MUSIC-AMERICAS: Reconquista! Latin Rock Invades U.S.

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Apr 29 1997 (IPS) - In North America, the inspirational figures of rock music may well have been Elvis Presley and the Beatles, but in Latin America, Mexican rebels Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata are just as much a part of the legacy of rock and roll.

That at least is the impression one gets from “Reconquista! The Latin Rock Invasion,’ a new collection of Latin and Spanish rock music made available to U.S. audiences by the Rhino and Zyanya record labels.

Designed as a primer for U.S. listeners to sample the most daring Latin punk and rock groups, ‘Reconquista!’ succeeds primarily at presenting a tough, rebellious alternative to the clanging, angst-ridden music that typifies the genre in the United States today.

While North American rock can be characterised today by the guitar-heavy laments of groups like Nirvana and Pearl Jam or Canadian singer Alanis Morrisette, the top Latin American groups – like Mexico’s Maldita Vecindad (Damned Neighborhood) or Argentina’s Los Fabulosos Cadillacs (Fabulous Cadillacs) – are openly political and defiant.

Indeed, the record’s compiler and producer, Mexican-American rocker Ruben ‘Funkahuatl’ Guevara, argues that the groups collected on ‘Reconquista!’ take up the cause of revolutionaries like Zapata and outsiders like the zoot-suited ‘pachuco’ gangs of the 1940s. “Rock is music for the minds and mouths that have been sealed by social, political, sexual and economic tyranny,” he says.

The Spanish-French punk group Mano Negra (Black Hand) make that point clearest in one of their punk-influenced anthems, ‘Viva Zapata!’, on which they shout out the traditional leftist protest, ‘El pueblo unida/ Nunca sera vencida!’ (The people united can never be defeated!)

Backed by a jumpy rhythmic beat reminiscent of Jamaican ska and the Irish punk group the Pogues, Mano Negra is just one of the groups here that balances a serious message with hyperactive, cheerful music.

Maldita Vecindad, perhaps Mexico’s most popular group, has much of the same charm. Their two songs on the collection, ‘Pachuco’ and ‘Un Gran Circo’ (A Big Circus), are pulsing tunes about Mexican street culture, marked by a ska-influenced horn section and hoarse singing reminiscent of British punk groups like the Clash.

Similarly, los Fabulosos Cadillacs – who also appear on the soundtrack of the U.S. comedy film ‘Grosse Point Blank’ – takes on a punk edge on ‘V Centenario’ (Quincentennial), which criticises Christopher Columbus’s attacks on the Indians and parodies the U.S. musical ‘West Side Story’ and its naive Latino chorus, “I want to live in America.”

Many of the groups, in fact make the simultaneous argument that they are what ‘America’ is all about – just as much as the North Americans – and that the North is often ‘the enemy.’

Negu Gorriak (Red Winter), a Spanish Basque band, takes on the memory of John F. Kennedy in their blistering attack ‘JFK,’ while the reggae-tinged act Tijuana No, in their song ‘Transgresores de la Ley’ (Lawbreakers) declares support for Mexico’s Zapatista rebels in their fight against imperialism and global capitalism.

At the same time, the collection also offers some groups that recall the fun, but dumb, spirit of much of rock and roll. Mexico’s hard-rock band Cuca (Cockroach) captures the goofy yearning of ‘heavy metal’ music on its twisted romantic tune ‘El Son del Dolor’ (Song of Pain). By contrast, the gloomy Mexican group Santa Sabina revisit such black-attired, sad-voiced British acts as Siouxsie and the Banshees — sounding equal parts doomy, wistful and mystical.

If ‘Reconquista!’ carries any message, it is that the charging, anything-goes spirit of the world’s most rebellious musical styles, – from Jamaican reggae to Algerian rai, and from punk rock to Latin musical influences – have combined to create a new Latin rock sound.

Judging from groups like Maldita Vecindad and Mano Negra, that new sound is where the most fun rock music can be found today.

“We hope this collection will ignite a sonic fire storm, spreading the world Latin rock movement into the non-Latin U.S. and Canadian rock communities, reigniting its primitive howl, which is now sadly a whimper, a cold shadow of its former self, regurgitating tired, safe cliches,” Guevara says. That’s a tall order, but the rock descendants of Zapata are certainly the ones who might pull it off.