Meteoric rise to stardom surprises young crooner
What did 2018 mean for Cuco? It’s a deceptively simple question that the singer-songwriter has a few answers to, including one that he can’t seem to fully articulate.
First, the easy answer: “The last year was really crazy,” he says by phone from his parents’ home, where he lives, in Hawthorne, south of Los Angeles. “It was intense. I didn’t expect to be anywhere where I’m at.”
Indeed, on the surface, the past year would appear to be a dreamlike, singularly explosive success. Omar Banos, the 20-year-old Chicano artist known as Cuco, who will be performing at the Regency on Saturday, Feb. 16, released his third record, “Chiquito EP,” last spring to acclaim and had his music — a mesmerizing palette of woozy indie pop, dreamy lovelorn ballads and lo-fi hiphop made out of his parents’ garage — streamed in the hundreds of millions. He performed internationally and in practically every major music festival, including the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in Golden Gate Park. A year before that, he was performing in
backyard shows, where a rabid following, built online from precociously polished SoundCloud songs, came to sing his brokenhearted lyrics.
His skyrocketing fame has seemed decidedly of-the-moment: a Gen-Z, first-generation Chicano artist whose three DIY EPs tapped into millions of fans, independently, through the straightforward nature and vitality of the internet.
But in Cuco’s telling, there just seems to be not much to tell. He fastforwards through a summary of his trajectory over the last two years: a short video of him playing the guitar in his bedroom went viral on Twitter in the summer of 2016, and by 2017, he dropped out of community college and started making music full time. He met his manager, and things just happened from there.
His music, all composed entirely on his own — from psychedelic guitars to sunny trap to Spanglish love songs like the breakout hit “Lo Que Siento” — quickly made him a rare representative and, with his chunky glasses and thin mustache, unlikely heartthrob of a young indie Latinx subculture in Los Angeles, then a pop figure with a global fan base.
Yet Cuco recounts it all casually and without detail. It’s not as an affectation of cool indifference, but maybe as a result of some sort of ambivalence with the whirlwind of success.
“I feel like don’t know how to really appreciate it the way I should because I still don’t know how to understand that it’s happening,” he says. “It’s really weird, because I’ve always been like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m super stoked and in disbelief that this all happened.’ But then I’m like, am I really? Or am I just saying that? Like, has it really just not hit me yet?”
In other words, his reaction to everything might not simply be a result of the dizzying whiplash of sudden fame for a young artist recording out of a makeshift studio in his parents’ garage, though that is undoubtedly a part of the equation. Only a few years into the game, Cuco actually just seems tired, jaded, even disillusioned.
“Touring is like the worst thing ever,” he says. “I like playing shows. I like seeing people be happy and whatever. But for me, it’s way too much.”
The logistics of road life are exhausting, but Cuco is particularly anxious for an upcoming mini-run of shows in California and one in London.
“Honestly, it’s pretty much the accident. So it makes me nervous to tour in general,” he says. Cuco is referring to last fall, when his international tour was abruptly cut short after a major car accident on the road — one he is still unprepared to talk about — put several people in the hospital and him in surgery. Recently, Cuco, who often posts cryptically diaristic messages on social media, tweeted: “The hospital brings back traumas n anxiety I don’t know how to deal with.”
The incident, along with the slog of touring, seems to be only compounded by the larger forces of the music industry that are inevitably encroaching on his rising star. In discussing the trials of sudden fame, a laconic Cuco opens up about his aversion toward the machinations of “malicious” industry players that he’s encountered firsthand and witnessed others face.
“It’s kind of like nobody really gives a s—,” he says. “They don’t really care about the humanity of the person. It’s kind of like: ‘Let’s just milk these people for money.’ I feel like that’s why I hate it too, because it’s very tiring. Trying to filter all that out is kind of impossible.”
Ironically, Cuco’s career has been built upon an unorthodox route that upended the industry apparatus (in meetings with labels themselves, he says, they praise him as “out-of-the-box”) and could serve as a budding paradigm for the future of music. But Cuco doesn’t necessarily see that kind of happy future for independent artists.
“Once you start putting anything out and start involving yourself in all these festivals or anything, the industry will always come in — no matter how independent you are,” he says. “It’s always going to be up in your face.”
This reality is perhaps why Cuco seems to shirk ownership around the narratives surrounding his trajectory, only lightly acknowledging him and his team’s uniquely independent come-up.
To be sure, he is happy — and surprised — to see his music representing and empowering an often unrecognized young Latinx and Chicano fan base. He’s also grateful to be able to help support his parents, who came to America as undocumented immigrants (his mother worked as a housekeeper, and his father is a photographer). “They obviously inspired me a lot because they did really come from nothing,” Cuco says.
But more than anything, he seems to be weighed down under pressure, though he also qualifies himself as just a “pessimistic person.”
“I could talk about how f— up everything is, like, all day if I want to,” he says. “It’s work at the end of the day. As much as music might be something I love doing, it became my work. It’s just how it is. You just have to overcome it and put up with it.”
Behind much hype, Cuco’s debut album is set to come out this year, filled with what he calls different sounds and more mature production. But as for the long term, he hints at stepping back.
“I’m just tired right now, and I know what I want my trajectory to be, and I know I don’t want it to be touring my whole life,” he says.
That it might mean working as a producer in five years, rather than an artist, he indicates.
“I could have been the type to enjoy the spotlight,” Cuco says. “I don’t know how to handle it, I guess.
“I’m thankful for everything I have, obviously. The impact that I create means everything to me, and that’s more important to me than anything. But I think, as well, taking care of myself is important.”