On May 9, 1964, the Los Prisioneros drummer was born in Santiago. Not only did he contribute behind the ship, but he also composed one of the few songs not attributed solely to Jorge González that has become a classic. Here is his story.
It was May 9, 1964 when Miguel Tapia Mendoza came into the world 14 years later, when he met jorge gonzalez And Claudio Narea at Liceo 6 in San Miguel they gave life to the most important musical group of the 80s, Prisoners . Of the lot, Tapia is the oldest by age, followed by González (from December 6, 1964) and then Narea (from July 13, 1965). These icy classrooms will give life to their training as music lovers, then as instrumentalists. Under the absolute direction of González, they will release their first album, The voice of the 80s in 1984.
Of the 10 songs that make up this first flagship album, only one is not entirely composed by Jorge González. Who killed Marilyn? credited to González and Tapia, but mainly composed by the latter. It was during those years in San Miguel, between curfews and Giant Saturday, when the young drummer wrote the theme.
“I was a kid, I was around 18, but I had a super critical eye at the time. You turned on the TV and every day there was news speculating about Marilyn’s death, and I wondered all the time: who cares that she is dead? If much more important things were happening here!”, he commented during an interview with Publimetro, in 2016.
In the book pride and passion (Vía X, 2016), by Julio Osses, Tapia develops the version a little more. “The idea for Marilyn came about because I had been hearing for years that the anniversary of Marilyn’s death was being celebrated and new information kept coming out about who killed her. Then I noticed that every year a different version was coming out; I started writing the lyrics as if I didn’t care about that bitch, i.e. who killed Marilyn, if he was an extremist, if he was a Marxist, if he was a communist… I don’t understand the lyrics anymore, I don’t understand anymore I don’t remember, but it was kind of a laugh at that (…) Part of it is mine, then Jorge finished the lyrics and I took the music in my head, I hummed it to Jorge and we did it. In the end, that was the idea: how many eggs with Marilyn Monroe?
In those early years, González and Tapia pretended to be almost a kind of Lennon/McCartney emulator, but the course of the river took a different course. In fucking greaser (RIL, 2005), by Emiliano Aguayo, Jorge González explained it this way: “At the beginning, we composed together, yes. Miguel, I remember, did more letters than I did. And Claudio also composed at the beginning. We all composed when we started. What happens is that in the end we chose the material that was going to remain for the first album and my songs were better… it’s not that I was upset, but in the end we saw that he really had fingers for the piano to compose, it was me. Moreover, it was by far the one who composed the most.
Anyway, for Miguel Tapia the song was nothing more than a joke . “A lot of people think I was a fan of Marilyn, and that’s not true. The song was a satire, that’s why we included Mickey Mouse, the press… But I insist that at At that time, the important thing was something else, like the violation of human rights. And of course… Monroe’s death served as a distraction from the media.”
In these early 80s, as the dictatorship celebrated its 10 years in power, the first dissonant voices began to emerge. Anonymity allowed by the crowd meant that when Los Prisioneros played the song live and Miguel sang the phrase Who killed Marilyn? the gallada replied: “The pacos!”. Tapia assured years later that it happened spontaneously.
“If we think about this answer? No not at all. In fact, I remember a concert in Lota where people were always saying “los pacos”. As a result of that, the police entered the venue and wouldn’t let us finish the concert,” he told Publimetro.
At the dawn of the 2000s, when the group returned from its first separation and was on tour in Chile, Jorge González took the time to analyze song by song the group’s records up to that moment (2002) . The particular interview was posted on the band’s website and there the frontman referenced the song, again with his short but precise phrases. “It’s the oldest song left on the album. It was a letter that Miguel came to school with and I did the music on the piano. The song was a killer, the sound was super good There was a lot of The Cars in it: the snare sounded really loud, but the bass drum not so much. It was the most instantaneous song of all ”.
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Source: Latercera
I am David Jack and I have been working in the news industry for over 10 years. As an experienced journalist, I specialize in covering sports news with a focus on golf. My articles have been published by some of the most respected publications in the world including The New York Times and Sports Illustrated.
