Broadcasting Buenas Ondas: Rock Magazines and Radio Advertisements in 1970s Argentina

During the 1970s and the early 1980s in Argentina, rock nacional was one of the most visible ways for young people to express a generational identity while alternating military dictatorships and authoritarian civilian governments restricted or repressed other modes of political and social participation. Considering the small number of television channels available in the capital city of Buenos Aires and the expense of attending live rock concerts, the radio and rock magazines were essential to the formation of this rock nacional community and its associated youth identity. Through the musical genre and the exchange that it fostered, young people rejected what they regarded as the older generations’ pessimism and emphasis on order in favor of optimism, idealistic propositions for the future, and “buenas ondas” or “good vibes.”

Drawing on radio advertisements and articles about the medium in the music magazines Superstar and Pelo, satirical magazines Satiricón and Humor, and newspapers including Clarín and La Prensa, this paper analyzes how radio reflected and reinforced youth values of community and optimism. How did rock radio stations rhetorically and visually position themselves as a response to the social fractures and political disenfranchisement produced by the authoritarianism of the 1970s? How do radio advertisements represent the preoccupations of rock music and magazines —for example, notions of individualism and community, the quotidian and the utopic, and affective exchange and commercialism? How do these advertisements reflect the changing relationship between the radio, newer technologies like the cassette recorder, and the communities that these devices produced? This paper argues that the “buenas ondas” promised by radio advertisements not only referred to broadcasts, but also the sense of community they produced over time through shared experiences listening to live broadcasts, circulation of rock magazines, and exchanged cassette tapes.