ABSTRACT
The Iyric of the Argentine tango is the mirror of the Argentine soul. It serves as the painful expression of Argentine male loneliness, betrayal, and unrequited love. Since Carlos Gardel is the arch male symbol in Argentina, and in him the tango and male symbols combine, he will be used as the focal point of this chapter. Recognizing the number of homages paid to Carlos Gardel and the continued success of his recordings (number of re-emissions of records, and so on), it is clear that he is considered a true folk-hero of Buenos Aires. The last essential element for the construction of a heroic/myth of Carlos Gardel is a sense of alienation and vulnerability. An important theme in Gardel's tangos was inescapable fate. Destiny is omnipotent and omnipresent. Carlos Gardel does not seem to have been identified with any political grouping. Carlos Gardel was the personification of the tango - he was tango and the tango was he.
