Issue 03
Latin Alternative Sound
By Caroline RyderPhotos By Dan Monick
Illustration By Florencio Zavala
The sun’s going down on Tijuana, and some teenage kids are letting off firecrackers on the beach. Orange rust has decomposed a corrugated iron fence that extends into the Pacific, marking the borderline between Mexico and the United States.
A mural on the fence reminds would-be jumpers that 3,000 people have died trying to get across, but that doesn’t seem to bother Mario. He was deported three weeks ago after immigration agents tracked him down on a construction site in San Diego. The 29-year-old Mexican has been watching as we photograph the Tijuana electronica outfit Nortec Collective. He gazes at the band members, and then at the fence. He’s gonna jump over at 3am tonight.
Is he nervous? “No,” he says. “If I get caught I go to jail for eight months. Then I’ll try again. But I’m sure I’ll cross over.”
It is all too easy to draw parallels between Mario and his fellow Baja Californians, the Nortec Collective. They have been crossing over since they formed in 1999, sampling old banda sinaloense and norte–o records and running those sounds over beat programs. The result was a sparkling new blend of south-of-the-border techno that resonated with rave kids throughout Mexico, Japan and Germany and the US.
“Our sound reflects Tijuana,” said the Collective’s Pedro Gabriel Beas, a.k.a Hiperboreal. “It’s a frontier town, an encounter of two worlds. And our music is about the crossover of technology and traditional music. It’s about taking the urban and the folk elements of our city and processing them to create something new.”
Nortec, established in 1999, isn’t the first band to inject Chicano flavors into traditionally gringo sounds. Almost every alternative genre, whether punk, ska, lounge, hardcore, reggae, hip-hop, electronica, or rock, has a Latin Alternative Music (LAM) counterpart. Bicultural and often bilingual, LAM is a vast genre: “A hybrid of cafŽ con leche, of rock and timbales, of hip-hop and jalapenos, of new music with a subtle Latino accent,” according to the organizers of the Latin Alternative Music Conference, a yearly event dedicated to the expansion of Latino music and youth culture in the U.S.
The contemporary LAM scene pervades across the Americas, with alterlatino hotspots in Mexico, Argentina, and Los Angeles (known as ‘la capital’). You may know some of the genre’s biggest names: Mexico City innovators CafŽ Tacuba and Molotov (”Mexico’s answer to the Beastie Boys”), Monterrey’s Kinky, Colombia’s Juanes and Andrea Echeverri, Chileans La Ley, Tijuana’s Nortec Collective, and their former schoolmate, accordion maestra Julieta Venegas.
In the U.S., Volumen Cero, with Chilean, Peruvian, and Colombian roots, is on the brink of mainstream rock success. Spanish-language hip-hop artists like Kemo, Doble V, and Poison Ivy are making waves of their own. In Los Angeles, garage bands like Los Abandoned and Go Betty Go are now being eyed by the big labels, which are finally viewing LAM as more than marginal barrio music. In fact, the music industry is only just opening its eyes to the sleeping giant that is LAM, an untapped commercial force to be reckoned with.
Rolling Stone critic and pop culture academic Josh Kun likens the growth of the Latin Alternative Music scene to the “British Invasion” of the 1960s, except that “with the British invasion you were talking about sounds and styles from abroad that were new to the U.S. population. Now you are talking about sounds and styles from abroad, hitting a population from abroad, which is now becoming the dominant demographic of this country. You better believe that this is gonna be what everyone’s going to be singing and talking about in a few years.”
Kun, a prolific chronicler of the LAM scene, is something of a contradiction in terms. As a “white Jewish kid” growing up in L.A., he had no interest in rock music and had never even heard any Spanish language rock. “I was a new wave kid,” he says. “I thought rock was for the establishment, for white kids and frat boys.” When he first heard rock en espa–ol, the largely obsolete term once tagged to bands that sang in Spanish, it reminded him what rock was supposed to be - subversive and dangerous. “For these bands, it wasn’t about putting a record out, making money, or getting a deal,” he says. “It was about giving voice to a world that didn’t want you to speak.”
The rock en espa–ol scene was born in the ’50s when, as in many parts of the globe, pop and rock musicians in Spain and Latin America began imitating their Anglo-American counterparts, playing “refried” Spanish-language versions of U.S. hits. A Latino rock subculture started to build around West Coast artists like Ritchie Valens, Santana, and Los Lobos, who still performed mainly in English. By the 1960s, kids in Mexico were hunting down authentic Beatles and Rolling Stones albums, and English-language rock became known as the soundtrack to La Onda, the Mexican counterculture.
The big shift came in the ’80s, when bands across Spain, Latin America, and the United States started mixing rock and ranchera, beatbox and banda, and singing about the issues that affected them in Spanish (acts like Mexican blues-rockers El Tri and Charly Garcia were early pioneers).
It wasn’t until the early ’90s that the English-speaking world began to notice the movement. When Sire signed Spanish folk-rock duo Duncan Dhu and paired them with Argentinean rocker Miguel Mateos for a small-scale U.S. tour, it became clear that there was an audience outside their home countries. MTV Latino launched, and roqueros were filling clubs and stadiums to hear bands like Maldita Vecindad, Cafe« Tacuba, Caifanes, and Mana (Mexico), Soda Stereo and Los Fabulosos Cadillacs (Argentina), and Los Prisioneros (Chile). Later on, the scene would grow, sprouting new acts like Los Rabanes (Panama), Los Amigos Invisibles (Venezuela), Aterciopelados (Colombia) and U.S. bands like Maria Fatal, Los Olvidados, and King Chango.
The collapse of military regimes in many of these countries gave Latino musicians room to breathe. Back in the early days, Latino rock bands faced heavy opposition from the establishment in their own countries. In Argentina, for example, at the height of the military regime’s “dirty war” against the political left, just having long hair was enough to get you thrown in jail.
Despite an atmosphere of growing tolerance, bands that weren’t playing pop, folk, or ranchera still weren’t getting any love from the record industry, despite a steadily growing fan base. “Latin labels have never supported alternative bands, because it doesn’t pay,” says Kun. “In fact, the U.S. branches of Latin record labels have some of the most financially and culturally retarded people I’ve ever met.”
Andrea Echeverri of three-time Grammy-winning Colombian band Aterciopelados (the name means “the velveties”) says things were tough when they first started out. “We started the band 12 years ago without any hope of making it in Colombia, or anywhere else,” she says. “At that time we had no chance of ever putting a record out, because the music industry just didn’t exist. That’s the difference between the Latin American bands and American bands. In America, people are desperate to be rock stars and they forget about the music. For us, the music was all we had.”
With more than one third of the 30 million or so Latinos in the U.S. under 18 years of age, many have predicted a 21st century explosion in Latin Alternative Music, one that would equal, if not surpass the spread of hip-hop across the U.S. So why, if there are audiences hungry for Spanish-language alternative music and a growing number of talented artists making the music they like, hasn’t that explosion happened?
“For all these myths of U.S. diversity, the U.S. is still essentially a very xenophobic, culturally sovereign country,” ventures Kun. “The idea of rock-and-roll or punk in Spanish is still something that takes people a long time to get their heads around. When Latin culture does not come in the form of the Buena Vista Social Club or J-Lo, people don’t know what to do with it.”
Chelina Vargas, who hosts L.A.’s only Latin Alternative Music show, the Red Zone on Indie 103.1, believes that stereotypes about Latin music and poor market research by record labels are inhibiting the Latin music revolucion. “Here on the west coast, if you talk about Latin music, people automatically assume Mexican regional music, like banda and mariachi. Either that, or they think of Marc Anthony and Ricky Martin. I think that people are still unaware that there is music being made in Spanish similar to what is being made in English, as far as the alternative genre goes.”
After launching the Red Zone, Vargas found herself inundated with calls, both from music-starved LAM fans and from those who had no idea the genre existed. “People who didn’t speak Spanish were calling in asking, ‘Who is this band? I’ve never heard of them.’ Then there were people saying, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe you’re playing this music! We can’t hear it anywhere! Thank you, thank you, thank you!’”
Faced with a cautious recording industry and little or no radio airplay, some bands have had to venture outside the Americas in order to make themselves heard, as Grammy-nominated dance funk band Kinky, from Monterrey, Mexico, discovered. Their music, which blends samba beats with rock and electronica, didn’t fit neatly into any marketing category. Latin labels were reluctant to sign them, and the band members were nervous about signing with a Mexican label, believing it would limit how far they could go. And despite a strong local following, their home radio stations were still not interested in playing them. “Monterrey is known for its music scene, but even now, as a fan and as a band, you need to find your way by yourself,” said Kinky front man Gil Cerezo. “The music you hear on the radio is mainly folk, cumbia, and pop. Alternative music doesn’t fit. It’s not like in Los Angeles, where you can just turn on your radio and hear rock while you drive your car.”
Kinky eventually signed to British producer Chris Allison’s label Sonic360, and released their first album in London. Their popularity spread on the club circuit before boomeranging back to the U.S. and Mexico. “Kinky became the one band that all my English-speaking hipster white friends were talking about,” says Kun. “These were people who didn’t listen to Cafe Tacuba or know about the important role of revolution in Mexican rock. But they’d be like, ‘Oh my god, I just saw that movie Y Tu Mama Tambien and I’m gonna go see Kinky.’ It was part of a new hipster Mexican chic.”
With a Grammy category to itself, a mounting number of fan ‘zines, and emergent specialty record labels, some are concerned that LAM could end up being a victim of its own success, its burning musical and political attitudes smothered by mainstream audiences.
“There’s a big difference between corporate multiculturalism and real multiculturalism,” says Kun. “If you wear a Che Guevara T-shirt, it doesn’t mean anything. All it means is that you shop at Urban Outfitters. The fact that people like Mexican movies right now, does that mean there’s a real cultural revolution? No. It’s a trend. There are people who go and see a Mexican band but treat their gardener like shit. I’ll be cranky until that changes.”