“Taro”: love, war and death in the song of the Alt-J
There are songs that do not scream to be heard. Maybe they don’t even climb the rankings by decibel or obsessive refrains. No. There are songs that whisper, that insinuate yourself into you with the power of a tragic love and a truth that cuts like the blade of memory. One of these is titled “Taro”and closes “An Awesome Wave”the debut album of the British group Alt-jreleased in 2012.
It is the farewell, the swan song of a disc that moves between kinematic suggestions, sound architectures and small stories suspended over time. But Taro is much more than a simple final trace. It is a love story. It is a war story. It is the story, true, of two souls who have chosen to challenge death armed only with a look and a camera. They were called Gerda Taro And Robert Capa.
Gerda and Robert: when the photographs hit more than bullets
She was called Gerta Pohorylle. She was born in the year 10 of the 1900s, in the heart of Germany from a family of Polish Jews and seems to have definitely brought for tennis. But that Germany, that of 1934, was no longer a place where the racket could be harnessed, especially if you are Jewish and you decided to oppose the Nazi party. So, at twenty -four, Gerta runs away. He flees to Paris, like many. And there he reinvents himself to be photographed. Change a consonant of the name and invent a surname: he calls himself Gerda Taro. A new identity for a new life. That’s where he meets him: Endre Ernő Friedmannalso a Jewish, also on the run, also a photographer. The fate certainly does not control the identity cards, but that time it ends them both under the tower, a crossroads of their lives on the run.
But it is not only love, what unites them, on the contrary. It is complicity, it is passion for the same gaze on the world. And when Gerda suggests to Endre to invent a more “American” name, it was born Robert Capa. The myth. The pseudonym. The identity that the world will remember forever. The two begin to sign their shots together: Capable. They are not simple images. They are testimonies. Bullets of truths that immortalize the suffering and courage of the Spanish civil war.
Gerda was bold. Not only did he tell the war: he threw himself inside. The chronicles paint her as an inspiring figure, a voice that encouraged anti -fascist soldiers to the Resistance. A woman who did not fear to get too close to the front, in order to grasp the right shot. What, perhaps, would become the last.
Gerda’s last race
July 1937. Gerda is only 26 years old. He is returning from the Brunete front, in Spain, clinging to the external predel of a military vehicle. It is a hot day, as only the summer days of war know how to be, and the air is full of dust and fear. Above them, the planes arrive. It doesn’t take too much to understand it: it is the Germans. Mtragliano the Republican convoys. In confusion, a tank of the same faction overwhelms the car on which Gerda was traveling. The tracks crush her from the waist down.
It does not lose knowledge. Not even for a moment.
In the journey to the Madrid military hospital, he holds his hands tight on the wounds, trying to stop the blood. The doctors, without anesthetics and antibiotics, try to save it. But its organs are too compromised. There is nothing to do. The nurse receive the order: administer morphine. How much? All that possible. Not to make it suffer.
But she doesn’t complain. He does not ask for his health. Asks only: “The cameras? Have broken?”. His last thought is for the images, for the testimony. At dawn, Gerda Taro closes her eyes forever. And the world loses one of the first photoreporter women who fell in battle.
Capa decided that he would photograph death only in the foreground
Robert Capa was no longer the same. Gerda’s death crushed him, like an broken lens on the battlefield. He continued his work, of course. With the same camera, but with a different look. A look that was looking for death, as if he wanted to reach it.
We see him on the beaches of Omaha Beach, in the D-Day. We find it in the middle of the mud of Indochina. And when I write “see him” it is because his shots, still today, are those that we find on the history books. One step away from the bullets, closer and closer to danger. Until that day of 1954. He was in Vietnam, documenting another war. As he gets out of a jeep to take a photo, he tramples on a mine. His story ends like that of Gerda: on the field. With a camera next to it.
Taro: singing beyond death
And here the Alt-Js enter. Joe Newman, the frontman, says he was struck by this story. And so, Taro becomes a song that lasts four minutes, but that actually tells only four seconds. Two before, two after the explosion. Everything is played there. In that subtle border between life and eternity.
The song opens with a single word: Indochine. And we are already with Capa, a few moments before the explosion. The images follow one another as sequences of an impressionist film: “A white and yellow flash … a violent force that tears the limbs …”. Then the silence. Capa is thrown away. He stays on the ground, five meters from his leg … and from Gerda.
“Painless with immense distance
From Medic, from Colleague, Friend, Enemy, Foe
Him Five Yards from his leg and from you you, Taro “
The refrain is poignant. Capa speaks, or maybe dreams, or maybe delight. Cites a disturbing phrase: “Do Not Spray Into Eyes”. It is the wording that we read on chemical weapons, widely used in the Vietnamese conflict. But here it becomes a message of love: “I sprayed you in my eyes”. As if her memory had invaded his pupils.
The song grows. The battery enters the precise moment of the explosionas if he wanted to mark the point of no return. Sounds become increasingly intense, more psychedelic, almost spiritual. And what looks like a sitar is actually a guitar played with a roll of adhesive tape. A surreal expedient, but perfect. Because Taro is not a song that wants to play “right”. He wants to play true.
The final choirs, recorded with the students of the St. Ronan’s School In the Kent, they give the song a sense of solemnity. Like a farewell. Like a last embrace between two spirits that are sought beyond the meat.
Gerda Taro’s legacy
In the years immediately following Gerda’s death, Capa published “Death in the Making”a book of photographs that contains the soul of that time. A visual testimony of horror and hope. Yet, despite their contribution to the history of photojournalism, not everything was simple. The tomb of Gerda, in Paris, was refinement several times by the fascists during the Second World War. His epitaph, which celebrated courage and revolutionary spirit, was censored by the collaborative regime.
But today, after decades, their names continue to live. Not only in the history books. But also in a song. In four minutes of music that tell what sometimes a thousand words cannot say.
Music is made of sounds, of course, but also of stories, connections and cultural revolutions, small or large. In my articles I try to tell her like this: with love, attention to detail and a immoderate passion for anecdotal. Because behind each song there is a part of the universe that moves. Storytelling as an approach to criticism and the musical story. My greatest source of inspiration, in this sense, is Federico Buffa.
My name is Marco Brunasso, I have always dealt with music (and I have been writing for a few years), exploring artists, records and movements that I consider irresistible and interesting. Some of my articles have already been published on Rockit and Techprincess (for the latter portal I created a storytelling column called inside the song). For a few days I have co-founded an online magazine called Eye on hype, and I am founder, singer and bassist of the Indie-Rock Lehavre band.