The myth of rock endurance

The collective documentary brings together a set of six stories that suggest that maybe rock is dead, but that legends are immortal.

There is a territory in which the mythical story survives even in the XXI century. No, it is not the cinema, which perhaps lost that power when it became a machine for making sausages (which will be richer or uglier, but they are still sausages), but rock. There will be no shortage of people who affirm that this genre, which for decades was an emblem of youth rebellion and a catalyst for the eternal adolescent search, has been dead for a few years, also turned into a sausage factory. This is partially true because rock lost its revulsive character more or less with the death of Kurt Cobain. From there, marketing won the tug of war at the attitude and what currently survives on a massive scale is just the packaging within which the color photocopy of rock is sold.

However, there is a nucleus of resistance in which the essential principle of the rock soul still dwells. It is not for nothing that one of the synonyms for resistance is endurance and endurance is one of the defining characteristics of that undercurrent in which that original spirit incarnates today. The collective documentary The Peripherals brings together a set of six stories that conjure up the myth of rock endurance and with them shows that it may be true that rock is dead, but that legends are immortal.

These six episodes, each one told in the style given by its directors, rescue different figures that, although they refer to a past of glory, also show that the flame is still alive. This is how they tell the myth of Max, singer of the punk Sequestration, whose graffiti invaded the Buenos Aires walls back in the '80s, who today is a professor at the medical school. Or that of Raúl “Rulo” Fernández, a violent man from La Maquina, a combo that integrates the basic genealogy of national rock but whom almost no one remembers today. Or that of Enrique Syms, the Argentinian Henry Chinaski, legendary editor of the magazine Pigs and Fish who continues to combine his proletarian poetry with the chords lent him by a group of young bluesmen. Or the figures of Gus and Batra, responsible for the Pueyrredon Hall, an emblem of the counterculture that resisted Menemism and, if rock wants it, it will also survive the Macri era. Or that of Eddie Pequenino, father of local rock that all encyclopedias have been responsible for forgetting.

The eclectic character of these records gives Los Peripherals an aesthetic of fanzine punk, those self-managed magazines whose layout owed everything to the bastard art of collage. The richness of this work is found in those somewhat sloppy leaps that the film takes from one episode to the next, which also recovers the group spirit that usually identifies rock. Peripherals once again show that a good movie is not always the result of a sublime way, but the product of a search of its own that helps to enhance the story that is told. And in this documentary background and form could not be more intertwined.

As in all myths, in these stories, the popular plays a decisive role, while mythology always is by definition. At this point, it is again necessary to distinguish between popular and massive: none of the stories in Los Peripherals portray a massive figure or phenomenon. Perhaps the closest thing to that is the case of Pequenino, but forgetfulness has taken away that character. In this sense, the title of the film is also appropriate: it is about characters and stories that have remained on the margins and it is from there that their aura is projected in an almost always heroic way. Because generally the myth does not incarnate in the figure of the one who triumphs, but in that of the one who is defeated but still fights to maintain their dignity. That is endurance. That is rock and that is also what Los peripherals are about.

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