Metro Balderas (song)

"Metro Balderas", as it is generally known, or for its original name, "Estación del metro Balderas" ("Balderas subway station"), is a song by Mexican rock musician Rodrigo "Rockdrigo" González, which refers to a man looking for a woman who got lost in the crowd at Mexico City Metro station Metro Balderas.

This song, along with other González' songs such as Distante instante and Balada del asalariado, can be found in the album Hurbanistorias, recorded in 1982. These songs are available online at González'official website.

Gonzalez had enormous influence on Mexican rock bands, such as El Tri and Botellita de Jerez; his songs have been recorded many times, especially after his death.

In 2003, a tribute album was recorded by the name "Ofrenda a Rockdrigo" ("An offer to Rockdrigo"). A plaque on Balderas subway station was placed on September 19, 2004 to remember Rockdrigo on the nineteenth anniversary of his death, at 34, when his apartment building collapsed during the big earthquake of 1985 in Mexico City.

The original song is built as the monologue of an alienated subject hijacking a subway train, with lines such as:

Get lost from here, mister engineer,

this is a hijack, I'll drive the train. [...]

You better pay attention or I'll shoot you,

haven't you noticed how upset I am? [...]

Once the hijacker's character has been defined, his motivations are eventually revealed and the repeated as a choir all along the song:

Four years ago I lost my girlfriend

in these crowds that form here. [...]

I looked for her at platforms and waiting rooms,

but she just got lost in Balderas station. [...]

It was in Balderas subway station, [...]

...there a wave of people took her away [...]

...there I lost my love [...]

...Darling, I searched for you in every train. [...]

The Balderas subway station, as the downtown crossing of the oldest subway line (Line 1) with the longest one (Line 3), has been known for years for its excessive crowds where people gets easily lost, so the story actually makes plenty of poetic sense for local listeners.

Even if searching four years for a lost girlfriend at a subway station, let alone hijacking a subway train because of it, are unlikely situations, there is located most of the poetic and ironic force of this song; by exaggerating the loneliness and despair of an individual whose emotional life is run over and ignored by the metropolis, gets to put them more in sight.

...
Wikipedia