The first ideas arose in 1927, with the failure of his first Tango (Qué vachaché, 1926) on his back, “in the middle of the daily difficulties, of the bitter job, of the injustice of the effort that doesn’t make profit, of the sensation that all horizons cloud, that all paths are closed”. With these words from the author, Yira...yira... can’t be thought like a mere individual drama. In any case, it reflects the perspective of a man faced with the disappointment of understanding an ill-fated world order, faced with the situation of extending his hand and not finding an answer; In sum, the perspective of losing hope. On one hand there is the vital disorientation, what in the daily language would be “not knowing where to get a grip”; On the other, poverty that lies in wait, in surreptitious facts like the mate herb dried to the sun to be used again (“la yerba secada al sol para volver a ser usada”) or the cracks on the shoes (“la rajadura de los zapatos”). The main character of Yira... yira... (like in other Tangos of Discépolo) finds himself immersed in a hostile world, without love, in which indifference rules scandalously.

In Yira... yira... social drama and individual drama get together. It’s the discourse of an unsuccessful man that tries to warn (“avivar”) to anybody in his same situation. The unsuccessful is shown without shame, in part because it’s a collective failure, in part because there is a didactic intention.

The message is skeptical. Two verses structured like temporal clauses present the anaphora “when” (“cuando”) to describe a borderline life situation. Faced with a desperate economical situation, and when hope has been lost, it’s possible to acknowledge the world’s indifference (“la indiferencia del mundo”). The images of the second verse are touching: a man rings a doorbell until the batteries dry and it stops ringing, he is looking for somebody else that hugs him in the moment of his death; Somebody that has worked hard all his life is abandoned to his fate; somebody about to die sees how his descendants are trying on his clothes. The warning has been made: When the addressee of the discourse finds himself in any of the described situations, he will remember that disappointed idealist that metaphorically knew how to bark (“ladrar”) his anger.

The chorus presents the metaphor of the word turning around like a representation of the lack of solidarity, as a sign that life goes on no matter what happens, like a confirmation that in the more transcendental moments, we are all in our own.

While in Qué vachaché the main character is presented as ingenuous by the woman that is kicking him out of the house, in Yira... yira... that same idealist is the one that stops believing, because he realizes that men are like beasts (“los hombres son unas fieras”). These literal words of Discépolo do not belong to the lyrics of this Tango, but they were taken from a dialogue that he had with the singer Carlos Gardel which was filmed. In 1932 film-maker Eduardo Morera(1906-1997) filmed fifteen short films(five of which were lost), odd precedents of the modern video-clip, in which Carlos Gardel interpreted in each a song –most of them, Tangos- with the purpose of being shown in cinemas before the feature films. One of these short films is about Yira... yira...  and has the added value of starting with this memorable dialogue between the singer and Discépolo:

Gardel: Tell me, Enrique... ¿What did you want to do with Yira... yira...?

Discépolo: With Yira... yira...

Gardel: That’s it.

Discépolo: A song of loneliness and despair...

Gardel: ¡Of course! That’s how i understood it.

Discépolo: That’s why you sing it in an admirable manner.

Gardel: But the main character is a good man, isn’t he?

Discépolo: Yes; he is a man that has lived the beautiful hope of fraternity for forty years. And all of a sudden, one day, when he is forty years old, one day, he finds out that men are a bunch of beasts.

Gardel: But... He says bitter words!

Discépolo: You will not expect him to say nice things a man that has waited forty years to “find out”(“desayunarse”)… 

Oddly enough Yira... yira... was first sung by Sofía Bozán the 5th of September of 1930, that is, the night in which general José Félix Uriburu was about to overthrow the constitutional government of Hipólito Yrigoyen, an act that would represent the first in a series of coups d’etat that would take place in Argentina during the last century. Yira…yira… served as the overture o fan opera that posterity would name the “Dreadful Decade” (“Década Infame”). The social injury that Word be lived in those years –both economic and spiritual- would be the cause of multiple disillusionments and disbeliefs. That overwhelming reality, that went on destroying each individual or collective dream, appears portrayed precisely in Yira…yira….

Oscar Conde.