LA ARROLLADORA BANDA EL LIMÓN DE RENÉ CAMACHO, “NIÑA DE MI CORAZÓN”

16th October, 2010

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Pretty much every one of the most popular banda sinaloense groups has a Lizárraga in its history, because they all hail from Mazatlán, but the Salvador Lizárraga who took the reins of Banda El Limón in the 70s does not appear to have been a close relative of the Cruz Lizárraga who founded El Recodo some forty years earlier. When Salvador suffered a stroke in the 90s, clarinetist René Camacho took the reins, and had enough success that once his former boss recovered enough to reclaim his position, Camacho no longer wanted to take his orders. And so the group split: Camacho's band, La Arrolladora (the overwhelming), has continued to have pop success, while Lizárraga's Original Banda El Limón has retained its audience, occasionally coming close to La Arrolladora's heights but staying a little more traditional.

Not that "Niña de Mi Corazón" is paricularly iconoclastic: lyrically, it's an extremely old-fashioned love song in which Jorge Medina's male lover sees his female beloved as an innocent young girl in need of protection. It could read as extremely paternalistic, not to say creepy, something the video ameliorates by having the love story be an old man's memory of childhood love in an orphanage; and the girl is adopted, leaving the boy behind. But the lightness and complexity of the rhythm, a modified bolero, keeps the big-band arrangement from feeling too stodgy. Camacho's wind-forward arrangements are among the most gorgeous in banda, and Medina's tender singing is unrivaled in the banda I've covered to date.

But this is the last banda #1 we will encounter before Billboard's metholodology for calculating the Hot Latin chart changes to incorporate streaming. I haven't decided yet whether, when I reach that milestone, I'll switch over to the Airplay chart, which uses the same methodology that has served this chart since 1986, or stick to the Hot Latin chart for continuity's sake. If you have a strong opinion one way or the other, consider leaving a comment or atting me on Twitter about it.

BANDA LOS RECODITOS, “ANDO BIEN PEDO”

20th March, 2010

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This is only the fourth banda sinaloense record at #1, but it's the third to be managed by the superemely successful Lizárraga family, whose Banda El Recodo was the first to have a pop following. Los Recoditos was formed in 1989 when patriarch Cruz Lizárraga put together an ad-hoc group of young musicians (including his eldest son, Alfonso Lizárraga) to perform for a visiting eminence gris, and they had an abbreviated career until Alfonso told them they could no longer use the name in 1998, having graduated to the leader of El Recodo since his father's passing. The remaining members changed their name to Banda Vuelta del Río, but a year later, Los Recoditos was reformed as the junior wing of El Recodo, with oversight by Alfonso, and some but not all of the band members returned. (There are still people who refuse to accept it as the real Recoditos, as is their right.)

In 2008, singer Carlos Sarabia, who had quit El Recodo in 2003 after butting heads with Alfonso, joined Los Recoditos in order to fulfill the terms of his contract with the family, and based on commercial performance he seems to have been exactly the breath of fresh air the outfit needed. Although this song is primarily sung by Luis Ángel "El Flaco" Franco, who had been singing for Los Recoditos since 2003, Sarabia's shit-eating grin in the video's opening shot and whooping backup on the choruses gives the song its raffish charm: especially compared to the main outfit's politely romantic "Me Gusta Todo de Tí," which alternated with it at #1 for a while, the freewheeling swagger of "Ando Bien Pedo" (I'm very drunk) is joyous in its careening recklessness, the brass bright even to harshness and the tempo a clattering lurch. Marco "Zapata" Figueroa's songwriting is vernacular without being very slangy beyond the title line, making use of repeating trisyllabic words to evoke the punchy circularity of drunken thought.

Raucousness, working-class rowdiness, male bonding through alcohol: all of these are longtime drivers of pop energy throughout so many different kinds of cultures. It's tempting to call "Ando Bien Pedo" the most rock & roll song we've seen on this travelogue in a long time, almost certainly more rock & roll than anything that's under the "rock en español" tag. And if we remember 2010 in Anglophone pop, it was very much part of the zeitgest: this was the era of Ke$ha, 3OH!3, and "Like a G6" -- partying while we can, because there might not be a tomorrow. Although "Ando Bien Pedo" is textually about drinking due to romantic disappointment rather than due to more existential concerns, sonically and visually it's very much about recklessness and having no regrets.

BANDA EL RECODO DE CRUZ LIZÁRRAGA, “ME GUSTA TODO DE TÍ”

26th December, 2009

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Banda El Recodo's second number-one of 2009, and their last: the moment in which banda crossed over so thoroughly to the larger pop audience did not last long. Although they continued to consistently make the charts well into the 2010s (as indeed they had since the late 90s), and retain their devoted regional audience.

Luis Antonio "El Yaki" Partido's vocals again take center stage here, as they did in "Te Presumo", but the aw-shucks sentiment of that song is replaced by mere bland desire here. "Me Gusta Todo de Tí" means "I like all of you," and the lyrics are a dull recitation of everything the singer likes about his object of affection. The banda orchestration feels much more pro forma here too, with few grace accents or flourishing solos. That's on purpose, of course: the point is to highlight the very trite, very sincere lyrics. It's very much the kind of song that gets played at weddings, that a groom sings to a bride, traditional in the deepest sense.

In fact, it was #1 for a month in the winter of 2010 before the spot moved on to other, more exciting songs; but after a gap of twelve weeks it returned to #1 for a week in the middle of April, which does seem to suggest that weddings really did have something to do with its popularity.

It also happens to be the song that was at #1 when I started writing this blog in January of 2010. I don't remember specifically hearing it then, because I was still in an "all banda sounds the same" headspace (and indeed I'm not sure I would have known enough to even call it banda then), although the title melody stirs a vague memory. But I can't help but appreciate it anyway, because I wanted to like it (from looking at the #1s list on Wikipedia) and was daunted by how much lay between the first #1 in 1986 and it. Eleven and a half years later, there are a lot of Hot Latin #1st to get through still, but it seems unlikely we'll ever hear anything this intentionally naïve ever again.

ESPINOZA PAZ, “LO INTENTAMOS”

8th August, 2009

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Only the second banda sinaloense song ever to hit #1, and the second within the same year: 2009 is as diverse a year for Hot Latin #1s as there has been on record to date. Which says as much about the changing formats of Latin radio airplay within the US in the late 2000s as it does about audiences (or even the specific virtues of the individual performers, which we'll get to). For decades, Billboard had divided its Latin charts between Hot Latin, Tropical, and Regional Mexican, because that was more or less the divide in radio formats: Hot Latin (across the country) played pop music in Spanish, generally whatever was popular throughout continental Latin America and Spain, Tropical (keyed to the New York and Miami markets) played what was popular among the Caribbean diaspora within the US, and Regional Mexican (keyed to the Southern California and Texas markets) played what was was popular among blue-collar Mexican immigrants and their children.

There had always been plenty of overlap between the Hot Latin and the Tropical formats, as we've seen, and Regional Mexican had also made plenty of inroads into the Hot Latin chart as well, depending on the year and the region. But several trends over the past decade -- including the massive growth of native Spanish speakers within the US (between 1990 and 2010, their percentage of the population almost doubled), the consolidation of commercial radio in the hands of a few major corporations, and the rise of truly national Spanish-language media (Telemundo and Univision did not segregate their music programming by region) -- meant that Regional Mexican music began to have a stronger presence than ever in the Hot Latin charts just at the moment when the strongest threads in that chart had become Puerto Rican reggaetón and Dominican bachata, both Tropical genres.

And "Lo Intentamos" (we tried it) actually begins with traditionally Cuban percussion, sounding almost like a bolero, before the full banda comes in and the foursquare stomp of the drums solidifies the rhythm. But it's never quite as oompah as so much banda is: this is a highly contemporary pop song written by a man whose long apprenticeship took place in the United States, where he'd been a seasonal migrant laborer, as well as in Mexico. Structurally, it has R&B and rock in its DNA as well as banda, and it's easy to mentally recast the swaying tempo as a rock & roll ballad.

Espinoza Paz was born in Sinaloa in 1981, where he began writing songs as a childhood hobby, and first crossed the border at the age of fifteen, following the footsteps of his father, who had also been a migrant worker in the US. After a decade of work and struggle, he finally managed to sell a brace of songs to an established banda singer in 2004, gaining a foothold in the industry; his first major-label album, which marketed him as a singer/songwriter of the people, was released in 2008, giving him the minor hit "El Próximo Viernes." The follow-up Yo No Canto, Pero Lo Intentamos (I don't sing, but let's try it) gave him this, his sole Hot Latin #1.

It's a superb song, romantic and sad and vernacular -- the language is very plain and unadorned in a kind of way that many Spanish speakers sneer at, dismissing it as simpleminded underclass music aimed at uneducated first- or second-generation immigrants who are losing touch with, or never knew much, Spanish. Maybe so; but they deserve popular music that speaks to and for them just as much as, and maybe more than, university graduates and Europeanized Latin Americans do. Paz expresses his regret at not doing enough to keep his lost love, and the pain that her new love gives him, in basic, universal language, and his untrained voice struggles to keep up with the melody as it pushes into a higher register.

Within three years, he will announce a short-lived retirement from music in a bid to regain control of his career; he will never again be as popular as he was around the turn of the 2010s, as the genre of banda moves away from his slightly callow, aw-shucks persona. But we only have a few more years left in which banda can break through to the top of the chart at all; the streaming era is coming up quickly.

MAKANO, “TE AMO”

23rd May, 2009

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The channel that Flex opened for Panamanian reggaetón to get a hearing in the wider pop marketplace seems to have only let one more song escape before it was closed off again by the shifting musical tides. Makano, whose name derives from a childhood singing group who called themselves Los Makanos after the macano tree, a symbol of Panama, didn't have the reggaetón roots that Flex did, and leaned even more into the romantic, pinup side of the music. I'm not usually very interested in talking about imitation rather than spheres of influence, but it's noteworthy that Flex's breakout single was "Te Quiero," (literally I want you, but generally used as a way to say I love you without being too intense) and Makano's second single was called "Te Amo" (I love you, directly stated).

Even so, once the song was released internationally in October 2008, it only got as far as #11 on the Hot Latin chart before starting to fall again in March 2009. What really got it to #1 was the remix with Puerto Rican duo R.K.M. y Ken-Y (who I said would not trouble us again, but I was wrong), and perhaps the banda remix with Sinaloan star Germán Montero helped on Regional Mexican radio too.

The latter is perhaps the most interesting of the three official releases, Makano and Montero singing over a banda version of the reggaetón production by Panamanian DJ Fasther; the drummer tries hard to evoke the one-and-three rhythms of banda's polka roots, but because reggaetón is Black in origin, the downbeat is actually on the two and four, and so there's a fascinating tension to the recording that the smooth, undistinguished original lacks.

Makano had only a sliver of Flex's global success before returning to merely local stardom, but he seems to have maintained his stature in Panama better since; he's whiter, so that's unsurprising. We won't see him again from this vantage point, but his contribution toward the domestication of reggaetón will bear fruit.

BANDA EL RECODO, “TE PRESUMO”

28th February, 2009

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And another genre that defined the Hot Latin chart when I first encountered it at last breaks through to #1. This is banda, specifically banda sinaloense (i.e. from the Mexican state of Sinaloa), the brass-heavy music that has been a strain in Mexican regional music since the late nineteenth century as a result of heavy German immigration, but as a formal genre really exploded in popularity in the 2000s as conjunto (smaller combos, often playing the same styles) music declined. Banda El Recodo is considered "la madre de las bandas" (the mother of the bands), as it was founded in 1938 by Cruz Lizárraga and cut its first record in 1951. A lot of water has flowed under the Recodo bridge -- imagine a version of the Count Basie Orchestra, or even a Sousa-descended marching band, hitting #1 in 2009  to get some understanding of just how differently Mexican (and Mexican-American) audiences relate to pop history than Anglophone ones do.

Then again, some things are constant: perhaps the biggest reason that this song went to #1 when no banda record ever had before was that Luis Antonio Partida, a.k.a. "El Yaki," had signed on as a vocalist in 2008. Formerly of the Banda Estrellas de Sinaloa de Germán Lizárraga (the band founded by Cruz Lizárraga's son once he left El Recodo in 2002), El Yaki was that universal draw in pop, a cute boy with a sweet voice.

It helps that "Te Presumo" is a good song, a swooning waltz with an appealingly vernacular lyric. The refrain "te presumo" is sheer bad grammar in most Spanish-speaking countries, the same way its literal translation, "I presume you," is in English, but in the Mexican vernacular it means something like "I aspire to you" -- it's the language of courtship, even of country courtship. And to the degree that banda is the country music (really, a country music) of Mexico -- rural, working-class, and hewing to conservative musical tradition -- it achieves emotional authenticity by being earnestly true to what a sophisticated urbanite might consider a corny, outdated sound.

But I love the textures of banda, from the flatulent tuba keeping the bass anchored to the silvery tang of the brass and the sharp flutters of the woodwinds. These are all orchestral instruments, but (as in hot jazz) they're being used to pop ends, each section playing as one instrument (the way Duke Ellington or Brian Wilson used pop orchestras) to create novel timbres and support El Yaki's romantic yearning with propulsive immediacy. These precious few years before streaming crowds nearly all variation out of the top of the chart need to be savored: as much as I love reggaetón, the Hot Latin calculus that rewarded many different kinds of music was way more interesting and fun than one that just presents the most frequent common denominator.