Lo estamos pasando muy bien

"We're Having a Great Time" sounds like a canned scream in an elevator that goes up and down between dark humor and the most direct irony. It’s not a song that invites you to dance, but rather to laugh at what hurts: that forced optimism peddled by the official narrative in the ’80s, when Chile was still living under the weight of the dictatorship. The melody moves along with a catchy yet unsettling rhythm, as if Jorge González’s bass were dragging each note toward a place that never quite feels festive. The chorus, with its obsessive repetition of “we’re having a great time,” functions as a distorted mirror of the political propaganda of the era: was everything really going well, or were they just making us believe it?

The song appeared on Los Prisioneros’ third album, *La cultura de la basura*, released in December 1987. That album was a reckoning with the neoliberal Chile that was beginning to emerge, and “Lo estamos pasando muy bien” was one of its most controversial tracks. By the time the Latin American version was released in 1988—featuring remixes and some new tracks—it had already become an unwitting anthem for those who saw the facade of economic progress as a farce. Its nearly six-minute runtime gives the song room to unfold that irony at a leisurely pace, as if each chord were yet another ironic comment. Recorded at a time when the band had already broken through the media blockade but was still banned from the radio, the song ended up being a hit in countries like Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, where the message resonated deeply with a youth that was also living under authoritarian regimes.