Resident Alien

I recently interviewed Calle 13, whose new album drops today, April 24. This time we had a pretty good conversation; they seem like they're in a groove about their sudden rise to fame. They're representing Boricua but they're finding a way to be transnational.

Here are some of the words we exchanged:

Spanglishkid: It seems that you’re trying to make a statement about the ugliness of the industry by taking on the role of the devil.

Residente: I wrote that chorus of “Tango del Pecado” thinking about some criticism that was made when I started going out with my girlfriend [former Miss Universe Denise Quiñonez]. People said I would be going to hell with her, and they started quoting verses from the Bible, so I said damn if my music is Satanic, then turn up the volume. El Residente is the maximum exponent of sin, and I assumed the role that they were pinning on me. The lyrics are about a love that is not accepted, that isn’t looked well on by many people. So we mixed that with tango, which has a lot of torch songs, theatrical songs.

Spanglishkid: Do you finally have a good relationship with your girlfriend’s parents?

Residente: No, I still haven’t met them.

Spanglishkid: Then there’s “La Fucking Moda” which is saying, step off, I am the fucking style.

Residente: Yeah, it’s an ego trip, but I’m making fun of that. Maybe the whole world can have that feeling of that they are the fucking style. I think everybody has that inside of them.

Spanglishkid: But it doesn’t weigh on you to be the fucking style?

Residente: [Laughs] I know I’m not the style, there are a lot of fads, they pass with time. I wouldn’t want to be a fad. Every song on this album is like a screenplay and it obviously can’t be taken literally. If you take my songs literally you’ll go crazy, it’s like taking Quentin Tarantino’s films seriously, you’re going to go crazy with all those heads being chopped off. It’s a screenplay, a movie. This is fiction.

Spanglishkid: But on the album even your mom calls and leaves a message on your answering machine saying the record is too violent.

Residente: She does think it’s violent, but she understands the violence on the album.

Spanglishkid: This record is kind of like the Latin Americanization of Calle 13…

Visitante: We were touring all the time and every weekend we went to a different country. I think that was captured on the record. Every time we brought back an instrument, and we brought back a record. And we experimented with folkloric rhythms, sometimes they’re more evident than others—on the song “El Norte,” the folkloric isn’t that evident, but there’s a Venezuelan cuatro.

Spanglishkid: I read somewhere that you want to make a documentary about your travels to Latin America.

Residente: We have been traveling through different countries with indigenous people, and the documentary will reflect their story. We’ve been with the Yanomamis from Brazil, with the Amantaní in Peru, who live on an island in Lake Titicaca, which is the highest elevation of any lake in the world. The Buyús we got to know a little bit, they’re in Maicau, on the border with Venezuela and Colombia. And also the Aruacos of Colombia, who are in there between the guerrillas, paramilitaries, and the government. They’re taking away their land.

Spanglishkid: This is reflected in the song “Llégale a mi Guarida,” right?

Residente: It could be a guerrilla, it could be a paramilitary, it could be an indigenous person, who’s singing that chorus. “Llégale a mi guarida/Jurado todo el mundo es pura vida/Pero si atentan contra mi vida/Quizas una bomba suicida haga el trabajo” The song is pretty violent. I took some personal stuff that I’ve felt and I say, man I shouldn’t be saying this, but I’m saying it. So I mixed it with this sort of Latin American vibe, and Vicentico of Los Fabulosos Cadillacs does the chorus.

Spanglishkid: Did Gustavo Santaolalla introduce him to you?

Visitante: Santaolalla got wind of the project because Gustavo Cordera of Bersuit mentioned it to him. And he was going to bring him a CD so he could listen to it. But Gustavo lost the CD and what happened was I met him at a TV show, and right when we were going to do “El Tango,” it occurred to me to work with him. From the beginning Gustavo was super cool, really great with us.

Spanglishkid: Did you go to that Cadillacs show around ’98 in San Juan?

Visitante: I would go to all the Cadillacs shows. The people of Puerto Rico really love them a lot. What’s cool about the Cadillacs, is that they start with one vibe and then they reinvent themselves with another style. A lot of people I know think that their last CD “La Marcha del Golazo Solitario” is their best.

Spanglishkid: Vicentico has a very unique voice. He sounds like a fútbol player who is wandering out of a bar singing….I was wondering, is “El Avión Se Cae” a figure of speech in Puerto Rico? Meaning, “the whole thing is falling apart”?

Residente: I didn’t say it as a figure of speech. I said it literally. It’s a pretty trivial song, it says the plane is falling, and I took some pills, and I saw the flight attendant naked, and animals having sex on the plane.

Visitante: There’s not much hidden meaning there.

Spanglishkid: It sounds like early Pink Floyd to me.

Residente: Yeah, it’s a trip.

Visitante: We put a lot of reverb and delay on the song. It has a little of that atmosphere.

Spanglishkid: On the album there’s a lot of interplay between the sacred and profane. I liked the song with La Mala Rodríguez a lot because it’s kind of sweet even though you talk about dirty sex.

Residente: It was really cool working with her. I wanted to do something less intense sexually and she wanted to do something stronger and she wanted me to be stronger too. So I mixed it up a little, because the character I play is pretty strong sexually but he has a small [penis] and he comes rapidly, so that joke is there. Then the music that Visitante made, it was all done there at home…with shoes.

Visitante: Yeah it was done with props in my room…

Residente: It’s like if I were going to tape over your mouth or tie you up or do something sexual, instead of a snare drum, we used the sound of ripping masking tape. You hear the heels of the sneakers, squeak, squeak, squeak and the heels of a woman’s shoes.

Spanglishkid: It was like you want to be listening to this with a bottle of wine.

Visitante: Exactly, it can be a soundtrack for an erotic scene in a movie.

Spanglishkid: Did you make a video of it?

Residente: No, we haven’t done that but it would be cool. I’d like to because La Mala knows Julio Medem who is one of my favorite directors. Man, if we could do something with him it would be bad.

Spanglishkid: What did he direct?

Residente: He did “Lovers of the Arctic Circle,” and “Sex and Lucía.”

Spanglishkid: With Paz Vega.

Visitante: Damn, Paz Vega. That’s intense.

Spanglishkid: What was it like to work with Tego Calderón?

Residente: I’m one of his followers—in fact he’s the only one, besides Voltio that I have worked with from that genre. It’s not that I want to close myself off from the genre but I have to like them for me to work with a person. Tego is someone who created a change in the genre. Working with him for me was a source of pride.

Spanglishkid: What about this controversy about when you were criticized when you won at the Grammys. Is there still a problem?

Residente: Most people don’t consider us part of the genre. But they still see us as like a menace so that’s why when we won they dissed us. I don’t have any problems with any of them, but I’m also not friends with any of them. I have some friends from the genre with whom I can sometimes have a beer, but maybe they’re not my closest friends. Voltio is my man for a long time, he’s the only one I’m good friends with.

Spanglishkid: What do you think about the possibility of unity between the different Latin American countries?

Residente: That’s what we’re doing with the documentary and with traveling and trying to connect. It’s a really difficult task. We’re doing it through the medium of music and now when we started to release those images people are going to feel a kind of pride in seeing their country projected on television in North America and understand the necessities of each country and understand the virtues and good things they have.

Spanglishkid: When you finish this investigation of Latin America, do you think it would be a good idea to take a look at the Latino diaspora in the U.S.?

Residente: I have a song that I started but it’s not there yet. Maybe it’ll come out on the next album. It had to do with when I came here to New York, and I was checking out all the Latinos. The ones who recognized me were working class. If I went to a restaurant it was the cooks in the restaurant. And if we went to a hotel it was the ones who cleaned the hotel. So that tripped me out, then all of a sudden it was like seeing all those people here working in the cold, you know they come from other climates, and suddenly they’re here. So I started to write a song about that, and I say, “Hace frio afuera/Ponte una capucha.” “It’s cold outside/Put on your hood.”