A good friend, for some months, will give me a little jewel: Raimon’s first disc released by Edigsa l’any 1963. The vinyl counted, with és sabut, quatre temes: the stone, we are, to cops and the mythical al vent, which will be the sixth letter of introduction. These days, we celebrate the six-years of the publication of this song, written in 1959 and inspired, as the author has explained Manta Vegas, on a motorcycle trip between Xàtiva and Valencia. I confess that I did not feel the first search of the al vent, only the later mature versions, more stylish. L’experiència é copidora: la joventut de la veu, l’trencadora attitude, sincerity, l’èmfasi i la seguretat son de un intensitat extraordinària, cara avui. Overtot, avui.
The radical modernity of the peça crosses the decades and the modes, and is nailed to our present with the offering of a classic. In the text of the album cover, written by Joan Fuster, there was the best explanation: “Raimon is going to sing to us al ventia tots ens semblà that I also discovered a clear possible energy, vinguda from the bottoms of the earth or from an oblidat racó del temps”. L’assagista descrivia amb precisió un phenomen llavors emergent, sense parangó.
Under Francoism, Catalan companies and entities are going to promote a new culture of the masses
It is a cliché to say that Raimon’s song is a crit, but this term remains curt. It will be a miracle. From a land folklorized by regime and from a time of misery, from a silence –as the mateix Raimon will say later– “antic i molt llarg”, more than total expectation, springs the insolent song of a young university student, who opts for the language of their home, not for the official world or the mercat.
Other Valencians, during the sixties and seventies, are devindran cantants d’èxit in Spanish, because their mother tongue is, in many cases, the mateixa than that of Raimon: Nino Bravo, Camilo Sesto, Juan Bau or Bruno Lomas , this darrer also from Xàtiva and from 1940. How is it that Ramon Pelegero does not fa with them?
read also
“Il.lusió i cant become a single i mateixa thing, and Raimon is discovered in the veu les paraules del seu poble”. Fuster said. Neither more nor menys. This discovery marks the difference. It was at the cost of understanding the enormous significance of Raimon’s decision, which is parallel to that of a group of people from Barcelona, who posed at the Els Setze Jutges marx. Sense conèixer-se, l’un i els altres tenen la mateixa intuïció: sing in the language they speak, the one that the dictatorship does not allow the schools to teach.
Marta Vallverdú has written an essential book, Seixantisme. The Catalan cultural school of the 60s (L’Avenç), which explains many things with Catalan culture and language, gossip about Francoism, thanks to the fact that the resistance attitudes of the first post-war period evolve when it is possible for the creation of companies and entities that played the card d’una incipient culture of masses. In the schools created by economic modernization, the new cultural Catalanism will promote editorials, magazines, encyclopedias, schools and a new aesthetic that will connect Europe. Raimon’s first album has a very attractive cover designed by Jordi Fornas with a photo by Oriol Maspons. The retrobated identity summoned the future. Hi there was a country that was not going to disappear.
Això is the one that s’hauria d’explain avui in all the col.legis d’Espanya, if this fos, of debò, a multicultural State. Això could prevent her from making people as uninformed as Begoña, the young nurse from Cádiz who works in Vall d’Hebron and never learns Catalan.
read also
