ARIEL CAMACHO Y LOS PLEBES DEL RANCHO, “EL KARMA”

14th Mar, 2015

Wiki | Video

Mexican regional music is so heavily drowned out by urban Caribbean sounds in the streaming era that it almost exclusively takes an extraordinary event for it to break through to the #1 spot even for a single week. In this case, that extraordinary event was the death of Ariel Camacho in a car accident on February 25, 2015, at the age of twenty-two.

Camacho had been one of the most promising figures in Mexican regional of the 2010s, bringing attention to the little-heard sierreño (tr. of the mountain range) genre. He began his career as a teenager by posting faceless videos to social media platforms in which he played a twelve-string guitar and sang songs by elders like Miguel y Miguel as well as his own compositions; they earned him enough popularity that a Mexican record label sought him out and got him to form a trio with friends on rhythm guitar and sousaphone. Their spare, almost skeletal sound was a novelty in a musical universe dominated by large-scale banda arrangements, and Camacho's songwriting, which dipped into the violent glamor of the narcocorrido as well as more traditional songs of love and heartbreak, was raw but promising. After two minor-label singles in 2013, his debut album El Karma was released in both Mexico and the US in the fall of 2014, produced by regional star Gerardo Ortíz (who has appeared twice in my Airplay Watch), with the title song receiving a relatively lavish video.

They did well enough that Camacho and his Plebes shot another four videos by the end of the year, a rate not unusual in the high-turnover, newly social media-driven world of Mexican regional, especially one aiming at a youth audience. When Camacho died, there was enough recorded material banked to release a posthumous album -- after that, Los Plebes hired a new singer and continued on as Los Plebes de Ariel Camacho, eventually splintering even further into configurations that won't trouble us here.

But the mourning that drove this nearly year-old song (the single went to streaming services on August 5, 2014, but the video had been uploaded to YouTube on March 11th, 2014, though I couldn't swear to when it was made public) to the top of the streaming chart was not mindless: Camacho y los Plebes had released a new single the day before his death, which you might expect to have received the bulk of the outpouring. But "Te Metiste" is a reverent, uncomplicated love song; "El Karma," the stark, first-person tale of a violent killer whose drug trafficking wealth has made him a target for reprisals having his family taken ransom, and whose attempt to kill the kidnappers ends in his own death, with the grim final line "Nadie de la parca se puede escapar" (Nobody can escape their fate), was a much more fitting memorial. 

But also, it had the benefit of already being familiar to his audience: the song had first been noticed in any of Billboard's charts back in August (the Digital Sales chart, on the single release) and grown slowly before reaching a natural premortem peak at #16 on the Hot Latin chart in January. In their article about the event, Billboard noted that its one-week #1 status was driven heavily by streaming, with YouTube receiving 86% of the traffic. It was the first Mexican regional #1 of the streaming era; it will be quite a while before there's another.

Airplay Watch:

• Ricky Martin, "Disparo al Corazón"
• A curious power ballad driven by banjo as much as the standard swelling strings, drum hits and keyboards. It's a generic enough love song that the video shows it applying to parental as well as romantic love, but Martin's committed-as-always performance gives nothing away.