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In Los Angeles, Songs Without Borders
By LAWRENCE DOWNES | The New York Times
There are many ways to know a city — through its restaurants or museums, its landmarks or outdoor spaces. But one way to get to a city's heart is to immerse yourself in its music.
You might think that would be impossible to do in Los Angeles, a landscape far too huge, too varied, too dizzying to ever sort out. But if you stick to the Los Angeles that has been remade by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, the parts shaped by waves of immigration, assimilation and reinvention, you travel on remarkably stable ground. Wherever you go in this rich, sprawling terrain — getting off the freeways, driving through downtown and then heading generally south and east to suburbs like Vernon, South Gate, Lynwood, Huntington Park, El Monte, Pico Rivera — you can follow the sounds of the Mexican countryside.
In clubs, bars, swap meets and concert halls, from car radios and ringing cellphones, you will hear corridos, old-time folk ballads in the banda and norteño styles. "Corridos are part of the literature of the common people," wrote Chris Strachwitz, who founded Arhoolie Records and has spent a lifetime collecting and studying traditional Mexican music.
Many of these songs will be narcocorridos, stories of bandits and outlaws updated to the age of drug cartels and AK-47s, and known to some, because of their grim authenticity and bad reputation, as "the rap of modern Mexico." And in all these places, even if you listen only a little while, you will hear Chalino, or someone trying to sound like him. Chalino was the nickname of Rosalino Sánchez, one of the most influential composers and singers of narcocorridos. Mexicans know him as a valiente, a brave one: armed, dangerous and doomed. Comparisons are superficial, but you could think of him as part Billy the Kid, part Bill Monroe. A hip-hop idol from down on the ranch. Maybe like Johnny Cash, if Johnny Cash truly had been Folsom Prison material. But then not really. There was no one like Chalino. >> Go to Full Story >>>