Since Billboard‘s Latin charts tend to turn over slower than car engines during Chicago winters, the scene doesn’t look much different than it did two weeks ago. All titles in the Top 10 remain the same, with more than half of them occupying the exact same positions. The presidential primary campaign chart tenure of King Romeo’s indecent proposal has reached 118 weeks, and there are only six new songs, four on the big chart and two on the Regional Mexican airplay chart. Plus — and this makes NorteñoBlog howl hot tears of pain — both of Pitbull’s songs, “El Taxi” and “Baddest Girl In Town,” have left the Top 25. Beep beep, sir; beep beep.
But! As you know, NorteñoBlog has a bit of a thing for the late Ariel Camacho, whose “Te Metiste” is still sitting pretty at #7 Hot Latin without placing on the Regional Mexican chart, meaning people continue streaming and/or downloading the heck out of it. (Probably streaming.) Other songs in this predicament: Arrolladora’s “Confesión” and Recodos’ “Mi Vicio Más Grande,” both of which boast expensive-looking novela-lite videos.
Three months ago on our Top Singles list, NorteñoBlog was concerned about a lack of chart hits and puro sax music. Worry no more! There’s a bit less variety on this list than before, in part because I devoted the month of agosto to a project that prevented me from trawling for indie singles. (More on that project soon.) But the states of California, Chihuahua, Texas, Tijuana, and Zacatecas all represent below, along with ever-present Sinaloa.
(First quarter singles are here; second quarter singles are here.)
1. Marco A. Flores y Su Numero Uno Banda Jerez – “Amor de la Vida Alegre” (Garmex)
Mexican radio hit
Flores, who also made NorteñoBlog’s favorite single six months ago, is like the Ramones with better beats, Rae Sremmurd if they were fast, early Madonna with a better voice. He makes termite art of the most gnawing and forward-thinking sort. He spends half this song crowing over just drums and tuba.
[Note: this post has been edited to strike some unwarranted snark, for which I apologize to Milo Miles.]
A few weeks ago, the excellent music writer Phil Freeman alerted me to some “avant-banda” music at his blog Burning Ambulance. Although Freeman knows and loves Latin genres, Burning Ambulance largely covers jazz and metal, and the banda in question was Banda de los Muertos, a Brooklyn consortium of horn players playing what amounts to an arty chamber homage. (Says Muertos founder Jacob Garchik, “I might play a dance gig with the Banda on a Saturday but the next day play jazz for a cerebral, sit-down audience. I don’t want to do just one or the other!”) The Banda sounds like they’re fun live — by all accounts, Muertos shows are a blast of “hoots and hollers” and dancing. But on their new album Banda de los Muertos (Barbes), their take on the thriving commercial genre of banda resembles Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy remakes of the Notorious B.I.G. and the Spice Girls — both played with gusto on this album — or Brooklyn’s Asphalt Orchestra when they covered Swedish metal band Meshuggah. It’s a step removed. It’s “fun” (or “banging” or “rocking”) with scare quotes.
What it’s NOT is Banda For People Who Don’t Like Banda. There’s no reason you can’t enjoy, as NorteñoBlog has, both the mainstream banda music on commercial radio stations AND Banda de los Muertos’ somewhat jazzed-up take via NPR. Unfortunately, NPR reviewer Milo Miles seems to disagree:
Now, a pair of multi-instrumentalists in Brooklyn, Oscar Noriega and Jacob Garchik have revitalized Banda, a Mexican style Noriega grew up listening to with his immigrant parents and playing in a band with his brothers. Noriega and Garchik call their new group Banda De Los Muertos [ed: in this segment pronounced “BAYNda DEE los Muertos”], and their leadoff original instrumental on the group’s debut, “Cumbia De Jacobo,” is as much unadulterated fun as any tune this year.
I turn to NPR for many things — detailed news, election coverage, the annual jazz poll for which they mysteriously allow me to vote, journalists trying to maintain straight faces while Republicans say crazy things — but I’ve never met anyone whose go-to source for “unadulterated fun” was NPR. (Maybe they need a new ad campaign.) Fun on NPR always seems thoroughly and explicitly adulterated, even if it’s adulterated by such respectable substances as “brains” and “human decency.” And while Muertos’s leadoff cumbia is, yes, fun, it’s fun in the manner of a killer Pérez Prado track from the ’50s. Continue reading “Banda de los Muertos Is Cool, But Come On! (or, NPR being NPR)”→
Mexico and the U.S. might not agree on how to end the drug war or where to store El Chapo, but say this for international unity: we both love us some Banda MS. The banda’s uncharacteristically snappy “Piénsalo” continues at #1, both on the Mexican “Popular” chart and on Billboard‘s Regional Mexican chart, which measures U.S. airplay. Within the genre, they occupy the same position Arrolladora did a couple years ago, where any single they release is guaranteed to inundate radio playlists and hang out high on the charts for a couple months. (Not that Arrolladora’s doing badly for themselves lately — see #7 below.) I for one welcome our new romantic overlords and would like to encourage them to play a unity concert for the Supreme Leader of Iran.
New and notable this week:
At #12, Noel Torres’ ballad “Me Interesas” finally enters the Mexican chart, more than a year after topping U.S. airplay. More notable as an accordion hero and corridero, Torres also knows how to do banda romance right, largely because he knows his own voice. Nobody’s ever gonna mistake him for the world’s greatest crooner, so he skimps on the vibrato and instead delivers each lyric with forthright efficiency that cuts through the sentiment. Hearing him grow more confident with ballads has been an unexpected pleasure of following his career. (Don’t confuse “Me Interesas” with El Komander’s “Me Interesa,” returning to this chart at #16 and not nearly so interesante. Nobody’s ever gonna mistake El Komander for the world’s greatest crooner either, but he has fewer coping strategies for ballads.) An unenthusiastic Pick to Click!, then — did I mention this song is really old?
NorteñoBlog has pretty much made its peace with boring ballads about corazones and the hombres who break/nurse/fondle them, so this week’s Mexican Top 20 comes as a pleasant surprise. Most of the new songs are fast! Or at least midtempo, which often sounds like “fast” around this lot. (When Arrolladora’s devious mujer destroyed their collective soul, she also apparently destroyed their ability to play faster than 60 bpm.) Almost every inch of this new batch is perfect, from the bottom to the top:
At #20, Leandro Ríos, of superfun rhyming exercise “Debajo del Sombrero” fame, is now a no-good cheating bastard. But he’s really tortured about being caught “Entre Ella y Tú,” so that’s gotta count for something, right? Oh wait — HE’S NOT TORTURED AT ALL. As long as you’re content with the amount of Leandro you’re getting, what’s the problem? The jaunty accordion gave him away.
¡Ya era hora! Banda El Recodo, los papás corteses de Sinaloa, suenan más emocionados en su nuevo sencillo “Mi Vicio Más Grande.” A The Singles Jukebox, Rebecca A. Gowns escuchó “the ‘My Way’ of 21st Century banda.” Yo escribí:
The Sinaloan institution Banda El Recodo is closing in on 80 years old, and they haven’t stayed at the forefront of their genre all those years by happy accident. Bandleader Alfonso Lizárraga has tailored Recodo’s recent singles with sartorial precision, filling gaps in the regional Mexican playlist. In 2009 he adapted “Dime Que Me Quieres” from a ballad into a cumbia because there were no romantic cumbias on the radio. Four years later Recodo went the opposite direction, plugging “Vas a Llorar Por Mi” into the spot earmarked for “melodramatic stop-start ballads about death.” (You didn’t know you wanted that, did you? RECODO DID.) Now the team returns with their liveliest song in years, a furious minor-key chops killer about living the good life. The theme is nothing new, but the furious minor-keyness picks up where spinoff band Recoditos left off two years ago with “Mi Último Deseo.” Recodo races through that two-minute slot with thicker brass and, in Geovanni Mondragón, a less personable singer, though I do admire his trembling vibrato in the chorus, seconds before his bandmates wallop him with a giant hemiola.
[7]
NorteñoBlog went on vacation at the worst possible time, because while I was gone, IT ALL WENT DOWN. Not with the music. Except for El Komander (¡VALE LA PENA!), very few notable albums came out in the past few weeks; we’ll catch up with albums and singles in the coming days. No, I’m talking about las personas en las noticias:
LA BUENA:
Joan Sebastian’s discography is a mile long. The singer, songwriter, and guitarist not only wrote over a thousand songs, from ranchera to synthpop, but he wrote and produced entire albums for other singers. This is how NorteñoBlog has encountered him in the past: as the man behind Vicente Fernandez’s irresistible “Estos Celos” and Graciela Beltrán’s “Robame Un Beso.” Sebastian was famously “el poeta del pueblo,” riding his horse on stage and representing for his gente, and that meant giving the people what they wanted, mixing up regional styles with pop sounds from El Norte and acting in the novela Tú y Yo. And then there’s this delightful factoid about the man born José Manuel Figueroa:
Mr. Sebastian’s Facebook page says that he changed his name to Juan Sebastian in 1977, and that he turned the “u” in “Juan” into an “o” on the advice of his sister, a numerologist.
Maybe a commenter can explain how that math works?
I’m still catching up with him, and probably will be for a long time. RIP
Also while we were gone, Banda El Recodo became the first banda to play on Spanish TV. If I’m surprised they hadn’t done so already, does that reveal my cultural chauvinism? This is just more evidence that the term “Latin music” makes absolutely no sense as a genre, because it tells us nothing useful about the music in question, what it sounds like, or who listens to it. Surely somewhere in the world, someone is lumping together Wiley and George Jones as “English music” — but that doesn’t make the idea any less nonsense.
But the music production and distribution business has changed dramatically since El Chapo’s last escape [in 2001] — meaning times have changed on the narco-corrido front, as well. Forget six months; within six hours, bands and singers had rushed songs of El Chapo’s second escape onto YouTube and FaceBook. By Sunday afternoon, bands were recording their just-written Chapo tunes in the studio, playing the songs in front of enthusiastic live audiences and releasing elaborate videos with news coverage interspersed with dramatic reenactments of the tunnel escape.
Here are Los Alegres del Barranco:
These corridos are mostly gleeful, because El Chapo is now even LARGER than larger than life, and because of the Mexican government’s uncanny resemblance to Keystone Cops.
This musical expression points bluntly to collusion and to Mexico’s failure to run a government of law and order.
As many analysts have pointed out, the escape is a major embarrassment for President Enrique Peña Nieto, who in an interview with Univision after El Chapo was captured, said that allowing another escape would be “unforgivable.”
There’s also a Frontline documentary on El Chapo, if you’re so inclined, and Cartel Land, a documentary about the autodefensas and their less defensible U.S. counterparts, the border yahoos militias. NorteñoBlog has seen neither, but I’ll report back.
Two years ago, the last time Banda El Recodo released an album, I wrote, “Like happy families and episodes of The Waltons, all Banda el Recodo albums are alike. When you play one, you’re assured 40 minutes or so of ace arrangements and pleasant tunes in a variety of styles.” I haven’t heard all of their new album, Mi Vicio Más Grande (Fonovisa), but I may have to go back on my word. For one thing, it’s only 30 minutes long! Possibly inspired by the rambunctious spirit of their title song, a previous Pick to Click, they’ve decided to dispense with this album quickly with only 11 songs, down from the 19-song high water mark of 2009’s Me Gusta Todo de Ti. But that’s OK, NorteñoBlog likes short albums. Worse news is that aside from “Vicio,” the songs I’ve heard suck. “Todo Tuyo” may have been a hit but it defines the idea of a nothing ballad, sucking brain cells into its void. Nor do the other two advance tracks seems designed to stick, whether it’s songwriter Freddy Osuna enjoying “La Miel de Su Saliva” or the sage songwriting team of Luciano Luna, Joss Favela, and Miguel Angel Romero skipping through “De Haber Sabido.” By now bandleader Alfonso Lizárraga has proven he can simply spin Recodo’s wheels, releasing an album with the requisite two hits (“Vicio” has gone top 20 on the Hot Latin chart) to keep the brand going.
NorteñoBlog has previously been bewildered by the prolific career scope of psychedelic corridista and family man Larry Hernández, whose new Vete Acostumbrando (Sodin/Fonovisa) dropped two weeks ago. In contrast to the somewhat unofficial “got purp” feel of his last album 16 Narco Corridos Vol. 2, Vete is an official hitmaking release full of romance and obsession and a Gerardo Ortiz duet. At only 10 songs (NorteñoBlog cheers!), most of which are good, none of which stand out, it’s less of a chore than either new album by Ortiz or Recodo. Hernández doesn’t innovate his genre like Ortiz, and he doesn’t even sing as well — listen to the fine quartet ballad “Ya Me Cansé” and you might think he’s coughing up his lyrics. But he zips through his music with unabashed and unpretentious pleasure. On my loosely ranked list of favorite albums of 2015, Hernández sits next to Kid Rock, which seems about right. Plus my awesome librarian Gloria likes him. I’ll confer Pick to Click status upon the banda firecracker “Aferrado Corazón,” which features Hernández not quite reaching his high notes in a very appealing way.
El Komander yadda yadda another single blah blah blah not really trying any more but that’s integral to his charm yak yak yak. But — what’s this? — Sr. Riós seems pretty invested in his sixth (?) official single in as many months. It’s called “El Elegante,” it’s fast banda and barely a song, but it does herald his forthcoming album for Twiins Enterprises, Detrás Del Miedo. Due July 7th! I’d say reserve yourself a copy, but let’s face it: such effort would hardly keep with the spirit of Komander’s recent loosey goosey output. Although to be fair, the guy’s released a single per month in 2015; what have I done?
That sort of existential uncertainty hangs heavy over “Wildfires,” the new Mariachi El Bronx single on ATO. Wait. No it doesn’t. Mariachi El Bronx sounds like fucking Fastball. Let’s be clear here: NorteñoBlog is not categorically opposed to U.S. pop appropriations of regional Mexican styles. More such appropriations might be welcome, because horns and strings sound great on the radio, and the people of El Norte need to learn these styles. The members of Mariachi El Bronx have doubtless studied more mariachi music than I have. Some of them are Latino. They play their instruments well. But let’s also be clear: they’re not playing mariachi music. They’re using mariachi as a gimmick to sell tickets to indie rock shows, same as Cake uses a trumpet. (Sometimes I like Cake.) If white hipsters go to Mariachi El Bronx shows to gawk at music that’s “cute” or “indigenous,” or if white hipsters leave Mariachi El Bronx shows thinking they suddenly know something about mariachi music, I suppose that’s the white hipsters’ problem, but I wish I had more confidence in Mariachi El Bronx to combat the problem. Ultimately though, I’m ragging on Mariachi El Bronx because of my longstanding disinterest in rote indie rock songs. (Plus, the lead Mariachi sings with a tenth the authority of George Strait; but then, don’t we all.)
When Pitbull someday releases a career-spanning greatest hits album, it’ll be a monster. He’s got one hits album already: 2012’s Original Hits compiled his early stuff from TVT records and it looks good (I confess I haven’t heard all the songs), but since he released it in the midst of the Planet Pit/Voli Vodka world takeover, most of the world outside the 305 area code overlooked it. NorteñoBlog doesn’t often cover Pitbull because he has about as much to do with regional Mexican music as Rita Moreno does. (I confess I have even LESS of a connection to the format, but here we are.) But since he is possibly the most charming man on the planet — he needs to be loved slightly more than everybody else does — I will share my theory of Pitbull hits:
There are two tiers of Pitbull hits. The top tier includes such monster EDM smashes as “Timber,” “Give Me Everything,” and “Time of Our Lives,” and these songs are pretty good, just as the Planet Pit album was pretty good. That’s disc one of our hypothetical career spanning compilation. But the second tier, our hypothetical disc two of smaller hits… THAT’S where Pitbull hides his gold. I’m talking stuff like last year’s #23 hit “Fireball,” his astounding Ying Yang Twins feature “Shake” (included on Original Hits), 2010’s phenomenal, bilingual, featuring-Lil-Jon-and-everybody “Watagatapitusberry,” and the Pick to Click that climbs this week to #25 on Hot Latin, “El Taxi” featuring Sensato & Cuban oral sex freedom fighter Osmani Garcia. (“Chupi Chupi” was the too sexy song in question.) It’s really Garcia’s song — he originally received top billing and it’s more than a year old at this point, with 111 million Youtube views, but I assume it’ll appear on Pit’s forthcoming Spanish album Dale. “El Taxi” is lowdown and slinky. It features car horns beeping. I mean, come on.
NorteñoBlog 