Let's call a spade a spade. Tango is not only for rich kids, it is not merely a New Yorker's souvenir or a postcard of a Japanese who has bought a piece of history comprised in a bandoneón lying around in a house in Villa Urquiza. Tango is also the culture, the spirit and pain of a city that has changed. It is no longer the trams that travel her roads now; it is the frightful fatality of those night ghosts that pick up whatever they can carry in their trolleys, while the city is asleep.

It is not the same Buenos Aires, although deep down she still thinks she is the Rio de la Plata princess, Europe's spoiled child. It is a fact: Buenos Aires is not as spoiled as she was anymore, and she is increasingly becoming similar to Latin America. And over these years of Tango resurrection only few lyricists have ventured to hit a raw nerve to erase the hypocrite years of a Recoleta Tango, with farfetched, academic metaphors. However, it is true that certain chroniclers have began to appear who force others to rethink the genre as one with new rules and new sounds. They are black ships to tango purists. To the unprejudiced, this is an interesting way to listen to Tango, submerged in other skins, in other voices and harmonies, like the Pequeña Orquesta Reincidentes, Angela Tullida, Palo Pandolfo or Romina y Los Urbanos: heirs of the role that national rock played when tango was subdued.



the transition toward a new tango song are unmentionable, damned legends. Singer-songwriter Juan Vattuone is one of them. In the years when many tango performers would have their pictures taken with former president Menem in the Presidential Palace, singer-songwriter Vattuone would dedicate him a song called "Misántropo" ("due to his hate for human beings", he would clear up), or he would talk about "Yuta Lorenzo", a torturer who died of love in the arms of a transvestite. These days a restless (sub)urban poetics keeps circulating the shores, the margins, the dark areas and the blurry border between downtown and the General Paz highway. They are more realistic, more obscure, more tragic expressions of a city living different times. If you are alert, you will be able to hear paving stones bleeding dry and wigs flying off when Peche, the singer in Buenos Aires Negro (new tango lyrics and rock attitude) sings those crude, bittersweet elegies about a tormented Buenos Aires that comes to: "Buenos días, a los que ya no están, muertos, vivos, desaparecidos, sobre las calles grises de esta ciudad/ Buenos días a los cristos que van entrando en trenes hacinados con el peine en el bolsillo/ Buenos días a los hijos del mundo y su buena estrella, y a vos que amanecés conmigo en la ventana del micro y nos espera un Retiro ciego y frío".