Salud, Dinero, Amor

"Salud, Dinero, Amor" carries the weight of an old Argentine toast — health, money, love, the three things everyone wants and almost nobody has simultaneously — and Los Redonditos de Ricota transform it into something darker and more ambivalent than the phrase's folk-wisdom origins suggest. The track moves with a driving, mid-tempo urgency, the rhythm section establishing a persistent pulse that feels equal parts celebratory and desperate. The guitars are thick and insistent without being heavy in any metal sense — there is a funk undercurrent, a looseness in the hips of the thing, that prevents it from ever becoming purely grim. El Indio Solari's delivery here has a sardonic warmth to it, like someone toasting at a party they know will end badly but are determined to enjoy anyway. His phrasing is loose, almost conversational in places, then suddenly sharpens into emphasis when a line lands with particular weight. The lyrics take the familiar blessing and interrogate it, turning sentimentality inside out to expose the anxiety beneath. This song belongs to a very specific Argentine social experience: the simultaneous embrace and distrust of aspiration, the knowledge that the system dispenses its gifts arbitrarily and briefly. It is music for the complicated joy of being alive in a country that is always either rising or falling — a feeling those who know it recognize immediately.