Last week when the interview with Yolanda Díaz ended at Lo de Évole, Jordi Évole tweeted: “He is our Freddie Mercury, our Gloria Fuertes, our Dylan and Mocedades. He is a star and we are lucky that he exists.” The journalist was putting honey on his lips to announce who was going to be his guest this Sunday: Rodrigo Cuevas. And surely many would think to themselves, who is Rodrigo Cuevas? Today there will be few who do not know. Rodrigo Cuevas is free and he tells whoever has to tell him, even Miguel Bosé himself. Clothes don’t hurt.
Rodrigo Cuevas is a diva, “a folkloric diva”, a lover, the lover of folklore, of tradition, of what we now call Empty Spain, of getting up in the morning and taking his first piss looking at a landscape with which Many dream, that others yearn for, that many are unaware of. If last night was the first time you heard and saw Rodrigo Vázquez, it will be difficult for you to forget him.
It happened to Jordi Évole’s parents. In the middle of the pandemic, in one of the video calls that the journalist made to his parents every day, they, hallucinated and excited, told him that they had been watching videos of a boy singing copla. “Rodrigo Cuevas?” Évole asked them. “That, that, that!”
Probably last night whoever saw Lo de Évole and for the first time placed Rodrigo Cuevas on the map would have the same thing happen to Jordi Évole’s parents. Or, perhaps, the opposite would happen to him. What is clear is that Rodrigo Cuevas never leaves anyone indifferent when you see him on stage and also when you listen to him.
Rodrigo Cuevas is a “diva of folklore”. He is an artist who fills concerts in Miami, in Paris, in his land, in his town… He is the diva who, as a child, only lived free in his grandfather’s town, who did not know what it was to be a “faggot”, that in Oviedo, where he grew up, he did not see a gay man until he was 19 years old: “I thought that gays had not reached Asturias. I did not know that he was gay. I thought it was like winning the lottery, but in a bad way” .
That he endured the bullying of his classmates and that today he lives “free” in a small town in Asturias, in Piloña. There he lives with his orchard, his donkeys, his neighbors, his theater, the one he is reforming, La Benéfica, because “they talk about depopulation all the time and the answer is always to demand infrastructure, but what we need are ideas, that the young people say ‘I don’t lose anything by living here’. Giving a collective self-esteem to the town and for young people to say that living in a town is very cool. The coolest thing about here is not its roundabouts. The emotional attachment to a place happens for fun, for culture”.
It is what he does in Piloña, but also what he does every time he goes on stage. Unite the traditional with the modern, folklore with the mainstream, the usual with the new. Therefore, every time he speaks, each of his sentences is a couplet. He always has them in his mouth. He sings you Suspiros de España and serves you coffee – the usual coffee, not Nespresso – in a jug shaped like a “cock”. “”I like to rant on the outside”, he acknowledged last night to Jordi Évole. And he rants, of course he rants.
“We lack a lot of collective self-esteem. It seems that loving Spain is putting on your bracelet and covering up all the bad things. Wanting a place, loving Spain, is recognizing mistakes and correcting them. The more you want a place, the more you want to improve it.” Each sentence by Rodrigo Cuevas sticks, because without shouting, without insulting, without being disrespectful, without going into the so fashionable “and you more” or “and you less” he says what many are silent about, but think.
It is clear to him why he lives in a council in the eastern part of the Principality of Asturias that does not reach 7,000 inhabitants. Because for Rodrigo Cuevas that is life, because for Rodrigo Cuevas there is nothing like drinking the milk you milk, eat the meat you raise, drink the coffee from a pot. And, above all, because Rodrigo Cuevas is the demonstration that it is possible: “Older people are more reasonable, understanding, more open-minded. I never feel threatened. It’s like gays have a chip in their head that jumps out at you in the head where you can be free and where not. Here I am”.
“Older people have given me practically everything,” he continues. Older people are the ones who teach me my songs, they taught me a way of knowing and reading the world. They know many things and use memory a lot. Folklore is a very poetic way of learning about things and I try to teach it to young people, but they don’t like it.” Rodrigo Cuevas is 37 years old.
Just like his art and his music doesn’t fit with what we think should always fit. He is not a young man like those of today, as the elders would say, nor is his music like today’s, nor does it seem that he has anything to do with what is now. And maybe that’s why whoever sees him gets hooked.
He doesn’t like technology because it “destroys”, but he needs it and what he does is a kind of symbiosis, which shows that it is possible, that the two things can be combined, that you can live from both, that Rodrigo Cuevas is a fusion of these two things: “The people who work with folklore take advantage of something that we did not do, of something that does not have an owner, but it does have an owner who is its town. There is no SGAE for the towns The idea of La Benéfica is to give something back to my people because part of what I get rich with is from others.”
He says that he is no longer in the market, but he goes to Maribel’s bar on a Thursday and each one fulfills “their social function.” “It doesn’t matter what you think or who you are. Everything doesn’t matter here. At a party like this we’re all the same. Everything doesn’t matter in here. That’s mortar. Today someone fucks here.”
But to get there, Rodrigo Cuevas has had to go through what many have gone through. But there is no rancor in his words, far from it, quite the contrary. In his words there is truth and many balls. Those of saying things as they think and as they think they are, it stings whoever listens, but without any intention of stinging.
Because Rodrigo Cuevas still tells you that there is “a lot of folkloric faggot”, that young people don’t know how to flirt because “they don’t know poetry”, like “man always has that thing that you don’t dance because you look like a fagot, don’t move your hand because you look fagot and they shoehorned him into us”. They were other times, Rodrigo Cuevas also lived them. And, perhaps, because he lived through them, he has a lot to say to those whose mouths now fill up saying that “before there was more freedom.” More than one should listen to him, for example, Miguel Bosé.
“Lie. Before there was no more freedom. I heard Miguel Bosé say in El Hormiguero that in La Transición we had more freedom than now. Boy, how come you didn’t come out of the closet 40 years ago and not now? If all those you tell about your Family, when you got caught, when your father forced you to kill a deer, did that seem more freedom to you than normally raising a child in true freedom? That they see it with more freedom because they didn’t care what was going on around them Because that happens with youth, it doesn’t mean there was more freedom. It bothers them that suddenly there are people who have said ‘until now, you’re not going to laugh at me anymore, you’re not going to be able to make a joke like the one who made Tuesday and Thirteen of a battered woman.’ Of course not, it’s not laughing.” And in an instant, in half a minute, he put many in his place.
And I don’t think it was precisely Rodrigo Cuevas’ intention to put anyone in their place, but it’s enough for Rodrigo Cuevas. What need does this folklore diva have to get into any ‘fregao’? Because she was not looking for that, she was looking to show reality.
Perhaps when Jordi Évole thought of dedicating one of his programs to Rodrigo Cuevas, he only thought of people knowing him because he is worth knowing. And yet, what Rodrigo Cuevas discovered is that he can live free, you can live as you want and the rest is Chinese tales.
“The day Rodrigo was born
what planet would rule
wherever it goes
From the village to the music hall
Good star guides you.”
According to the criteria of The Trust Project