CUIDATE Lyrics in English by Dorian Ampie
Pulsea comes from pulsear, which literally means to wrestle or engage in a contest of strength, and can also mean to challenge someone. In the song, “hasta el macho me pulsea” uses it figuratively to describe even the toughest person testing or confronting him, giving the word a vivid streetwise intensity.
"CUIDATE" by Costa Rican artist Dorian Ampie is a street warning wrapped in a prayer. The title means "take care of yourself" or "watch out", and the whole hook keeps hammering it: "Ten cuidado que en la calle te están velando" [Be careful, on the street they're watching you]. Velar usually means to keep a vigil, but here it means someone is keeping an eye on you, and not in a friendly way. He's blunt about the stakes too: "Dos o tres sueñan con verme tirado" [Two or three dream of seeing me laid out], where tirado (thrown down) means dead or beaten on the ground.
What I like is how the tough talk sits right next to faith. He has "Dos del cielo me acompañan a todos lados" [Two from heaven go with me everywhere], and he keeps praying through it all. There's a great everyday idiom in "Una falta de respeto conmigo le sale cara" [Disrespecting me will cost you dearly], literally "comes out expensive". And watch the street spelling: words like parao', amenazao' and tocao' drop the d from parado, amenazado and tocado, so "me han amenazao' pero nunca me han tocao'" [they've threatened me but never touched me] is how people really talk. Plata is everyday Latin American slang for money. By the end he lands on "Pero vivo sin miedo a morir" [But I live without fear of dying], which is a bit much as a boast, but it fits a song this sure of itself.
