Pimpinela Dúo in the Argentine democratic transition: a political listening

Abstract

In this paper, I propose to listen some Pimpinela Dúo songs in a political key. These artists became popularities at the beginning of the eighties of the last century with an innovative proposal that combined the themes and musical forms of the romantic ballad with dramatic structures typical of the theater, to represent scenes based on fights and couple breakups. This fight songs, altought they showed the ability to massively challenge the public, have not been thought of in connection with the democratic transition process that began in those years with the weakening of the dictatorship, mainly after the Falklands war. However, listening in a political key is made possible if two aspects are linked: on the one hand, the crisis in relations between the genders – especially, marital relations – and, on the other, a broad set of demands for democratization that characterized the period. To found this political listening, I propose to recover two notions with a long history in cultural studies: the "political unconscious", developed by Frederic Jameson, and the "sentiment structure", proposed by Raymond Williams.