A mi ciudad: Critical Listening in the Symbolic Construction of Santiago in 1980

Based on the need to develop an interpretative and critical perspective of musicology,which has been postponed by the prevailing analytical approach focusing on musical writing,this article asks how popular song has symbolically built in the city. To do this,I consider fourteen songs recorded in the 1980s in Chile with Santiago as a central theme. Most of them expressed the symbolic construction of a social space stressed both by the military dictatorship and the neoliberal economic model. During this decade more songs inspired by the city of Santiago were recorded than ever before,despite the extent to which the prevailing censorship affected their production processes and mediation,generating new questions for the study of Chilean popular song in the 1980s. The article focuses on the case of “A mi ciudad” by Luis Lebert and Santiago del Nuevo Extremo,the first song to the city of Santiago of the eighties,which has since held a predominant position in the country ‘s memory. I also want to address aspects of canon and repertoire in popular music as well as forms of circulation and song production under dictatorship. I propose an intertextual study of “A mi ciudad” considering a cluster of musical,literary,performative,audio,visual and discursive texts,from a listening socially and historically situated. I propose that it is in the inter-relationship of these texts where the song is formed,so analyzing them separately would not allow to fully grasp their aesthetic and symbolic aspects.