![]() ![]() Everyone tours the same venues relentlessly. Indie artists like Fidel Rueda and Los Inquietos regularly get played on mainstream radio major and indie bands record the same corridos, and sometimes the same love songs. But the barriers between majors and indies seem more porous in Mexican regional music than they do in Anglo pop and rock. Today’s world of online promotion means it’s easier for musicians of all genres to get heard, though not necessarily to get paid. In terms of their commercial outlook, bands like Máximo Grado and Los Rodriguez don’t resemble the reactionary ’80s heyday of “indie rock” so much as the early rock heyday of the ’50s and ’60s, when bands simply wanted to get paid to rock out, whether they recorded for Excello or Sun or Decca or RCA. No, all this means is that norteño and banda music have thriving independent scenes, geared more toward online video than terrestrial radio - see the tiny labels and self-releases promoted by Beto Sierra, whose YouTube clients make up a good portion of this list. But who knows, I may relent before the year is out. ![]() This quarter we’re down to three, which doesn’t necessarily mean the radio has turned into a wasteland - after all, part of the thrill of radio is hearing a song you never much cared for, like Gerardo Ortiz’s “Fuiste Mia,” suddenly sound really good in the company of entirely dissimilar songs. Last time out, NorteñoBlog counted six chart hits among the quarter’s best. Continue reading “Pepe Aguilar and Banda El Recodo Visit the Past, To Mixed Results” → Genre mixing is definitely welcome, and it’s still little-heard on regional Mexican radio (the format probably played more genre mashups during the ’90s electro-banda-and-Tejano heyday), but Aguilar’s music has plenty of company in the wider world.Įxcept - here’s respectful disagreement part 2 - this album is so bad. And since artists as diverse as Juan Gabriel, Juanes, Chiquis, Helen Ochoa, and Natalia Jiménez have all recently mashed up “traditional” styles with pop, Aguilar’s music fits right in. (Who can forget the mariachi version of “Jackass”?) Even if we limit our search for audacity to Aguilar’s field - the intersection of pop and ranchera known to radio programmers as “romantic Mexican music,” says Billboard‘s Leila Cobo - the idea of crossing over is nothing new. In 2016, there’s nothing “audacious” about mixing up those styles of music - especially for Aguilar, who’s been doing so longer than his contemporary Beck, who made his reputation with purportedly audacious musical mixology back in the ’90s. Over at OC Weekly, Gustavo Arellano overrates the new album by Pepe Aguilar, No Lo Había Dicho (Equinoccio), calling it “an audacious mix of vallenato, pop, banda, and ranchera that lands more often than not.” NorteñoBlog respectfully disagrees with both value judgments expressed in that sentence. ![]()
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