Over time, while tragedy becomes comedy, apparently, the scoundrel rumbas of Melendi They grow in significance, as if it were a family matter, for audiences as broad and transversal as this Friday at the Palau Sant Jordi. If, in previous visits, the Asturian filled this room for a single night, on this tour, ’20 Years Without News’, has doubled the attendance (adding 34,800 attendees, according to the promoter The Project), and it was interesting to record the number of girls who attended to sing, dance and jump with the songs of a day known familiarly as ‘Milindri’.
Material, especially, from when he had dreadlocks and looked like he had just gotten out of a drug trafficking bust. Over time, Ramón Melendi would move away from that lyric rich in mentions of paperinas, whistles, junkies, drug traffickers, trotting horses and “wet bible paper.” But everything comes back, even what you would least want, and his people now applaud this return to the rawest version of him, from before he became a more conventional pop singer.
‘Show’ in a big way
All in all, the Melendi that we saw at Sant Jordi was not the street singer-songwriter of 2003. His super-production had an impact: fifteen musicians, almost symphonic sound (that ‘heavy’ start with ‘El Parto’), scenery with high flames. As if wanting to give more packaging and solemnity to songs whose grace lies in simplicity. In the middle of the racket, he and his tattoos, his rhymes (and ripios), and that closeness with which he has penetrated homes through ‘The Voice’. Not having been blessed with a vocal gift, but conveying in a colloquial manner. Perhaps Melendi triumphs because he is very similar to many people and because he tells himself the most endearing and universal lies: “I am an ex-smoker who smokes, but on January 1, like every year, I quit,” he said after having run out. wheezing at the end of ‘Touched and Sunken’.
Those rumbas (quite a rocker) laid the foundation, with pieces such as the title of their first album, ‘No news from Holland’ (sensitive portrait of the addict and apology for weed), the romantic ‘Con la lunaful’ or that hymn to dealing and laziness called ‘I’m dealing again’. Can it be said that in those years Melendi shot Estopa without risk of receiving darts from the ‘fandom’? Listen to ‘Fiddler on the Roof’, and the sudden acceleration of it, and then we’ll talk. Along those lines was the ‘medley’ with numbers like ‘I know what you did’ and ‘Mi rumbita pa’ tus pies’.
Melendi in the process of assuming the past, in short, completing the agenda with past ballads (‘The Promise’) and without resorting to any song from his latest works with the exception of that new song, ‘Thank you for coming’, with the one who celebrated the journey with his contrasted poetic audacity: “Twenty years / unbuttoning his blouse / and I still don’t understand / what direction / my muse is about.” No need to worry: the muse knows what she is doing.
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