Intro
You can skip this introduction; it won’t affect the story. I wanted to say that this whole album manifestation is in English because the songs are in English. I’m proud to be Chilean and native Spanish-speaker. When I began writing music, I was 20 years old, and all my first compositions were in English. At that time, I didn’t think more than doing something by instinct. Wanna Die Dancing, Addiction and Macho were the only tracks I produced from a group of 20 written songs. Each one of them means something different to me. Wanna Die Dancing is a fight between my spirit and my body. Addiction is about my love for sex. Macho is about brutal discrimination and hate between men. When I decided to stop writing songs in English and write in Spanish, 7 years after Macho (the short album) was produced, I realized that the reason I did it was because it was a way to hide my real feelings. I’m not pretending to be an English-speaking artist, I believe language is just another art form, like a painting. Spanish is, let’s say, yellow. English, blue. And the meaning under the words is the final result of all the colors on the canvas. The story is divided into 10 individual chapters. I was inspired by humanity and the meaning behind the songs. The stories inside may be part of my experience, but also, they might be fiction. Macho Story, written by Picho in 2021.
Photographs by: Camila Grandi (1,2,4,10), Gabriela Calderón (3,5,7,8,9), Richard Baptista (10).
Chapter one:
It seems like humans are here to become something quite hard to understand. Chances for knowing what we really want are just minimum, so we act unconsciously and conscious at the same time. That makes us humans, unlike machines. Machines are made to work under orders, to complete tasks. Since then, it’s easier to kill through machines. No human prints on someone else’s skin. Machines sometimes need help from humans to function, but love is really transforming machines into humans every day. We need to change, or machines will kill us each other. Not by coincidence but by an order. Electro Machine was stolen from a scientific lab and its hardware allows people to torture people to death within limits.
Chapter two:
All the things that you can remember easily might have touched your feelings in an extreme way. Maybe it was pain. Maybe it was pleasure or happiness. But sometimes, you are not waiting for a flashback to appear in your life. You might be at work or having dinner with your best friend. Suddenly, an emotion controls your whole system and ties you down to your place. It seems that at night, all emotions become easier to manage. I don’t know if it’s just me. The cold inside the dark, the blindness given by the city lights, all of that makes me feel a bit of freedom. They make me know that something great is going to come. So, in case you don’t know what life is hiding from you, try to have sex and imagine what you really want. You can lie to someone, but your body won’t lie to you. You just know what your body wants. You know how to find that pleasure in tiny things, or weird things (no limitations). But when the sun arises, again, you realize that another day is coming. Your whole heart begins to pump again, and you prepare yourself to face the moment and the past, which comes inside memories and words.
Chapter three:
Now that you are ready to see reality, be aware of everything. I feel wet and I have some difficulty to breathe normal. The feeling I am trying to secure is often called anxiety. I really don’t know what that is. I’m scared. Yes, I am really scared while I’m typing this text. I’m disturbed digging through my past wounds. Should I share them with you? What are you going to do with my confessions? Would you try to understand me or grind them inside of you and speak to yourself about your life, about your pain, about your mistakes? I really wish you could take those two paths. I really do. Do you always smile when you place yourself in the past? The sad thing is that doesn’t usually happen. It’s so easy to change from one state to another. It’s like gas. It escapes! It can be toxic! It can be oxygen! I had for so much time the burden of protecting my real feelings. And many other things. I think for almost 10 years the verb I put in action the most was “hide”. Hiding is what machines are made for. To hide human’s slow rate of work, hide evidence, hide real feelings. The moment I set myself outside was liberating. And it was not the typical thing that everyone may think you need to do to change: did I went to a specific trip? Did I speak to some spiritual human? Did I speak to a machine? What I did was to listen carefully. Hiding comes with silence. In that silence, I really took the time to listen to strangers and known humans. I realized that many of my animal family were in desperate need for help. No one knew they needed help. What I did discover was that humans feel pain, and everyone grows with pain. It was an enlighten moment for me. I did not feel alone for the first time. I just knew what my position in this life was. To transform spirits into bodies and bodies into spirits. If you can’t see under the words inside the water, you may get confused and caught fast by the silence. Don’t let anyone put a chain around your neck, push you through the mist of loneliness. If you can’t realize you are being put on a belt machine, singing songs, or working (or whatever action you may imagine), you will end in an eternal maze. You can escape from that box. The only way is to open your eyes and learn to love. Love is a friend. Have you ever lost a friend?
Chapter four:
Once, I repeated to a friend that I needed love to stay alive. “I need love to stay alive. I need love to stay alive. I need love to stay alive”. Do we really need love to stay alive? I’m addicted to my mind. It’s so free to think whatever you want. No one can judge what’s inside your mind, until you make it happen. When I was in my darkest moment, I was caught by superficiality. We are all trapped by a different knot, and I guess that was one of my three most critical smashes in life. You can easily see your pain when you listen carefully to other living beings. But what happens in a world where everyone is repressed? Voices will be misheard forever sometimes. Artists may have an advantage because their work is to express themselves and everyone seeks for their points of view. But what if artists just speak through their art and not during their private life? Let’s make a critical comparison. Put art and artist in different tags. The artist is the human part, the vital. The art is the artist’s work, the machine. If you just express and speak through your art, you will still be consumed in your fears. Now take art – artist and place it into your life. We are really in a comfort zone through machines and technology, we let them speak for us! Wanderings are needed to take us out of machines. In the darkest moment of my life, I bought stuff to improve my machines, the superficial part of me. Yes, I want to confuse you with my words, so you can stay for a moment and put everything together, like a puzzle. Do you like sex? My favourite position is when one is faced down, commonly known as “4”. My heart was becoming rot. I didn’t need love. I needed life. I needed passion. I became so dry from the inside that I thought my happiness was X but was Y. There was a moment when I was a bit more satisfied. I started to feel free when I began to listen and realize all humans were injured through their lives. Just like me. But what did really change me? Death. Thinking about my past. Those two portals took me off this world and sent me to my deepest thoughts, where you only see the light in your imagination, where you only can touch yourself to wake you up. You will always be a human unless you turn into a machine. Machines like humans can die.
Chapter five:
Do you consider yourself a machine? I think it’s different to think we are machines to really be one. Machines have no gender discrimination. Machines are built up to satisfy something in particular. Wait…humans too! If you spend your whole day naming functions that machines do for you, you may wonder if you could replace one machine. What you can’t replace is the fact that you have a whole gender history underneath your belly. Technology has been grateful and kind to correct biology. But, what about broken and hurt souls underneath the skin? What about men? How is life as a man, or as a boy? Is it all about power and discrimination? I would say survival and liberation. Being a man has affected me since I was a kid. I often see myself as a powerful man, but I don’t think I’m that strong. I often want things to challenge me, but many times I end up alone. They have told me being alone is normal and that I shouldn’t desperate. If I have fallen in despair, I may have ended surrounded by pressure. The strongest pressure is the one inside your mind, when you doubt yourself, when you take your pride from your hands and let your conscious walk for you. When I was a kid, I played videogames and I chose girls as characters. Some older men thought it was not correct that boys play as girls. I heard so many things against my choice, I never did cry, but I felt fear most part of my childhood. Fear of hearing a painful word against me, just for being myself. When I grew up, I began to modify my mind to an enormous ego, never forgetting to be kind and to share with friends, but my ego was out of control at times. Do I see this same defensive tactic in other men? Have I found men’s fragility? It’s just a gender. As I tended to speak more about the nice part of life, I hid my pain most of the time, so I never realized this was changing my happiness to a fake smile. Yes, I felt happiness many times. But I had an inside voice that wanted to speak. Your inside voice is the one you should trust. If you are happy making love, enjoy it. If you feel sad doing something, you will not stop it if you don’t listen to yourself. I began to understand that men are all hurt in different ways, I’m just one more. Women are hurt also, and their stories are as cruel as you may imagine. So, I ended up writing on my desk with lead pencil: “humans should not be classified by their gender when we speak about pain and traumas. Being a boy, trans, girl, or no binary, won’t really take our spirit from our body, so why should we lose time in educating people? Sadly, not all people and generations are open minded. I have found amazing men and tough men. I have met kind women and selfish women. But I have never found someone totally healed. Humanity is ill. And the system is sauntering so fast that time is not enough to save people from killing themselves. Or to stop someone who is trying to end someone else’s life! It’s painful. It’s unbelievable. And machines are there, to give us company in the dark. But machines can kill us too. Don’t let that happen. Don’t let them fool you”. Someone is knocking my door at this moment. It’s a man. I open the door and with his fist, he pushes my face to the desk three times. I start to bleed and ask him to stop. He can’t listen to me because he is yelling madly. Then, he pulls me to the window until it breaks. All I see is blood and tiny glass on the floor. I don’t want someone to come and rescue me because I know I will see glass across my skin. My soul hurts, I wonder what I did wrong.
Chapter six:
And the boy was lost. The sand from the ground kept stomping his face with the wind blowing with no mercy. The houses were all locked, small, and big houses, all prepared to the worst. No one wanted to come outside because of the storm. When his eyes stopped being hit by the sand, the boy washed them with his saliva. The sand tasted like something he has tasted before. He then, continued to find an exit. He was lost in darkness and the moon was turquoise. Then he ran and drank water from a lake. The water began to pour like a fountain, and he heard a desperate sound from one of the cities. An avalanche of people was running towards him. He didn’t know what to do. If he decided to cross the lake, he may sink and drown, but if I he ran facing the madness, they would break his bones. He just stood paralyzed. People pushed him to the lake and then walk on him. They all began to steal the water, ignoring that the boy was suffocating. The lake dried in less than 12 minutes. Everyone came back to the city with water in their hands. The boy was in the center of the dried lake, trying to survive. He was wondering if he should have stayed home. Crawling like a snake, he continued to scape. Inside his heart, he knew the storm may return. He stayed under a white thing. He couldn’t see what it was, he was too weak to think and to remember how reality was. He was thirsty and may have internal injuries. He began to cry. He missed his family. But if he stayed there in the ground, he might die. He was in despair because he didn’t have strength to continue. The temperature fell quickly, and the boy began to tremble. He said in silence: “I might die now, but I’m not prepared to die. Wish I could have just one more day”. The boy’s body was slowly turning off by hypothermia. The tall white pillar was frozen. The boy was fighting against his eyes not to close eternally. His hands hugged the white structure, and his instinct pushed him to climb the pillar with his body. The boy was climbing with an unexpected force. His body became warm and so he continued. He climbed for almost an hour, sweating, and moving the clouds with his feet. He reached the top and for a moment he felt his whole life in his face. Though in heights there are no signs of sand, the boy had the taste of the sand in his tongue. His face smiled as he thought he had the perfect view of humanity. From the height he looked down and realized people were all inside a labyrinth.
Chapter seven:
I asked this man to tell me his thoughts about life. I think I wanted to learn how another man sees the world. His view is his world. My view is my world. And we both stand on the same planet. I called him and we got together. He told me that we all grow up wanting to have sex like animals. He told me his girlfriend was the only one that could make him smile. He told me he gave up his dreams. That night, I sat down in my bedroom watching the ceiling and imagining how my life could have been if I was another person. What would my dreams have been? When I take showers, I usually put music with the maximum volume possible. This morning, I wondered if I gave up my dreams or if I was in the right direction, while the water fell softly through my legs. I have encountered barriers for being a macho. I have always love being a man, or a boy. My masculinity has always been on a mission. At the age of 7, I asked myself if I was supposed to be born as a girl, rather than a boy. At school, a friend heard me and never forgot about this. Maybe I shifted her innocent mind at school. We were just 7 years old! My mind always surprises me. My loneliness has taught me to stay strong and not to be afraid of thinking. Even if I cried many times as a child, happiness has put me in nice situations. I feel grateful of my family and friends. Lovers and one-night stands. I have given my all through my whole life. But sometimes I feel selfish to express my happiness. I have seen people spiritually lost. I feel guilty sometimes when I hear others’ misery. Technology allows us to connect with people from many parts of the world, under different circumstances. Sometimes I wish they could tell me something with value when I need it. Sharing is emotional. I must admit I love to kiss passionately and go crazy during love. But this same action has caused humans to dig on their traumas. So where are the limits? Machines may tell us what to do. And our bodies are the only thing we have for sure. I remember what ended the man to be in control by strangers: he gave up his dreams. I believe a dream is the memory of the childhood.
Chapter eight:
Repression will always end in your true colors spreading out.
Repression will lead you to open your eyes.
Repression will want you to make love and experiment.
Repression will hurt you so bad you will never forget.
Repression might end your life before you want to stop breathing.
Repression is a machine. A killing machine disguised in words and actions.
Repression will make girls feel ashamed of their bodies and hide.
Repression will turn gay men into eternal shadows of loneliness and fear.
Repression will break families apart.
Repression will manipulate men to hurt others till death.
Repression is food and water with no guarantee for the world.
Repression digs deeper in the lake of envy and remorse.
Repression is one of the most used words in the planet, and it’s not because it’s popular, it’s because the amount of repression happening every day is abundant.
Repression is power. Repression is weakness.
Repression during sex is violation. Repression in a relationship is disaster. Repression will turn kids into answering machines and not into free spirits as they should be. Repression will end lives and visions. Repression is afraid of dreams and faith. Repression is afraid of strong people with great ideas. Repression is afraid of art. Repression is not a drug. Repression is not death or survival. Repression will not always make you bleed. Repression is not feminine nor masculine. Repression is not a world. Repression is alive and as a heartbeat will pump your head every day and may upset you. Repression may be eternal. Repression may be limited. Repression is not the reason you should stop. Repression is not the reason we should stop loving each other. Repression must be taken as a task, as a lesson, but what could us be without repression? Freedom is not repression.
How can we end repression if we are consumed by repression, as we are machines controlled by a living being called repression?
Chapter nine:
Yes, I have found love in men and women. Yes, I have kissed men and women. Yes, I have been judged and discriminated. Yes, I have been cruel and mean. Yes, I have changed. Those are phrases I don’t want to use anymore. I don’t have to confess everything to say something. I’m so tired of fighting for myself. I want to fight for others! Society locks our hearts and wishes under disrespectful patterns, and sadly, in suffering. I want your love; I want your body. I really wish we could connect one day. I know you want. You will enjoy it! But, for now, I must break the wall you put between your desire and what’s right. Who was the writer of the limits of what is accepted? Many nights I asked myself if I’m addicted to pain, because I tend to feel passion on hard things. May I tell you a true story of my life? Do you have time? When I fell in real love for the first time, when I lost my virginity and all that stuff that makes you excited to life when we are young, I faced a horrible breakdown. On the other hand, my social life was being a disaster. I felt outcasted. Alone. And I gave up to everything to save that relationship but never realized the problem was in my mind. I was addicted! I felt like love was a war and I was defeated! I cried almost every day. Torturing myself with sad songs. This darkness lasted for 6 months. Pain and pain. But then, I felt alive again. I wondered if life is about killing yourself like in a game, again and again. I wish I can help you at this point. Do you feel addicted to something? I know addictions may harm, but I also think addictions help us to shape our future. So, I’m ready to step into the hardest question to answer: am I sane?
Chapter ten:
For many years I tried to avoid thinking about death. “What’s going to happen to me after my heart stops beating?” That question pumped desperation. I lost my calm close to tears many times. But through the days and years, I began to realize it’s my destiny. It’s written everywhere and many men and women have invested thousands of years finding that answer. What if we just stop searching for the answer and start to enjoy our life? I know I’m going to die. I know that all my effort will rest someday, somehow. I feel adrenaline when I push myself to the fence of life. I’m scared of heights. In fact, I hate planes. But life is not just about to be in extreme places. Life is also about being in extreme positions, between physical and spiritual edges. When my mind learned that I was going to die, I stopped being worried about that. It was a worry I released off my hands. So, I asked myself, do I really want to die? For the moment, I want to survive as long as I can. I have some dreams yet to touch. Freedom allows us to die and revive every day, with the first solar heat in the morning and with the last moon breeze at night. For sure, I want to die dancing. When I dance, I reach freedom in its pure form! No one can understand how dancing and moving turns my heart alive, it’s like time stops and I just live my life. When I feel sick and can’t dance for days it’s almost death. So, I want to die, die dancing. I don’t care, I’m a free man! I’m a free spirit! Does it make sense to you? I also feel free when I’m having good sex. I like the sounds and to turn my mind into a sex-machine. After dancing for hours, I need to rest. After that rest I resuscitate and will get ready for the next dance of my life. That’s how this story ends. Love, dance and enjoy this persecution called life. You must stop and remember your past, so you can stay connected to your mind. And open your eyes to see that darkness will come in different shapes and forces. Shapes of humans. Shapes of dreams. Just pull yourself to your heart, be honest and prepare to die…. Not today! When you feel it’s the right time. Use your voice, make wise choices, make stupid choices…. you are free! Be proud of yourself and set your body into a human machine with control. Don’t hide anymore! Scream what you want! You want more? Ask for more! Reach freedom. Search equality. Love yourself.
