Songs Written With a Machete #1: "I’ll Cut Your Face With a Razor Blade," Sing Las Hermanas Calle
I spent eighteen months of my three-year South American adventure in the Colombian wilderness, in a mountain village near the infamous Medellín. As a bluesman, I was impressed by local songs, whose lyrics would wake up even Oblomov from his lethargy. I decided to translate the juiciest pieces and bring them to you in the series Songs Written with a Machete.
The rough world of cowboys, bandits, sicarios, narco-barons and guerrillas is spiced up with very specific humour, in which darkness is combined with light crazy lyricism. Three generations of Colombian songwriters and wandering bards have been trying to cram the demons and ghosts of magical realism into an imaginary bottle of the infamous aniseed brandy.
The rough world of sisters from the street
Nomen est omen, they say. There is perhaps no better proof of this saying than the wild artistic career of Fabiola and Nelly, whose surname Calle means "street" in Spanish. Las Hermanas Calle. The sisters of the street. They were born in the turbulent 1940s in the wild Andean department notorious for guerrilla warfare and the evil of cocaine baron and murderer Pablo Escobar. The 11-member Calle family had always been obsessed with music, so it's no surprise that their two most gifted daughters started their own show in Medellín in the late 1970s.
They celebrated their greatest success with a song whose toxic lyrics and tormenting trumpet charmed the Colombians so much that a local popular rock band created a punk version of "Razor" ("La cuchilla" in the original), as the song is called. And no wonder. See for yourselves:
In a bar, I found him,
in a bar, I lost him.
Today, I go from bar to bar
looking for the ungrateful man who abandoned me.
If you don't love me I'll cut your face
with one of those razor blades,
I'll stab you on your wedding day,
I'll rip out your belly button and kill your mum!
I might find him drunk
lying on the pavement,
drunk and covered in vomit,
crying by a jukebox with disdain.
If you don't love me I'll cut your face
with one of those razor blades,
I'll stab you on your wedding day,
I'll rip out your belly button and kill your mum!
Indeed, a song written with a machete...
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