Abstract

ALABARCES, Pablo  and  GILBERT, Abel. Palito Ortega: la felicidad como misterio socio‒musicológico. Taco brea [online]. 2023, n.17, e0099. ISSN 2362-4191.  http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.14409/eltaco.9.17.e0099.

Our recent investigation into singer-songwriter «Palito» Ortega presented us with quite a few problems to solve. It is a career mainly as a composer and popular singer, and an especially successful career: Palito Ortega was and is the second best‒selling Argentine artist in the history of local music, only surpassed by Leo Dan, with 28 million records compared to 43 million of the latter. If we limit the comparison to his contemporaries, Palito is among the ten best-selling Latin American artists in the history of the continent. However, his work has never been studied: the most successful artist of so‒called modern Argentine music was never researched as such – that is, neither as an artist nor as successful. What can be said about Palito’s work? And consequently: where did the causes of its success lie? Our work sought to avoid elitist condemnation or scorn, as well as the exact opposite populist celebration. We want to show in this presentation some of the questions that we should have asked the materials —music, films, journalistic, documentaries— as well as some of the answers that we arrived at, the product of a disciplinary intersection that is verified, at the same time, in our intellectual biographies and in our professional practices.

Keywords : Palito Ortega; New Wave; Popular Music; Bad Music; Sociology of Music.

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