Tambourines on the terraces: how Spain’s biggest rapper, C Tangana, wrote a football anthem
Text by Ben Cardew; reblogged from The Guardian.
He used to style himself as ‘the man from Madrid’, but with his hymn for Celta de Vigo, the bestselling star is also winning new fans in Galicia.
When Celta de Vigo start the new season this summer in La Liga, Spain’s top football tier, their fans will have a new club anthem to shake the foundations of their Balaídos stadium: Oliveira Dos Cen Anos by C Tangana, a rapper and singer whose El Madrileño was the bestselling album of 2021 in his native Spain.
From You’ll Never Walk Alone to Seven Nation Army, the crossover between football and popular music is well established. But the new Celta anthem is far from the Three Lions template of big choruses and simple singalongs. The song is the result of intense research and modern pop nous, fusing tradition and modernity to create what might be the most artistically ambitious football anthem ever.
Tangana, real name Antón Álvarez Alfaro, doesn’t actually sing on it, ceding the spotlight to Vigo’s Coral Casablanca choir, tambourine-wielding female vocal group Lagharteiras and Celta supporters’ club Tropas de Breogán. What’s more, the song leans heavily on the folklore of Galicia, the north-western region of Spain where Vigo is located. The song is in Galician – its title loosely translates as “100-year-old olive tree” – and uses the traditional rhythms and lyrics of Galician folk music. The song’s video, meanwhile, highlights the landscape of the Vigo estuary, including the island of San Simón and the Rande Bridge.
Tangana says he saw the song as an opportunity to create something that could transcend popular culture. “What cultural objects can you create that will change – or endure in – our culture?” he asks. “Although this is something local, around a city, that feeling of belonging to the club and the institution it represents, makes it a really strong opportunity for you to influence a lot of people.”
The origins of Celta’s new anthem – a himno in Spanish – were simple. In 2021 Celta used Twitter to ask supporters if anyone would like to compose a new anthem to celebrate the team’s 2023 centennial. Tangana, born in Madrid to a Celta-supporting Galician father and Andalusian mother, replied and the wheels were put in motion.
Composing the new anthem, however, was far from straightforward. Before putting pen to paper, Tangana carried out research with important figures in Galician culture, including writer Pedro Feijoo and folk musicians Rodrigo Romaní and Alfredo Dourado. Tangana says that the opportunity to immerse himself in Galician folklore “was like a gift to myself as an artist”.
“It is an anthem for a centennial,” he says. “Each element has to have the same weight: a centennial weight.”
From the various traditional ideas incorporated into the song, Tangana highlights the importance of the pandeireteiras and cantareiras (both groups of female singers, with the former, such as Lagharteiras, using tambourines). “This combination of female voices, always in a choir, almost never as soloists, playing percussion, all together, for me is the most moving thing there is musically in the whole world,” he says.
He himself is not fluent in Galician and writing a song in the language was a challenge. But he says it was important to stretch himself. “In the globalised world in which we live, with this obsession that everyone has to be the same, express ourselves in the same ways, make the same gestures […] cultural expressions that are very local for me have great value,” he says.
Tangana’s decision to write an anthem for RC Celta de Vigo initially caused confusion in Spain, with the artist closely linked to Madrid – El Madrileño translates as “the man from Madrid” – but the club’s fans were won round after the rapper explained his links to the club. What’s more, Tangana says he sees writing Oliveira Dos Cen Anos as part of the same process of fusing folk culture with modern production that he explored on El Madrileño, where flamenco music met Latin folk, rock, hip-hop and R&B, and on his hugely successful 2021 Tiny Desk performance for National Public Radio in the US, where he was joined by family members and musical collaborators for a performance that buzzed with the raw energy of a flamenco show.
“When I started to do international tours, spending a lot of time in the US and Latin America, I started to realise that I was missing something,” he says. “That made me turn towards the culture of Spain, towards cultural elements that had shaped my childhood and adolescence, and that I had given up on because I was looking at a screen or listening to music that came from other places.”
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| Galician vocal group Lagharteiras, who feature on Oliveira Dos Cen Anos. Photograph: Rocío Aguirre |
In this, Tangana’s music is part of a wider trend in Spanish culture, where musicians are combining elements of musical folklore – from Rosalía’s use of the flamenco palmas to Maria Arnal i Marcel Bagés’ take on Catalan folk – with 21st-century production. “The music I listened to as a child, the records that my parents liked and my family listened to, who was singing at a fiesta, what you eat in a normal day in Spain, where you hang out, the way you interact with alcohol, parties, family, all that helped to shape El Madrileño,” Tangana says. “Finally I feel like I have an artistic identity that is related to me.”
Oliveira Dos Cen Anos is also firmly in the Spanish football tradition, whereby clubs commission local musicians to create bespoke anthems – such as FC Barcelona’s Cant del Barça – which are then taken up by fans.
Tangana says it is for RC Celta supporters to decide whether they want to sing Oliveira Dos Cen Anos on the terraces but the response so far has been very warm. And if they do sing his song when the first game of the new season kicks off in August? “I am a bit nervous,” Tangana says with a smile. “But to hear it in the stadium, in front of so many people, will be incredibly powerful.”
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