More than a decade has passed since a group of Sinaloa groups made sombreros and jackets covered in diamonds and sequins fashionable on stage. From there they told stories of violence, drug trafficking and excess, which were applauded by the public but disapproved of by the authorities. The songs ended up converging into a new musical subgenre and, later, into a cultural movement of exaltation of consumption: the so-called altered movement. That big bubble that captured an eccentric lifestyle began to deflate over the years. Until two weeks ago, the musician Alfredo Ríos, The Komanderstirred up the networks with the announcement that the altered corridos. The most nostalgic followers have already echoed this.
El Komander appeared in the post shared on his social networks dressed in an outfit overloaded with prints and glitter. The message that accompanied his photograph was a declaration of intentions: “We are going to fix this mess…”, he stated, alluding to the current musical panorama, marked by corridos tumbados, the successful variant soaked in influences from traditional corridos and current urban genres. The response to Ríos’ post was a flood of supportive comments from the public and from the musicians who popularized the movement, such as Régulo Caro or Los Buchones de Culiacán.
Mexico’s historical and social context has served as a breeding ground for inspiration for today’s musicians. The war against drug trafficking launched during the Felipe Calderón administration (2006-2012) led to a brutal spread of violence throughout the country, leaving more than 170,000 dead. The corridistas were quick to narrate this reality. “Why was it sung about (violence)? Because it was the theme of the country at that time (…) Besides, in the region where we are from (Sinaloa) there is the bush, it is a strategic point for drug trafficking. We live with them every day. I think it would be disrespectful on our part not to tell these stories, it is inevitable,” Eulogio Sánchez, singer of Los Buitres de Culiacán Sinaloa, one of the bands that pioneered the movement, told this newspaper.
The corridos tumbados are another example of the influence of contemporary reality on the genre. The artists modernized their music by embracing deep-rooted Mexican music and the idiosyncrasy of urban music that has led the current scene: from the aesthetic style to the theme of the lyrics, centered on the life of excess. The result gave rise to an unprecedented internationalization of Mexican music, led by names such as Natanael Cano or Peso Pluma. These new corridos present a key difference from the classics, “They are no longer stories, they are more like music than song,” explains Juan Carlos Martínez-Pimienta, a professor at San Diego State University and one of the first scholars to research the movement.
In 2009 Los Buitres released Do not be afraida song that dealt with that popularized theme: it talked about conquering a woman, but also about weapons and luxury cars. Sánchez talks about that theme as the one that gave rise to the movement: “People got confused and said: ‘Oh, gosh! Is it a song or a corrido?’ And that’s when people said: ‘Ah, the lyrics are altered.’ The altered music was precisely that, altering the lyrics and the way of singing.”
Confusion in networks
Martínez-Pimienta highlights the beginning of the 2010s as the beginning of the subgenre and links it closely to the Culiacan record label Twiins Enterprise. During those years, the label began to release a series of compilation albums with songs by various artists – among them, Los Cuervos – under the title of Altered movement.
At that same time, the progressive corridosanother very similar movement, but promoted by the record company DEL Records. “They called them progressive corridos because musicians like Regulo Caro, who were rockers, said that certain progressions (used in their compositions) were from the rock. But in those years, we all identified it under the label of the altered movement,” says the professor. The artists of this other movement also announced their return, which led to confusion among the followers. on social media. A promoter linked to musicians from the altered movement strongly states to this newspaper that they have “nothing to do” with the progressives.
Martínez-Pimienta explains that the bloody context of the time triggered an epistemological change in the corridos: “There was a very strong return to violence. The corridos in the 90s, early 2000s, were generally very calm.” The lyrics of the previous decades maintained the idiosyncrasy of the genre, with themes such as excess, women or alcohol. But without reflecting the raw violence that the artists were beginning to relate.
Controversy and corridos have gone hand in hand for much of their history. The popularization of narcocorridos by Los Tigres del Norte in the seventies led to an amalgam of criticism. The death of six people during a shootout when the group Enigma Norteño was playing in Elota (Sinaloa), in 2016, triggered the prohibition of corridos that talked about drug trafficking in the state territory. Los Cuervos were the subject of this criticism. Radio stations did not play their songs, but the development of networks such as MySpace or Metroflog made their reproduction inevitable. “Many people say: ‘But why are you going to praise it? If you listen to a corrido, people are going to want to be violent.’ No, I tell them, it’s like saying that if you go to the cinema and see the Superman movie, you’re going to want to fly. If you listen to a corrido, you’re listening to a story,” says the singer of Los Cuervos.
Michael Jackson and the outlandish outfits
The return of Los Alterados – announced by musicians and record labels – came as a surprise to Los Buitres. “We were caught up in all this movement in the week following our vacation, that’s why we’ve spent all these days in a mess, doing things,” he admits. The Sinaloa group began preparing a battery of Alterados songs at the beginning of the year, all of this, Sánchez says, without taking into account the sudden announcement.
For Martínez-Pimienta, the return of the altered can be explained by the absence of the narrative of stories developed in current songs. “(The musicians) compete for the Mexican public of those aged 40 and above, who want to hear this type of corridos (more narrative). When they see an opportunity to say ‘here is a space for nostalgia’, they return. There are groups that live off nostalgia,” explains the professor. The explanations are simpler in Sánchez’s words: “Why bring them back? Because the public is asking for it and people want to hear it. At the end of the day, the public cannot be fooled.”
The singer also denies any rivalry with the tumbados artists, a controversy that arose from publications on social networks and different media; and he shows his pride in the success achieved by them: “If you are in this business for 23 years, almost 24, as we have been, you realize that in the music business there is an audience for everyone.”
The altered artists broke with the previous generation on an aesthetic level. The young people who went on stage sought to modernize the outfits of their predecessors, who were accustomed to those basic shirts, belts with large buckles and hats, as worn by artists such as Chalino Sánchez. In that early decade of the 2000s, they took references from the Anglo-Saxon world. Los Buitres inspired some of their outfits even in the clothes of idols such as Michael Jackson. A revolution similar to the one now adopted by the new young people, who with the influences of the urban artists of the moment, go on stage dressed in loose clothing and flat-brimmed caps.
The announcement of the comeback unleashed a flood of memes on social media, where users joked about the return of those outlandish styles that so marked the followers of the movement. Sometimes, the worn-out expression that reality surpasses fiction becomes canon. The boys from Los Buitres have been looking in recent days for some garments from emblematic brands of the time, such as Ed Hardy, whose clothing inspired by the world of tattoos is characterized by the overloaded style of the designs. “Believe me, we have been looking for it by heaven, sea and land. But it is a little complicated. The rosaries have already been made. It is about giving people what they like,” he says.
The altered label has sparked the voices of various artists who are trying to associate themselves with the movement. But Sánchez waves a purist flag of those who were there from the beginning. “Right now everyone wants to get on board with this.”
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