WILL CNCO BE THE NEXT BTS?
BORN ON ‘LA BANDA,’ THIS LATIN BOY BAND IS RISING TO THE TOP
IN 2015, BRITISH RECORD executiveandrealityTV tycoon Simon Cowell had a novel idea. After assembling the beloved English-Irish boy band One Direction for his show “The X Factor,” Cowell would attempt to work the same miracle once more — but this time, in the Latin music space.
And so came to be Univision’s competition singing show, “La Banda,” created by Cowell and produced by Puerto Rican superstar and Menudo boy-band veteran Ricky Martin. “La Banda” viewers voted weekly to advance their favorite singers until a final lineup was cast: Christopher Vélez, now 25, Richard Camacho 24, Zabdiel De Jesús, 23, Joel Pimentel, 21, and Erick Brian Colón, 20. Hailing from five different parts of Latin America and dubbed CNCO, the group soared
to the top of Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart, with both its 2016 debut, “Primera Cita” and 2018 album “CNCO.”
In 2020, the band was laying down tracks for its third studio album, prepping its most expansive tour yet and poised to finally break beyond the Latin charts — until COVID-19 planted the band members, and their Air Jordans, firmly on the ground. On March 18, the group announced it would postpone the album indefinitely.
“We had a lot of original songs ready to go,” Pimentel tells The Times. “We just had to adapt to the times.”
Over video call, the five band mates call from their shared house in Miami, where they’ve spent most of the pandemic playing video games, working out and preparing their new covers compilation, titled “Déjà Vu,” released on Feb. 5. On it, CNCO presses rewind on its favorite Latin hits of yesteryear, revamping pop classics by artists like Mexican R&B group Sin Bandera, Puerto Rican pop heartthrob Chayanne — and with a nod to its more anglophone-leaning fan base, Enrique Iglesias’ “Hero.”
Each song is polished anew with the same formula that helped CNCO’s 2016 breakthrough
single, “Reggaetón Lento (Bailemos),” go platinum five times: honeyed group harmonies sung in effortless, homegrown Spanglish, guided by a gentle dembow bounce. But in the black-and-white video for their cover of Ricardo Montaner’s 1988 piano ballad, “Tan Enamorados” (“So in Love),” the guys recall an American hit of the same year: New Kids on the Block’s “You Got It (the Right Stuff ).” Wrote the New Kids on Twitter: “[CNCO]’s definitely got the right stuff.”
“Even though we couldn’t be on tour, we got to catch up with our families and revisit the music our parents loved,” says De Jesús. “We want to introduce these super iconic songs to our generation and bring people of all ages together through a shared experience of déjà vu.”
It’s not just a cheap nostalgia card the guys are playing: Now in their 20s, the members of CNCO take inspiration from the output of their Latin pop idols as they, too, grew up with their audiences. They’ll be the first to admit that their longevity as a band depends on maturing their sound.
“It is like a marriage, being in a band,” says Camacho, reflecting on CNCO’s fifth anniversary in December. He lets the phrase hang in the air before he adds: “But just the contract!” The guys nod and chuckle. Even if they are bound only by the Sony Music Latin contract they won on “La Banda,”the band mates enjoy ragging on one another much like childhood friends, poking fun at one anothers’ celebrity crushes, which rotate among Selena Gomez, Normani and the Jenner sisters. (No Spanish required.)
“We are five guys from different countries, with very different lifestyles before all this,” says Camacho, who became a father at 20, just as the band was taking off in 2016. His daughter, Aaliyah, makes the occasional cameo on CNCO’s Instagram. “We bring a little bit of everything from Latin America into the mix,” he adds.
The Dominican American Camacho was born in New York City, where he developed a preference for R&B slow jams. De Jesús attended a prestigious ballet academy in Puerto Rico, while the shy Pimentel, a Mexican American from SoCal, was on the musical theater track. Colón, the kid brother of the group, was born in Cuba and lived in the States for only three years before competing on the show; meanwhile the eldest, Vélez, worked several odd jobs in his teens to financially support his family back in Ecuador.
In Latin America, the teen pop wave had come and gone long before CNCO’s members were born. The 1980s produced popular vocal groups like Timbiriche, which counts Mexican divas Thalía and Paulina Rubio as alumni as well as the Puerto Rican outfit Menudo, which famously helped kickstart the career of Ricky Martin. As producer of “La Banda,” Martin eventually took CNCO under his wing, inviting the band to support him on North and South American stops of his One World Tour.
Yet what set the band apart from its mentor was its embrace of an emerging urban-pop fusion sound, which it developed with the help of Wisin, the
Puerto Rican rapper and producer who rose to fame as one half of the reggaetón legacy act Wisin & Yandel. Under the influence of Wisin, CNCO could explore its bad boy side; but much like Martin, CNCO kept it PG-rated enough to mollify the parents of its younger fans.
CNCO happened to emerge just as Latin pop began its renaissance in the U.S. mainstream, hallmarked by the ascent of pop-adjacent MCs like Daddy Yankee, J Balvin and Bad Bunny. This new Latin wave dovetailed with a global pop boom that saw the stratospheric rise of K-pop idol groups like BTS and Blackpink, who rarely, if ever, sing in English. After One Direction’s dissolution left a black hole in the Western pop-music universe, and as millennials and Gen Z clamor for more inclusive, multicultural media, the bilingual CNCO appears primed for mainstream fame.
“This new, contemporary generation of boy band fans tend to be more diverse, politically progressive and curious about the world than those fans that preceded them,” says Maria Sherman, boy-band historian and author of “Larger Than Life: A History of Boy Bands from NKTOB to BTS.”
“‘Crossing over’ to appease English-speaking audiences by rerecording in English doesn’t really exist to them the way it did for, say, Latin pop fans in the 1990s,” Sherman adds. “BTS is the shining example. They didn’t release their Englishlanguage single ‘Dynamite,’ until seven years into their career. They were already the biggest band on the planet by then.”
Despite making few appearances on non-Latin music charts, CNCO has continued to expand its global fan base, which has reached well beyond Latin America and the Hispanic community in the U.S. The band has entertained fans as far as Japan and Sweden, where young CNCOwners, as they’ve called themselves, have taken
Spanish lessons to communicate with their idols. The vast majority being young girls, CNCOwners conduct themselves like investors or patrons of the band.
“Through them we’ve had the power to tour, the power to see different countries, the energy to keep going,” says Vélez. “[The fans] motivate us to be our best.”
Much like K-pop’s fiercest fan bases, says Isabel Feria, senior marketing director at Sony Music Entertainment, CNCOwners act as a virtual street team, flooding social media with praise for the band and leading guerrilla campaigns that result in millions of streams and views. Deep in the comments on YouTube, where CNCO counts nearly 11 million followers, fans urge one another to circulate their videos. “We’ve found it’s very similar to the gaming community,” says Feria. “They use social media and live chat rooms to drive engagement — and now, so do we. So for this cycle, we’re going back to what we did with ‘La Banda’ — the fans get to vote for the next music video they want to see. We have the content ready to go, the fans have their say.”
Despite a pandemic-induced lull, CNCO performed on MTV’s pared-down Video Music Awards in New York, where it out-polled Post Malone and Lady Gaga for best quarantine performance. Not long after, CNCO was tapped to appear at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
So long as the group retains its distinct international appeal, the band members get to subsist on what really matters to them: showing the world what Latinos in the U.S. have to offer.
“We’re not in competition with any bands,” says Camacho. “Like [BTS] is sharing their culture, we’re sharing our culture. We’ve all got the same dream: to make great music and spread good vibes around the world. That’s how we do our thing.”
IN 2 013 , S H E R I H O L M A N had just turned 47 and her life was falling apart. Raised in Virginia by a struggling single mom, Holman had bootstrapped herself through college to earn a theater degree, then moved to New York City to pursue acting. When that plan proved unworkable, Holman took a series of temp jobs in publishing, eventually becoming an assistant to an influential literary agent. Throughout the early 1990s, when book advances were soaring, Holman wrote her first novel, “A Stolen Tongue.” Published to raves in 1997, the book built an audience for her 2000 bestseller, “The Dress Lodger.” In 2003, Holman’s “The Mammoth Cheese” was a finalist for the Orange Prize. Secure in her work, she married a good guy with a real job. They bought a Victorian house in Brooklyn, had a daughter and then twin sons. Holman quit her job to write novels and mother full-time. Slow-forward five years. One of Holman’s sons was battling cancer. Her marriage was over. Her third book was taking forever to complete. “Witches on the Road Tonight” was finally published in 2011, to disappointing sales, with the book advance money long gone. “My editor broke the news to me that publishers’ profits, and therefore advances, were down, so most novelists were going to need two jobs,” Holman recalled. “I’d earned $9,000 on my writing the year before. … I needed one job that paid enough to live on.” Then she heard from a novelist friend who’d moved to L.A. and was making “big bucks” in an HBO writers room. “I decided to teach myself to write for TV.” Lacking a trust fund, savings or income, Holman sold the Victorian and
squeezed her brood into a small, rented flat in a less gentrified neighborhood. There her vocational retraining began. “I spent 2013 watching and rewatching the pilot for ‘Six Feet Under’ with my iPhone stopwatch marking every beat change,” Holman said. Using that template, she wrote a pilot based on her previous novel. It took 15 months to get it right.
In February 2014, NBCUniversal bought Holman’s pilot. With three days notice the network flew her to L.A. for her apprenticeship: an entry-level spot in the writers room of a series called “Emerald City.” And just like that, Holman the novelist became Holman the TV writer.
As the financial rewards of writing books shrink and the need for streaming content continues to grow, more and more novelists are doing what Holman did, expanding their skill sets and their incomes by moving from page to screen (or writing for page and screen). In recent years, novelists have been warmly welcomed — in some cases, energetically recruited — into TV writers rooms. And as much as publishing has changed in the past two decades, television has changed even more.
“When I came into network TV in the 1990s, the execution of every show was baked in,” said veteran TV producer, director and writer Tom Spezialy, best known for his work on “Desperate Housewives” and “The Leftovers.” “The writer’s job was to make the script 90% familiar and 10% something new. Back then, all TV was network TV, and all network TV was formulaic. TV shows were plot-driven, not character-driven like novels. So the networks bought novels, not novelists; then they hired TV writers like me to translate those novels for the screen.”
In the tradition of Hemingway’s advice on dealing with Hollywood — drive to the California border, throw your book over the fence and take the money Hollywood throws back — novelists were thrilled to cash the checks that TV producers were happy to write.
What changed? In a word: cable. The emergence of HBO original
programming — beginning with “The Sopranos” in 1999 — set down a gauntlet for high art on the small screen, for prioritizing character over plot, for genre storytelling with literary flair. Eventually, along came “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men,” harbingers of the current era of glossy abundance, when even campy fare like “You” comes dressed in bookish garb.
And who better to write novelistic television than novelists? Suddenly showrunners needed authors like Holman, skilled at creating complex contemporary characters. In exchange for a steady income, L.A. winters and health insurance, novelists were willing and able to learn the tricks required to do the TV writer’s job: how to share authorship in a writers room instead of dreaming up stories in solitude and how to spin a tight 42minute arc instead of a meandering 400-page narrative.
“Screenwriters rely on behavior and image to communicate inner life,” said Dave Andron, showrunner of “Snowfall,” FX’s blistering depiction of the L.A. crack epidemic. “Novelists can tell you exactly what’s going on in a character’s mind.” TV, as we now know it, needs both.
IN 2 014 , Charles Yu was working 18-hour days as in-house counsel for a Los Angeles tech firm, supporting his wife and two kids while writing on the side — successfully. At 38, he’d published two short story collections and a novel.
When he was midway through drafting his second novel, “Interior Chinatown,” he learned he had important fans; the showrunners of HBO’s “Westworld” liked his fiction and wanted to interview him for a staff writer position. When Yu explained that he already had two full-time jobs, the showrunner said, “You should be writing fulltime.” That was Yu’s last day as a lawyer.
“It still feels like a dream,” Yu said. “One day I’m an attorney. The next day I’m in a writers room in Burbank, eating free snacks and talking about robots and consciousness.” To say the move worked out is an understatement. Yu has continued to work on TV series, from “Sorry for Your Loss ” to “Here and Now. ” As for “Interior Chinatown,” that novel he was working on, narrated by a Hollywood extra? It won the 2020 National Book Award for fiction.
For Yu, this isn’t just creative success on parallel tracks but a single career in which one medium feeds the other. “I find myself trying to import skills and tools from scripts to novels and back again,” he said. “From TV I’ve learned about structure and outlining and how to thread multiple storylines through a longer work. Going in the other direction, I try to find ways to incorporate my voice, my tone and a sense of being experimental from my books into my TV projects.”
While Yu considers himself lucky, he also acknowledges the pressure of representing his ethnicity in both worlds. “Although I haven’t experienced overt discrimination in TV, in the six writers rooms I’ve been in, I’ve been the only Asian American writer.”
In his fiction, and in essays like a Time piece headlined “What It’s Like to Never See Yourself on TV,” Yu tackles the pitfalls of tokenism. “Interior Chinatown” cuts right to the heart of that question. Soon he will adapt the novel for Hulu, bringing his point of view before the masses. “Since I don’t write huge bestsellers,” he said, “television gives me