![]() In a Billboard profile of the group, Jesse Katz described them as " part Facebook-savvy boy band, part boot-stomping Sinaloa cowboy quartet." Calibre 50 performs at 10:15 p.m. Over 30 years ago, John Fiske argued in his classic book Understanding Popular Culture (1989) that “popular culture is made by the people at the interface between the products of the culture industries and everyday life” (2011, 21).Leading norteño band Calibre 50 tops the entertainment lineup for Mexican Fiesta this weekend at Maier Festival Park. His insightful analysis of the diverse ways in which people use and subvert commodities to create their own meanings and messages remains equally relevant today, when music has become a streamed product easily accessible to the public at large. At the time of publication of Fiske’s book, certain types of popular music had become the target of censorship, in the United States and elsewhere (Jones 1991). government intervened directly in the distribution of popular music, holding hearings in Congress on the matter of music lyrics (Chastagner 1999). While in the United States these measures were geared specifically towards the genres of rock and rap music, laws to regulate popular music in Mexico targeted the then-emerging narcocorrido genre, a type of ballad that cherishes the lifestyle of drug traffickers (Astorga 2005). However, unlike the demonizing of popular music genres with roots in African or African diaspora culture, the banning of narcocorridos was not related to structures of racial oppression (Rivera 2009, 121): narcocorrido opponents’ moral concerns were based on class distinctions. Perspective, journalist Elijah Wald compares the narcocorrido to gangsta rap, calling one of its key figures in LosĪngeles, Chalino Sánchez, “the Tupac Shakur of narcocorridos.” According to Moreover, today’s censorship of narcocorridos criminalizes artistic expressions as a preventive strategy to combat criminal activities related to drug trafficking. This kind of comparison does not apply in Mexico, Rap, specifically, but it’s the same audience” (interview with Walroth 2002, Wald, narcocorridos occupy “not just a kind of equivalent terrain to gangsta ![]() The topics of violence, illegal activities, physical prowess, and There are certainly some thematic parallels between these two genres-such as Where narcocorrido fans have very little exposure to hardcore rap music. ![]() As Steve Jones has noted: “It is likely thatĪttempts to silence popular music arise not because popular music empowers Accordingly, it was not the music itself but rather the Remain so deeply rooted in rural Mexican music that the audience cannot discernīetween a traditional corrido (folk ballad) and a narcocorrido only by The ensembles that accompany narco-balladeers Masculinity-the lyrical expression and the overall musical sound areĭrastically different (Simonett 2006). Youth but because it empowers via the flaunting and or breaking of rules andĪuthority” (1991, 85). Quick look at the corrido’s century-long history as a subversive expression of To understand the narco-music’s appeal to today’s youthĪudiences on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, it is necessary to take a Stories about the deeds of bandits, poachers, smugglers, and other outlaws have long captured the imagination of diverse audiences around the world (Hobsbawm 1969). In Mexico, narrative songs or folk ballads, known as corridos, have told the stories of the common people for one and a half centuries, commenting on everything from natural disasters and political events to crimes, family feuds, horse races, romantic entanglements, migration, and, more recently, drug trafficking (Herrera-Sobek 1993 Nicolopulos 1997 McDowell 2000, 2015 Griffith 2002 V.A. Populated by heroes and/or anti-heroes that emerged from the marginalized classes of society to perform inchoate class war, this mestizo cultural form flourished within the context of border conflicts with the United States and contributed to the rise of a Mexican national consciousness, especially during the post-revolution era in the early decades of the twentieth century (Paredes 1958 McDowell 1981 Holscher and Fernández 2001).įamous are the deeds of the gold-miner-turned-bandit Joaquín Murrieta, who terrorized the California mining camps after Mexicans suddenly came under the newly imposed U.S. Foreign Miners Tax Law due to California’s annexation in 1848 (Leal 1995).
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