Gerardo Ortíz

Fiesta de Aniversario: THE PICKS TO CLICK

NorteñoBlog doesn’t always Pick to Click, but when I do… sometimes I get it wrong and type “Click to Pick.” This made searching for the previous year’s worth of Picks INTERESANTE.

The Pick to Click began as a shameless ripoff from Charles Pierce’s must-read liberal politics blog at Esquire, as did a couple other, possibly subtler NorteñoBlog tics. (Spot them all! Both! Whatever!) It’s a useful way to highlight the song I enjoy the most in a particular post, so that you the loyal reader don’t have to wade through a pool of Banda MS’s tears to reach the good stuff. Of course, if you enjoy the delectable bouquet wafting from Banda MS’s tears, you can always Click what I don’t Pick, though you’ll run the risk of turning Banda MS happy and then they might run out of Art. Besides current singles, the following list includes some older singles and current album tracks.

Most Picked at three apiece: NorteñoBlog’s probable artists of the year Alfredo Ríos “El Komander” and Marco Flores y #1 Banda Jerez. Banda Cuisillos, Noel Torres, and Chuy Lizárraga each scored two Picks. So did Los Gfez, Pancho Uresti, and Ariel Camacho, though one Pick from each of those three was in a “featured” role. Besides norteño and banda, the list includes cumbias and puro sax stomps, reggaeton and ABBA-schlager, Jenny and the Mexicats and Pitbull, and covers of Johnny Cash and — first up — Shania Twain. Happy Clicking!
Continue reading “Fiesta de Aniversario: THE PICKS TO CLICK” →

October 21, 2015 2

Desfile de Éxitos 10/24/15

It’s not quite our one-year anniversary — that’ll come next week — but NorteñoBlog has been at this funny business for 51 weeks and in all that time, Billboard‘s Latin charts have always contained a song by either Gerardo Ortiz or El Komander. UNTIL NOW. Well, really until two weeks ago, when Komander’s “Malditas Ganas” dropped off the chart. “Malditas Ganas” entered the chart back in May, hi-fiving Ortiz’s “Eres Una Niña” as it sauntered out and paving the way for Ortiz’s “El Cholo” a week or three later. (NorteñoBlog doesn’t need your fancy “fact checkers.”) And now “Ganas” and “Cholo” are both gone, and NB’s heart is empty, and… ooh, what’s that! New Chuy Lizárraga!

Please note: it’s entirely possible that both Banda MS and Julión Álvarez have been on the charts the entire length of the NB’s existence, much like well-known Methuselan beard “Propuesta Indecente” (116 WEEKS!), but frankly, that last bit of data gathering has plum tuckered me out and I would like to listen to some songs now.

The Hot Latin Top 10 is a complete reshuffle of a month ago. (NOBODY. EVER. GOES. IN. and NOBODY. EVER. COMES. OUT.) So we’ll just skip down to #11, where Bomba Estéreo have repurposed their excellent single “Fiesta” to include a rap by new Bomba Estéreo superfan Will Smith. This isn’t Smith’s first visit to the Latin charts: “Men In Black,” “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It,” and “Wild Wild West” were all monster hits that received Latin airplay and broke the Hot Latin top 40 back when the Hot Latin chart allowed for such things. (Weirdly, “Miami” doesn’t seem to have received the same bienvenido.) This may, however, be the first time someone has tried to rhyme “mamacita” with “beer-a.” Let’s hope it’s the last. Smith’s other intriguing line is this odd bit of post-coital pride: “Woke up behind her/ No gas in me, I’m a Tesla.” Yo homes, smell you later!
Continue reading “Desfile de Éxitos 10/24/15” →

October 16, 2015 0

Shot Through El Corazón: Sinaloa Muscles In On Latin Pop

I wrote this a couple years ago for Maura Magazine; I reprint it here with their kind permission.

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“He’s really good,” said my librarian Fatima, handing me the new Noel Torres CD. She’d seen him live in Chicago a few months back. I’d never heard of the guy — when it comes to library CDs, I have no standards and few expectations. La Estructura, featuring Torres’s perfectly trimmed hair and penetrating scowl, immediately moved to the top of my stack.

Fatima knew what she was talking about. When you hear La Estructura, the most appropriate response is awe, followed by abject humility and despair because you will never create anything as good or alive or technically accomplished, as upending of your expectations. “I can’t even fathom what his band is doing,” went my first attempt at an explanation. Torres is a young man from the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa. He sings, plays the accordion, writes most of his songs, and leads a four-piece norteño band as well as an occasional brass band. His unadorned singing gets the job done; at all other tasks he is a motherfucker. Tossing off blazing accordion riffs with the “top this!” spirit of ‘80s hair metal, he leads his band through variations on polkas and waltzes. But while much Sinaloan norteño music simply bounces along, arid and sparse, the Torres band fills every instant with rambunctious noise. Tuba and bajo quinto fall all over each other, the drummer bashes like he’s playing on a John Zorn record, and somehow all this craziness congeals into steady pulses and familiar forms. My second attempt at explanation was one word: “brutal.”
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October 5, 2015 8

NorteñoBlog’s Top Singles of 2015: Julio – Septiembre

UPDATED YOUTUBE PLAYLIST HERE

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.

Continue reading →

October 2, 2015 1

Ask a Norteño Fan: Juan Carlos talks Movimiento Alterado

“The first time when I hear the corridos — ‘Sanguinarios del M1’ — when I hear that song and when I see how these guys dress, I like it, and I buy a lot of clothes and I like a lot of style of those guys, of those groups… the Movimiento Alterado.”

So says Juan Carlos, a 25-year-old norteño fan who lives and works mixing chemicals near Chicago. Though his family hails from the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, he mostly treasures the new corridos coming out of Sinaloa, a few states to the northwest. His first love, “Sanguinarios,” was the 2010 flagship song of Movimiento Alterado, a loose affiliation of wannabe millionaires playing ultraviolet horror-corridos under the aegis of Burbank-based producers Adolfo and Omar Valenzuela, aka “Los Twiins.” They’re the guys in the “Sanguinarios” video who scowl at you last, and the only ones who don’t sing a verse.

Listeners with a vested interest in the 100-year-old corrido tradition tend to despise Alterado, but for many young fans like Juan Carlos, the movement defines “corrido.” Continue reading “Ask a Norteño Fan: Juan Carlos talks Movimiento Alterado” →

September 15, 2015 5

Gerardo Ortiz en La Jukebox

En otros ocasiones cuando The Singles Jukebox ha escrito sobre Gerardo Ortiz, ha escrito cosas felices, pero ahora… ¿tal vez estábamos cansados? Rebecca Gowns dice Gerardo está cansado — o mejor, “El Cholo” está “sloppy,” “loping and dragging.” Es justa. Multiples criticas escribieron sobre el shoutout a El Chapo, pero él es solo un parte del paisaje aquí.

Escribí:

Accordionist Marito Aguilar is a badass of Randy Rhoads proportions, in that I imagine certain young shredheads — albeit with diametrically opposing hairstyles — buying the CDs of Gerardo Ortiz or Ozzy Osbourne just so they can retire to their bedrooms and dissect the flurries of fingers. Aguilar is the best reason to hear Ortiz’s latest album; given free reign by the star, the studio pro came back with some jaw-dropping chromatic French cafe shit. The drum sound, boomy but articulate, makes me wonder whether someone found a way to mic Luis Navarro’s sticks. Otherwise, Ortiz’s living-the-good-life corrido is… good enough. It’ll be an eternal singalong anthem for Sinaloa partisans, same way I still get a kick from hearing Nelly shout out Plaza Frontenac.

VALE LA PENA

August 27, 2015 1

Who’s On the Mexican Radio? 6/26/15

This week’s Mexican radio roundup looks far different than it did last time, for two reasons: it’s been a month and I’m using a different chart. Inspired by the discovery that audience impressions matter more than total radio spins, NorteñoBlog has begun following the audience impression chart at radioNOTAS. So we say adios to a whopping 10 songs — half the chart — including winners from Leandro Ríos and Zacatecan dancing machine Marco A. Flores, losers from Banda Los Sebastianes and songwriter-to-the-stars Espinoza Paz, and startlingly hot motorcycle enthusiast Jovanko Ibarra.

That said, this week’s Pick to Click is cheating, in more ways than one. The new single by Chicago’s startlingly hot chicas malas Los Horóscopos de Durango, “Estoy Con Otro En La Cama,” is dramatic banda camp about cheating, and it comes from the “spins” chart, not the “audience impressions” chart. This study of hi infidelity uses “cuernos” imagery worthy of Shakespearean cuckoos, and it’s a welcome bit of smut from aforementioned songwriter Espinoza Paz, seen performing it here. (Los Horóscopos don’t have a video yet; that link above will get you to a stream that might disappear at any moment.) Paz’s stripped down version might be even better; his audience keeps laughing at key lines and it has the transgressive feel of a Toby Keith “bus song.”

Also noteworthy: Continue reading “Who’s On the Mexican Radio? 6/26/15” →

June 29, 2015 3

Who Plays on the New Gerardo Ortiz Album?

The mystery is solved! Allmusic appears to have acquired a physical copy of Hoy Mas Fuerte the same time NorteñoBlog did, and we’ve learned that Ortiz drew his small band from the usual stable of Del Records session pros: Pablo Molina on tuba, Aaron Gonzalez on bass, Lorenzo Fraire Reyes on bajo sexto, and Luis Navarro on drums. But Allmusic did omit some crucial players, notably the guy who most owns the sound of Fuerte: accordionist Marito Aguilar. Fuerte isn’t necessarily VALE LA PENA, but it’s worth hearing at least once for Aguilar, whose fingers are all over the place and constantly coming up with new ideas. He’s played with Ortiz on previous albums; he’s played on good albums by Regulo Caro and Adriel Favela; and he’s been one of the few reasons to pay any attention to Luis Coronel.

If you get excited by fly-on-the-recording-studio-wall videos and scenes of professional musicians overdubbing and “punching in,” ~~you are to be pitied above all others~~ you should totally watch this video of a session for Ortiz’s 2012 album, El Primer Ministro.

NorteñoBlog’s other discovery: “¿Por Qué Terminamos?”, the only Fuerte song I walk around humming, the one that sounds like a Luciano Luna ballad, IS IN FACT a Luciano Luna ballad. (Luciano Luna and Joss Favela, to be exact.)

June 1, 2015 0

Who’s On the Mexican Radio? 5/29/15

Say what you will about the new Calibre 50 ballad — and no, I cannot prove that some nefarious Disa executive forced them to play the song while submerged in gelatin, although the first time I watched the video I thought the music had been screwed and chopped — but at least it knocked their previous ballad “Contigo” off the chart. (Don’t worry, “Contigo” is still huge in El Norte.) In fact all the new Mexican radio hits this fortnight are ballads, which makes Picking to Click a more difficult proposition than usual. But NorteñoBlog is not completely devoid of romance! NorteñoBlog knows the desires that wrack the heart! And you know who else knows how to rip out his heart for all to see? German Montero, that’s who! So give a listen to “Me Seguirás Buscando,” where Montero promises to keep searching… and searching… to provide you with complete satisfaction. Judging by his overwrought performance, the search might entail self-strangulation and vocal nodes, but if that´s what it takes…

In El Norte chart news, El Komander goes top 10 Hot Latin for the third time with “Malditas Ganas.” Billboard also reports that his ballad “El Papel Cambio,” which we encountered on the Mexican charts earlier this year, is lurking down in the U.S. 40s. The U.S. seems to lag a few months behind Mexico in our love for El Komander songs. NorteñoBlog has no ready explanation for this, since it´s certainly not true of every artist — see both countries´ immediate embrace of Recodo´s “Mi Vicio Mas Grande.” Komander does seem to do better with streaming than he does with radio play, so maybe his more ramshackle sound is a tougher sell for U.S. radio programmers?
Continue reading “Who’s On the Mexican Radio? 5/29/15” →

June 1, 2015 1