David Bustamante has a new album on the street, ‘Inédito’, and to promote this work, the singer from San Vicente de la Barquera sat down with El País to answer the questions in a brief questionnaire, and left a striking headline.
When the journalist asks Bustamante what values he thinks the public knows him for, the singer answers because he is a good singer and also because of his sensitivity. Bustamante adds that in fact he considers himself “ahead” of his time for having shown male sensitivity on television, at a time when it was less accepted. In the first edition of Operación Triunfo, in 2001, Bustamante was known for his great voice, but also for crying frequently, more than his peers.
Bustamante believes that every artist must be sensitive and, when he remembers his time in Operación Triunfo, he points out that he suffered harassment for “showing how a man cried in public.” “They bullied me” are his words. Then he adds: “Sorry, I invented masculine deconstruction: they criticized me for being a crybaby, and today, thank God, with the evolution of society, those things are no longer seen in a negative way.”
Although Bustamante is surely joking when he suggests that he has “invented” anything, he is right when he remembers that for crying in public he was labeled a “crybaby.” In this way he was infantilized as if a man, simply because he was one, could not cry in public. On the other hand, evidently male deconstruction involves much more than simply crying in front of everyone.
At other points in the interview, Bustamante talks about the transfer of values to his daughter, the difference between self-love and self-esteem, or his love of poetry.