Rock Poetry in Post-Dictatorship Argentina

Book excerpt: This book is a historical and discursive study of rock poetry produced in Argentina, during the “transition to democracy,” in the 1980s. Lucas R. Berone analyzes the lyrics and albums of a heterogeneous group of Argentine rock artists and bands, who began their careers at that time, to demonstrate the emergence and functioning of a new grammar of discursive production, he terms the “grammar of the incognitus (or hidden) subject.” This grammar is a very specific and distinct way of elaborating the enunciative relationship between the artist and his audience when compared to the traditional countercultural rock discourse. The author asserts that the new discursive grammar, focused on the singularity of the present and the “self,” will produce the last important revolution in the tradition of the so-called “rock nacional,” motivating critical responses in the leaders of the movement.