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.

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.

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.