1983: Clics Modernos, Charly Garcia

By Ramiro Portnoy

Sangre en nuestro hogar/ Blood in Our Home

Footprints of escape turn to marks on the skin. Charly said so. If you too have left your home for another distant home, perhaps you can run your fingertips across your skin and feel the bumps. Perhaps you’ve traveled over an ocean, the water’s vast expanse underneath you, the distance out of grasp. 

When I turned six-years-old, my mom explained to me that we were moving to another country. The memory is vivid: in our Buenos Aires apartment, she’s pulling out tourist pamphlets, showing me all that our new home in the United States will have to offer, telling me we’re going to live close to Disneyland. In that moment, the glittery promise of the United States and all it has to offer is made clear. I don’t even question it; I embrace it without full understanding and without any doubt. 

Years later, the doubt catches up in different forms, each time hard to place where and why it sits in my body, but each time like a pang, only blunted. Eventually I came to understand that my family was escaping an Argentina caught in the middle of a major economic depression around the turn of the millennium, all in hope of a more stable life. But more significantly, I am beginning teenagehood when I learn that my family is undocumented, living in California on expired visas. Our legal status prevents us from traveling out of the U.S. if we wish to return, meaning the friends, family, and home we left behind are out of reach, with a clear pathway to American citizenship nonexistent. The freedom to simply leave and return to Argentina is there, sure, but now with a symmetrical cost—the new life we’ve built here. I try to make sense of this throughout my teenage years but come up short, knowing I’m missing something. I feel Argentino, but I don’t. 

A veces me encuentro lágrimas de golpe, y no entiendo muy bien porque.

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Clics Modernos was recorded during the last gasping breaths of a fierce military dictatorship in Charly Garcia’s home country of Argentina. In power since 1976, the vicious military rule led to the torture and disappearance of thousands and thousands of people. With the support of Serú Girán bandmate Pedro Aznar, Charly took a trip to New York City during September of 1983 in hopes of recording his next LP out of the country. He and Pedro walked into the historic Electric Lady Studios with a wad of cash and some ideas. They picked producer Joe Blaney from a written list of engineers associated with the studio, and got to work, using a TR-808 as a foundation for the album’s rhythm-heavy and modernized sound. 

By the time Clics Modernos was recorded, Charly had become a master at translating dissidence into song and lyric, always codifying metaphor in his songwriting to avoid the eye of the dictatorship. Even considering that sly ingenuity, the risk he always took to express these words—both in his previous bands and in his solo career up until that point—was severe. Despite that risk, with Argentina still under military rule, Clics quickly took the shape of an album containing some of Garcia’s most unquestionably political songs. 

The album was released in November of that year, the week after the formal return of democratic elections in the country and following a gradual collapse of the military junta’s power. Still, the evidence of experienced oppression throughout the record remains. Clics Modernos is urgent in its call to dance and sing against the systems keeping a people down, in other moments almost stopping time in liminal fashion to contemplate loss suffered. Regardless of the tempo, all thirty-four minutes and twenty-nine seconds of the record serve to process what the country’s people had been enduring for years. 

I have a memory that comes up when I think of my parents introducing me to certain music––growing up, my mom always had a CD playing in the car, and for a couple of years, it was Charly’s first solo effort, Yendo de la cama al living. In this way, I was introduced to Charly, though I wouldn’t come to find Clics Modernos until later, on my own. 

I grew up listening to punk music in the English language. The spirit of punk is non-conformist, and I was drawn to the expression of being an outsider against systems that surround you, to the music’s call for collective action against injustice. Punk music has come to signify many things, has been co-opted and distilled and morphed in a million different ways, but perhaps its most typical conceptual ideal is to fight oppression.

Albums like Clics Modernos protest repression all the same, yet the stakes of expression appear overwhelming when the risk is a very palpable state-sanctioned violence, the result of death a real possibility. Artists living under dictatorships have always risked their lives to create, and people like Charly, who sang against a government under which any discordant thought could be punishable by torture and death, are a testament to this human need for creativity in times of suffering. 

Of course, the album’s release became heralded by the return of democratic elections and a feeling of freedom in Argentina— a collective joy reverberating throughout the springtime air after the October vote in 1983—but it’s difficult to imagine that a military junta relinquishing power was truly a guarantee at the time of recording. With the country still under the regime in a time of transitional crisis, Garcia, always tempting fate, boldly composed music about the damage dealt under political repression—the lasting damage it causes and the ways people are left to redefine and rebuild. 

This temptation of fate is not a strange thing in Latin American music—I always think of Victor Jara, the Chilean musician and activist who had his hands cut off before being tortured and killed in 1973—as if to say that even in an afterlife he wouldn’t be able to play his instrument, the threat of repression chasing him well into death, knives at his back into the beyond. I circle back to feeling in between. I weep for what I do not know, for what I will never know, for what I cannot truly comprehend. A veces me encuentro lágrimas de golpe.

Around the close of the ‘70s, it was no secret that Charly was reticent of the “new wave.” Rock music in Argentina was dominated by elements of prog at the time, perceived to be made more for thinking than for dancing, the culture palpably reticent of the approaching era of pop. Yet Garcia ended up using an 808, a few James Brown samples, and some guitar hooks to make a new wave record that everyone wanted to dance to.  

This is clear from even the first moments of the album—the synthetic beginning of the drum machine with its mechanical precision, to the guitar coming in seconds later, urging listeners to stay on pace. The future is now. Right away, the opening track, “Nos siguen pegando abajo,” sets a scene. There are people dancing in a club, a facet of the underground heavily policed during the dictatorship, when a man falls to the floor. But it’s not because of the pills he took, the song urges—it was the men in grey that knocked him down. The titular refrain shouts: “Miren, lo están golpeando todo el tiempo/ Lo vuelven, vuelven a golpear/ Nos siguen pegando abajo” [They’re hitting him all the time/ They’re hitting him yet again/ They keep hitting us while we’re down]. The collective nos is searing. The track intensifies in a dramatic bridge as the song shifts perspective and the fallen man cries for his mother, a light being snuffed out in a horrific moment of vulnerability. He watches from the ground as the men in grey go crazy with pleasure in the damage they’re inflicting. But the pop-driven tone of the track does not fade behind the horror of the subject. Instead Garcia, sick under the weight of the political situation, seems to enter this unfamiliar territory of new sound with his arms outstretched, shouting about this system that punches down at its very people, while never forgetting to dance.

I’m at dinner with my dad, and I ask him what it was like to live under dictatorship, if he lost people he knew. He tells me his parents lost friends, persecuted for certain ideology. He was younger during the dictatorship years, and while a larger perception of everything that was happening might be hard for him to conjure, he tells me the most palpable feeling he can recall is fear. “You’d see a policeman, a military soldier, and you’d just be afraid of them,” he tells me in his Spanish. Los hombres de gris weren’t human as much as they were a force, always capable of inflicting suffering. 

“Los dinosaurios” [The dinosaurs], the seventh track on the record, describes this inhumanity. Written and first performed in 1982, this song is a chilling reminder that everything is capable of disappearing, or—more importantly—of being disappeared: “Los que están en el aire pueden desaparecer en el aire/ Los que están en la calle pueden desaparecer en la calle” [Those on the air can disappear on the air/ Those in the streets can disappear in the streets]. Yet over the haunting lull of the piano track, the song offers a comfort: “Pero los dinosaurios van a desaparecer” [But the dinosaurs will disappear]. These archaic figures symbolic of savagery will surely go, too. He doesn’t specify if this will happen soon, he doesn’t place a timeline on it, but you know he believes it’s coming, a sliver of tender hope almost audible in the space between the chords.

My grandmother still lives in Buenos Aires, and she sometimes has this sense of harmless panic about almost everything. It’s the most endearing thing about her to me—and I try to remember what people before me like her have endured. She tells me about having to burn books with my grandfather to hide political beliefs, about a separate time spent ripping a text by Lenin into pieces the size of rice grains so it could never be discovered. I am in awe of her, I am in awe of Charly.

I think of the ocean my family and I crossed to get here. In “Plateado sobre plateado (Huellas en el mar),” Garcia ruminates on exile, on the people who left their country to find something better. I think people forget exile is not always forced. It can be voluntary, which might be confusing to some—but that’s a central question of Clics Modernos. What makes our home and what will we put up with to stay there? Many of Charly’s generation struggled to make the choice to leave loved ones behind and escape to other countries, and in this song, he considers the pain surrounding this: “Nos quedamos por tener fe/ Nos fuimos por amar/ Ganamos algo y algo se fue/ Algunos hijos son padres/ Y algunas huellas ya son la piel” [We stayed out of hope/ We left out of love/ We gained something, and something was lost/ Some sons are fathers/ And some footprints are now the skin].

Those that stayed in Argentina out of faith that things would get better soon, and those that left because they couldn’t bear the pain any longer. He recognizes this exile as an act of love, ultimately—something people did for freedom of expression and more, yet something they paid a price for, leaving lives and identity behind. 

To immigrate in search of a better life is to punch the concrete wall of this idea head on. Leaving does not come without a price; though these might be choices willingly made, to leave or to stay, what’s found in the boundaries between those two lines will always leave its mark. “Y algunas huellas ya son la piel.” Under the circumstances of dictatorship, some of these footprints in the ocean that people leave on their way out, some of these marks have become our very skin. “Sangre en nuestro hogar/ ¿Por qué tenemos que ir tan lejos/ Para estar acá, para estar acá?” [Blood in our home/ Why do we have to go so far/ To be here, to be here?], he asks. 

And this is the formative question of Clics Modernos, really—the things we endure in spite of it all, how this transforms our very flesh. How far are we willing to go? What scars might we choose to adorn ourselves with in hope of a better life? Until our skin is all marked up and we lose sight of it all and we can no longer recognize ourselves? 

I think of my grandmother, entering the last decade of her life in a city six thousand miles from me. I think of calling her again soon, how I wish I was in the same place as her. What if she falls suddenly ill and I can’t go see her, the ocean between us swallowing my cries under the waves? Se me llenan los ojos de vuelta. 

I think of my parents packing up and taking us to California, hoping for promise. Exile as an act of love, a chance at a better life for someone and those closest to them, a plunge into a world of knowing nothing and knowing too much and knowing nothing again—is it painful? Yes. Is it worth it? People like my parents and I will spend our lives wondering.

Ramiro Portnoy is an editor of comic books & graphic novels based in Long Beach, CA. He loves his dog Poppins, and he doesn’t know anything. For now, he is most active on instagram @insta_ram; sometimes also on twitter @cant_hardlywait