On 5 June 2026 Carlos “Indio” Solari died. He was 77. The news did not merely close a musical biography. Almost at once, it opened a collective scene of mourning. On social media, farewells, photographs, fragments of songs, concert videos, family memories and phrases passed from one account to another multiplied like so many small digital candles. In Buenos Aires, groups of followers gathered of their own accord in Plaza de Mayo. They sang, wept, danced and once again made visible something that already existed before the artist’s death.
It did not seem to be only the farewell to a musician. It seemed to be the gathering of a community that needed to confirm it was still there. But his physical death also reactivated a question Solari had posed very early, in 1986, when he imagined a twenty-first century shot through with technology, corporations and information.
That is the anthropological starting point. The question is not only what Solari wrote, nor what place Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota occupy in the canon of Argentine rock. The question is what kind of relationship that music produced. What it made possible between people who did not know one another. What form of belonging it activated. What kind of community could sustain itself for decades around a cryptic, independent, uncomfortable and deeply popular body of work.
That community was often called “la misa ricotera”, the ricotero mass. The expression is powerful, but it can also become too comfortable. Used only as a religious metaphor, it turns the phenomenon into an emotional cult. Used with care, it allows us to look at music as a social practice. A way of gathering, travelling, singing, caring, remembering, arguing, transmitting and beginning again.
A death across networks
The reverberations of the past few days show the extent to which Solari’s work no longer belonged to the musical field alone. The family confirmed the death on social media and announced a public farewell. Skay Beilinson said goodbye to him with a brief and painful phrase. Tributes also arrived from musicians, political figures, human rights organisations, football clubs and ordinary people who recalled a first listening, a journey, a ticket, a concert or an inherited phrase.
Digital mourning was not a minor appendix. It was part of the mass, in its contemporary form. Where cassettes, posters, tickets, banners or oral accounts once circulated, now screenshots, videos, threads, stories and shared posts circulated. They do not replace the gathered body, but they prolong the community in another space.
There is something very ricotero in that mixture of crowd and secret. A body of work that always resisted total explanation ended up being mourned in a public sphere saturated with quick explanations. And even so, what circulated was not only information. Belonging circulated.
Argentina, the Southern Cone and rock as a common language
To understand Solari’s cultural weight we have to situate him in Argentine and River Plate history. Argentine rock nacional was not only a musical scene. It was a generational language under dictatorship, democratic transition, economic crisis, neoliberalism, disenchantment and popular recomposition. On that map, Los Redondos occupied a strange place. They came from La Plata, from the underground, from an artistic sensibility that mixed beat poetry, graphic art, theatre, psychedelia, anarchism, black humour and rock. Yet they ended up summoning crowds that overflowed any initial label.
The Southern Cone has a particular relationship with music as political memory. Argentina, Uruguay and Chile know the song well as refuge, password, mourning, protest, celebration and popular archive. In that landscape, Solari was not a political singer-songwriter in the classical sense. He did not write direct slogans or offer programmes. His politics were of another kind. They were a persistent distrust of power, of spectacle, of the policing of meaning, of media obedience and of the domestication of life.
That is why his songs could travel so far. Not because they were clear, but because they left room. They were incomplete maps for lives that were also incomplete.
FM La Boca 90.1 lets us recall the importance of those cultural infrastructures. Founded in June 1986 in the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of La Boca, the station presents itself as a pioneering community radio station. Today it broadcasts twenty-four hours a day from Buenos Aires and sums up its identity with a simple phrase: “el rock nacional es nuestro idioma”, rock nacional is our language. That idea matters. A musical community does not live only in stadiums. It also lives on the radio, in daily repetition, in the voice that keeps someone company at dawn, in the song that plays again when it seemed to have left the centre.
The twenty-first century he saw coming
There is another reason why this radar belongs to AIthropology Lab and not only to a section of musical memory. In December 1986, when Oktubre had just appeared and Los Redondos were not yet the crowd they would later become, Enrique Symns interviewed Solari for Cerdos & Peces. The title under which that conversation returns today is unsettling: “Los psicópatas serán los hombres del siglo XXI”, the psychopaths will be the men of the twenty-first century.
It is unwise to read that interview as a literal prophecy. Solari was not talking about artificial intelligence, nor about digital platforms, nor about generative models, nor about Silicon Valley. But he was thinking about something that touches us directly today: the relationship between technology, information, corporations and forms of subjectivity capable of surviving in an order that is ever more abstract, automated and dehumanising.
Here we see Solari off stage. Not the singer turned myth, but a ferocious reader of reality. He speaks of a common life filtered through information terminals, of a science and a technology turned into an official religion, of a space adventure presented as a human epic yet organised by corporate interests. He also formulates a very hard image: technology as a world made in the image of another machine, not of the human being.
That is the bridge with our present. Not because Solari anticipated AI in any strict sense, but because he sensed a central twist of the twenty-first century. The possibility that the technical system might not simply extend the human, but begin to select which kind of humanity it finds functional. In the interview, the “psychopath” should not be read clinically or sensationally. It is a cultural figure. It names the subject adapted to an order that rewards affective disconnection, efficiency, obedience to available information and survival without much community.
From AIthropology, that intuition matters. The contemporary question about AI is not only what machines we are building. It is also what kinds of people, institutions and bonds become normal around them. Which sensibilities are rewarded. Which forms of attention are eroded. Which bodies become surplus. Which voices turn into noise. Which communities resist.
There the ricotero mass works as a counter-image. Against the technocratic future, the body. Against calculation, song. Against information as obedience, shared interpretation. Against the machine that does not need the human being, a crowd that gathers to keep a common language alive.
Music, body and community
John Blacking defined music as humanly organised sound. The formula shifts the focus. Music is not only a work one listens to, nor only a score, nor only a cultural commodity. It is a practice organised by human beings in concrete social contexts. It matters who sings, who listens, who travels, who waits, who recognises themselves, who is left out, who inherits and who transmits.
From there, the ricotero mass cannot be understood as a mere concert. The concert was the visible moment of a wider weave. Records that passed from hand to hand. Phrases argued over for years. Tickets obtained with effort. Routes travelled. Banners prepared. Neighbourhoods made present. Bodies entering the pogo. Friendships born in the waiting. Memories later recounted as a genealogy.
The music of Solari and Los Redondos produced a community of listening, but also a community of movement. It was not just “I like this band”. It was “I was there”. “They took me”. “I heard it for the first time with someone”. “We sang it together”. “I understood it years later”. Belonging was not formulated as doctrine, but as shared experience.
That is why Tim Ingold’s reading is useful here. Instead of thinking of kinship as an inherited substance, Ingold proposes attending to kinning. Not kinship as a thing, but as an action. A relationship made in common life. In that sense, the ricotero community was not a family in a sentimental or biological sense. It was a practice of popular kinning. A way of becoming part of a weave through songs, journeys, bodies, grief and memories.
No one becomes a ricotero by sharing blood. One becomes a ricotero because someone passes you a song, lends you a record, explains a phrase, takes you to a concert, tells you a story, teaches you that there is something there that is not exhausted by the music. The filiation is musical, but also bodily and narrative.
Lyrics for living without a complete explanation
Solari’s lyrics never quite give themselves up. They do not work as transparent slogans or as orderly autobiography. They are full of characters, urban debris, violent scenes, twisted tenderness, dark humour, desire, defeat, drugs, televisions, police, false saints, fugitive women, broken kids, animals, cities, shipwrecks and small flashes of redemption.
On Oktubre, titles such as “Preso en mi ciudad”, “Divina TV Führer”, “Motorpsico”, “Ji ji ji” or “Canción para naufragios” condense a sensibility of confinement, trance, political irony and survival. On Un baión para el ojo idiota, “Todo preso es político”, “Vencedores vencidos” and “Todo un palo” open another register of historical defeat, fury and popular celebration. On La mosca y la sopa, “Toxi-Taxi”, “Fusilados por la Cruz Roja”, “El pibe de los astilleros”, “Salando las heridas” and “Queso ruso” sketch an Argentina of accidents, remains, social violence and dirty beauty.
Later came “Juguetes perdidos”, “Mariposa Pontiac”, “Gualicho”, “Pogo”, “Morta Punto Com”, “Nike es la cultura”, “La piba del Blockbuster”, “Todos a los botes!”, “Submarino soluble”, “A los pájaros que cantan sobre las selvas de internet” and “El ruiseñor, el amor y la muerte”. The list alone already shows an imagination that is hard to domesticate. There is consumption, apocalypse, neighbourhood, politics, technology, night, eroticism, death and a tenderness that almost always appears twisted, as if it were afraid of becoming obvious.
That opacity was a central part of the bond. The songs did not close an explanation. They invited deciphering. Each listener could appropriate a fragment, a character, an image or a phrase that seemed to speak to them without ever fully explaining itself. There lies one of the keys to the phenomenon. Solari’s work produced not only identification. It produced interpretive labour.
There are phrases that became public passwords. One of them, “vivir cuesta vida”, living costs life, resurfaced in these hours of mourning as a minimal way of saying a great deal without explaining too much. There is the force of his writing. It does not speak for us. It lets us speak ourselves.
A thick description of a mass
Clifford Geertz would speak here of thick description. It is not enough to say that there were banners, chants, pogo or shirts. We have to ask what they meant within that scene. A banner was not only a banner. A shirt was not only merchandise. A journey was not only displacement. A pogo was not only movement.
All of that worked as a public system of signs. Ways of saying “I belong”, “I was there”, “I remember”, “I am still here”. The ricotero mass demands that thick description because its meaning is not in a single place. It is not only on the stage, nor only in the lyrics, nor only in the audience. It is in the relationship between all of that.
A recorded song becomes collective singing. A fictional name, Patricio Rey, organises a shared myth. A body of work signed by concrete artists ends up circulating as the affective heritage of a crowd. El Indio, who for years guarded his public distance, became intimate to people who had never met him. That intimacy was not biographical. It was musical.
Perhaps that is why it hurts so much. Not because each listener “knew” the artist, but because many lives came to know themselves through those songs.
Rock, class and aguante
A reading of the ricotero phenomenon needs to pass through Argentine popular culture. The literature on rock chabón or rock barrial, associated especially with Pablo Semán, allows us to locate a transformation of the audiences of rock nacional in the 1990s. The impoverishment of the middle classes, their convergence with popular sectors, the presence of banners, journeys, aguante and an increasingly bodily relationship between audience and music.
Los Redondos are not reducible to rock chabón, but they help us understand its condition of possibility. Their audience gradually revealed a mutation of rock nacional. From certain urban middle-class circuits towards a more plebeian, territorial, travelling and football-inflected mass. That change should not be read as cultural degradation. It was a transformation of the ways of being together.
Here Pablo Alabarces serves as a necessary background. Aguante is not only a word from the terraces. It is a form of bodily and moral presence. It means backing someone up, accompanying, putting your body on the line, sustaining a belonging even when it becomes uncomfortable for dominant ways of seeing. In the ricotero mass, that grammar of aguante mixed with listening, with the cryptic poetics and with an affective economy of loyalty.
The result was hard to classify. Too massive to remain underground. Too enigmatic to be transparent pop. Too plebeian for part of the educated canon of rock nacional. Too affectively organised to be reduced to mere chaos.
And, at the same time, too loved to be left in the hands of a single explanation.
Circuits, independence and technologies of circulation
The independence of Los Redondos was not only a business decision. It was part of their cultural form. The band grew for years outside the full domestication of the record industry and of television. Their legitimacy rested on the live show, on word of mouth, on circulation among listeners, on the slow construction of a scene.
This point connects with other Latin American phenomena of independent popular music. The case of Brazilian tecnobrega, for instance, shows that popular musics cannot be understood from the author or the work alone. We have to look at circuits, agents, technologies, parties, informal economies, active audiences and their own ways of stabilising a cultural market.
This is not about comparing Los Redondos aesthetically with tecnobrega. It is about learning the same caution. Music lives in networks.
Ricotero culture was that too. Records, radios, cassettes, concerts, posters, rumours, accounts, the internet, tributes, videos, family memories. A body of work that endures not only because it was recorded, but because it was continually rebroadcast.
The unthinkable
Michel-Rolph Trouillot used the idea of the unthinkable to think about events that do not fit the categories of those who try to narrate them. This is not about comparing incomparable historical phenomena, but about taking from Trouillot a warning. Sometimes a cultural order cannot fully recognise something that is happening before its eyes.
For years, something of the ricotero phenomenon worked like that. It was not unthinkable because it was mysterious in a romantic sense, but because it disordered categories. Was it rock? Yes, but not only. Was it a market? Yes, but not in the usual way. Was it an audience? Yes, but it acted as a community. Was it the cult of an artist? In part, but it was also a collective way of appropriating a common language. Was it political? Not as a programme, but as a form of independence, of distrust and of popular presence.
The ricotero mass forced people to think what the available categories did not name well. Perhaps that is why it generated fascination, fear, contempt, loyalty and misunderstandings. The ricotero crowd did not ask permission to exist as a cultural fact.
Closing
El Indio Solari leaves songs, but not only songs. He leaves a form of continuity between strangers. He leaves a cryptic archive and a pedagogy of listening. He leaves a scene in which thousands of people learned to recognise one another without needing to know one another.
Perhaps the fairest tribute does not consist in fully explaining his work. It would be a betrayal to reduce it to a single key. Solari’s power lay, in part, in never delivering a complete explanation. But we can attempt something else. To describe thickly what his music made possible.
It made a community possible.
It made a form of popular kinning possible.
It made it possible for a crowd to gather around a difficult language, not to resolve it, but to keep singing it.
And against a twenty-first century of information, automation and technologised solitude, that insistence on singing together remains a form of collective intelligence.
Sources and further reading
- Enrique Symns, “Los psicópatas serán los hombres del siglo XXI”, interview with Carlos “Indio” Solari, Cerdos & Peces, no. 7, December 1986, recovered by AHIRA and republished by Factor el Blog.
- Alejandro Agostinelli, “Indio Solari: Los psicópatas serán los hombres del siglo XXI”, Factor el Blog.
- Verified lyrical corpus of Carlos “Indio” Solari, internal working document for AIthropology Lab.
- Associated Press, “Carlos ‘Indio’ Solari, a legend of Argentina’s rock scene, dies at 77”.
- Javier Lorca, “Muere el ‘Indio’ Solari, una de las últimas leyendas del rock argentino”, El País.
- Daniel Saldaña París, “Indio Solari, el único héroe”, El País.
- FM La Boca 90.1, “Sobre nosotros”.
- Tim Ingold, “Commentary: Afterword”, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2026.
- John Blacking, How Musical Is Man?.
- Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture”.
- Pablo Semán, “Vida, apogeo y tormentos del rock chabón”.
- Pablo Alabarces, works on popular culture, football and aguante.
- Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.
- Lemos, Ronaldo and Castro, Tecnobrega: Pará Reinventing the Music Business.