The reaction against náufragos, hippies, or rockers—exchangeable terms in the late 1960s—was premised on homophobic sentiments. Over the months of intense police and “civilian” raids, for example, the lifestyle magazine Siete Días published fifty-two letters from readers addressing the “hippie” issue. An adult man initiated the series of letters when he wrote to complain that the “long-haired hippies” represented a threat to Argentine society because, he argued, “they are all homosexual.” Responding to this letter, two young men, signing as “Adam Dylan” and “Oswald Lennon,” claimed that the “hippies and rockers” were the “true representatives of the Argentine youth” because they carried the “message of peace and love” that the country needed.50 Readers were split regarding these two stances: while eight backed “Dylan and Lennon,” forty-three agreed that “hippies and rockers” were a homosexual menace. Among them were many youths, including Omar, age twenty, who argued that rockers could not be “good Argentines” by “smoking marijuana and being homosexuals,” an argument with which Juan “totally agreed.” Carlos, age nineteen, argued even more heatedly: “if the hippies want to help the fatherland,” he wrote, “they should be courageous and abandon their music and stupid clothes.”51 Ironically, psychologist Eva Giberti, who since the late 1950s had advocated for democratizing intergenerational relations, reached similar conclusions. Commenting on a concert by Los Gatos, she cautioned her readers about how dangerous the “little cross-dressing games” were for young men, since they would “heighten the natural sexual confusion of their age.”52
The homophobic reaction the rockers incited upon first entering into the public milieu was framed by anxieties over the transformation in gender relations taking place in Argentina. It had been young women who, in a practical rather than self-conscious fashion, initially marked the limits of the prevailing arrangements of domesticity and patriarchal authority by remaining longer in the education system, fully participating in the labor market, helping shape youthful leisure activities, daring to experiment with new courtship mores, acknowledging publicly that they engaged in premarital sex, and marrying older than before.53 Until the mid-1960s, young women’s experiences and expectations created a generation gap vis-à-vis their mothers’ that did not have a parallel in the case of their male counterparts. In the second half of the 1960s, though, rock culture offered a contingent of young men an iconoclastic framework through which they challenged the dynamics for making “men” out of boys. By stimulating a sociability centered on hedonism, companionship, and leisured life, rockers questioned discipline, responsibility, and sobriety, which were the premises for the hegemonic ideal of masculinity. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick pointed out, when some sense emerges that the traditional ways of transmitting patriarchal power are broken, it can “take the form of ideological homophobia.”54 Old and young men—and women—created a homosexual menace out of rockers, whom they believed jeopardized the generational continuity of patriarchal power. The blend of these social responses with the threat of police repression—common to other Latin American experiences—politicized rock culture, shaping the ideological and gender dynamics of the rapidly growing movement.55
In the late 1960s, countless groups of boys launched themselves into rock music by playing and listening. The first evidence that young men were taking up the music was the impressive increase in the sales of certain musical instruments: the sales of electric guitars had increased by 260 percent between 1967 and 1970, base guitars by 180 percent, and drums by 120 percent. In early 1970, a journalist suggested that, in Buenos Aires alone, there was a rock band every four blocks.56 The explosion of music playing came as a boom for the record industry. In fact, after the success achieved by “La Balsa,” record entrepreneurs embarked upon a search for bands to emulate Los Gatos. In mid-1968, a producer for RCA visited rehearsals throughout the city, like the ones of Almendra, a quartet led by Luis Alberto Spinetta, who had just finished secondary school. Meanwhile, a new label named Mandioca was formed by participants in the group of náufragos at Plaza Francia and also by the publisher Jorge Alvarez.57 Unable to attract Almendra, this label produced the trio Manal and was a preeminent organizer of concerts. Burgeoning across Buenos Aires, rock concerts were venues for further shaping rockers’ fraternity in the face of police harassment that took place in obscure halls and larger theaters alike.58 Police harassment and state prohibitions oftentimes even conflicted with the music business. As late as 1970, a famous radio DJ and RCA executives organized the would-be “Argentine Woodstock” in a district 120 miles away from Buenos Aires. Police did intelligence work and concluded that the organizers were “drug addicts, with dubious morality.” The police decided not to authorize it two days before the festival was due to begin.59 Police repression was crucial for setting antiauthoritarianism as the most significant ideological component of rock culture, and that repression also partially helps explain why the fraternity of long-haired boys largely excluded women.
In the early 1970s, there were only three women in the fifty-five bands and soloists that had recorded. Gabriela, Carola, and María Rosa Yorio shared two commonalities: they were vocalists and all were married to prominent musicians. The marginalization of women in the rock scene was a global episode. Women, as performers, found more room within the folk variants of the rock scene. At the same time that Joni Mitchell recorded her first LP, for example, Gabriela did the same in Argentina. She also tried to find a more “female” voice but, unlike Mitchell’s, hers was not feminist. In her “Voy a dejar esta casa, papá” (I’m leaving this house, dad), for example, Gabriela asked a fictionalized father “to come off his wings” since there was “another man waiting outside.” There were no elements in her poetics that allowed for an autonomous female experience. Moreover, being the most successful female performer did not mean that she was booming in the market: “rockers are machistas,” Gabriela explained.60 Carola and María Rosa Yorio also recalled their earliest experiences as unfolding in an unfriendly landscape.61
Equally important, the initial venues of sociability like plazas and streets and then concerts were not a welcoming space for many young women. As a middle-class young woman, Hilda recalled that it was hard for girls to go to rock concerts: “We were afraid of the police, but our parents were more afraid.”62 Even when they were willing to attend, young women found it hard to negotiate with their parents: concerts were associated with disorder, not suitable for girls. Many girls, though, did have a chance to attend some concerts, like the shows organized by a radio program to celebrate the end of the 1969 school year, where bands like Manal played.63 For musicians and “true” fans, these shows represented chances for “money making” and not for “playing.” Young women only participated in rock sociability in contexts that male rockers deprecated. This also held true for the rock band with which young women engaged the most: Sui Géneris. The duo first played acoustically and sold almost two hundred thousand copies of its first LP in early 1972, which was reportedly purchased by both boys and girls. When many rockers praised “electric” sounds, Sui Géneris, according to their own producer and La Pesada’s leader, Billy Bond, “played like and for girls [nenas].”64 Playing “like nenas” was as insulting as playing “for nenas”: rock was supposed to bind together a fraternity of boys.
Although young women were excluded from the fraternity of rockers, song lyrics were flush with representations of them. These representations oscillated between two poles: either a reverential attitude toward young women as the epitomes of tenderness and love or an aggressive posture towards supposed female superficiality. As in other countries in the 1960s, rock poets traded in imagery about “hippie princesses.” Tanguito and Lernoud, for example, wrote of a “golden princess” who was ethereal, motherly, “perfect.” This deferential attitude toward “princesses” reverberated in myriad lyrics related to love and sexuality. In one of the most poetically sophisticated lyrics of Argentina’s rock, Spinetta sang to the “girl with honey breasts,” as
king her to “wait to dusk” while he built a “castle” with her “belly.” Duo Pedro y Pablo deployed similar language when depicting “blonde Catalina” as a tender giver and taker of sexual pleasure.65 Yet many rock lyrics constructed representations of women as mere sexual objects. Two years after writing on the “honey-breast” girl, Spinetta wrote the misogynistic “I like that pussy,” and he also sang to the “foolish girl” who just wanted to be “suntanned.” La Pesada, for their part, made use of an old childish rhyme addressing chores like sewing. While acidly criticizing domestic stereotypes of women, the song posited that it was hard to find a “lady who knows how to think,” a verse that led one journalist to dub it as “rockers’ antifeminist, or antifeminine, manifesto.”66
Besides unveiling a machista sentiment, perhaps the antifeminine attitude rampant among some rockers comprised one way through which they tried to counter the homophobic claims against them. As scholars have noted for other contexts, rockers shaped their own sense of masculinity by expelling “the feminine,” mainly when they were targets of homophobia.67 In Argentina, slander of the feminine formed a key divide of the rockers’ fraternity that opposed Almendra and Manal. Spinetta’s leadership provided Almendra with poetically sophisticated lyrics as well as exquisite music that drew on fusion, notably with tango. Manal localized blues and relied on Javier Martínez’s poetry, focused on narrations of rude, mostly working-class landscapes.68 Scholars have assessed the opposition in class terms: Manal would have aimed at interpellating a working-class audience, while denying that Almendra belonged to a rock culture based upon claims they were mere “middle-class boys.”69 Yet the members of both bands came from middle-class families and, as Mario Rabey—former manager of Manal—recalls, both attracted a cross-class audience to their concerts. “Almendra was softer,” he sarcastically recalls, “while Manal was a boys’ thing.” In the opinions of some of Manal’s fans, the trio sounded “more macho.”70 The rockers’ fraternity was misogynist on its own terms and helped to incite a discussion about what Argentines expected from the boys-will-be-men dynamics as well as about the significance of “manners and morals” in an authoritarian context. Embedded within a transnational repertoire of ideas, sounds, and images, rockers’ iconoclasm cut across class barriers to encompass an ever-growing mass of middle- and working-class men.
Three Times Hair: Beat, Rock, and Counterculture
In March of 1970, the movie El extraño de pelo largo (The Long-Hair Stranger) became a hit. By drawing on the symbolism of long hair, the movie epitomized the implosion of “beat” styles that pervaded the visual and sonic spheres. In that year, also, the first rock magazine in Argentina appeared, tellingly titled Pelo (Hair). Pelo was crucial for creating labels to assess what rock meant vis-à-vis beat, including the notion of authenticity, which it applied to Almendra, Manal, and Los Gatos—all of which disbanded in 1970, at the height of their popularity. Pelo also organized annual festivals where the rockers’ fraternity gathered en masse, one of the key elements of the “second-stage” of Argentina’s rock culture (ca. 1970–75). In 1971, Argentines saw their version of Gerome Ragni and James Rado’s musical Hair. Criticized because of its links to the entertainment industry, the experience of Hair nevertheless allowed for members of its cast to start communal living. The three variants of hair revealed different articulations of masculinity. The youth attracted to rock helped modernize the contours of masculinity by helping to expand the aesthetic parameters of how men could look, and, more crucially, by insisting on a cultural politics that allowed for reimagining experiences of love and family.
The first invocation to “hair” refers to the success of El extraño de pelo largo, which was premised on the beat wave. That phenomenon fueled a renewed expansion of the music industry, which was directly involved in shaping and marketing the bands. Record production expanded dramatically: while in 1967—the year of “La Balsa”—15.5 million records were produced and sold, in 1969 that number rose to 27 million, and in 1971 to 40 million. Business reports showed that, between 1968 and 1970, 70 percent of local records belonged to beat music.71 Targeted as a beat band, for example, Almendra sold one hundred thousand copies of its single “Muchacha (ojos de papel)” and twenty-five thousand of its LP. Yet the figures pale when compared to the success achieved by Los Náufragos, whose singles sold three hundred thousand copies. The case of Los Náufragos illustrates the shaping and marketing of these bands. By appropriating the notion of naufragio (shipwreck), entrepreneurs at CBS determined the selling-point for these long-haired boys. CBS also hired professional musicians to compose and play the music and songwriters to create the lyrics. The record company secured broad media promotion as well. Lifestyle magazines and papers ran numerous interviews with the beat band, where they propagandized a sugary image of nonconformism, happiness for being young, and satisfaction with conveying their “music and feelings.”72
Calling to mind the qualities of youth and dynamism, the beat style was a conduit for diversifying the options of how men—both young and adult—could look. Its major impact was, in fact, on menswear and hair style. For instance, color began to appear in men’s dress shirts: in 1970 only 30 percent of the shirts sold were the “[traditional] white, sky blue, or grey.” Also in 1970, the stylish clothing store Casa Modart opened a branch in Buenos Aires wholly dedicated to “youth clothes,” but the most prominent costumers, according to a report, were “middle-aged men.”73 Though exaggerated, the report offers a glimpse of the juvenilization of menswear, along beat lines. Equally important were the changes in hair style. While in 1967 the náufragos recognized themselves as wearers of long hair, three years latter it could hardly act as a marker for unconventional cultural grouping. Although people on the streets still shouted homophobic remarks to long-haired boys, many employers refused to hire long-haired workers, and school principals endorsed the wearing of short hair, a growing minority of men let it grow.74 A barber in a working-class neighborhood commented that young boys and also some “middle-aged men” went to his shop with pictures of “modern singers” to have their haircuts modeled after them. In fact, the figure of the long-haired young man had become accepted in the larger public culture.75
As it happened in other countries in the early 1970s, the beat style that pervaded Argentina’s mass culture represented a vehicle for updating beliefs about the aesthetics of masculinity. The youth that, since the mid-1960s, participated in the making of a rock culture did so in bodily terms. They combined a taste for rock music with a particular sociability and certain bodily practices, which were the keys to produce and convey a criticism against the sites and institutions that punctuated the boys-will-be-men dynamics in authoritarian Argentina. At the same time that old and young men and women reacted against the náufragos by deploying homophobic claims, their bodily styles infiltrated music and fashion. In becoming a mass culture phenomenon, those styles—now labeled “beat”—paved the way for new forms of fashioning, and of performing, masculinity for young and middle-aged men alike. Casualness, “color,” and a celebration of individuality were the new mandates.76 Those mandates potentially conflicted with the notions of respectability and respect for hierarchies that premised the hegemonic construction of masculinity. They promoted a certain degree of egalitarianism—in terms of age and class—and they tolerated a more relaxed positioning of men in their everyday interactions. However cosmetic or apparently superficial they were, the beat styles made visible and helped define broader societal tolerance with alternative forms of producing and experiencing masculinity.
Reacting against the wave of beat fashion and trying to recapture the symbolic potential of hair for a fraternity of “true” rockers, in February of 1970 the first issue of Pelo appeared. Pelo’s explicit objective, an editorial stated, was to differentiate “what is honestly authentic from what is just commercial merchandise.”77 Unlike other youth magazines, Pelo was devoted to rock: it represented a crucial step for the autonomy of Argentina’s rock culture a
nd reinforced its gendered dynamics. As Daniel Ripoll, Pelo’s creator and director for thirty years, recalls, the readership for the magazine was almost totally male, including many “amateur music practitioners.” The magazine rapidly sold 150,000 copies monthly, and was exported to other South American countries. From the outset, it carried updated information about rock worldwide. When rumors about the separation of The Beatles spread, for example, Ripoll himself traveled to London to gather “precise information” to deliver to his readers.78 Pelo also included information about novelties in equipment, and like rock magazines such as Rolling Stone and Melody Maker, participated in the cult of “guitar heroes.” Emerging as the epitome of rock, guitar players were expected to combine “virtuosic display, bodily flamboyance, and control of technology.”79 Pelo promoted that variant of masculinity, tied to the notion of creativity and authenticity.
Pelo’s most pressing concern was to establish criteria for differentiating the “authentic” from the “commercial,” criteria framed into gendered language. Pelo crafted a vital dichotomy: complacientes (complacent) and progresivos (progressive). The former were the bands whose creative decisions depended on the record business. The progresivos, in contrast, were the bands engaged in a search of more sophisticated musical and poetical forms, which would find little echo within the record business. By using these categories, Pelo mapped out Argentina’s musical landscape, gathering data on fifty-three bands. Thus, Los Náufragos were unquestionably placed into the complacientes, while Manal, Los Gatos, and Almendra ranked high among the progresivos.80 This dichotomy was the way in which Pelo coded the opposition between pop and rock, as shaped in the 1960s and 1970s worldwide. As happened with that opposition, Pelo’s dichotomy was gendered. Like any “pop star,” the complacientes were depicted as having a female audience and endowed with attributes related to the feminine: weakness, passivity—regarding the music industry—and superficiality. As “true” rockers, the progresivos occupied the male and superior position: active, moving forward, and creative.81 In endorsing progresivos alone, Pelo uplifted these perceived male values, which would ideally bind a renewed fraternity of rockers.
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