Pusiganga of Resignation

A cover, with original lyrics by Jun Togawa, of "El Borrachito" (The Drunkard), a folk song by Manuel Acosta Villafañe. His career was centred on the culture of his homeland, Argentina's Catamarca Province, contained almost entirely in the Andes. Togawa is drawn to Andean folk music for its themes of something inside people and their sadness, which she finds soothing.

Togawa wrote the lyrics without any hesitation, in one to two minutes. They reflect a feeling of wanting to give up that has driven her entire life, compounded at the time by the taxing demands of her career and mixed reception to solo work from Guernica fans, combined with the sense she was at a crucial point in her life and had to keep being active in her dream job. To Togawa, the only fitting word for the song’s title was "Pusiganga", whose meaning she claims is "sitting in a circle, drinking alcohol, singing and dancing".

One of the Andean folk groups that had its albums released in Japan is Los Incas, an Argentinean-Venezuelan ensemble from France. Their repertoire includes "El Borrachito", as well as the traditional Bolivian sicuriada/huaino "Pusiganga".

Originally released as a studio recording on her first solo album, 1984's Princess Tamahime (玉姫様). Susumu Hirasawa made a bold techno rearrangement for the Showa Kyonen Tour of early 1990, where he and his solo backing band keyboardists (Hikaru Kotobuki and Kitune Akimoto) accompanied Togawa. Hirasawa considers this one of his favorite Togawa songs: "That is the god himself who created god".

Lyrics

 * 1 The song's official English title, given in an Alfa Records compilation released after her departure, is "A Piece of Flesh", an arbitrary change by the label that Togawa dislikes.
 * 2 To Togawa's annoyance, Alfa misspelled the "Ikkai" kanji as 一塊 instead of 一介, reflected in their translation as "but a piece of flesh", also used in the title of the 1988 Keibunsha photo-book Jun Togawa as a Piece of Flesh. Here the kanji is fixed and the line changed to match the title of that photo-book under its 2005 Book-ing second edition, Jun Togawa as Only a Lump of Meat.

Connections

 * Another song performed by Los Incas is "El Cóndor Pasa", which is connected to Yapoos' The Condor Has Flown.