Less than a year ago, few outside the bars of his hometown of Jalisco had heard of featherweight. Today, the lanky young Mexican with an Al Capone tattoo on his arm and a bowl haircut is one of Jimmy Fallon’s guest stars, already has the blessing of fashion producer Bizarrap and has surpassed Bad Bunny in visits. The reggaeton superstar, who incidentally donned ranch boots to sing a cumbia grupera with the Chicanos Grupo Frontera in April. A genre that Christian Nodal knows well, a mariachi with tattoos on his face who has just burst at the Wizink Center in Madrid. Trumpets, guitars, accordions. The headphones of millions resonate to the rhythms of local Mexican music, a booming genre that’s overtaking reggaeton on the global charts.
Mexican music is choral music. Mariachi, banda or norteño are different genres but are usually put in the same bag, that of Mexican regional music. It has always had its audience, especially among Mexican immigrants in the United States, but now it has established itself mainly due to the success of the corridos tumbados, a variant created by mixing the old traditional corridos – narrated episodes of everyday life to Epic Deed mode – with urban genres like rap and reggaeton. Meanwhile, the featherweight is a sensation, but the father of the invention is Natanael Cano, also 22 years old. His Corridos Tumbados from 2019 marked the path that is shaping international catalogs today. At the time of writing this report, five of those songs were in the Spotify Global Top 50.
Overshadowed by class prejudice for decades, Mexican music has become cool and fashionable. The same reggaeton journey a few years ago that opened the door to Latin music for the general public. “We’ve already seen it with Rosalía or with J Balvin. Latin America is a muscle. It is very consuming and geared towards a large region, with a single language. Sometimes even Italy joins us in this crusade. Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift are still on the charts, but they’re like holdovers from the last decade,” said Uriel Waizel, Spotify Mexico Editor-in-Chief. Although entering a new era, he affirms that this phenomenon does not have to replace reggaeton. “There was a big change [cambio] of the great reggaeton consumption that is still there and will continue there, but the public turned to these new idols of Mexican music.
an incredulous smile
April this year. Featherweight sings on stage at Toyota Arena in Ontario, California. At some point he falls silent and smiles in disbelief because he doesn’t believe that the 11,000 people in town are singing one of his themes: “Night”. In just over a year of experience Hassan Kabande – his real name – has become the greatest exponent of the lying corridos and a musical phenomenon. He now surpasses legendary Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny in web searches and spends weeks at the top of Spotify and other major charts like the Billboard Hot 100 – the list of the top 100 highest grossing singles in the United States – with Ella Baila Sola, a shared Song with Fuerza Regida. Google Ads – a tool for delivering advertising – is more skeptical than web searches. The tool shows that Featherweight has an average of 550,000 searches, which is close but still far from the 673,000 that Bad Bunny returns. But the trend is impressive: Over the past year, it’s up 75,461%.
It’s not the only sensation of Mexican music on a global scale. Chicano’s Grupo Frontera has also secured a top spot in recent weeks with Un x100to, their Mexicanized Cumbia Grupera in collaboration with Bad Bunny. In April, the band performed three songs by the Puerto Rican on the main stage at Coachella, the premier festival in the United States. The same festival a year earlier featured Grupo Firme, another band triumphing with norteño music. Mariacheño’s father, Christian Nodal, has also found great acclaim on the international stage. Two weeks ago he became the first Mexican whose appointment at the legendary Wizink Center was sold out. Mexican music expands through its ramifications.
Featherweight on Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show. featherweight
Producer Edgar Barrera, one of the architects of the Mexican region’s success, believes he had to update certain genres that were very popular in Latin America. As an example, he cites the song he composed with Nodal: They Said You False. “They started saying there was a lack of respect for gender and culture. I saw it differently. If we want to revitalize the mariachi, we must revitalize them by speaking to the new generations and speaking as we do. I took the poetry out of the lyrics and made it real,” says the 33-year-old composer, who was born in the United States and grew up in the frontier culture. Barrera has won 18 Latin Grammys and one Grammy, showing her flexibility between genres. He recently composed x100to, the hit for Grupo Frime and Bad Bunny. He has done regional songs for Nodal, Gera X and Los Plebes del Rancho to name a few. And pop and reggaeton for Maluma, Camila Cabello, Ariana Grande and Jennifer López and other artists.
“We have something stronger and dirtier, like Featherweight; but we also have Grupo Frontera. The scale is very balanced and everything is there. You can choose between one or the other, but in the end it’s all based on the musical history of Mexico. There are many ways to sing regional Mexican,” explains Teresa Aguilera, a Billboard journalist with a long career focused on Mexican music. The country has around 127 million inhabitants, making it a key area for market control. Regional music, which used to be frowned upon or left to the lower classes, has broken down prejudices in recent years and spread to all classes. Another analogy to reggaeton.
Tigers look north
The Spotify executive reiterates that Mexicans have always kept an eye on their northern neighbor, the United States. A frontier influence that has left big names that are now seen as the backdrop to this new boom. That’s what the five members of Los Tigres del Norte, veterans from the northern state of Sinaloa, tell of, dressed and dapper in a hotel in Mexico City. “At that time [a sus inicios en los años setentas] We listened to a pioneer group called Los Alegres de Terán. But when we came to the US, western music also influenced us a lot. In particular, we also heard Johnny Cash because he sang and spoke in his songs. We started making music like that, but in Spanish,” says Hernán Hernández, one of the members of the historical band. Everything changed with the arrival of Los Tigres. They popularized a song called “Contraband and treason” (1974) in which they fictionally talked about drugs and drug dealing, and became one of the pioneers of narcocorrido, a genre that caused great controversy but spread across the country. Following these themes, Los Tigres took their music to another level, playing more regional styles and varying their lyrics on other themes.
“New artists also understand music as an identity that goes hand in hand with what they have experienced. Mixing with cultures like American is part of the growth of music, it has to happen and it’s good that it happened. If not, who knows what year Mexican music would have been revived,” supports Los Tigres leader Jorge Hernández. The new artists have succeeded in reinventing the classic rhythms of their historical references and also mixing them with the American music of their time, the urban genre.
The Northern Tigers.FONOVISA
The humble ranch in Los Angeles
One of the powerhouses of this new sound boom is in a small town of 55,000 southeast of Los Angeles. Paramount is home to the offices of Rancho Humilde, the company that founded Fuerza Regida, Natanael Cano and Junior H, among others. The epicenter of the Corridor of Lies was inaugurated in style last May with the presence of various artists and a nod to the roots that footed this empire in Mexico and the United States. In this location there is a mural of Los Angeles and its Gothic font favored by Chicanos. Also a large mural of the singer Chalino Sánchez, one of the pioneers of the internationalization of the Corrido.
“When I met Chalino’s music, it became part of my soul,” said Jaime Alejandro Humilde, known as Jimmy Humilde, the son of Mexican immigrants who left Michoacán for California in the 1980s, in interviews. Vicente Fernández, Cumbias and Tejano Music. His world changed when he heard Sánchez, an iconic composer and influential figure for Mexican Americans. Chalino was assassinated in Culiacan, Sinaloa, in May 1992. The Humilde Center is in Chalino’s former office and shop (he sold beepers).
Rancho Humilde was founded in 2008 but found success nine years later. It was 2017 with De periodico un gallito, a LEGADO 7 corrido about a young man with no future who starts selling drugs on the streets of Los Angeles. The theme told the story in territory familiar to Jimmy Humble, namely the amoral world of the soldiers of the urban gangs that populate hip-hop. This was one of the favorite genres of the company founder, who grew up in Venice. His favorite artists included New Yorkers LL Cool J and EPMD.
So Rancho Humilde mixed the rhythms of different Mexican genres with the sounds and stories of rap and hip hop. The formula enjoyed great popularity. The company has included six songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. There were five of these topics last month. The Humble Factory artists even used the same gestures as rappers when they were successful. With his first license check, Natanael Cano bought his mother a house.
To conquer their audience, entrepreneurs are turning to YouTube, the world’s most-used audio consumption platform. The presence of Rancho Humilde artists on radio and television was very limited. Bebe Dame by Fuerza Regida, a hit released in late 2022, was the first to hit radio in the US. Social networks with 3.5 million followers are the company’s great marketing tool.
As the managing director of his label, Humilde is also responsible for a pragmatic strategy. Avoiding long-term deals with record companies, he opts for his artists’ specific deals with different companies: Warner, Sony and Universal. This has enabled them to gain a global presence while remaining independent.
A conversation between neighbors
The dialogue with the United States was not only musical, but also aesthetic and identity-forming. In Los Angeles in the 1980s, the Cholo movement emerged, a manifestation of young Mexican migrants (or children of migrants) seeking a mixed identity between country of origin and country of destination. In the rough neighborhoods of peripheral Los Angeles, the dialogue between gangsta rap and Mexican corridos, black and Mexican culture took place. The cholos maintained – and continue to maintain – an aesthetic characterized by headscarves, shirts buttoned only at the neck, baggy trousers or high-top sneakers with a logo.
The conversation continues today with the same two elements of the original mix. New Mexican artists wear hats and sneakers (although in cases like Grupo Frontera they retain the essence of hats and boots). They attempt to appear luxurious and prestigious through expensive clothing, powerful cars, and even guns, an aesthetic associated with drug dealing. The youthful audience of urban variants like the lying down corrido bases its style on color gradients in the hair, baseball jackets, branded T-shirts and sports shoes.
“It seems that, as is the case with many things in Mexico, they first have to go abroad to be recognized and then appreciated. Could be [el director] Guillermo del Toro or other things, it happens in the cinema, in gastronomy… It helps a lot that this culture [la del regional] get a foothold in California or Texas or because it’s going to be cool and ambitious. The way we work is also interesting because we move between the USA and Latin America. Companies sometimes split by market and that forces us to look at Mexican music as a third country [un tercer país]a bicultural, binational collaboration,” explains the Spotify editor.
“Narcoculture” and the “counterculture”
May this year. Natanael Cano sings on stage at the legendary National Auditorium, Mexico City’s grand venue. His dancers perform with fake guns and mimic gunshots and a drug deal. The controversy surrounding the drug trafficking references has constantly surrounded the lying corridos: the references to JGL, the initials of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, El Chapo; the Ch and the pizza, a pun on the chapiza, the armed arm of the capo… Some of these artists have admitted in interviews that they make these types of songs “to order”, a common practice in the corrido genre. An example of this were some corridos by another pioneer, Chalino Sánchez, another Mexican who told about the border, sang stories of criminals and was murdered.
The artists of the Mexican urban scene have started out with independent record companies and their own labels, moving away from the big commercial record companies, another similarity, for example, to the success of Bad Bunny, which stays true to Puerto Rican independent record companies. “They are absolutely countercultural and I would like to see American culture, in search of audiences and markets, assimilate those cultures as well in order to normalize them. I would love to watch Gen Z TV shows like Euphoria [la serie de HBO]where characters lie,” reflects Uriel Waizel.
Mural honoring Chalino Sánchez in the city of Paramount, California. Unique Nicole (Getty Images)
The oft-repeated journey from the edges to the center has already begun. The band’s new artists, the Norteño or the Mariachi, understand the importance of networks like Tiktok – the social network with the largest Gen Z presence – and know how to take advantage of it. “I think TikTok and Instagram have a lot to do with it. It’s important to understand the numbers we have right now,” Featherweight said in a recent interview.
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