Pateando piedras

Jorge González composed Pateando piedras on the road when Los Prisioneros were covering demands for concerts throughout Chile: "When I think of Pateando Piedras, I evoke something provincial, clean, and I especially remember Concepción, because a large part of those songs were made while we were playing in the south". In 1985 Jorge González joined the group on keyboards. He and Miguel Tapia -as the band's guitarist Claudio Narea points out- had become followers of Depeche Mode and other groups that used the keyboard as their main instrument. González bought a Casio CZ 101, with lower case keys, and later bought one just like it. With this instrument he composed "¿Quién le tiene miedo a las máquinas?", "Pendiente fuerte de ti", "Ellos dicen no" and "Muevan las industrias" which made their debut in August of that year in a presentation at the Cariola Theater. The last two songs were the only ones included on the group's second album, while the song "Ellos dicen no", which talked about the media closing its doors on them, was completely modified and became "Por favor". == Recording ==

The recording of the album began in the winter of June 1986 after Santiago was recovering from a storm that overflowed the Mapocho River. he bought three Casio synthesizers, and a Simmons electronic drum set. == Style and songs ==

Lalo Ibeas, leader of the group Chancho en Piedra, said that it was very risky "to have made their second album radically changing the sound of the band, going from guitars to The Clash style, to the sound of synthesizers, and yet they kept playing like Los Prisioneros." According to Colombia.com, in Chile "there was a feeling of disappointment and anxiety due to the unemployment rates caused by the clearing of the national industry to make room for British, North American and French companies that invested in the country's economy and They stayed with the markets. Many people wandered the streets looking for what to do to survive, from this phenomenon arises "Muevan las industrias"". The second theme, "¿Por qué no se van?" criticized the avant-garde of the time, those snobbish artists and intellectuals who wanted to leave the country. The third song, "El baile de los que sobran" is considered by the group to be their best song and one of the most emblematic of Chilean popular music of the eighties. It tells about young people who were promised to go to university but, nevertheless, the neoliberal system left them with no chance of studying, leaving them practically unemployed for their future. "Estar solo" was described by González himself as a combination between The Cure and Depeche Mode that "didn't turn out very well" and described the lyrics as "half embarrassing", considering it one of the poorest songs on the album. "Por favor" was the curtain of a Radio Beethoven program that Carlos Fonseca, the band's manager, had. According to Jorge González, it was the first song by Los Prisioneros to have an acoustic piano. == Artwork ==

On the cover, Los Prisioneros appear on Line 2 of the Santiago Metro going to San Miguel. In the original photo, Miguel appears standing, with his arms behind his head, looking into space; sitting in front of him, Jorge and Claudio looking at the camera. Jorge with an ironic smile and Claudio laughing happily. In 1987, during a promotional tour in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the guitarist recounted in his book Los Prisioneros: Biografía de una amistad, that the album cover had a different photo. "He looked the same except for one small detail: I didn't appear laughing," he said. As the representative of the group —Carlos Fonseca— explained to him, the original had been lost, so they decided to look for the one closest to the sequence —taken a second before or after the other— to replace it. "It was almost the same, only in this one I had a lost look," Claudio explained. Later, in Chile, the photograph was also changed, then, when Pateando piedras came out on CD, the photo where Claudio was smiling came out, however, shortly after they replaced it again with the other one. "Summarizing, the story goes like this: Kicking stones was released in September 1986. But already in April 1987 there was another photo. Then in 1991 it appeared. Then, in 1992, it got lost again," he concluded. The session at the Metro was in charge of Jorge Brantmayer, inspired by the techno "wave" that the band took with their publicized Casio synthesizers and Simmons de Tapia drums. The vinyl edition, which could only be purchased at Fusión, had a low-angle photo of the band on the back cover in front of a high-voltage tower, 40 kilometers south of Santiago, on the way to Rancagua. Los Prisioneros never liked the photos of the Metro, according to Fonseca. At first Jorge suggested to Carlos that the three of them appear in the photo in a huge green field, and that they could be seen walking in the distance, however, EMI rejected the idea, since, according to them, it was going to look like a Los Huasos Quincheros album. == Release ==

This album was released on September 15, 1986, a week after the attack against Pinochet in the Cajón del Maipo. The album sold five thousand copies in the first ten days of its distribution. A record never reached by a youth music group in Chile and in two months and two days after the album came out they achieved a second platinum record with twenty thousand copies sold, something that no artist had achieved since the days of the Nueva ola. Two months after the release of their second album, in November 1986 they officially launched Pateando piedras, appearing at the Chile Stadium in front of some 11,000 people. The group broke a record by filling the venue twice in a row. The first single to be launched was "Muevan las Industrias". == Legacy ==

Before the anniversary no. 20 the Chilean actor Héctor Morales said that the album lyrics are still current, and that they can fit in any stage of the country. And shortly before for the anniversary no. 25, Jaime Bollolio from El Mercurio made an analysis of Chile today with the songs from Pateando piedras according to his order, from "Muevan las industrias" to "Independencia cultural", reaching contingent topics such as the student movement and HidroAysén. Not only does the contingency arrive in Chile for the album lyrics, but also in countries like Colombia and Peru. In the latter they were a phenomenon at the end of the eighties, according to Mario Ruiz, EMI Marketing Manager at the time, Los Prisioneros managed to open those markets for "rock en español". The album was chosen as one of the most important of the Ibero-American Rock scene, placing Nº 160 on the list, "Los 250 mejores discos de rock iberoamericano", published by American magazine Al Borde, in 2006. In 2008, it was chosen as the 15th-best Chilean album by Rolling Stone magazine. In this way, it shares an important place in the musical history of Chile. "Quieren dinero" was the main theme of the Chilean soap opera Cómplices (2006), being interpreted by Rigo Vizcarra. It was also part of the soundtrack of the Colombian Netflix film El robo del siglo (2020). == Track listing ==

Side A Side B == References ==