A new strain in Mexican music opens here. It's not actually new, of course: both members of Sin Bandera, Mexican Leonel García and Argentine Noel Schajris, had been knocking about the industry for the bulk of the 90s, and when they got together the music they made wasn't particularly different from that of, say, Ricardo Arjona. But this is one of the first entrants in this travelogue of a musical tradition which will only grow more important in the years to come: internationalist Mexico City-based pop for thoughtful grownups.
The Distrito Federal's contributions to Mexico's musical traditions have hitherto been limited to the internationalist bolero movement of the 30s and 40s and the schlocky factory-line 80s pop which produced child stars (some of whom became adult stars) like Luis Miguel, Cristian Castro, and Timbiriche; but starting in the early 2000s, a scene began to coalesce that took the earnest, self-conscious artistry of Anglophone singer-songwriters for granted, and married it to all kinds of musical ideas. The producer who helped Sin Bandera's first few albums get off the ground was Áureo Baqueiro (who had gotten his start working for Timbiriche) -- the other debut albums he produced around the same time were Natalia Lafourcade's and Paty Cantú's.
Sin Bandera, who chose their name (without a flag) to indicate their loyalty to no nation or creed, a gesture of artistic freedom with roots in nineteenth-century Romanticism, were not the most creative of the scene's members: in fact "Mientes Tan Bien" (you lie so well) sounds like nothing so much as 70s soft rock, an America or James Taylor with updated production and less distinctive voices. As a song, it's terrific, a series of lies told and accepted which function both lyrically and mechanically as poetry, with superb rhymes and intricate rhythms. But as a record, it's dull and soporific, focusing on the glib prettiness of García's and Schajris' voices with such focus that a listener who isn't paying attention to the density of the words, who is just looking for a hook, is left wanting.
In fact, while the lyric is certainly broadly applicable (YouTube comments are full of broken-heart emojis embedded in countless narratives of trust and betrayal), it never accommodates more than a single idea, reformulated over and over again, and ends feeling rather smug and airless as a result. The video, in which supermodels pretend to be first poor fishing-village waifs and then bored, classy strippers, is the kind of thing which admires its own profundity without actually saying anything, all too indicative of the song's vacuity. The minute-long coda to the video, however, which interpolates an uptempo Sin Bandera song while showing the wrap party for the filming, is much easier to like.
It's a pity that this is Sin Bandera's only appearance at #1 to date (in fact very little of the D.F.'s grown-up pop will ever make it to this travelogue) -- they were more varied than this song suggests. But we have places to be. 2004 awaits.
No comments:
Post a Comment