Joan Manuel Serrat educated me with his songs. I know every verse of “Mediterráneo” by heart. Every time I go to a presentation of his, I come out “new”, I feel that life is worth living and I always learn something. In short: I admire and love him since I was a young girl.
I have sung his songs in my shows. My favorite is “Lucia”. Truly, he is a unique being.
Reading Serrat’s recent speech in Costa Rica, sent to me by a friend, I felt less “different”. I definitely share his worldview and his way of analyzing the mess we live in today. This should be read by the whole world:
“In the last years, the technological and scientific growth we have experienced has been extraordinary. But the loss of the moral values of our society has also been very great. Terrible damage has been done to nature, many of it irreparable, and the corruption that power has seeped into the whole of society is shameful.
More than an economic crisis, I would say that we are going through a crisis of the model of life. And yet, the conformism with which part of society views it is surprising. As if it were a nightmare from which sooner or later we will wake up. Spectators and victims seem to hope that those who have brought us here will save us.
We need to recover the democratic and moral values that have been replaced by the vileness and greed of the market, where everything has a price, where everything is bought and where everything is sold. It is a right and an obligation to restore memory and claim a future for a youth that needs to recognize and be recognized. Maybe we don’t know which way is. Maybe we don’t know where to get to before. But we do know which paths we should not take again. I hope that you, good, educated and tolerant people, will know how to judge my words by their intention, rather than by the way in which I have been able to express myself.
Meanwhile, let the musicians not stop playing their instruments. And that the poets do not stop raising their voices. May the cries of anguish not make us deaf. And that the everyday does not become normality, capable of turning our hearts to stone. Thank you very much”. Joan Manuel Serrat.
The singer-songwriter will go down in music history. And what happens today in the world, no. And don’t tell me that Serrat and I are old. The world is wrong, the music our children listen to, too. We are taking the wrong path. Values do not change, they are eternal.
Sex education is not indoctrination. Obscenity and repeated noise (except, in some cases, in Colombia and the Dominican Republic), is not music, it is not art. Remember: human beings cannot live without true art.
I would just add something. We do know the way: recover the values, work with the family and justice, and remove the majority of politicians.
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