Wos’ emotion after winning the Gardel de Oro: “It’s a great happiness”

Shortly before midnight on Tuesday, at the Movistar Arena, it became known who the Gardel de Oro 2022 model was. And this year the chosen one was Valentín Oliva, known to almost everyone by his artistic pseudonym: Wos. The rise of him, from that rapper who intertwined in cock fights to this soloist congratulated by Fito Páez, and who unites like no other the separate dome of the Redonditos de Ricota that make up Indio Solari and Skay Beilinson, deserves the worn-out qualification of meteoric.

“I choose not to expect anything because there is nothing to do either”, Wos replied to the question about the rumor that during the previous one gave him as winner of the Gardel Dorado. Exhausted but happy, after winning that award e consecrate himself as the most victorious of the nighthe underwent the ritual of speaking to the press.

-What was the first thing that came to your mind when you heard your name as the winner of the Gardel de Oro?

– Nothing, total emptiness. And then, of course, I embrace you with my compliments. It’s a feeling I’m still experiencing, so there’s not a lot of analysis I can process. But it is a great happiness, especially for the great fellow musicians who also received this award.

-What does Dark Ecstasy mean to you?

-It is that feeling of contrast, of contradiction in many things. That light in the shadow from which you have to open up a little, the chiaroscuro, the ups and downs. And he was also a great companion throughout that whole moment: that record is a great companion for me.

-Maradona said he and a select group of people know how heavy the World Cup weighs. How much does Gardel de Oro weigh and what does that teamwork that you highlighted on stage mean?

-I don’t know much about math or grams, but I grabbed it and it floated, it radiates powers (laughs). As for the team, being with the people you love is the best thing that can happen to you, so working with them, with my family and friends, makes them participate too.

-With these Gardel Awards you have legitimized urban music. What did you think, at the same time, to have won in the rock categories?

-The urban scene is much wider and there are people who have been doing it for many years, like in the squares. There are many other characters who take urban music to the top, but it’s nice to meet a lot of colleagues who crossed paths with me when I was fourteen when I wasn’t even making music, it’s something beautiful. And this thing about categories is crazy, it’s something that has always cost me and still costs me today. It’s nice to have gone through those categories, because the album goes through all of this and allows you to get together and share with people who make very different music.

-What does Gardel mean to you and what does it mean to be Gardel?

-I think Gardel is an icon that represents history. I just think that in rap, saving great distances, there is something that tango has left in the way of interpreting, of saying, of telling one’s stories. And in placing a lot of emphasis on how to say it in terms of expressiveness. I’m not a big connoisseur of tango as a genre, but the subject of the lyrics is something that has always interested me a lot, so it’s a great source, as it has a lot of amazing games.

-After the pressures endured after the launch of Caravan, and what that debut meant up to Dark Ecstasy, is this a revalidation of that process of having to go in and then go out and explode?

-I never thought about it too much, but everything you do is related to the previous one. And this process of Dark Ecstasy was one of introspection, of going inside to see what was going on there, in all those emotions that maybe had exploded in Caravan, so that was the Big Bang for what was to come next.

Wos is a phase of “very beautiful joy, euphoria and madness” in his career

-What stage of your career are you at now?

-I do not know. I am happy to be able to play again, which I have missed a lot. This is why in this moment there is a beautiful phase of joy, euphoria and madness.

-Finally, you said a sentence about “Don’t buy colored mirrors”, what does that sentence mean right now?

-Sometimes, in these adrenaline-fueled situations, of a long history, of so many incredible things that are happening with Argentine music, I think we have to take advantage of it to continue to trust in what we do, in what is ours, in what everyone must show. And don’t buy things that sometimes show you and put you where you need to go. There are a thousand ways to make music, and there are things that excite us that can be very distracting, very surprising, but in the end they are pretty hollow.

IS