Spain's Perales and the music canon: Why 20th-century tunes sound better

Perales, Ana Belén, and Julio Iglesias as indicators of a changing era

Nostalgia does not explain everything. When someone plays «Camino Soria» and feels they are hearing something from another planet, they are not simply idealizing their youth: they are measuring a difference in craftsmanship. The diagnosis running through this conversation is that for decades there was an industry that paid well to professional composers, and today that infrastructure has been replaced by studio templates, prefabricated synthesizers, and AI capable of churning out songs that all sound like the same can. The complaint is not just aesthetic. It is economic.

The 20th century as a historical anomaly

There is an argument that repeats itself: the 20th century was an anomaly. Never before or after did such density of composers, arrangers, session musicians, and producers work simultaneously on the same popular repertoire. «Camino Soria» is nearly forty years old and holds up as one of the best songs in Spanish rock, according to the participants themselves. Ana Belén performs it with an elegance that seems almost exotic today. And Julio Iglesias, so often reduced to caricature, turns out to have built much of his repertoire on French and Italian originals: «J'ai oublié de vivre», by Johnny Hallyday, or material by Mario Balducci and Gianfranco Reverberi. This does not diminish his merit; it removes the excuse for those who confuse singing with vocalizing over a backing track.

The comparison launched in the debate is brutal: placing Perales next to certain current voices and bursting into tears. It is not just that Perales sings better. It is that behind Perales there was an entire apparatus—record labels, orchestras, musical directors—that has now been dismantled or become invisible.

The bottleneck is not talent, but distribution

The most uncomfortable argument is about intermediation. Radio stations no longer play what they like: they play what they are sent. According to this reading, the album of a trendy Latin artist is sustained by the musicians who played on the recording and by the production, not by the performer. Vulgarity is not a choice made by the audience; it is what reaches them. And what does not reach them, does not exist.

Hence the feeling that something has broken in the system. It is not that good musicians have stopped being born. It is that the circuit connecting them to a mass audience has narrowed until it nearly disappeared. A young person who has only listened to reggaeton and TV hits can go years without encountering multi-voice vocal harmony. The day they discover it, says one message, they have a revelation. That is not nostalgia: it is pending musical literacy.

The contagion effect: from records to cinema and series

The conversation quickly drifts toward cinema. Several participants admit having abandoned modern series after the pilot and taking refuge in classics they had left pending: «What Ever Peine to Baby Jane?», «Nights of Cabiria», «Dial M for Murder», «The Train», starring Burt Lancaster. Filtering Filmaffinity selections by high rating and year prior to 1980 becomes a method. The conclusion is the same as in music: it is not that one gets older, but that the previous canon was denser.

The parallelism has its charm. The cinematic forties and fifties—Ford, Wilder, Capra, Hitchcock, Cukor, Walsh, Huston, Chaplin, Welles, Hawks—are cited as an unrepeatable golden age. And the complaint about current cinema is formulated with the same bitterness as the complaint about music: industrial production, repeated formulas, sequels, and franchises. The shared suspicion is that the problem is not sector-specific, but rather a cultural model that rewards cheap production and easy consumption.

AI as the perfect alibi

The role of artificial intelligence appears as the main suspect. The idea that today one asks a machine to compose a song and gets something interchangeable with the previous output has a real basis: generative models are trained on the same corpus and tend toward the average. The result is a correct and bland product, lacking the risk a composer took when betting their salary on a chorus.

But it is worth avoiding oversimplification. AI has not replaced talent on its own. What it has done is lower production costs to the point where paying an arranger becomes unnecessary. If before the bottleneck was the studio, today it is attention. And attention is bought with hooks, not with harmonies.

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The prediction, with all reservations, is that the pendulum will swing back. Not due to nostalgia, but saturation. When everything sounds the same, distinctiveness becomes an asset. The doubt is how long the market will take to realize this, and whether by then anyone will remain who knows how to write a score without asking a machine.