My mission president, God bless him, was the very rare sort of man who refused to outright ban music for missionaries, preferring instead to actually allow us to use our free agency^[1]Imagine that, actually practicing what we preach!, realize on our own that certain types of music impeded our access to the Spirit, and voluntarily choose to turn it off on our own while we served our missions.

Believe it or not, this approach actually worked reasonably well! I dare say the majority of us voluntarily put away the Pop music before we went out proselyting (certainly I suspect we had much higher compliance with the Church’s music rules than missions that took far more draconian measures). Yet that doesn’t mean we, like missionaries everywhere, didn’t still push the limits and probe for loopholes^[2]Never underestimate how badly teenagers need their music; just because you’ve forgotten doesn’t mean they have., viz: treating P-Day as a free-for-all, listening to the soundtracks of our favorite PG-13 and R-rated movies^[3]e.g. Gladiator, Last of the Mohicans, and etc.; I’m sure the Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean soundtracks entered heavy rotation after I served as well., and so on. In Latin America where I served, the most common strategy was to listen to Spanish Pop music under the guise of “learning the language.” Hence, quite a few of us gathered surprisingly extensive CD collections of Shakira, Maná, Juanes, Don Omar, Daddy Yankee, Tego Calderon, Celia Cruz, and more by the time we flew home.

Among us missionaries serving in early-2000s Puerto Rico specifically, the by-far most popular CD was that bona fide classic of Latin Rock, 1996’s Vagabundo by Robi Draco Rosa.

It was the Puerto Rican teenagers we’d run into who first introduced us to Vagabundo, in fact (hence we could credibly claim that buying the album was a “fellowshipping” technique), as these young Hispanic Rock fans correctly deduced that a bunch of American white dudes reared on ’90s Alternative would be all over a Latin Hard Rock album.

Indeed, most of us were sold on the CD before we ever even hit play based solely on its wild back-story: Robi Draco Rosa as a teen had been one of the final members of the popular ’80s Puerto Rican boy band Menudo (literally: “often”, as in how frequently the lineup changed once a member aged out), alongside such luminaries as Ricky Martin–who had broken through into the US mainstream just before most of us had put in our mission papers.^[4]Draco Rosa had even co-written his massive cross-over hit “Livin’ La Vida Loca.”

Young Millennial Rockists that we were, we had in High School mostly treated Ricky Martin tolerantly if indifferently–certainly more pleasant than the Boy Bands and Rap-Metal that also saturated the airwaves at the time, but not essential. Martin’s ex-bandmate Draco Rosa, however, had taken a decidedly different route, apparently rejecting the more lucrative temptations of Pop stardom like so many other Menudo alumni, to instead not only record a hard rock album, but an extended meditation on the fear of death–what Hugh Nibley once called “The Terrible Questions,” of what awaits us, if anything, when we die, and why we are even alive in the first place.

Needless to say, for us kids who had listened to way too much Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, and Nirvana growing up, Vagabundo was a revelation.

I use that word only half-facetiously; we still in the early-2000s took somewhat-seriously the idea that one must not “sell-out”, even as we also recognized how rarely that ever actually happened—such that encountering a pop singer who really did forsake the vanities of Top 40 was astounding to us, genuinely courageous in a way no one seemed to do anymore, a distant relation to not only our favorite Anglo alt-rockers of the ’90s, but even (I think we dared flatter ourselves) to us Mormon missionaries who were at least nominally leaving behind the things of this world to seek for the things of a better^[5]Even if only for two brief years; D&C 25:10.. All our Youth Leaders growing up had told us to reject the world and not follow Mammon^[6]While still of course suiting up for their corporate jobs and voting for tax-breaks for the rich; Draco Rosa actually did it!

Certainly Draco Rosa had made no artistic concessions to a Top 40 sensibility on Vagabundo. Tracks like the Noise-Rock-inflected opener “Madre Tierra,”^[7]“Mother Earth” the ominous slow-burn of “Llanto Subterraneo,”^[8]“Subterranean Weeping”–which is perhaps an oblique allusion to the Bob Dylan track? Draco Rosa did later cover “One Too Many Mornings.” the freak-folk of the title track,^[9]“Vagabond” the pre-Modest Mouse stylings of “Penélope,”^[10]Specifically, it reminds me most of “Ocean Breathes Salty”, another song about the terrible questions. the paranoid Punk rock of “Delirios,”^[11]“Deliriums” the Grunge Metal of “Para no olvidar“,^[12]“To Not Forget” the Gothic angel of death on “Blanca Mujer,”^[13]“Woman in White” the Chopin waltz opening “Vivir“^[14]“To Live”, the dark carnival on ”Vertigo”,^[15]I think you can figure out the Spanish translation for that cognate on your own the legitimately terrifying Jeff Buckley-esque “Brujería,”^[16]“Witchcraft” the Tom Waits-style drunken troubadour on “La Flor del Frío,”^[17]“The Frozen Flower” and the twin sepulchers at the bottom of the sea on “Amantes Hasta el Fin,”^[18]“Lovers to the End” cannot credibly claim to be aspiring towards a broad crossover appeal á la Ricky Martin. Unlike the rest of our Latin CDs, Vagabundo not only helped us missionaries learn Spanish, but caused us 20-year-olds (who were at best nodding acquaintances with Death at the time) to confront the terrible questions directly.

That is, Vagabundo wasn’t just an escape or a reprieve from missionary work, but in a round-about way, a justification for it. I mean, shouldn’t we all be confronting the great and final fact of death more often? Isn’t the whole point of religion to answer the great-and-terrible question of what happens to us when we die? Were we not purportedly representatives of Christ Resurrected, preaching the victory over the grave and Eternal Life and the great Plan of Salvation? Wasn’t someone like Draco Rosa–that rare man who refused to look away from the hard facts of death, even when he could have just as easily cocooned himself into the hedonism of Pop stardom–at least theoretically the exact sort of person that our message should resonate with? If we weren’t confronting the terrible questions for ourselves, then just what the heck did we even think we were doing out there?

I’ve quoted before Harold Bloom, who once said in a PBS documentary on the Church, “What is the essence of religion? Sigmund Freud said it was the longing for the father. Others have called it the desire for the mother or for transcendence. I fear deeply that all these are idealizations, and I offer the rather melancholy suggestion that they would all vanish from us if we did not know that we must die. Religion rises inevitably from our apprehension of our own death. To give meaning to meaninglessness is the endless quest of all religion. When death becomes the center of our consciousness, then religion authentically begins. Of all religions that I know, the one that most vehemently and persuasively defies and denies the reality of death is the original Mormonism of the prophet, seer and revelator Joseph Smith.”

Seriously, religion is no better than TV, games, sex, wealth, and other distractions, if it isn’t proffering genuine comfort and answers to “the terrible questions.” (Not for nothing is one of our baptismal covenants to “mourn with those that mourn…^[19]Mosiah 18:9”)

I often think we don’t take that idea seriously enough, and even within the Church we spend as much time avoiding thinking about death and our final end as those without it. “How vain and trifling have been our spirits, our conferences, our councils, our meetings, our private as well as public conversations,” said Joseph Smith from Liberty Jail, ”too low, too mean, too vulgar, too condescending for the dignified characters of the called and chosen of God.” If we are wallowing in such trivialities boring meetings, then we fatally misunderstand what the entire appeal of the Gospel is supposed to be in the first place.

And on a personal note: the fact that my Mom died two days after I got home from my mission–which you can still read about in my book here–has certainly kept these terrible questions at the forefront of my consciousness ever since. (It is, incidentally, why I open Chapter VII with a Draco Rosa epigram.) Such is also why Vagabundo has kept resonating with me personally, long after the rest of my Latin music CDs have became mere nostalgia pieces.

In any case, I still give Vagabundo a spin every October or so, that one rare time a year^[20]at least in the English-speaking world when we at least pretend to acknowledge that death surrounds us and haunts us continually, even if we (futilely) try to downplay it with kitsch and costumes. Overall, its an album that not only reminds me of my mission, but of why I served a mission in the first place.^[21]Coda: As for whatever happened to Draco Rosa himself—after garnering critical acclaim and a strong cult following with Vagabundo, he finally dropped his long awaited follow up Mad Love in 2004, … Continue reading