FERMIN MUGURUZA: 40 YEARS OF LIVE MEMORY

On the 20th of June 1984 he published his first demo with his band Kortatu in Irun. Since then it has been 40 years; 40 years making the world’s B side dance, 40 years in the frontline.

In these 4 decades, has metabolised the punk, rock, reggae, dub, hip-hop, soul, drum & bass, funk and any other musical style he has encountered along the way, making sing, scream and kick various generations. He has made apparently unsingable words like “fascism”, “hypocrisy” or “dam bourgeois” dance and invited Bertolt Brecht, Mikel Laboa, Angela Davis, Rosie Pérez, Malcolm X and Sarri to that particular choreography of his. Because we are not alone and we neither want to be, Fermin Muguruza has provoked the craziest connections here and there, and in the same way that all the glory of the world fits in one corn grain, he has shown again and again that all the nations of the world fit in this little corner of ours. This way, when we shout “long live the people!”, we don’t exactly know which people/nation we are referring to, and in that unknown lies, in reality and depth, the nucleus of all this.

By the time Nike launched “Just do it”, we already had learnt of the existence of “Do it yourself”, thank you Esan Ozenki. Because Fermin Muguruza is not only What, he is also How: he has taught us how things can be done, how to protect our independence, how to maintain coherency and not to draw away from what we would like to be in these smoking times.

Fermin Muguruza is a strange force of nature that will drag you away even if you don’t want to. That’s why in a few minutes thousands and thousands of tickets for his two concerts in December have been sold. And next year he will go around the world on an international tour.

Let nobody think that it’s nostalgy: there will be quantic concerts, where many generations will converge in the same space, where the dictatorship of linear chronology will be destroyed, where the space between what we were, what we are and what we can be, where the good and the bad will merge, where, all and all, the chaos that is life will be celebrated.

Eider Rodriguez