LIVING LA VIDA COCA

Singing Along With The Drug Trade

You're driving down Harbor Boulevard with the windows rolled up, but you
can still feel it from a distance: the brain-rattling bass from a car
stereo transmitting itself through the imperfect media of air, car and your
own skeleton. You expect an expletive-filled rap from a Honda, but you
instead pull up to a yuppie panzer, and then you hear the Spanish lyrics
and the herky-jerky polka strains of an accordion. At the wheel is a
teenager with a shaved head and earring but otherwise dressed like a
chuntaro (a Mexican hillbilly).

This is the future America. The new Mexican no longer toils on his family's
sterile plot of land. He works in el Norte to earn the new beast of burden:
an SUV. He is the product of narcocultura-literally, the culture of
narcotics trafficking-itself a byproduct of the American war on drugs.

Over the past 30 years, Mexican economics, pop culture and dress have been
shaped by the drug business. And like almost everything bad in this world,
narcocultura can be blamed in part on American excess. During the
drug-fueled '70s, entrepreneurs known as narcotraficantes introduced drug
crops throughout rural Mexico, especially in the state of Sinaloa, where
the major narcotraficantes have been based. In an effort to eradicate the
emerging narco-economy, the Mexican army went after smugglers and growers
with equal vigor. With a common enemy, narcotraficantes and townspeople
united in a socioeconomic symbiosis: the narcos would give ailing ranchos
financial aid, and the citizens would grow drugs.

The benevolence of narcotraficantes created cult followings for the cartels
and their leaders, including such figures as Amado Carrillo Fuentes, "El
Senor de los Cielos" (the Lord of the Sky), who died during plastic surgery
in 1997; Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera, who recently escaped from a
Guadalajara prison and is currently at large; and the Arellano-Felix cartel
of Tijuana. Narcos became the modern-day folk heroes of Mexico, reported on
breathlessly by the Mexican media.

With jobs and adoration, though, came gang hits and drug-related massacres
throughout rural Mexico. The violence was exploited by a Mexican film
industry that had been in decline throughout the 1960s and was desperate
for a moneymaker. Thus the narcopelicula, the narco film. These were not
Cheech and Chong farces but rather portrayals of the Mexican drug trade as
a deadly but glamorous adventure. The men were almost stereotypically
macho, the women either whores or virgins, and the movies violent even by
the sanguinary standards of Mexican film. Shootouts were the norm-at
weddings, while driving, in the mountains. The most famous actors of the
narcopelicula, brothers Mario and Fernando Almada, were the good guys:
50-year-old Dirty Geraldos massacring anyone who crossed their path. They
became Mexican idols, and their films are still shown as if on an endless
loop on Spanish-language television stations.

But the embodiment of narcocultura was the late Chalino Sanchez. Elvis
Presley, John Lennon and Johnny Rotten rolled into one undocumented Mexican
immigrant, Sanchez helped transform the corrido, Mexico's traditional song
structure, into a running commentary on the glories and terrors of drug
running: the narcocorrido.

Sanchez sang narcocorridos not in Mexico but in Southern California during
the late 1980s. He combined the violent imagery of the narcopelicula and
the corrido form-with its emphasis on communicating history-and added his
own ideas. Sanchez turned the corrido into something like journalism,
singing about contemporary but otherwise anonymous people whose only claim
to fame was their (usually violent) life story. If he was experimental, he
was also traditional, writing songs on commission, transforming the
invisible lives of immigrants into heroic songs of violence, hard work and
tragedy.

Soon, narcocultura had a sartorial style named for Sanchez himself, the
Chalinazo: a cowboy hat, exotic-animal cowboy boots, gold chains, an ornate
belt called a cinto pitiado, and silk shirts. After Sanchez's 1992
assassination in Sinaloa, his style and music became de rigueur for any
Mexican who wanted to be el mas chingon, the biggest badass around.

The music and clothes established, the official car of the narcocultura
emerged from the suburban dreams of soccer moms and dads: the monstrous
SUV. Much like corridos about famous horses in days gone by, new corridos
hit the radio waves boasting about trucks-such as "El Cherokee de La
Muerte" ("The Cherokee of Death") and "El Suburban." These new ballads sing
the praises of vehicles bought with drug money and emblazoned with symbols
of the rancho: bulls, horses and la Virgen de Guadalupe.

This love of materialism yielded the newest trend in narcocultura: corridos
pesados, heavy corridos. They deal only peripherally with drugs and
narcotraficantes, instead concentrating on trash talk. The protagonist in
the corrido pesado has made his drug money; now he brags about what he owns
as a result and vows to kick your ass if you have a problem with him. Most
notably, singers of corridos pesados cuss-big time. This created a dilemma
for the Federal Communications Commission. During the birth of corridos
pesados, around 1999, Spanish-language radio was awash in expletives.
Perhaps FCC monitors spoke Spanish, but not the Mexican Spanish in which
many swear words translated literally have no obvious vulgar content. For
example, "Te voy a madriar" means "I'm going to mother you," but in Mexican
Spanish more liberally translates as "I'm going to kick your fucking ass."
The FCC seems finally to have captured the nuances of Mexican swearing; in
the past year, corridos pesados have been censored or outright banned on
Spanish radio.

The group with the biggest reputation among narcocultura acts is Los Razos
de Sacramento y Reynaldo, who play at JC Fandango Sunday night. Emulating
the voicing (something between a howl and a screech) and dress that Sanchez
employed, Los Razos have made their name as Los Reyes del Corrido Pesado
(Kings of the Heavy Corrido) with songs such as "El Jodon" (The Bad-Ass
Motherfucker) and "El Huevudo" (The Guy with Big Balls). In interviews,
lead singer Sacramento Ramirez has frankly said the only reason his group
sings corridos pesados is because that's where the money is. It's not the
older generation of immigrants he wants as fans-it's their children, the
ones who drive the huge trucks, are immersed in narcocultura and are the
future of this nation. With corridos pesados in one culture, gangsta rap in
another, and thrash metal as overlord, we can look forward to some
interesting shit in the next decade.

Los Razos de Sacramento y Reynaldo perform with Eliseo Robles, Flamazo
Norteno and Banda Grullo at JC Fandango, 1086 N. State College Blvd.,
Anaheim, (714) 758-9998. Sun., 8 p.m. $30.