Soda Stereo and their Iconic place in the New National Rock Scene
Soda Stereo’s popularity coincided with Argentina’s move towards a democracy in the early 80s. As Guillermo Toscano notes in his essay ‘Rock argentino: letras, orígenes, identidad’ which appears in ‘El rock argentino en cien canciones’ 2003, young people, sick of politics, the hearings about the systematic torture and disappearance of thousands of Argentines and the worsening economic outlook, turned to the fresh sound that would project them out of their violent past and towards a modern Buenos Aires. Soda Stereo’s songs with powerful guitar riffs and words about love, sex, anonymity and contemporary life in the ‘city of fury’ mirrored the zeitgeist of the time.
Since then, Argentina has known many great bands that have reinvented pop, rock, punk, and even hip hop in Spanish, fusing it with local sensibilities and instruments. But, the legacy of Soda Stereo is still in the air as witnessed by their instant sell-out concerts as they announced their reunion in 2007. To this day the city of fury still craves the sound that launched its national rock scene and Soda Stereo remain rock legends not only in Argentina, but also in the rest of Latin America.
