The corrido, or ballad, is one of Mexico's oldest and most respected song styles, and also one of its most contemporary and controversial. The classic corridos are Mexico's equivalent of the Spanish romances, the British broadside ballads, and the cowboy songs of the old West. Today, the form has been reborn as one of the most popular musics in Mexico and the U.S., but most of the corrido protagonists now are drug traffickers, and in Los Angeles or the border towns these narcocorridos are regarded by many people as a sort of Mexican equivalent of gangsta rap. While narco songs dominate the field, groups like Los Tigres del Norte also use corridos to tell eloquent stories of immigrant life, and to deal with the twists and turns of contemporary politics. This album, designed to accompany the book "Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas" (Rayo/HarperCollins) is the first to survey the modern corrido boom. It focuses on the work of the genre's defining band, Los Tigres del Norte, with examples of other styles and artists showing the breadth and variety of the current scene. Like the book, it gives particular attention to the great corridistas, the writers who have made this medievaly-rooted form into one of the most exciting and relevant musics of our time. It has full notes on all the songs and artists by author Elijah Wald, in both English and Spanish.
This music is far more popular than most English-speakers can imagine. In the year 2000, Mexican regional music accounted for over half of all Latin and Spanish-language record sales in the United States -- selling almost four times as many records as all the “tropical” styles (salsa, merengue, cumbia) put together. It is hard to say what proportion of those records are corridos, but one of the five top stations in Los Angeles is playing corridos and narcocorridos virtually all day long, and corrido stars appear regularly on the Billboard Latin charts.
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