Juan Villoro
I have lived long enough to attend the weddings of a friend who refers to the most recent one as his “fourth transformation.” A journalist colleague commented that these marriages should not be mentioned in the Social section but the Sports section. Dr. Johnson, who was rarely wrong, said that anyone who remarries confirms “the triumph of hope over experience.”
The topic came up at a dinner where the “romance of the year” was discussed. Information has become ambient, to such a degree that some of the lives of others are part of our own. Even those who have not seen her movies are in a position to know that Jennifer Lopez is back with Ben Affleck. The issue itself lacks editorial relevance, but it allows us to explore one of the unique variants of popular culture: wedding music.
Samuel Johnson’s phrase pertains to one who remarries another person, but also to one who reiterates their affection, making longing outweigh disappointment.
The actors fell in love for the first time in 2002. Like the Musketeers, they return twenty years later. Much has changed in that time. However, something endures even more consistently than JLo and Ben’s great looks. I knew it at my friend’s fourth wedding when the dance floor was assaulted by those songs you don’t have on records or usually look up on Spotify, but you know by heart. And something even more important: you don’t know that you know them.
Three-tiered cake baking and ice swan sculpting are crafts for weddings. On the other hand, the tunes that “set the mood” were not conceived for matrimonial purposes. This is not a propositional repertoire; it belongs to the random dynamics with which popular culture defines an era.
How to classify it? Let us turn to a method of proven usefulness, with which D’Alembert defined the great Encyclopédie that he coordinated with Diderot. In his Preliminary Discourse, he writes: “All our knowledge can be divided into direct and reflective. The direct are those we receive immediately without any operation of our will; finding open, as it were, all the parts of our soul, enter into it without resistance and effort. Reflective knowledge is what the understanding acquires by operating on the direct ones, uniting and combining them.” One would say that culture necessarily belongs to the order of reflective knowledge, but this is not always the case. The obvious example is wedding music, which activates the organism and brings back memories outside our will. This article aims to turn “direct knowledge” into “reflective knowledge.”
Although the greats of popular songs (Lara, Manzanero, José Alfredo, or Juan Gabriel) sometimes appear on the playlist, they are not social event musicians. If a bride dances the first piece to the beat of “Bésame mucho”, that does not mean that this classic song becomes a wedding standard.
Every artistic trend has its sneaks and its opportunists. Every now and then, a melody tries to triumph as “song of the summer” and is usually accompanied by a dance that conceives joy as an opportunity to lose the sense of the ridiculous.
The friend I spoke of at the beginning cannot be criticized for having married several formidable women; besides, he is a wonderful ex-husband. But we can’t forgive him for making us dance to “Don’t break my poor heart anymore” at his second wedding. “And all for what?” asks the colleague who accuses him of turning a civil convention into a sport.
Those pieces are heard for a few seasons and are replaced by others equally ephemeral. The real enigma lies in the songs that my friend danced to from his first to his fourth marriage or that JLo and Ben dance to on their reunion. Ice swans melt, but certain rhythms remain.
Regardless of what music historians say, in Mexico, the predominance of this genre belongs to Timbiriche. Conceived as adolescent music, it endures beyond individual taste and is mysteriously inscribed in the spirit of the times. Its secret attraction may derive from the youth it summons. Its moment is always the future; it is not a reality but a promise: “the triumph of hope over experience.”
This column was originally published in Spanish on August 6, 2021, by Reforma