Jorge González liked Mexican pizza. At least that’s what I noticed when we met at a restaurant in the Roma neighborhood. He and his wife, the Chilean photographer Loreto Otero—with whom he had also formed the duo Los Updates—already had a couple of huge slices loaded with cold cuts and vegetables on the table.
A couple of days earlier, González hadn’t been able to make it to a concert he was supposed to perform with the duo: he’d been mugged at an ATM in Mexico City. Or at least that was his story. The Chilean had been living in the Mexican capital for just over a year. It was the mid-2000s. In 2011, the couple would split up and he would move to Berlin.
Jorge González’s story is full of complexities and contradictions, typical of an artist who never settled into a single persona. His career with Los Prisioneros—the Chilean band he formed in the early 1980s—has yielded so many noteworthy moments that they have already been the subject of several books and biographies, including a rather mediocre biopic.
You never let anyone down
That conflicted relationship with his country’s art and culture scene was evident in his songs from an early stage. In “Nunca quedas mal con nadie,” for example, he lashes out at the protest musicians who were multiplying like gremlins at the time: “Your little bag and your handmade poncho, I really can’t stand your cheesy culture, I don’t care about your protest, because you never look bad to anyone, ” he sings. The song foreshadows, in a way, the idea that rebellion sells. Although it targets those artists who opposed their country’s dictatorship without naming it or taking risks, his criticism ends up being broader and more relevant. In fact, it’s directed at a counterculture that claims to be subversive but rarely challenges or transforms what it claims to fight against. During a concert at the Teatro Cariola in 1985, González even added the verse “keep your poetry, Charly García”, emphasizing the sharp edge of that provocation.
In other songs, he went even further. “¿Por qué no se van?” is a bitter critique, set to a techno-ska beat, that repeats the title like a mantra while, with chauvinistic flair, taking aim at snobbish contemporary Chilean artists who look down on local art. “If you dream of New York and Europe, you complain about our people and their clothes, you live loving the art house cinema of the Normandie,”, says the first verse. The Normandie Art House Cinema—a Santiago venue that in the 1980s screened films for intellectuals, something like the Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City—serves here as a symbol and a form of cultural resistance. “If your avant-garde doesn’t sell here”, it continues, becoming more incisive in the following stanzas:
“If you travel to Italy every year
If the culture is so rich in Germany
Why don’t you stay there next year?”
The Culture of Trash
Something similar happens with his take on pop music in the song “La cultura de la basura.” “Listening to the radio, we go to the stadium, we like Julio Iglesias and rockabilly, we have trash culture, we’re stubborn, we eat plain bread, we read comic books, TV makes us sleepy, but at night, I keep a poster of Raphael, and I comb my hair like him.”
Years later, in Corazones —the album on which Los Prisioneros moved away from social criticism to explore intense romantic songs—González would declare that Raphael was one of his influences.
Cultural independence
The gathering at the pizzeria was informal. We didn’t talk about his songs or his career. We talked about politics and how much he hated it when some artists asked him to cover his own songs. Jorge González, the eternal nonconformist, was happy with the pizza and engaged in the conversation about pre-Hispanic history and the discography of The Sisters of Mercy.
“Starting this Monday, the school’s main hall will host an exhibition of works by the promising Chilean painter and sculptor: Vittorio Angelonini, this outstanding student of the late Boris Van Hausen, is exhibiting for the last time before embarking on his journey to further his studies in France. In this distant place, people are poor, people shake hands, there is no racial pride, no colonies or tradition, always hiding their accent; at school they teach that culture is anything strange, anything but what you do,” sings Jorge with Los Prisioneros in the song “Independencia Cultural.”
In the song “Arte para cuatro gatos, “ the satire is already biting. “They get scholarships, go on trips, and stay up to date on the latest trends. They attend schools with teachers who have artistic-sounding last names and look the part; they’re steeped in culture.”
Jorge González: Contradiction and Search
Regarding that contradiction—he writes several songs critical of Europe and, at the same time, spends long periods there—the Chilean journalist and writer Óscar Contardo noted in a South American newspaper:
“Jorge, that conflict is always there. It’s the tension between the metropolis and a country that hasn’t quite come to terms with itself. I think the same thing happens to these artists: their life stories may seem contradictory, but they find coherence in the fact that they are on a quest.”
After that meeting with the former frontman of Los Prisioneros, I never saw him again. There’s a photo out there—a terrible-quality shot from a pre-iPhone cell phone. We exchanged a couple of emails about plans that never came to fruition—including some installations featuring music by his then-current band, Los Updates—and that was it.
Following the definitive breakup of Los Prisioneros —the band that’s been performing without the lead singer is a joke almost as ridiculous as the former members of Soda Stereo playing over a video with a hologram of their late lead singer—González spent several years at odds with his former bandmate Claudio Narea. The relationship broke down amid mutual accusations and alleged proposals for threesomes—including the story, this one actually documented, of an affair with Narea’s wife—and ultimately led to the band’s breakup. Added to that were constant clashes with the press, which on more than one occasion led to awkward incidents. Like when González threw microphones and cameras at reporters during a press conference.
No More Prisoners
In Mexico, he spent several years reinventing himself, away from the spotlight and living much as he had in his early years in Chile, before he became a famous artist.
Some time after our meeting, in February 2015, the media reported that Jorge had suffered a severe stroke following a concert in Nacimiento, Chile. Since then, he has stepped back from the stage and from the spotlight indefinitely. He currently resides in the San Miguel district of Santiago, where he grew up.
In one of his songs (“¿Acaso quieres venir?”) with Los Updates, he sang over a post-rave electronic beat:“Do you want to come to where you’ll cease to be? Come, come, take my hand here and take me to the perfect country”. We’ll never know if he found that idyllic place. Whether it was in Chile, Mexico, or Germany.
In 2025, after nearly a decade without releasing new material, he released a series of almost entirely instrumental tracks that border on ambient music. He rarely gives interviews. When he does, it’s to confirm that he won’t be performing live again. He isn’t interested in an audience that asks him to sing like he used to, nor “one that looks at their phone more than the stage,” he says.
