Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas

Narcocorrido is a Mexican fusion of gangsta rap and hard country, a "medieval ballad style whose Robin Hoods . . . fly shipments of cocaine." Its leading purveyors, such as Los Tigres del Norte, are wildly popular with Mexicans and Mexican Americans but almost unknown to mainstream U.S. audiences. Meanwhile, "educated Mexicans [are] horrified by the narcocorridos." Wald traces narcocorrido's development from the Mexican Revolution and Prohibition, when heroic odes (corridos) to revolutionary leaders and tequila smugglers (tequileros) were written. The narcocorridos update that practice to deal with contemporary drug-dealing antiheroes. Wald limns Angel Gonzalez, who "spawned Mexico's most violent and reviled narcocorrido" with his "Contrabando y Traicion" ("Smuggling and Betrayal"); Paulino Vargas, "the most important corrido composer of the modern era"; and others, including larger-than-life legends and tragic heroes aplenty, such as Chalino Sanchez, whose rise to legendary status via demise in a retaliatory gang shooting is "a Mexican version of the Tupac Shakur story." A worthy shelf mate for Michael Eric Dyson's brainy Shakur study, Holler If You Hear Me [BKL Ag 01]. --Mike Tribby

Guitar in hand, journalist and musician Wald (Josh White: Society Blues) takes a yearlong journey through Mexico and the southwestern U.S. tracking down composers and performers of the narcocorrido, a modern spinoff of the 19th-century Mexican folk ballad (corrido) that combines the traditional accompaniment of accordion and 12-string guitar (bajo sexto) with markedly current lyrics. Gone are the old "song stories" celebrating heroic generals and lost battles of the Mexican revolution. Narcocorridos romanticize the drug trade the botched smugglings, fallen kingpins and dishonorable police. Wald interviews dozens of key players, from Angel Gonzalez, whose 1972 "Contrabando y Traiciin" ("Smuggling and Betrayal") is credited with launching the narco-trend, to the Rivera family, whose popular Los Angeles record label releases "songs that are notable for their lack of social consciousness, their willingness to push the limits of acceptability and baldly cash in on the most violent and nasty aspects of the drug trade." The style has become hugely popular in L.A. and northwestern Mexico and has spawned a narcoculture marked by cowboy hats, sports suits and gold chains. Unfortunately, Wald's narrow, first-person account reads like a travel journal, blithely moving from subject to subject, ignoring historical context. He glosses over the U.S. and Mexican governments' antidrug military campaigns, which disrupted the lives of many innocent civilians. Wald may think the history of U.S.-Mexican drug trafficking has been sufficiently recounted elsewhere, but explaining the narcocorrido without this background is like writing a history of the American protest song without discussing Vietnam. B&w photos not seen by PW. (Oct. 1) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Wald (Josh White: Society Blues) hitchhiked across Mexico in search of the modern corrido, a popular musical genre that reports the heroics of its subjects against the backdrop of norte?o-like harmonies in guitar and accordion. His book focuses especially on the narcocorrido, a genre of ballad that glorifies gun-toting drug lords in a Mexican version of gangsta rap with accordions. In this personalized account, the author interviews corrido songwriters Angel Gonz lez and Paulino Vargas, who scored hits with Los Tigres del Norte, the most popular group of the genre. He takes his readers to Culiacan, the heart of the Mexican drug business, where archetypal corridista Chalino S nchez immortalized drug traffickers and their exploits before his own assassination. Wald moves next to Los Angeles, where the Chalino-influenced Riveras reign as the first family of the narcocorrido. In the last part of the book, he locates the more politically minded corridistas Enrique Franco and Jesse Armenta, travels to the Rio Bravo and the Texas border for Old West-style corridos, and takes a bus to Mexico City and the mountains of southern Mexico, where little-known corridistas sing paeans to Zapatista guerrillas. Wald ends with a visit to Michoacan, the southern Mexican drug capital, where he meets corrido legend Teodoro Bello. Half enthusiast and half ethnomusicologist, Wald offers an engaging, fascinating, and well-written account of a much-neglected musical style that will be irresistible to readers of all types. Dave Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, Seattle (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A fascinating journey south and north of the border on the trail of songs about marijuana, cocaine, and Monica Lewinsky. "Though the Anglo media act as if the current Latin music boom were driven by Afro-Caribbean styles like salsa and merengue," writes music journalist and blues historian Wald (River of Song, 1999), "Mexican bands account for roughly two-thirds of domestic Latin record sales." And while there are plenty of Mexican rock, folk, jazz, and even rap acts, the bulk of those sales are in the norteño genre, Mexico's equivalent of country music, which mixes elements of Central European polka and German oom-pah-pah with flamenco and other Spanish-born styles. A norteño staple is the corrido, a longish folk ballad often celebrating the exploits of Robin Hood-like bandits, revolutionary heroes, and other outlaws. Lately Mexican artists have taken to updating their subjects to include Zapatista guerrillas, drug smugglers, and other figures taken from the daily headlines; one group in particular, Los Tigres del Norte, with whose members Wald spends much time in these pages, has made a lucrative specialty of celebrating the very people American law enforcement has pledged to eliminate. That drugs should be such a popular theme is no surprise, according to Wald, for all of Mexico is awash in contraband and dependent on the income it brings; one resident of the city of Culiacan tells him, "There are only three wealthy families here that have no drug connections in their history . . . and that number is not just symbolic or poetic license." That's all well and good, the composers reply; did not the Kennedys, who also figure in corridos, make their fortune bootlegging and then investing in legal enterprises? It's a huge business, drugs, drug-fueled revolution, and singing about them, and Wald does a superb job of taking his readers into that world.