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

14th Mar, 2015

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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.

CARLOS VIVES, “LUNA NUEVA”

23rd March, 2002

Wiki | Video

Hooray, he's back!

As we've seen twice now, Carlos Vives had been a journeyman pop star since the mid-80s (the release of his first album coincides with the beginning of this travelogue), but it was only in the millennial era that he began to top the chart regularly. "Luna Nueva" (new moon) unveils no new facet to the beachy singalong persona which has given him these hits, but its agreeable uptempo rattle and uncomplicated love-song lyrics make it one of the most enjoyable songs we've encountered all year.

Its categorization, as I'm coming to expect with Vives, is more perplexing. It uses the rock-based instrumentation of his pop-vallenato band, but the shuffling rhythm and squawking, not swinging, accordion is closer to Mexican corrido. As always, he's a synthesist, and his pan-Latinism is one reason he's here at the top of the Hot Latin chart rather than merely famous in South America or the Caribbean.

In the video, he plays an inmate of a psychiatric hospital that functions more like a prison, literalizing the title line in the chorus, where he wants to love "con desespero, como loco en luna nueva" (with wild despair, like a madman in the full moon). It's a cartoonish and offensive depiction of mental illness, which is probably why it's not on his official channel. But the internet doesn't forget.

LOS TIGRES DEL NORTE, “EL MOJADO ACAUDALADO”

19th July, 1997

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The last time we heard from Los Tigres, they were taking on corruption and systemic failure in the Mexican government. Their return engagement to the top of the chart, in contrast, sees the most fearless conjunto in norteño engaging directly with the immigrant experience. "El Mojado Acaudalado" means "The Prosperous Wetback" (the slur is comparable, maybe, to the way country music has reclaimed "redneck"), and the lyrics are as plain and direct as any we've seen:

Me estés esperando Mexico lindo
Por eso mismo me voy a ir
Soy el mojado acaudalado
Pero en mi tierra quiero morir

(Beautiful Mexico, you're waiting for me
That's just where I'm heading to
I'm the prosperous wetback
But I want to die in my own country)

The crisp stomp backing up this bone-dry recitative is beautiful in its spareness, a repeated descending bassline as close as we get to any instrumental flourishes. The fact that the song opens with the chorus sung by a child is perfectly appropriate: it's simple enough for a child (or an uneducated laborer) to sing, as plain as a hymn, as straightforward as a nursery rhyme. Comparisons with country music, especially Johnny Cash's bone-dry rattle or Hank Williams' brusque eloquence, are inevitable; and in the roundup of American placenames to which the narrator is saying goodbye, it echoes the grand old country tradition of a travelin' song. But it also positions him as much American as Mexican -- W. E. B. DuBois' notion of "double consciousness" is as applicable to the immigrant laborer as to the black American.

For the nth time, I'm not rating these out of ten. I suspect, though, that if I was, this would be one a ten.

LOS TIGRES DEL NORTE, “EL CIRCO”

11th May, 1996

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However easy it seems to look back at the decades and identify patterns, make generalizations, and persuade yourself that music is its own through-line, there are always going to be pieces of the puzzle that go missing if all you hear, if all you know, is the music.

So while I've been making a pretty glib case for the increasing recurrence of Mexican norteño music (and American tejano music) at the top of the Hot Latin chart being entirely due to Selena's star power, it's just as much due to demographic shifts — in the wake of NAFTA, cross-border immigration exploded as multinationals opened cheap factories across Mexico, decimating local economies and sending millions looking for a better life in the factories and fields of the United States. But this too is glib (though no less pertinent); focusing on the new immigrants obscures the Spanish speakers who have been here for generations. Border life for Mexican-Americans means being concerned with the politics, the culture, and the wars of two nations, and Los Tigres del Norte, a norteño band from the Mexican state of Sinaloa, are the Clash, the Bob Marley, or the Public Enemy of the region, truth-tellers and gadflies of power who couch their commentary in witty, effervescent music. (The fact that they do most of this truth-telling from San Jose, California doesn't hurt.)

The tool they use for this commentary is the corrido (lit. "ballad"), a standard form in Latin music that can be analogized to the twelve-bar blues in its standardization, its antiquity, and its flexibility and adaptability to any tempo, instrumentation, or topic. Los Tigres' primary lead instrument is the norteño accordion, and their stiff polka-derived tempos may sound corny if you're not hearing with the proper ears (as I didn't for many years), but once you accept these as features instead of bugs, there's a whole world of little runs between verses, ironic chord changes, and most of all, the deliciously biting, sarcastic lyrics.

Los Tigres del Norte (that's "The Tigers of the North" in English) came to fame in the mid-70s with a series of narcocorridos, or ballads about drug trafficking — in humanistic, literary songs, with a cinematic gift for narrative and character — and have remained at the very top of the norteño heap since; but on "El Circo," which hit the top of the Hot Latin chart for a week in the spring of 1996, they turn their gimlet eye on the world of Mexican politics.

Even if you know Spanish, this might not be immediately apparent; after all, as leader Jorge Hernández sings the first verse, it's a song about two brothers who own a circus. (The full text of the song — my translation — is behind the jump.) But anyone who'd been paying attention to Mexican politics from the late 80s to that very week knew exactly who the brothers Carlos and Raúl were supposed to be: ex-president of Mexico Carlos Salinas and his strongarm brother Raúl, then in jail for conspiring in political assassination and under suspicion of money laundering. (It was Carlos Salinas who negotiated the NAFTA agreement with the Clinton administration; under his right-wing presidency, Mexico plunged into debt and suffered economic collapse.) The political enemies of the Salinas brothers tended to meet mysterious but fatal ends; in this regard, both the Tigres' recording of this song and the airplay that pushed it to #1 on the (American) chart can be seen as acts of political defiance.