12 Seconds of Darkness

Friend: I thought this CD might be up your alley.
Me: If by that you mean Jewish Uruguayan singers, then, yes.

Spain is enamored of Jorge Drexler, an intense but soft-spoken singer-songwriter from Uruguay, whose most recent album “12 Segundos De Oscuridad” has garnered both popular and critical success since its release. Take, for instance, the slew of YouTube videos in which Spanish twenty-somethings pound out crude versions of his most popular songs on their guitars. Drexler’s songs have struck a chord with a generation of educated Spanish and Latin American youths searching for meaning in a disconnected yet increasingly globalized world. His compositions run the gamut from simple, quiet love songs (“Sanar”) to commentaries on how technology invades our personal lives (“La Infidelidad en la Era Informática”) and musings on the power of doubt in an increasingly polarized age (“Hermana Duda”). Most of these themes go untouched in modern pop music, which in both English and Spanish seems obsessed only with conveying a graphic depiction of sexual acts and a sappy, idealized version of love.

Drexler is best “known” in the U.S. for winning the 2006 Academy Award for Best Song for his composition “Al Otro Lado Del Río,” from The Motorcycle Diaries. The song was unmercifully butchered on Oscar night by Antonio Banderas, who, as anyone who has seen the movie version of Evita can attest, is vocally challenged. Drexler tried to regain some of the beauty and ambiance of the original version by singing a few measures during his acceptance speech, since his English at that point was somewhat limited. Still, Drexler’s talent and earnestness was either lost on or soon forgotten by American audiences (both Spanish and non-Spanish-speaking).

But 12 Segundos De Oscuridad, which Drexler describes as his most painful and emotional album to write, may be more successful at breaking into the American music scene. 12 Segundos is Drexler’s first album to be released domestically (albeit nearly four and half months after its release in Spain and Latin America), and the domestic release includes an insert with an English translation of all the lyrics. The album is available at nearly any Barnes & Noble or Borders, or on iTunes, which has also just released a compilation of Drexler’s earlier work, previously unavailable domestically. Most visibly, however, is that on 12 Segundos Drexler has chosen to cover Radiohead’s “High and Dry,” in a meandering, melancholic vein similar to Iron & Wine’s version of The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights.” Will Jorge be able to capture the American Indie-turned-OC-pop scene?

Not likely. While the foremost barrier to success in the U.S. for any foreign artist is language, Drexler also has to confront the fact that his subject matter may be too difficult for Americans, even Hispanic Americans, to swallow. Drexler has won fans in countries where globalization, interdependence, and integration are daily facts of life (Drexler himself was part of an exodus of young Latin Americans seeking greater opportunities in Spain). Musicians in Latin America (and other countries) have long struggled to carve their nation’s place in the world cultural milieu, meanwhile batting an onslaught from Western U.S.-dominated cultural mores. Take, for instance the song “Latinoamérica Es Un Pueblo Al Sur del EEUU” by Chilean rock group “Los Prisioneros,” which satires Latin America’s unimportance on the world stage (“Nobody in the rest of the planet takes seriously this immense group of people filled with sadness”). Drexler’s songs, whether they question the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or his own disorientation at transatlantic flights, concern themselves with not so much with the question of national or regional identity, but of personal identity in a rapidly changing and highly interconnected world. Perhaps the song off of the new album that best represents this dilemma is “Disneylandia,” which, although a cover of a song by the Brazilian band Titãs, reveals Drexler’s true fascination with globalization:

Hijo de inmigrantes rusos casado en Argentina con una pintura judía. Se casa
Por segunda vez con una princesa africana en Méjico…
Imágenes de un volcán en Filipinas salen en la red de televisión de Mozambique…
Niños iraquíes huídos de la Guerra no obtienen visa en el consulado americano
De Egipto para entrar en Disneylandia.

Child of Russian immigrants who got married in Argentina
To a Jewish painter, married for the second time
To an African princess in Mexico…
Images of a volcano in the Philippines are
Shown on a television network in Mozambique…
Iraqi children fleeing the war can’t get a visa
At the American consulate in Egypt
To get into Disneyland.

The vast majority of Americans are perhaps better insulated from this type of globalization than our counterparts in other countries, and even those who aren't tend to question it less. Like other artists such as Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga (the duo who brought you Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel), Drexler uses his talent, earnestness, and ingenuity to question that which most of us take for granted in our daily lives. As his personal battles and insecurities become our own, will we turn the lens on ourselves?

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www.jorgedrexler.com