of Agua de Luna, a collection inspired by short stories of Gabriel García Márquez. I wrote an Arizona Republic preview piece for what proved to be an invigorating concert on the Celebrity Theatre's somewhat awkward rotating stage, with Blades's Seis Del Solar keyboardist breaking out a melodica, if memory serves—it was considered a big deal that Blades had the temerity to replace salsa's traditional horns with synthesizers, and it was as if his keyboardist was keen to demonstrate in a live setting that, dammit, the sound was still produced by blowing from the gut.

In honesty, the album's ubiquitous synths haven't aged so well, but the record still packs a punch overall, in particular the penultimate track, "La Cita," or "The Appointment," based on the Márquez story "The Woman Who Arrived at Six." After a loping, throat-clearing instrumental introduction, the song revs up into a perky groove for a few verses about human folly, about how we've invented time as if to make false distinctions, and we should judge not lest we be judged—and then the irresistibly hooky salsa chorus tumbles in over a big percussion fill at the song's halfway point, about 2:23: "Despiértenme a la hora de la verdad," Blades sings in a thick harmony, which I've seen variously translated online as "Wake me up at the moment of truth," or "Shoot me at the moment of truth" (even "Wake me up when push comes to shove"). Then we hear bureaucratic chatter, as if from the DMV-like waiting room in some crowded office of the afterlife, before the chorus returns ecstatically at 3:52. If this is the sound of the party that awaits in heaven, sign me up.

A year later Blades released a somewhat effortful English-language crossover record, Nothing But the Truth, which I quite admired despite (or maybe because of?) its occasional self-conscious earnestness. Many of Blades's originals hold up quite well, while his collaborations with other songwriters—Sting, Lou Reed, and Elvis Costello—have always sounded like inspired imitations of his respective co-writers. I especially cherish the gritty, rollicking "Letter to the Vatican," a first-rate bit of sad-sack New York storytelling he wrote with Reed. And "Shamed Into Love" is a standard-worthy jazz ballad written with Costello, years before he and Bacharach started painting from memory.

The record's true gem, though, is the Costello-Blades co-write "The Miranda Syndrome," which sounds to me like the perfect marriage of two lyricists known for their wit and wordiness, with a pointed, pop-culture-riffing lyric about the toxic caprice of stereotype (the "Miranda" of the title is Carmen, she of the "song and dance and an edible hat"). The sound evokes Costello in his King of America acoustic mode, starting with a mild, sunny calypso groove on the verse, then shifting ground under the pre-chorus as a cuíca starts barking, only for the floor to drop out for the wrenching shuffle of the chorus, which is every bit as catchy as "La Cita's" but which has a more ominous tone.

There's no denying that the lyrics have an unmistakeably Costello-an cadence:

And now the news is just showbiz
They make a trivial case of every curse
And food is just like cabaret
And vice versa

But Blades, who's lived at least part-time in the U.S. since the early '70s, is no slouch as a wordsmith. Indeed he's as notorious as Costello is for cramming syllables into his songs, and just as capable of mind-snapping turns of phrase, as in "La Cita":

De este mundo nadie se marcha
Sólo cambiamos de posición
No hay excusa para justificar nuestra inocencia en el Juicio Final
Ya estamos condenados por haber inventado el cómo condenar

Which Google translates, not entirely without elegance, thus:

Nobody leaves this world
We just change our position
There is no excuse to justify our innocence at the Last Judgment
We are already condemned for having invented how to condemn

Nothing but the truth indeed.