Lola sings

I presume that Spaniards know what Coplas sound like. I don't really. No, let's be honest I don't at all. I know it's a sort of poetic metre and, having Googled it, I now know that the copla is a form with four verses and four lines in each verse. Coplas have a musical form too. Again, remembering that I am probably wrong, think of an overwrought Spanish waily sort of song and you probably have it. On the other hand you may be thinking of something a bit too Flamenco. Andalucia is the part of Spain that supplies nearly all the clichés - the frocks, the hats, the dancing, the horses, the sherry, the bulls etc. and a strong and regularly mimicked accent. I think coplas are Andaluz too.

Not to let detail get in the way of a post there was a big, blousy woman called Lola Flores who was famous for singing coplas. I've half looked at a couple of videos and she does a lot of lifting her dress off the floor and stamping as she sings. Lola was famous for her performances on stage, screen and TV but also for saying what she thought and for not paying her taxes. I heard something on the radio about her today where she was standing up for trans women. Given that she died in 1995 and that her peak years were in the 1970s that must have been a radically brave opinion. 

So Lola is a long dead Spanish icon. She's all over the place at the moment though because of a beer advert. For Cruzcampo an Andalucian beer which I quite like but which has plenty of detractors. Given that it's owned by Heineken, they're probably right. The video is made with a technology called Deepfake which digitally places the face of one person on the body of another and generates moving images. So, in this ad the face of Lola Flores is grafted on to the body, I think, of her daughter Lolita Flores. The daughter does the voice too, but the moving face looks like Lola. 

In the ad Lola goes on about the Andalucian accent, which, as she explains isn't just about how you speak but how you put on makeup or how you dip your bread in fried egg - it's the essence of home, your roots and the importance of being true to yourself. There are lots of side references to Andaluz culture, like the painting that I've used in the heading. It's a stylish, modern ad that basks in Andalucia and features a couple of still slightly undiscovered but hip (if you still say hip) musicians including the band Califato ¾ and a singer a bit Rosalía like called María José Llergo. 

It's a talking point. I've seen newspaper articles about the ad, a slot on the TV news and an academic style interview, on an artsy radio programme, about Lola's lasting influence on popular culture. A soon as I looked on YouTube there are "making of" videos and lots of commentaries on it, as well as the original ad.

Because of the media burble about it I took more interest. I was well pleased that I knew the slightly hip musicians but there were three or four words that I didn't know. Obviously I do now. I thought a couple of them were great. Quejío for instance is a word to describe the "Aayyyy!" sound in Andaluz type songs and the other was Cochinchina which means something miles and miles away. It's based on the French word for the part of Vietnam that France first occupied in the 1860s. Remember the French got kicked out of Vietnam before the USA. How arcane is that?

Maggie says I'm a bit odd at times but I was really pleased how much of Spain I was able to extract from a, finally, inconsequential sixty second TV advert. Nice job Cruzcampo.