Mexican Ballads Get New Beats
LOS ANGELES — When Francisco Rodriguez, 31, was in prison, he began writing songs. He had grown up in Santa Maria, California, listening to corridos, traditional Mexican ballads that his parents and grandparents loved, so that is what he gravitated toward.
Corridos are born of an oral tradition of storytelling that goes back to the 19th century. Whether it is the daring tale of a real-life revolutionary or a romantic saga set in rural Mexico, a corrido comes with a narrative arc. Many are based on real events: The “Corrido of Joaquín Murrieta” tells the tale of a bandit and folk hero from California’s Gold Rush years.
In prison, Mr. Rodriguez focused on what he knew: the perils of trafficking arms across the United States-Mexico border. He wrote about the street hustlers and drug dealers from his neighborhood. Over time, he also experimented with changing the traditional corrido sound — infusing the acoustic guitar and accordion accompaniments with a quicker pace, including hip-hop beats based on the music he listened to growing up in Southern California in the 1990s.
Going by Shrek, he has been out of prison for two years and is the lead vocalist of Arsenal Efectivo, one of several popular “trapcorrido” groups influenced by rap and hip-hop.
Before a recent sold-out show at the Forum in Los Angeles, Mr. Rodriguez reflected on the evolution of his sound: “I left the drug dealing and trapping life and pursued music after I was released from prison, and that’s how all of this was formed.” He added: “When I first started my band, we were dressing in crocodile boots and wearing big tejanas and sombreros. But now I’m dressing in blinged-out clothes and blinged-out jewelry, I got a grill in my teeth, and that’s something that has never been seen in our culture — Mexicans who wear a grill and sing corridos.”
Jesus Ortiz Paz, 22, the lead singer of Fuerza Regida, another trapcorridos group from Los Angeles, said: “We’re from the streets. We weren’t born in Mexico, and we’re not singing about the ranchos.”
As drug trafficking networks grew more powerful in Mexico, corrido records reflected the associated strife, creating a subgenre called narcocorridos. Chalino Sanchez, a native of Sinaloa, Mexico, sang embellished first-person accounts of shootouts with the police, murder and survival that became popular, especially in southeast Los Angeles, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
But while the trapcorrido musicians of today grew up hearing corridos, they also grew up in metropolitan California cities. They listened to hip-hop and rap music.
Josh Kun, director of the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication, believes that corridos, as a form of music that exists on both sides of the United States-Mexico border, lend themselves naturally to collaboration with other genres.
Still, Jimmy Humilde, who runs a label called Rancho Humilde that manages Arsenal Efectivo, believes that there is something unique about trapcorridos in Southern California. “This is the voice of young Chicano culture, and we’re representing Los Angeles culture with this music,” he said.
Musical collaboration between black and Latino artists is not uncommon. But racial tension in South Central Los Angeles, especially in the early 1990s, was fraught between these demographic groups, both caught in a system of limited access to economic and social resources. Some see trapcorrido music as a corrective, though not an antidote, to racial tensions. As a testament to its appeal, music venues across California are selling out for trapcorrido shows. The bands are traveling to other states and to Mexico.
“We feel like Selena,” said Mr. Paz, referring to the Mexican-American singer who became one of the most celebrated singers of the 20th century before her death in 1995. “We’re Mexican-American and we’re going down to Mexico just like she did and selling out shows just like she did.”
Tales of growing up on the streets, not ‘the ranchos.’