This is an installment of Mexico’s weekly newsletter, which can be followed for free at this link
A 20-year-old boy – and he looks a little younger – gathered tens of thousands of people this weekend, in front of a stage that looked like a hacienda, to the beat of ballads, this subgenre that he himself has inaugurated, a tributary of the main river, the corridos tumbados. He was Xavi, simply put, the latest cry of Mexican regional music, owner of a powerful voice and main candidate to dethrone Peso Pluma and Natanael Cano in the kingdom of the accordion and the tuba. It is no small thing, although in the ultra-youthful universe of corridos tumbados everything moves at a disturbing speed.
Born in Arizona, with one foot on each side of the border, Xavi was one of the main attractions of the second edition of the Arre festival, which was held this weekend in Mexico City and brought together more than 50,000 people each day, according to the organizers. He was announced as the headliner and occupied the main stage in the central hours, before Los Tigres del Norte. He was one of the big winners of the night, despite his melancholic outbursts, not given to dancing. 100 meters from the stage, a woman shouted at the top of her lungs: “Damn Xavi, you don’t turn me on at all!” Although it seemed more like a way of coexisting than a sincere complaint.
Someone in the music industry must have seen in Xavi a magical connection between the two great musical ranges of the country, that of the corrido, on the one hand, and that of the romantic song, on the other. A bridge that links the urgency and aggressiveness of tumbados with the intimacy and emotion of ballads and boleros – with permission from cumbia and salsa. There are La Diabla or Corazón de Piedra, incontestable hits, instant classics of the genre. But the above is embodied in Xavi’s inertia to sing to Luis Miguel, owner of hundreds of thousands of hearts throughout Latin America and Spain. On Saturday he sang Ahora te puedes marchar, to the beat of the trombone.
Xavi’s version of El Sol’s song sums up the state of things well. A handful of twenty-somethings are winning over audiences, who feel a fantastical, yet real, connection with these modern stories of bandits, guns, drugs and lost loves. That subtlety of Los Tigres del Norte when they sang about the boss of bosses has no place in the lyrics of the new ones, more obvious, shameless, and close to the reality of many youth experiences, in a country subject to a lukewarm war for almost 20 years.
His troubadour exercises, that musical mapping of “la maña”, as organized crime is called in many parts of the country, share space and geography with the burning, a pulse between the toxic and the romantic that focuses on an interesting stage of love mourning, the simulated indifference to loss. Few are as masters at mixing both things as Peso Pluma’s cousin, Tito Double P., composer of many of the former’s songs, owner, moreover, of an admirable presence on stage, as he demonstrated at the Arre, also on Saturday. If Xavi appears as the main candidate for the second line, Tito appears at his side.
It is the era of the sombrero. Or, rather, of the sombrero and the cap, of rap made into a corrido, of the ballad built with tubas. Eclecticism is the norm. Tito Double P.’s first song was a dembow that he sang with another of his generational colleagues, Luis R. Conríquez. Tito and his cousin released a kind of Sinaloa tango a few months ago, Los Cuadros. Conríquez himself, creator of another tumbado classic, Si no quieres no, with a mention of El Chapo’s children included, is venturing into war cumbia… The boys are in a hurry, they want to mix things up, experiment, see what happens. And the industry is delighted.
Sign up for the free EL PAÍS Mexico newsletter and to WhatsApp channel and receive all the latest news on current events in this country.
Continue reading
