SONGS FOR SMUGGLERS

I'm not really a trend-setting guy, so imagine my surprise to discover that
I was in at the start of a major trend in another culture.

Back in the 1970s, my friends and I ate at Mi Casa, a Mexican restaurant on
24th Street in San Francisco, where I discovered a tune on the jukebox that
I'd always play because I liked its title.

I had no idea what the lyrics were, but "Contraband y Traicion"
("Contraband and Betrayal") gave a hint, and I thought the band's name, Los
Tigres del Norte, was cool. So were the cheesy gunshots towards the end of
the song.

Glorifying the bad guys is hardly a new tradition in Mexican pop or folk
culture; consider Pancho Villa and his men.

According to Elijah Wald's excellent new book, "Narcocorrido: A Journey
Into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas" (Rayo/HarperCollins, $24),
my jukebox song was a watershed.

Its 1972 tale of a young couple who smuggle a load of marijuana into the
United States, sell it and divvy up the profits -- whereupon the man
announces he's leaving for his real girlfriend in San Francisco and the
woman shoots him -- was the first of a long series of commercially
successful narrative songs, or corridos, which usually glorify the lives
and careers of smugglers, drug lords and farmers who raise the crops which
give us heroin, cocaine and marijuana.

Glorifying the bad guys is hardly a new tradition in Mexican popular and
folk culture: I was already familiar with songs about Pancho Villa and his
men, and about bandits who dared to go up against the Federales, and even,
to a small extent, their connection to marijuana.

The venerable "Las Cucarachas," for example, is about rebel soldiers who
can't even walk around if they've run out of smokables.

I even made the connection with a song I remember from the radio in my
childhood, Marty Robbins's "El Paso." But a song everyone knows and sings
in a cantina is one thing, and an entire segment of the commercial record
business, complete with airplay bans and tie-in films, is quite another.

From the humble beginning of the unhappy couple who filled the four tires
of their car with pot -- which doesn't sound very good for either the tires
or the pot -- the stories have gotten wilder, the quantities of drugs
larger, the vehicles themselves more elaborate and, of course, the deeds
more boastworthy. Mr. Wald heard his first corrido in Morocco, of all
places, from a Mexican-American hashish smuggler who sang him a song about
three tequila bootleggers ambushed by the Texas Rangers. He figured that
the song, whose story dated from Prohibition, was a charming anachronism
that his friend had held onto because one of the smugglers was his grandfather.

Instead, in 1987, on a Mexican visit, he discovered the corrido was alive
and well and that Prohibition and tequila had been replaced by the war on
drugs and the "three little animals": the parakeet (cocaine), the rooster
(marijuana) and the goat (heroin). Kids proudly sported images of marijuana
leaves or the three animals on T-shirts and baseball caps, and, reminiscent
of the early days of punk, singers whose songs never appeared on the radio
were nonetheless big stars.

Fascinated, Mr. Wald returned to research this book. It's hard to imagine
he missed much. Hitchhiking all over Mexico, penetrating small towns where
entire local economies run on drugs and strangers -- particularly North
American ones -- are not exactly welcome, Mr. Wald managed to interview
nearly every important performer and songwriter in the genre, even
uncovering the songs of the Zapatista rebels, who aren't averse to
advertising their ideas via corridos.

He points out regional variations, for instance how Michoacan groups like
Los Hermanos Jiminez use the arpa grande, a large harp, in their songs,
while up north, the hot new banda sound -- full brass band, often with a
lead tuba -- co-exists with the more traditional norteno sound of guitar,
accordion and bajo sexto (a large acoustic bass guitar).

Naturally, such a well-written, comprehensive, colorful account can only
make your ears ache to hear some of this stuff, so Mr. Wald has joined with
one of Mexico's largest labels, Fonovisa, to produce a 16-track
compilation, "Corridos y Narcocorridos." Opening with -- what else? --
"Contraband y Traicion," it offers a pretty good tour through the territory
covered in the book. There's Chalino Sanchez, the Bob Dylan of the genre,
whose rough voice was made up for by the realism of his lyrics, singing "El
Crimen del Culiacan," a brutal murder tale made all the more haunting by
the fact that Sanchez was murdered in Culiacan after a 1992 appearance at a
club there.

And Los Pajaritos del Sur, a father-and-son duo who perform mostly on
long-distance buses for tips. There's Grupo Exterminador, with their wry
tale of a couple of female smugglers, "Las Monjitas," who dress like nuns
and, after a neat bit of wordplay, shoot down the cops who try to stop
them. And El Canelo de Sinaloa y los Dos del Sitio, a trio made up of two
12-string guitars and a tuba, and the L.A.-based, up-to-date banda sound of
Jenni Rivera, about the only woman in the narcocorrido business, singing
her signature tune, "La Jacalita" ("The Lady Jackal"). And lots and lots of
Los Tigres del Norte, which is not a bad thing at all, considering how the
group has continued to thrive with all kinds of songs after their dramatic
debut in corrido.

Of course, Fonovisa is not a documentary label (only four of these tracks
come from other companies), so we're missing such fascinating characters
from Mr. Wald's book as Andres Contreras, the Zapatista troubadour who
mostly busks at demonstrations, and, perhaps most crucially, Los Tucanos de
Tijuana, huge stars whose "Mis Tres Animales" established the
parakeet/rooster/goat trio in the public imagination. Not since Michael
Tisserand's equally astonishing 1999 "The Kingdom of Zydeco" (Arcade/Avon,
also with a companion CD, from Rounder) have I read a book which gets into
a musical genre and its supporting culture so thoroughly and
entertainingly. Solid research, superb interviews and compelling narrative
with a nonjudgmental cultural sensitivity are all essential to carrying off
a book like "Narcocorrido," and those of us north of the Rio Bravo (as the
Rio Grande is called south of the border, another thing I learned) should
be glad Elijah Wald has opened the door to this bizarre and fascinating
world for us.