Ritchie Valens

Not one of his ten planets sits in a cardinal sign and not one sits in water. Earth takes six, fire and air two each, and seven of the ten are fixed. This is a chart built to hold a position and continue, with nothing in it that starts and nothing that registers what any of it cost. The record says Valens recorded La Bamba, a Mexican folk song set to rock and roll, died at seventeen in the same crash as Buddy Holly, and that his whole career lasted eight months.

Five of the ten planets sit inside ten degrees of Taurus: Saturn at nineteen, the Sun at twenty three, Uranus at twenty six, Jupiter at twenty seven and Venus on the last degree of the sign. Half a chart in the sign that accumulates rather than announces, in somebody who was given eight months, is the hardest thing in this record to look at, and there is no version of this summary that improves it. Jupiter sits conjunct that Uranus at just over a degree, which is sudden growth and a life that changes shape quickly when it changes at all.

Mercury sits on the second degree of Gemini and sixty degrees from Pluto at half a degree, which is depth without strain: strategy, persuasion, and an unusual tolerance for uncomfortable information. Venus sits square Mars at seven tenths, attraction and drive disagreeing. His Moon sits on the last degree of Sagittarius at noon and may by then have moved on into Capricorn, which costs this chart both of its yods, so neither is used. Neptune alone was retrograde. Eight months is not long enough for a chart to be tested against, and the record says so in its own last sentence.

He died at Clear Lake in Iowa on 3 February 1959, at seventeen. Mars and Jupiter both ran straight into that Taurus group: Mars conjunct his natal Jupiter at fifteen hundredths of a degree and his natal Uranus at just over a degree, with Jupiter directly opposite his natal Venus at thirteen hundredths. The crash is in the record and the chart accounts for none of it. The Moon was at its last quarter and nineteen per cent lit, which is the phase that rethinks the whole premise rather than the details.