Putita

From the opening bars there is something slippery and deliberately provocative about this track — glam-rock guitar riffs with a synthetic sheen, a groove that swings its hips with theatrical self-awareness, production that winks at the listener while keeping its intentions obscured. Babasónicos in their early phase were mining a seam that ran through T. Rex and early Bowie and filtered it through the humid, chaotic Buenos Aires underground of the early nineties, and this song embodies that hybrid perfectly. The title is confrontational but the delivery is almost tender, the vocalist inhabiting a persona that is simultaneously mocking and adoring, where transgression becomes a form of affection. There is a looseness to the arrangement — keyboards floating in the margins, guitars that occasionally snarl before retreating — that gives the whole thing a live, slightly dangerous feeling. Lyrically it orbits around desire and identity, the way both can be destabilizing forces that the protagonist welcomes rather than resists. The cultural context matters here: in a country recovering from dictatorship and still negotiating what freedom meant for the body, this kind of deliberately provocative sensuality carried real charge. You listen to this at a house party where someone has made an unexpected playlist, where the volume is slightly too loud and everyone is dancing a little more than they planned.