Luis Alberto Spinetta: Google Doodle celebrates Argentine singer’s 70th birthday

Google Doodle celebrates Argentine singer Luis Alberto Spinetta’s 70th birthday on January 23rd, 2020. Additionally nicknamed “El Flaco” (“Skinny”), he is usually viewed as the father of Spanish-language rock and roll and a Latin American music icon.

Who was Luis Alberto Spinetta?

Luis Alberto Spinetta, also known as “El Flaco” (Spanish for “the skinny [one]”), was an Argentine singer, composer, guitarist, and poet. One of the most persuasive rock musicians of Argentina, he is viewed as one of the organizers of Argentine rock, considered the first manifestation of Spanish-language rock. Born in Buenos Aires in the residential neighborhood of Belgrano on this day in 1950.

Luis Alberto Spinetta learned how to play guitar and sing at a youthful age. He kept on building up his musical skills, and at age 17 Spinetta formed one of the most powerful rock bands in Argentine history, named Almendra, with two of his previous secondary school classmates. Almendra’s self-titled debut studio album reformed the genre as the first band to join Spanish-language lyrics with progressive rock.

Luis Alberto Spinetta gave himself completely to his music. In his lyrics, there are impacts of numerous writers, poets and artists like Arthur Rimbaud, Vincent van Gogh, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Carlos Castaneda, and Antonin Artaud, who has his name in the album Artaud.

During the 1970s and 80s, Luis Alberto Spinetta formed and led a few effective bands that inspired the international “Rock en Español” movement, including Pescado Rabioso, Invisible, and Spinetta Jade. Notwithstanding these group projects, he released more than twenty albums as a solo artist.

On 23 December 2011, Luis Alberto Spinetta published on the Twitter account of his child Dante that he was confronting lung cancer. He passed on February 8, 2012, in his native Argentina, at 62 years old. His remains were dispersed in the waters of the Río de la Plata, as per his last wish, alongside the Memory Park worked to recollect the Desaparecidos of the National Reorganization Process.

In 2016, Luis Alberto Spinetta’s most recent record Los Amigo won one of the highest honors in Argentinian music, the Gold Gardel Album of the Year award. His music struck a significant chord all through the world and keeps on affecting audience members right up ’til today. For example, in April 2019 it inspired the University of Buenos Aires informatics engineer Alex Ingberg to make an artificial intelligence program to produce song lyrics in Spinetta’s style. Furthermore, in 2014, to pay tribute to Luis Alberto Spinetta’s birthday, Argentina moved Día Nacional del Músico (National Musician’s Day) from November to January 23rd.

On January 23rd, 2020, Google pays tribute to the father of Spanish-language rock on Luis Alberto Spinetta’s 70th birthday celebration with an excellent doodle. Google Doodle artwork includes the color green as a tribute to Luis Alberto Spinetta’s iconic and sporadically shaped album cover of Artaud, as well as his celebrated red and white guitar.