Hay Moscas

The Song

Si lo tienes, ya lo quiero
Cuidado, amorcito, with your smile and your red hair
Cuidado, amorcito, hay moscas everywhere
Cuidado, amorcito, with your open heart and time to spare
Cuidado, amorcito, hay moscas everywhere
Cuidado, amorcito, your door unlocked and your purse right there
Cuidado, amorcito, hay moscas everywhere
Cuidado, amorcito, your kind word and empty chair
Cuidado, amorcito, hay moscas everywhere

Ay no
Cuando andas en la calle
(hay moscas)
Donde pones tus llaves
(hay moscas)
Cuando abres la ventana
(hay moscas)
Donde guardas el azúcar
(hay moscas)
Cuando apagas la luz
(hay moscas)
Si lo tienes, ya lo quiero
(hay moscas)
Si lo quiero, me lo llevo
(hay moscas)

Everywhere is hay moscas
Everything is hay moscas
Achtung, amorcito, hay moscas everywhere
Watch out, amorcito, hay moscas everywhere
Cuidado, amorcito, hay moscas everywhere
Cuidado, amorcito, hay moscas everywhere

It Means Leech

Flies means something different in Colombian. It’s not the house pest. It’s a specific kind of person that mooches off you, leeches off you. They won’t leave you alone and they won’t get off you. Colloquial Spanish has its own derivation of scrub, mooch, and ne’er-do-well.

Cuidado, Amorcito

Careful, my little love. While it sounds affectionate, it’s actually kind of not. Cuidado is a noun and only means care. When you drop the verb you just leave the noun. And amorcito means little love. There’s no “my” in there, so, in a way it’s actually pejorative because of its lack of possession.

The affix of amorcito: -cito does a couple of things at once. It’s sweet, but it’s deprecatory. Somebody who loves someone but concludes they don’t have the faintest idea of anything at all.

When the Composer Only Has a Melody and Can’t Give You a Full Set of Lyrics

In order to give the song more dimension, we built upon his initial lyrics. He provided “her smile and her red hair.” While that gives us what she looks like, we opened up the character by adding three additional lines.

Interjection: “Ay, No.” “Ow, No.”

In English this is going to sound quite a bit like “oh no.” That’s a close approximation. It’s not really the whole meaning. “Ay” has an interesting root.

Years ago in New Jersey I was friends with a guy who spoke Spanish, and he told me “ay” is the noise you make when you hit your thumb hammering in a nail. And the noise you make when you’re having an orgasm.

It isn’t an emotion at all. It’s a body doing something it can’t help. It’s cold, and detached, reflexive. There is no substantial emotional condition in it.

The call and response pattern doesn’t provide warm regard. It is flinching for her. And that’s all it does. It’s sung in unison with enthusiasm but that expression doesn’t lift a finger to her existential impunity.

And it isn’t aimed at her. It’s aimed at whoever’s listening. It goes off like a flare and sputters out sans pomp and circumstance.

The Five Characters

The characters in this piece are either aligned perfectly or diametrically opposed. But in total they are all incredibly ineffective.

In most songs you usually have about one or two characters. There are five in this piece, and each of them are very different but still very detached, and even in a daze. Very Kafka-esque.

Colloquial Spanish

Colloquial Spanish is one of those things where the more you learn about it, the more you realize you don’t understand it.

Certain colloquial Spanish words don’t mean what you think they mean, and you have to dig deep and look at multiple references to actually figure out not just what the characters are saying, but what their actual intent is, and how they’re saying what they’re saying.

They all speak in the same idiomatic prose.

Hay

Hay has no subject in Spanish. It simply means there are. It’s how you’d talk about the hot water in the shower running out.

It’s not about the flies coming. Flies coming would be something that just happened, and anything that just happens can also stop happening. Hay moscas is a phrase that implies something never started, so it can’t equally stop.

It isn’t an event in her life. It’s just her life.

Amorcito

Amorcito, not mi amor. Mi amor is my love, and people use it to convey affection. A shopkeeper says it to a stranger.

Amorcito is much, much more specific. It’s how a mother talks to her child when he keeps running out into the middle of the street. It’s warm, but it’s also pejorative.

The main female voice quantifies “her”

The vernacular vacillates between cuando and donde. When and where. That is the extent of the observation made about “her.” The observations made about “her” are materially inconsequential, superficial, and ultimately useless, in the sense that these observations do not let us look inside the main character in any way, shape or form.

The two flies

There are two flies in the story. The literal flies, as in the insect, and the fly who wants what she has. With the literal flies, sugar draws them and a window is how they get in. And if you combine the machinations of both flies, they are very much in concert with one another, even though one is an insect and one is a man.

Lo

He uses lo, which just refers to an inanimate object. Not a person. And that is the long and short of it. So he isn’t talking about her at all. He’s talking about what she has. She is barely present.

The Flies Get Their Own Voice

Two lines in Spanish:

The fly only gets two lines in the whole song, and they’re about what he wants from her. And although it’s clear he’s a self-minded narcissistic automaton, this is all we ever learn about him.

And he articulates his appraisal of her as: “Me lo llevo,” phrased as requesting a pack of cigarettes from a 7-Eleven clerk.

The Line Nobody Wrote

While parsing the song lyrics that were recorded on a cell phone, my speech-to-text engine erred and came back with “if I need it, I want it.” Those were about three seconds of room noise, and the software somehow interpreted that as a cohesive phrase.

My AI assistant was about to call it garbage and delete it.

And I kept it.

It turned into the fly’s line. I swapped need to have, so it became “if you have it, I already want it.”

And that was the best mistake of the entire process.

The Outro

Achtung, amorcito, hay moscas everywhere
Watch out, amorcito, hay moscas everywhere
Cuidado, amorcito, hay moscas everywhere
Cuidado, amorcito, hay moscas everywhere

The composer wanted Achtung in there, and that literally means pay attention now in German. It felt like a natural choice to put in English: “Watch out, amorcito.” Those little nuances are what make a song create cues in the listener to remember the song.

Everywhere, Then Everything

Everywhere is hay moscas
Everything is hay moscas

“Everything is hay moscas” is from the demo. “Everywhere” is the line that got put in front of it.

Everywhere there are flies is a given. There are plenty of moochers and hangers-on everywhere. But to state that everything is a “fly,” a hanger-on and a mooch is a nightmarish revelation.

And in contrast with the song’s upbeat, celebratory feeling, it creates a kind of Twilight Zone episode to the end of the piece. People will either dance to it and be none the wiser, move on to the next song, or leave the dance floor, head hung low, go into their apartments, sit on their beds, and fall into an endless abyss of existential dread.

And those two outcomes are totally acceptable.