This is for Noemi, a girl in Spain

I heard a song on Noemi's blog. It was the first day of 2011.  I guess you can say it was my first song of the year. She removed the song from her blog due to some poetic justice, so I'm taking the liberty to post it here.  Sorry, Noemi, "justice" in my house is just like Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr. used to say:  "just us."

I don't know anything about La Mala's music. Actually, I don't know a damn thing about La Mala, but this song kicks ass (Sad reality: the fact that I keep saying  "kick ass" whenever I like a song, tells me I would never make it as  a music critic for Rolling Stone).

My husband tells me that Noemi and I "almost" have the same taste in music. By the songs she posts on her blog, I can tell she and I  are equal opportunity listeners. I believe we can lend our ears to any song we like and not give a rat's fuck whether it is good or awful.  I'm sure once stoned, we will even listen to a punk version of Copa Cabana. 

For the record, I don't know much about rap or hip hop or whatever music is being sold to the skinny jeans generation. So, if you're expecting a Rolling Stone-esque type of musical critique of Mala's song,  I'm going to disappoint you. Too bad. So sad.  My only claim of rap knowledge is that when I was 14 or 15 or 16 years old I heard this one day:



But for the record, at that age I was still in love with this:



Okay, back to La Mala. Like I said, I know nothing about her music.  She speaks rapid Spanish and I have to click replay over and over in order for my California Spanglish ears to grasp meaning.  This song caught my attention and added  fuel to my recent obsession of landscape.  You see, ever since we returned from our recent trip to Mexico city/Puebla/Veracruz, I've been thinking a great deal of landscape and deception and how sometimes my brain  fills in the spaces that are unknown to me  with pretty lies. The culprit of my recent thoughts  is this film, which my  husband and I watched when we were in Mexico:



Yes. The setting of the above film is Barcelona and not East Los Angeles.  I, ignorant of Barcelona,  had previously filled the unknown territory with this:



Perhaps now you can understand how my brain fills those unknown spaces.  But Mala sings conozco esta zona /esta mona no se anda por las rama.......sin embellecimiento en este carro sin asiento....

Years ago, while waiting for the bus to take me to the airport, I asked a homeless woman who sat on the bus bench but with no plans of going anywhere: Does Berkeley lose its charm after a while? She looked at the hills and said, yes. 

I want to be a mona. I want to learn to truly see landscape....even if I see la misma mierda.