Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerillas

Interview with author Elijah Wald by Root Doctor

RD: Could you tell us how the world of narcorrido music ties in with the world of rap and hip hop?

EW: Well, the tie-in is pretty easy. For most urban Mexicans, certainly in LA and Southern California, this is not just a kind of equivalent terrain to gangsta rap, specifically, but it’s the same audience, I mean it really is a completely overlapping audience, any time I’m talking to a class full of young people, the guys who are buying this are also buying Tupac and Ice Cube, and it’s just not a stretch at all.

RD: There is no barrier?

EW: No, I mean, look, the Black and the Anglo White kids are not buying corridos [yet], but the guys who are buying corridos are all also buying rap, any time I get into some place for rap listeners, I start getting emails, calls, it was coming at the same time, from the same place, from the same LA neighborhoods, and with the same appeal--the "keeping it real" idea. It’s funny to me how many people forget what rap looked like before the LA guys got in. It’s very similar, you had Afrika Bambaata and Grandmaster Flash wearing fancy costumes and looking like pros just like El Tigres del Norte, and then the LA guys, be it Chalino [Sanchez], or be it Eazy E or Ice Cube, suddenly just came in dressed like street guys. To think about what was going on in their lives, it was exactly the same appeal. Not to mention Chalino getting himself (fatally) shot, I mean everybody calls him the Tupac Shakur of narcocorrido, it’s a metaphor you can’t escape.

RD: Chalino sales just went ballistic after that, no pun intended. You talked about the dominance of Mexican music sales versus the rest of the so called "Latin Music" category. How do we break through those stereotyped preconceptions and tell people what’s really going on?

EW: Again, there are parallels with rap; if you listen to the radio, you don’t hear a lot of rap, don’t hear a lot of narcocorridos, for exactly the same reason, which is that the people who don’t like it really hate it. If you mix one gangsta track in the middle of a general soul station, they’ll switch the dial, the same is true of the narcocorridos, if you’re doing like a Latin Music program and suddenly stick in Chalino Sanchez, you lose half of your audience.

RD: Plus you mentioned the risk that the dj will get thrown off the air or lose their show.

EW: According to Billboard-- and this is now a year old so you might want to check, it should be on the RIAA website--for the first time ever, they did a ranking of Latin Music by style, last April—May. At that point what they came out with was 16 % tropical [salsa, meringue, Cuban, cumbia]. Mexican regional, which is mariachi, banda and norteno, was 51% of dollar sales, but 55% of unit sales because they are on the average cheaper. And then there was about another 30% which was mixed rock and pop. They didn’t break that down by country, but six of the top ten rock and pop artists of that year were Mexican. I did a breakdown for the top 40 or 50, it was definitely the majority Mexican, because that’s the demographic, the Latino population in the USA is 65% Mexican, and on top of that, the Salvadorans and Guatamalans, are almost exclusively buying Mexican music as well. The percentage really gets pretty high.

RD: And that doesn’t even include all the bootlegs.

EW: Which is another huge point, down along the border, everybody is buying pirate. The CD burning revolution made it so that no one in Mexico is not buying pirate CDs, the cost is just so low.

RD: The Spanish version of the book is in paperback, and the English version is in hardcover only, correct?

EW: You’ll get the English language paperback, I think in November, it’s the usual thing of putting the hardcover out for a year first.

RD: Did you see many electric guitars and electric basses?

EW: Well, in professional circumstances, there are lots of electric basses, depending how far you get up in the mountains. If you get way up in the country, there is no electricity. But any professional group, I mean, ever since the Tigres del Norte, the electric bass, if you’ve got an actual gig, you tend to use the electric bass. The Tigres, frankly the electric bass is the strongest instrument they’ve got. Erlan, the brother who plays the bass, is really the virtuoso in the group and really redefined Norteno bass. And they mixed the bass pretty high, I think it’s that Sinaloan thing, the same way they love the tuba.

RD: In the banda music, is it heavily synthesized, or do you get a lot of natural instruments?

EW: You get all natural instruments, there was a period about five years of a boom in something called technobanda, but that’s over. You go to these clubs in LA now, there’s a 14 piece brass band on stage.

EW: And absolutely straight marching band, three clarinets, three trumpets, three baritone horns, tuba, and a bass drummer, and a snare drummer, and that’s it. The whole damn thing can march.

Regarding Chalino and the Rivera family and the LA phenomenon, you were saying saying that’s there’s a lot more of Mexican pride today than there used to be… people actually want to be known as Mexicans, not as Chicanos, and they’re totally down with it.

EW: Starting with Chalino, there came a whole new image, in which, essentially, being Mexican became cool. It used to be that the image of being Mexican meant you were the ‘hicks’ who had just come across the border, as opposed to Spanish or Chicano or Californio, which meant you were from up here and you knew the ropes. Chalino turned all of that around. And all these guys who would have been going for low rider cars are now getting these incredible souped up pickup trucks, so they can look just like drug guys off of the mountain.

RD: Just looking at CD covers, photos like the one you passed around at the presentation [at the Mission Cultural Center, San Francisco, May 10 2002], it looks like maybe Lupillo Rivera presents himself as the most modern in terms of clothing style and type of car…

EW: Actually the CD I passed around was El Original de la Sierra, who I think was sort of inspired by Lupillo. Lupillo really has been defining this new fashion idea, shaving his head, wearing mafia suits, he doesn’t do the hip hop thing. but now El Original is doing more of the hip hop thing…absolutely, I mean they are redefining this as the music of Los Angeles. The first wave with Chalino, it was the music of Mexico, but so hip that LA was into it. Now it is really becoming the music of Los Angeles.

RD: Do you think the scenes are going to continue to influence each other back and forth?

EW: Oh yeah, the LA stuff is going huge in Mexico. But it’s funny because the same guy in LA listening to it with the cowboy hat will go to Michoacan and be wearing a backwards baseball cap. An LA Mexican wants to be perceived as both LA and Mexican, and so in LA it’s the Mexican side of the fashion that gets emphasized, and then in Mexico the LA side gets emphasized. I don’t want to over-generalize, saying that everybody does that, but there sure is a strong element of it.

RD: You released a companion CD on the Fonvisa label. How did that come about?

EW: I asked them. Guillermo Santiso, the president of Fonovisa [a record company based in LA], is very close with the Tigres del Norte, and they’ve been working very hard to try to break out and reach the larger market.

RD: Although they are already huge megasellers…

EW: And the Tigres actually still reside in San Jose, California. Santiso was the one who led the Mexican boycott of the first Latin Grammys, because of the numbers I gave you earlier. They had invited 11 acts to perform and only one of the acts was Mexican. Considering that Mexicans make up 60—65% of the Latin market in the US Record sales, Santiso hit the ceiling, huge boycott… just trying to get respect for Mexican music, which is tricky — it does have some of the same problems that rap has had, but even more so, the joke is, if you want to imagine how much this music is hated by the ‘educated’ people in Mexico, you have to imagine that gangster rap was being done not by Ice Cube but by Garth Brooks. And if you picture someone who looks like Garth Brooks, doing gangster rap, you picture how many different ways this stuff is headed.

RD: It’s so facinating, the whole look and everything.

EW: And it’s both criminal and ‘dumb hick’ [naco].

RD: But that’s what makes it so likeable, so earthy.

EW: Oh absolutely, plus the traditionalism of it, which blows me away.

RD: Your book makes us aware that although the lyrics are ultramodern, the musical forms themselves are archaic.

EW: The exact structure of the corridos themselves goes back to, essentially, the cowboy era. The whole tradition, however, goes back to the middle ages. What’s interesting to me is that a lot of the corrido singers, over and over, both the guys who sang on buses and the guys who are selling millions of recordings refer to themselves as the modern heirs of this minstrel tradition. They are very conscious of that tradition and they are essentially writing about a new kind of knights in armor.

RD: So they are very aware of that history.

EW: Very much. It puts you in the tradition of Pancho Villa, but also in the tradition even before that.

RD: Thanks to your book and CD we have a big list of artists to get familiar with and enjoy. I am sure the public will appreciate this valuable resource which you have written. I myself have been collecting a long time, I even have a 78 rpm corrido record by Gaytan and Cantu, folks you mentioned in your book.

EW: So do you know Chris Strachwitz [Arhoolie Records of EL Cerrito, California]?

RD: I have sort of a nodding acquaintance with him —he’s a great guy.

EW: You know I put together that Arhoolie 40^th anniversary box set and liner notes, I actually won a Grammy for it. My one big award.

RD: Thanks to Chris Strachwitz [of Arhoolie Records, El Cerrito, California] we have all that stuff reissued, the Mendoza sisters and so forth.

EW: Absolutely. My involvement in this whole thing is to a certain extent owing to Chris, he’s been very supportive; he was one of the first people, when I expressed an interest, he said yes, you have to do this. He has a great love for the music. And he’s not a folklorist and neither am I. We are interested in what’s happening currently, what people are really listening to, not finding the oldest most primitive version, but finding what the folks who buy this stuff want to hear. I get sick to death of people who want to hear corridos say the Tigres del Norte are fake, and want to hear some old guy with no teeth, up in a mountain village. I like the old guys with no teeth too, but the Tigres are very real.

RD: Did you have any hair raising experiences where you felt like you were in danger, other than that one police episode mentioned in the book?

EW: No, I really didn’t. I always feel very safe hitchhiking. I wasn’t avoiding the serious drug world, if one of the musicians had invited me to come to a party at the mansion of some famous drug lord, with guns all around, I would have gone. But who would be so stupid as to invite a gringo reporter to an event like that? If I had moved into the Sierra and lived there for a couple years, I would have seen some shit that you wouldn’t have seen just passing through. People would figure out after awhile that I was not a DEA [drug] agent, or they would conclude that I was, which would be a very very bad thing.

RD: Are there going to be any video releases along the same lines as the book and the CD?

EW: That’s a good question, I’ve been approached by five different groups so far, who want to do documentaries, most recently, a film production company from the Spanish end of Universal Pictures. We’ll see… I’d love to do it, my guess is somebody will at least do something on the LA scene, which is fairly easy.

RD: It’s interesting that these film or video follow-ups came about after some of the corridos became big sellers.

EW: Well, they still make infinite amounts of those movies, they are being made "two a week" down in Tiajuana. They’re just all direct to video now. But if you go down to any of these Mexican video stores, you’ll see just rows of corrido videos. They’re terrible, but you can rent them for $2.50. You can probably still find El Banda del Carro Rojo [the red car gang], which was a big enough hit — I still see it around.

RD: Who are some good corrido lyric writers?

EW: Paulino Vargas is the most famous of all corrido writers. Reynaldo Martinez is another of the great, great writers of that generation, and he also gave me one of the funniest quotes. Because he’s written the most famous of the "drug lord" tribute songs, I asked him whether he’s been hired to do any of them, he says: "No, no, I never charged for my work. Of course, maybe sometimes, somebody will like one of my songs and give me a Land Rover or something."

RD: A minor trinket.

EW: Exactly, and he really said it in that tone of voice, like it was a minor trinket.

RD: Andres Contreras of Mexico City, what does he sound like?

EW: He sings and plays guitar; he sounds actually pretty traditional, there’s a lot of humor, a lot of character in his voice, it’s not raw and tough, more like an entertaining street singer, old style.

RD: You said he tapes the microphone onto the side of his guitar?

EW: Yeah, I remember lots of street singers who did that, because it picks up the guitar vibrations and also the voice. I’d love for a record company to put out Andre Contreras’s greatest hits.

RD: What would you like to get across to the music public more than anything else about the corrido scene? Would you focus on certain artists and writers?

EW: I think people who are interested in modern American street type music should check out Chalino Sanchez, one of the major figures of our time. Also, it’s funny, a lot of what I think is important about corridos is the lyrics, and if you don’t speak Spanish, it’s tricky. One pleasure of writing this book is that for the average Anglo, they can, I think, learn more about the corrido from my book than from listening to the recordings. That was a big part of it, I was trying to write the book to say, this [music] that you may hear as perky polka is actually an awful lot more than that. Really, a huge part of what I was trying to do, was just introduce people to the fact that this is out there, and to what it is. I don’t think there’s any other pop music form in the world that is talking about the world around in the same amount of depth and detail that the corridos are, in terms of commenting on the world around. I think rap is the closest other thing, but unfortunately, nowadays, the vast majority of it is focused on popular stuff, tending to be really focused on money, money, money, sex, sex, sex…the narcocorrido world has more depth in the sense of going back a lot further, more roots, more of a tradition. Plus, Chalino really does appeal to every age group from the teenagers to the grandparents, it is amazing. All the older corrido guys, Paulino Vargas, Teodoro Bello, everybody, spoke very highly of Chalino, he really had that genuine sound.

RD: If someone just doesn’t listen to anyone else, who would you say are the very most important figures in corrido music?

EW: You gotta hear the Tigres del Norte and Chalino in terms of style. In terms of writing, Paulino Vargas, is absolutely the key man. Strictly as a writer, Chalino has his place. The Tigres use various writers, besides Paulino, but always somebody excellent. The Tigres CD "Jefe de Jefes" [boss of bosses] makes a very strong case for what the corrido does, and has a lyric sheet too. Of course, the CD that goes with my book is a great resource; Fonovisa has posted full lyrics on their website, in English and Spanish. [Use the link from Elijah’s excellent website, www.elijahwald.com].