God never closes a door without first locking the windows. Sometimes we try in vain to get in through a window already locked, only to realise that God, with so very much on His mind, might have neglected to lock another one a few feet away, For decades I tried to make my living as a songwriter in the traditional way, by having bands that recorded my songs. But I began raking it only at the beginning of the present decade, when I began composing narrocorridos for Mexican and other Spanish-speaking drug lords.
It all began in Los Angeles in 2013 when my band The Romanovs played a swanky private party in Bel-Air, a neck of the woods favoured by those who have grown too rich for Beverly Hills. In between our second and third sets, a beautifully dressed young Latino in expensive-looking sunglasses (though it was nighttime!) and Paco Rabanne asked if I might be interested in composing some songs in honour of his boss, the head of a Oaxaca-based cocaine cartel. I said that I probably would not, as I would might feel morally compromised promoting drug use, but then he wrote a figure on his business card and handed it to me, and it contained more zeroes than I have ever seen in one place. I explained that, while I’d studied Spanish at Santa Monica High School in the 1960s, I had barely retained sufficient fluency to order lunch from one of the taco trucks that had become so plentiful in Los Angeles, and was relieved when he said I would be teamed with a translator/poet.
It turned out to be great fun. I would write a paragraph about the cartel kingpin, and the translator, Refugio, who encouraged me to call him Oojie, would translate it into rhymed Spanish. It turns out that I still have the first paragraph I sent to him, on my hard drive:
El Magnifico [as the subject of the song enjoyed being called] is a man of extraordinary virility, courage, wisdom, and compassion.
His penis is the size of a pre-adolescent’s forearm, and his testicles are the size of the navel oranges for which Veracruz is famous. He snickers disdainfully at the attempts of the corrupt and stupid federales to arrest him, and leaves such gigantic tips at the bars and bistros in which he likes to wine and dine beautiful young women with small waists and enormous breasts who find his wealth and virility irresistible that the restaurateurs are able to send their children to Spanish universities. Several such children have become medical researchers, whose work is sure to benefit all of mankind.
Oojie and I wrote 15 songs for El Magnifico, but all good things must end, and this past February we were advised that El Magnifico “wanted to go in a new direction”, and that our services would no longer be required. I emailed a couple of other cartel kingpins, one in Panama and the other in Honduras, but heard back from neither, and was pretty despondent up until last Friday afternoon, when Amy W—, an assistant to White House press secretary Sarah Fuckabee (oops!) Sanders, contacted me to ask if I might be interested in composing a new national anthem celebrating Donald J. Trump, to be entitled “Play Loud Thy Trumpets, Angels”. Amy thought it might be a very good idea to note in the song that President Trump's penis is the size of a pre-adolescent’s forearm, and his testicles the size of the grapefruits of Mar-a-Lago, that he snickers disdainfully at both Robert Mueller and CNN, and is passionately loved by his people.
I was one of 123 songwriters invited to compete. The winner would receive $25,000 and the admiration of a country that found The Star Spangled Banner difficult to sing, and lyrically nonsensical. The losers, of course, would be stiffed.
Intent on winning the competition. I have been listening for inspiration to Russian martial music of the Stalinist era, and already have some melodic ideas I think Ms. Fuckabee (oops) Sanders and others are really going to like. But I’m not saying I don’t welcome your supportive prayers.
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