10th March, 2012
Anything could happen.
That was how I felt in the spring of 2012, shocked and delighted that this underground tribal (pronounced the Spanish way, tree-BALL, hence the artist name) anthem had broken through to the masses and hit #1 on the national Latin chart. A year earlier, I had been deep in music Tumblr (R.I.P.) and my Google Reader (R.I.P.) feed was full of young music tastemakers from all over; I don't remember from which one of them I first heard about the Monterrey rave scene -- probably Club Fonograma (R.I.P.) -- but 3Ball was always at the center of it; I shot off a lazy blurb at the Singles Jukebox (R.I.P.) and ranked it #57 on my year-end 100 best songs list, in between a British indie band and a horrorcore rapper. And then I kept hearing it on the radio, and the album debuted at #2 on the Latin Albums chart, and it had (from my perspective) an unexpected second life as a mainstream Latin hit.
I'm not sure it's easy to explain, at this distance, why it felt so unlikely. (Apart from the fact that it was a season of unlikely hits: I had also included Australian quirk-ballad "Somebody That I Used to Know" in my 2011 list, and then it blanketed the US airwaves in early 2012.) Part of why it's hard to explain is that the aesthetics that 3Ball MTY (and their mentor Toy Selectah) were drawing from have only become more mainstream in the years since: enormous Latin stars are confidently blending tropical rhythms, squelchy synths, sing-song lyrics, and rock simplicity all the time now: global pop stars like J. Balvin and Rosalía owe as much to the Mexican underground as they do to the Puerto Rican 2000s-era reggaetón wave, whether they know it or not.
But everything sounds much more polished nowadays. América Sierra and El Bebeto are clearly jobbing talent collaborating with some teenage DJs, not slick, media-trained professionals. They're both from Sinaloa and had only recorded tiny-label regional music before this; in some ways they remind me of the great Eurohouse glut of the 90s, where an anonymous woman always sang the memorable hook and a dude always rapped awkwardly, but the real star was the zooming beats.
The three DJs, Erick Rincón, Alberto Presenda, and Sergio Zavala, had met online in 2009, when they were all betwen sixteen and seventeen, and started making beats together and putting them the internet; by the end of 2010, they were playing international music festivals and getting attention from labels. They signed with Latin Power Music, a division of Universal (so of course by the time I'd heard of them they were no longer strictly speaking indie), but their music, born of the internet, was both aware of global trends and defiantly local, combining the "tribal guarachero" that had been a lynchpin of Monterrey's underground rave scene since the mid-2000s with international-friendly sounds: once again, you can hear the ghost of reggaetón in the negative space of the triplet patterns, even if the dembow riddim itself never appears.
Structurally the song is more like baile funk or other dancefloor-centric music, made up of repeating patterns, than like a traditional pop song with its contrasting sections of verse-chorus-middle eight: El Bebeto sing-raps two verses, then América Sierra sincs two verses, then they do the same thing over again. It hardly matters: the chicken-scratch rhythms, cumbia mixed with Afro-Cuban percussion, Sly & Robbie drum fills, and nagging, buzzy synths, are the important thing about the song. The adults are singing something about coming together, trying it out, taking one another. The kids don't care. The kids are dancing.
Although nobody here will trouble us again in this travelogue, that doesn't necessarily mean the same oblivion that other one-hit wonders have faced. Rave culture means never having to say goodbye; there's always another festival or DJ gig around the corner. 3Ball, Sierra, and Bebeto have all continued to make music away from the glare of the spotlight that 2012 lent them for a crazy, glorious year. And while tribal guarachero itself is unlikely to appear at #1 again, its eclectic, tropical dance sensibilities will recur again and again in the years to come.
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