2023-05-15 03:08:57
It happened to a lot of people. The first time they heard camel they thought “they are funny, but this is not for me.” In that Spain of the early nineties so eager for modernity that everything that came from abroad was always better, or what came from here but resembled what was abroad, the music of the then Madrid trio evoked coins falling from the terraces of the humble neighborhoods on goats and dilapidated keyboards, marginalization, poverty. Nothing cool.
Those were the years in which Dioni Martín, Ángeles Muñoz and Miguel Ángel Cabrera grappled with the paradox of success at gas stations and street markets in the face of being ignored by the media, a war that ended in victory for popular support. The cultural elites continued to reject that Camela could be a cultural backbone of real Spain, but there came a time when the press was forced to react.
«The people are sovereign, they are the ones who dictate what they want and what they don’t. The masses are the ones in charge”, Dioni opined about the sudden change in attitude, not only in the media but in the whole world. Suddenly, that fan of Camela that is in all the groups of friends stopped receiving slaps and ridicule and became a visionary, and even the ‘indie’ festivals began to count on them to deny a snobbery that had stopped being cool suddenly. Criticism of Camela was automatically identified with elitism and became a public enemy, and festival music became the creed of the exaltation of the popular as something pure, free of intellectual circumspection built on a sort of classist cultural supremacism.
«There have been many people who have suffered hunger, hardship and cold for openly confessing in some social spheres that they listened and that they liked Camela. Thank God, times have been changing, they have evolved and these people have taken a step forward, “joked the singer, hallucinating with the change in perception.
The reality is that in popular spheres, Camela is probably the most reliable community musical cement that has existed since the hits of town festivals in the eighties. It will never sound on the terraces of the Salamanca neighborhood, much less in those of the Miraconcha or Pedralbes neighborhoods, but it is a (white) Spain brand, and next Monday in Madrid, during the San Isidro festivities, the show will be on the stage and also in La Pradera, where all those techno-rumba songs that are already Spanish pop classics in their own right will be danced and sung.
pick and shovel
Members of the group had been teased quite a bit in their early days, and had to work with picks and shovels to reclaim what was theirs. His managers registered Camela in his name, they kept almost all the income from rights since the singers only received 1% royalties, and they also hoarded a good part of the money from the performances. So when the money began to flow more and more, Dioni got tired of dividing it into three equal parts because her record company did not like the compositions of Miguel Ángel Cabrera and they were always left out of the records. Cabrera left, and once they became a duo, Camela established itself as one of the essential names in Spanish popular music in recent decades.
And also one of the most committed, and without boasting about it: when crises hit the economy of their fans, they tend to lower their cachet because they want to continue being “normal people who make music for normal people”, and in life they are it would happen to fall into the same elitism that crushed them by putting up VIP areas at their concerts or charging for having ‘Meet & Greet’ meetings with their followers. And it is that Dioni and Ángeles, making distinctions for money did not suit them when they were poor, nor now when they are reasonably rich. When they saw the big cows coming, when they signed their first millionaire contract in 1999, they went to celebrate with their manager and when ordering an expensive wine, Dioni had the reflex act of mixing it with soda. “You, gypsy, let this be the last time you do that with a 16,000 pesetas wine,” the representative told him. «I did not know about luxuries and I still do not have expensive tastes. That is not my life. I was and still am a man from the neighborhood”, the artist would recall two decades later.
That boy born “between shacks and mud” in the town of San Cristóbal de Los Ángeles south of Madrid, who left school at the age of thirteen “out of necessity” and who became a teenage father just a couple of years later, and his neighbor , a girl from a family of seven children, had become true heroes of the people although the industry, which continues without giving them a single award or recognition, still does not want to acknowledge it.
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