The Washington Post 
June 22, 1984

Latino Lyrics 

By Richard Harrington 

RUBEN BLADES, the Panamanian singer and songwriter who
will share the Merriweather Post Pavilion stage
tomorrow with his good friend Joe Jackson, is
beginning his farewell tour at the pinnacle of a
10-year career during which he became one of the
biggest stars in salsa music, as well as the first to
write his own material. Several months ago Elektra
Records released his "Buscando America" ("Searching
for America"), a scintillating conceptual album of
progressive pan-Latino music that suggests everything
from do-wop to Springsteen and rap to reggae. 

Yet just as he is being deluged with new accolades,
Blades, 35, is taking a sabbatical to earn his
master's degree at Harvard Law School, continuing a
legal career that predated his entry into the music
field. Having graduated from law school and worked as
an attorney for the Bank of Panama, Blades moved to
New York City in 1974. "I was on the verge of working
with the Panamanian delegation at the United Nations,"
he says, "but there was a change in government and
that was left hanging in the air. And all of a sudden
I got very busy musically ." 

By 1975 Blades was singing with Ray Baretto, switching
a year later to Willie Colon's band, a partnership
that lasted five very successful years. "Once I had a
lot of time and no money to pursue an education in the
States. Now I have the money and it seems like I don't
have enough time," Blades says. "But I have to be
thinking about what I am going to be doing 10 years
from now--and though I consider that I'm still going
to be involved in music as a writer, I don't see
myself as an active performer when I'm 45." 

Though he made his reputation in salsa, Blades has put
some distance between his roots and his current sound,
which he calls "urban music. Salsa was coined to
define a multitude of rhythms and melodic structures
that came from the Caribbean and were, more than
anything else, danceable. But the music that I've been
making these last 10 years is not oriented just to
dancing. I find the term confining. My music expresses
the feeling of the Latin-American city dweller--his
anguish, his hopes, his happiness and his pain." 

Indeed, "Buscanda America's" provocative, evocative
songs examine subjects as diverse as the 1980
assassination of El Salvador's Archbishop Romero, a
mundane day in the life of a secret policeman who
arrests political dissidents, the fate of those who
"disappear," migrant workers and barrio lovers. Social
and political commentary has generally been absent
from salsa, Blades says, since the songs "were simply
working as a backdrop to the music, which was the most
important thing. So the lyrics tended to be repetitive
and monotonous." 

Blades' songs are different in that they tend to the
narrative form, what he calls "short stories" or
"chronicles." Which leads to his next project, an
album drawn from the work of Nobel Prize winner
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. "I wanted to help banish the
notion that intellectuals and popular musicians cannot
collaborate," Blades explains. "In Latin America, the
social structure is very clearly cut and defined,
including the type of mentality which holds that
writers live in their little intellectual Parnassus
looking down on the mortals, and that musicians don't
read and have no understanding of what's going on. I
felt these were silly stereotypes that had to be
destroyed, thrown away." 

That Blades was not only an avid reader but a prolific
short-story writer himself gave him the nerve to
propose the project to Garcia Marquez. "Gabriel
himself loves this type of music. At first he was not
quite sure what I had in mind, but he was curious and
enthusiastic. I am going to take eight of his early
short stories and reinterpret them as songs. I
jokingly told him I was going to put a little caption
on the album that says: 'You heard the song. Now read
the book.' He got a good chuckle out of that one." 

Text may also play into another Blades project. He
sings in Spanish (the Elektra album provides a
bilingual text), and hopes that any videos he does
will have subtitles, which would be a first. "My songs
are small cinematic pieces, so to work them out on
film might add a dimension because of what's lost in
the problem with translation. It would be great if we
could do it like a French movie, with the translation
up there. I don't know how MTV would feel, but it
would be a way of balancing things out. There are 20
million Hispanics and Latin Americans in this country,
and yet we do not have the access to the media that we
should have. We certainly have something to say that's
as valid as anything being said today." 

Which brings up a final point: Blades senses a
political career not too far down the line, an
ambition bolstered by a Panamanian poll that showed
him third in popularity between the president of the
country and his good friend, boxer Roberto Duran. 

"I'm also studying at Harvard because I'm thinking
about the future of my country, where 50 percent of
the population is 21 or younger. I think there is a
need to utilize the resources that youth gives us to
try to resolve the problems those young people are
going to be facing . . . It's also my duty as a
Panamanian to be a part of the solution to the
problems there. Since I have this odd but wonderful
duality of having a professional degree in law and the
popular support from the music, I think I can put it
to good use some years from now. 

"But once I go into politics, I'm not going to run for
governor," Blades adds. "I'm going to go for the whole thing."