SHATTERING STEREOTYPES
Cuco charts his own course
When Omar Banos — the Mexican-american artist who goes by Cuco — shuffles wordlessly into the lobby of a Bogota hotel in April, he looks like a regular, shy 21-year-old. He has ruffled hair and glasses that give him a nerdy-cool demeanour. Still drowsy from a performance the night before, he mutters a quick “hey” and fidgets with a plastic cup of orange juice.
In just three years, the laid-back and unassuming Cuco has gone from being a hidden jewel of the internet to an indie-music act so promising that he sparked a bidding war among record labels and walked away with a seven-figure deal from Interscope (owned by Universal Music Group).
He’s rallied a devout legion of followers, many of them Latino kids in the United States who connect with his stripped-back songs and lyrical millennial moping. He’s part-slacker, part-dreamer, part-heartthrob — and the romanticism buried in his woozy, blown-out soundscapes explains why fans spent last February trading Valentine’s Day cards with his face on them.
“I wasn’t expecting any of this at all,” Cuco says of his new-found fame. “When things did start blowing up, I was always just tripping about how it kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So it was intense — it’s been intense more than anything.”
His ascent is partially a result of how much he bares himself to fans, awkward aloofness and all. On Instagram, he broadcasts that he’s, as he puts it, “just hella boring,” posting bathroom selfies and goofy videos alongside sleek tour images and tender updates. His music is also unabashedly emotional and plain-spoken, igniting a kind of blissed-out, teen wistfulness in listeners. He croons about love and old cars and getting stoned, shaping lo-fi soundtracks that are tailor-made for driving around aimlessly with friends at night.
He usually pours his heart out in Spanglish — a detail that lets him cross cultural worlds. He’s an artist clearly planted in the U.S. indie-music scene, but there’s a singularity to his work that speaks in particular to children of immigrants in the country. He laces Chicano iconography into his visuals, makes it a point to perform at immigrant rights’ benefits and collaborates with Latin American musicians. (He recently teamed up with Mexican R&B singer Girl Ultra, and he’s sprinkled mariachi sounds into a few tracks.)
Yet he’s experimental and hard to categorize, making his career feel like something of an escape hatch in an industry that often forces minority artists into particular genres or stereotypes.
“Cuco has really struck that balance of, ‘This is who I am, and this is what I sound like,’” says Leila Cobo, Billboard’s vice-president and Latin industry lead. “It wasn’t an artist who had one single, but someone who had built a loyal fan base, and that made him attractive in the long term.”
The rush of success occasionally bewilders Cuco. He’s excited for everything that’s coming — his studio debut, Para Mi, drops on July 26 — but he finds a dazzling absurdity in the speed at which he’s moved from playing backyard shows in Los Angeles to sharing stages with Kenny G and having throngs of fans crowd him at airports, which happened recently in Peru.
“It’s been actually crazy seeing people physically interacting with the music,” he says. “When I was in Asia and Europe, seeing people know my stuff word for word — that’s crazy. So, it kind of blows my mind a lot of the time, with people messaging me and telling me where they’re from. It trips me out.”
Cuco initially didn’t expect much to come out of his love of music. He grew up the only child of Mexican immigrants in Hawthorne, Calif., and he began teaching himself guitar when he was about eight years old. In high school, he experimented with psychedelics and played trumpet in the school marching band to get out of phys-ed class. He quickly learned that he was skilled at picking up instruments — the French horn, keyboards, drums and bass — and producing tracks on his laptop.
After graduation, he cracked into the public consciousness by playing Santo & Johnny’s Sleepwalk on slide guitar in a video that had thousands of views. Cuco spent the next few months getting high in his parents’ garage and releasing original songs on Bandcamp and Soundcloud, all while half-heartedly attending classes at Santa Monica College in California. His first mix tape, 2016’s Wannabewithu, featured seven DIY recordings that established his reputation as an emotive and somewhat unlikely indie-music hero.
“He’s a hella Cancer,” says his manager, a 25-year-old named Doris Muñoz. “He’s very emotional, and he opens so many sides of himself to people in his music. And it’s all coming from a kid who is very reachable, who seems like someone who goes to class with them. Which he is — he’s a marching-band kid who started to trip on acid and discovered (the music software) Ableton.”
Cuco’s other projects, Songs4u and Chiquito, solidified his sadsweet sound. But on his full-length album, the music is more experimental, more mature and even a little darker.
He has the support of Interscope now, as well as experiences that have come from growing up over the past few years. The album traces recent struggles and traumas, including an accident that sent Cuco and nine of his band mates to the hospital after a tractor-trailer slammed into their tour van in October. Cuco, who had 30 screws and a metal rod inserted into his leg, alludes in the video for the album’s first single, Hydrocodone, to the fear and existentialism the incident triggered. He lies on a bed wearing a full-body cast in one scene and later leads his own funeral procession in Mexico City.
“Some songs were written so long ago, and some were written recently, so there’s a huge journey,” he says.
Even the name of the project indicates a reflective look inward: The debut’s title translates to For Me. Still, there’s a lot for the fans who have stood by his side from the beginning. Muñoz describes the album as a “rite of passage” and imagines Cuco’s base playing the joltingly vulnerable songs in the backdrop of their lives.
“It’s like when you think back at the first time you smoked weed with your friends and you think about what was playing at the time,” she says. “This may be it for a generation of kids.”
Cuco is reticent when he talks about his music, frequently saying things such as “I don’t know, people just have to hear it.” Yet when he’s performing, his evasiveness fades. In Bogota, he played a set at the mega-festival Estéreo Picnic. Orbited by ink-blue twinkles and magenta flares, he had a magnetic stage presence.
When he launched into one of his most popular songs — the hazy ballad Lo Que Siento — he belted out earnest lyrics that everyone in the crowd seemed to know. “You know you’re my sueño,” he sang, waving his microphone in the air so the audience finished the last word in Spanish. His fans leaned closer, as though there were a gravitational pull lurching them forward, and yelled back in unison — their voices loud and giddy and endlessly youthful.