Margolies & Strub/¡Maldito Coronavirus!, 6. Maldita Pandemia

This chapter surveys the wide array of affective responses to the pandemic found throughout música del coronavirus. It begins by considering the specific material impacts of COVID-19 on professional musicians in the region, with an exploration of venue closures, performance cancellations, and the hospitalizations and virus-related deaths of notable Latin American musicians. It goes on to examine the ways in which lyrics, performance styles, and approaches to content distribution articulated different attitudes about the pandemic situation. This chapter explores how expressions of pandemic era fear, anxiety, and frustration became linked to broader cultural attitudes toward death, fate, and individual agency. It also looks at some of the more unusual affective treatments of the pandemic in the form of coronavirus drinking songs, hyper-sexualized quarantine dance videos, and songs that express doubt about the severity of the pandemic and the veracity of public health reporting in covid and in the vaccine movement. Finally, it considers examples of Christian messaging in música del coronavirus, and how this genre recapitulated many aspects of other musical examples alongside spiritual reinterpretation of themes of sin, judgment, and life after death in a time of pandemic.