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.

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.