The Life Of Pablo Part 2

[Ariel Wascom]

Almost done here," he told my mom. "I'm stopping by the store at Imbanaco next, and then heading home. If you want any food, call the store now so they can bring it out to the car when I arrive." As on every other evening, my mom called the bakery and ordered some bread and milk for breakfast. She began preparing a light dinner, knowing my dad would be home in half an hour.

When nearly an hour had passed and he had not arrived, my mom called, not without a twinge of annoyance, to find out the cause of the holdup. There was no answer. Our phone rang a few minutes later, but it was my uncle Chalo at the other end.

I squirmed when the word "Narcos" appeared in bold white letters across the top of my Netflix homepage. There was actor Wagner Moura, flanked by streaks of white powder, sporting an all-too-familiar side part and mustache. Here we go again, I thought.

I knew nothing about this new show, and that's how I wanted to keep things. Critics had compared Narcos to Breaking Bad and Goodfellas, but what Colombian could view the story of Pablo Escobar as entertainment? To a child of the narcoterrorism era, Escobar and his ilk could never be just characters in a story. Watching Narcos seemed to me like grabbing a bag of popcorn and watching my country burn.

But a few days later I began to hear colleagues talking about the show. The reports were good, but I remained resolute in my decision to stay away from it. Still, as conversations about Narcos kept popping up in the lunchroom, it was strange to hear my colleagues discussing plot twists that had once been facts of my daily life. I felt like an outsider to my own history. What version of events were the filmmakers presenting to my co-workers? What bastardized idea of Colombia was about to spread through popular culture? At last, curiosity got the best of me. I logged on to Netflix and clicked the play button on my screen without knowing what I was in for.

Narcos begins, oddly enough, by defining a literary genre. The camera pans over a dark landscape. It is the Colombian Andes, covered in mist, towering above a large city. Then we see the words: "Magical realism is defined as what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe."

Then there were the small details that brought it all together: the logos on political banners, the ever-present Renault 4s and Mazda 626s on the street, the miniature facades of colonial village houses hanging on the walls of Pablo's mother's home. None of these factors is essential to the story, and an American audience would never know the difference. Nevertheless, Padilha's emphasis on authenticity gives viewers an experience impossible to have through any other English-language show or movie ever made about Colombia.

Stories from the Colombia of that period are almost inevitably centered on the lives of outlaws and agents of the state; they say little about the experience of ordinary Colombians. One of the most eye-opening things about watching Narcos was realizing how significantly the drug wars shaped my world, despite my parents' best efforts to insulate me.

We lived in a nice neighborhood in Cali, where there seemed to live at least one cartel member on every street. My dad despised the drug traffickers, and to the extent that he could do so without getting shot, he was intolerant of any social interaction that might legitimize their place in society. If a neighbor showed signs of belonging to the cartel (somehow, you always just knew who they were), my dad would refuse to speak to him, not even returning a casual greeting. My sister and I were expressly forbidden from playing with the children from house numbers 3 and 5. When my aunt considered inviting them to a birthday party (along with all the other children on the street), my dad threatened that if she did my family would not attend. I still remember the boy and girl standing outside the entrance to my aunt's backyard, looking sadly at the entertainers.

To the extent that my dad could make it so, the mgicos did not exist to us. It was all the more striking, then, to watch Narcos and to see, in each episode, so many close connections to my early life.

When Carlos arrived, my grandmother had no choice but to let him and his sister Nina into the house, to serve tintos and snacks in the living room and chitchat as if they were just any old friends catching up. But Carlos's visit was a reconnaissance mission. Two weeks later, the M-19 attacked the town in the middle of the night, facing off with the army just up the road from our house.

Now, Narcos, which usually stays quite close the facts, takes a substantial degree of artistic license when it comes to the M-19. It is plausible that "Ivan the Terrible," one of the group's co-founders, may have relinquished for a time the group's most prized symbol, the stolen sword of Simn Bolvar, into Pablo Escobar's hands. But it is simply not true that Escobar murdered the guerrilla leader, as episode four depicts in a shocking scene.

By the time my parents decided that enough was enough and resolved to move our family to the States, I was a senior in high school. Not willing to make me to leave so close to graduation, they allowed me to stay with my grandparents my final year while they went ahead without me.

There, I saw a man in his mid-40s, sitting on a couch, in handcuffs, his head bowed in shame, his eyes wet with tears. He was a mule, the kind the first episode of Narcos shows the Medellin Cartel recruiting, drug runners who would try to sneak cocaine out of the country on their bodies, for sale in more lucrative markets. When an agent walked in and reported to the head of the office that "the test came back positive," the handcuffed man began to sob.

The handcuffed man could only cry, utterly hopeless, and I wondered about the hardships and decisions that had brought him to that point, and how those who truly profited from the drug trade continued to run free, tempting an entire country into ruin.

Nevertheless, Narcos remains a remarkable series. Its first season somehow succeeds in bringing to life a period of my country's history that most of us would rather forget, while at the same time respecting the culture and people that the drug trade nearly destroyed. The show expertly eschews Hollywood caricatures and casts an unflinching eye on the realities of the drug wars, for both the villains and the oft-compromised heroes of the story. The mere fact that a show like this can exist is evidence of how much things have changed since that time, both in the United States and in Colombia. Narcos makes the idea of a Chuck Norris or a Harrison Ford flying in to lay down the law look nothing short of ridiculous; it makes quite plain that the blame for Colombia's countless dead lies not only with the drug barons but with America's ravenous demand for cocaine. Today, when a much closer neighbor to the south finds itself in similar throes, the lessons of Narcos are nothing if not timely.

But still: While the cartels have been vanquished, and a peace agreement with the remaining guerrilla groups seems closer than ever before, there are still deep wounds in the country. Yes, our economy has grown, criminality has dropped, and our democratic institutions have been strengthened; Colombia is very different from the nearly failed state it became. Yet even now, even if extremely rarely, the salsa rhythms surging at night over the streets of Cali are sometimes broken by a deep, dull noise and the rattle of windows.

"There's something else, Silvia," my uncle Chalo continued. "Someone on the street told me he had seen a bearded man, gravely injured. And..." he paused. "And I wasn't allowed to get very close, but I thought I saw a small silver car badly damaged near the blast site."

"Mi amor, there was a bomb outside Imbanaco," said a male voice on the other end. "I got held up at the other store and missed it by a few minutes. Sorry I haven't called, but my phone ran out of battery right after we talked."

"Father Stretch My Hands" are songs by American rapper Kanye West from his seventh studio album, The Life of Pablo (2016). They are split into two parts on the album: "Father Stretch My Hands, Pt. 1" and "Pt. 2". "Pt. 1" contains vocals by American rapper Kid Cudi and American R&B singer Kelly Price, while "Pt. 2" includes vocals from American rapper Desiigner and American musician Caroline Shaw. Prior to release, the latter was played by West for Desiigner when the two met.

On June 7, 2016, both parts of "Father Stretch My Hands" were sent to US rhythmic contemporary radio stations through GOOD Music and Def Jam as a two-part single, standing as the second single from The Life of Pablo. Both parts of the song sample gospel musician and preacher T. L. Barrett's track "Father I Stretch My Hands"; "Pt. 2" remixes Desiigner's song "Panda" and features a sample of a sound clip from the 1991 video game Street Fighter II. West raps about models in his "Pt. 1" verse and delivers confessions in his "Pt. 2" verse.

A reinterpretation of "Pt. 1", produced by West, was released under the title of "Father Stretch" on Sunday Service Choir's debut studio album, Jesus Is Born (2019). It lacks sexually explicit lyrics and includes more elements of the gospel than the original. The song received generally positive reviews from music critics. The majority of them commented on the song's development of the original, while some critics noted its appeal to certain audiences. The song peaked at number ten on the US Billboard Gospel Songs chart in 2020.

West and Kid Cudi had collaborated on several tracks before "Pt. 1"; their first collaboration was the former's 2008 track "Welcome to Heartbreak".[1] Desiigner met West in front of Los Angeles International Airport after West called him to arrange a meeting, and West played "Pt. 2" for Desiigner in his car.[2] In an interview with The Fader, Desiigner said about his single "Panda" being sampled by West in the track: "He just took my song and was like, 'I love it.'"[2] Caroline Shaw was approached backstage by West, who asked for her phone number, at a 2014 Roomful of Teeth performance of Partita for 8 Voices.[3] Originally uninterested in a collaboration, Shaw changed her mind two weeks later after listening to West's 2008 album 808s & Heartbreak and released a remix of the album's song "Say You Will" in October 2015.[3] In addition to "Pt. 2", Shaw recorded vocals for The Life of Pablo's "Wolves".[3]

3a8082e126