>
> If I understand the "imaginary" beneath this, it is a highly
> derogative idea. But this idea hides an essential misunderstanding of
> what tango was, precisely in the 30s, for the Argentinians.
>
> [one] imagines tango as a dance for gigollos in the Cote
> d'Azur, or a plaything by that son of a bitch Macoco Alzaga Unzué (a
> bon vivant reckless Argentinian oligarch who dated women at his
> family's mausoleum, had the best relationship with New York maffias
> opened the "Morocco" night club there during the 30s, and went as far
> as to induce one of his daughters into prostitution!). This is the
> image tango has been given both by Argentinian oligarchs and by the
> American film industry.
>
> In fact, these "tango instructors" were most of them part of the
> "elegant scum" generated by the strained Argentina of the 30s. But
> for the mass of our people, tango in those years was a means for
> expression of the deepest and most painful currents that flowed
> through the Infamous Decade. The greatest Argentinian poet of
> hopelesness, of distress, of tragedy and absence of horizons, the
> true poet of that age, Enrique Santos Discépolo (who BTW had good
> contacts with socialism and turned Peronist later, something the
> intelligentsia never forgave and took revenge of by driving him, one
> of the most sensitive and gregarious persons on planet Earth, to die
> out of loneliness), wrote the most terrible tangos in those times:
> "Cambalache", "Tormenta", and many others. These tangos are
> formidable social and psychological evidence of the tragedy of the
> 30s in Argentina, and people took them as their own song -which they
> were, in fact- and made a popular dance out of a closed horizon.
In general, from what in the last year or so the tango in Argentina has about the same role in their culture as does Jazz in U.S. culture, and sneering references to it should be classified with similar references to jazz by many of the orthodox marxists of the '30s.
Carrol