Lucha de gigantes

Battling for Latin alternatives.

By Josh Kun

IN THE VIDEO for Cafe Tacuba's latest single, "Aviéntame," the walls of a Mexico City bedroom glow a sickly green. There are deep red velvet curtains and a poster of abuelo blues rockers El Tri. As Emmanuel del Real's fragile falsetto whispers over the bossa tickle of an acoustic guitar, the bedroom becomes a living retablo of love's terrors: an old man kisses a hooker, a woman cries, a man points a gun to his head, an old señora loses herself in the arms of a young gigolo. Band members stand alone, each bleeding through his shirt from a bullet wound or a broken heart. "Hold me and bite me, take my wounds with you," del Real sings before he pulls out his heart and offers it to us as a gift.

In the video for Control Machete's "De perros amores," the red and green of the bedroom have turned into the red and green of a strip club. A man and a woman sit in separate glass booths, watching and masturbating. There are no strippers, only dogs mounting dogs and couples kissing as they slow dance and embrace to music we can't hear. What we do hear is the unfolding of Fermin's gruff, slow-burning abstractions ("What would happen if flowers only withered or stayed as buds?") as Ely Guerra sings about a love that rises in the soul of the same body in which it sets.

Both videos are directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, whose film Amores perros explores those same themes – love that bleeds, loneliness that heals, desire that destroys – among a group of Mexico City strangers connected only by a car crash, a missing father, and the violence they force on their dogs in order to calm the revolutions in their own hearts. The Amores perros soundtrack (Universal), like the film it graces, offers the best of what Latin alternative music is supposed to be: music that offers alternative ways of feeling and living the experience of Latino life in the Americas. And it is not a strictly Mexican affair, either. Besides outstanding, artful new material from Tacuba and Control compatriots Julieta Venegas, Zurdok, and avant-banda crew Banda Espuela de Oro (they put urban protest back into cowboy boots and do a version of Molotov's "Gimme tha Power"), soundtrack supervisor Lynn Fainchtein has corralled Argentine funk fiends Illya Kuryaki, Spanish rock en inglés garage punks Dover, and Chilean alt-rockers Fiebre.

The U.S. release of the Amores perros album (the film is due here later this year) raises the bar on the artistic potential of Latin alternative, a still-struggling genre that boasts huge audience numbers, a Grammy category, and an annual industry conference but still suffers from low profit margins and even lower major-label budgets. It's gotten so bad that Escena alterlatina (Ark 21), a new mixed-bag compilation that puts big Latin American names (Mexico's Venegas, Argentina's Arbol) next to emerging U.S. bands (Miami's Volumen Cero, Los Angeles' Bayu, Oakland's Orixa) is trying various new marketing strategies to up U.S. consumer stats: the CD comes with a money-back guarantee and will be included in the price of a ticket for its various U.S. record-release parties (the tour stops in San Francisco at the end of the month, with performances by Venegas, Orixa, and San Francisco's Los Mocosos). Unfortunately not included on Escena is Los Angeles band Satelite, whose full-length indie debut, Ilumina (Satelite Musica), is by far the most promising U.S. Latin alternative release so far this year. With smart production and sophisticated packaging, Satelite know when it's time to throw in the '80s Depeche Mode towel and keep things interesting by taking their flashback alt-rock down new-school electronica paths (they remix themselves on "Esta vez" and also enlist the tweaking services of Mex-techies Kinky, Niño Astronauta, and Terrestre).

To borrow a phrase from Nacha Pop's '80s anthem (also on Amores perros), Latin alternative bands – especially the ones that sing in Spanish, especially the ones that refuse to be marketed alongside Ricky and Christina, especially the ones that steer clear of the Estefan mafia, especially the ones that reject rock formulas for Latino invention – keep fighting a lucha de gigantes, a battle between giants in a gigantic world, a mundo descomunal that no matter whose ranch Bush visits still wants to keep its center in place and its margins silent.

Round one: The veterans

Due to be released in May, after two delays, the fifth album from Colombia's pioneering foclorico fusionists Aterciopelados, Gozo poderoso (BMG), expertly picks up where Caribe atomico left off: mixing melody heavy and feminista-friendly alt-rock songwriting with Colombian vallenato and salsa and glossy electro-beat textures lifted from Bristol and beyond. The band's aggro, "Florecita rockera" days are long gone, so rockeros beware. With lush beats in heavy rotation, even the title track's grinding funk and "El album" 's lilting tropical breakbeat go down with more of an elegant gloss than usual. Argentina's Los Fabulosos Cadillacs have gone through plenty of their own transformations over 12 albums. Once the post-punk originators of a South American ragga-salsa prototype that is still spawning legions of copycats, they're now more immersed in pushing the limits of their accessibility, tripping on psychedelic tangos and riding jazz improvisation to a place where Celia Cruz, Fishbone, and Thelonious Monk can all get along. This year they give us two live albums, Hola and Chau (BMG), that focus less on the side of the band that immerses itself in the head-scratching of intricate ensemble musicianship and more on the side that plays live gigs like bawdy soccer games. All of their classics (from "Yo me sentaría en tu mesa" to "Matador") are here, as is the porteño big-band bebop of "La marcha del golazo solitario."

Round two: Los b-boys del norte

El Gran Silencio hail from Monterrey, one of northern Mexico's most reliable capitals of hat-and-boot, tassel-and-arrow-stitch norteño bands, but they perform wearing Run-D.M.C. T-shirts. Their second release, Chúntaros radio poder (Virgin Mexico), puts a name, "freestyle norteño," to their five-piece polkamuffin merger of beats, rhymes, and button accordions and does it "chúntaro style," the northern Mexico lower- and working-class aesthetic that uses limited means – folk and funk, country with city, Virgen de Guadalupe stickers on customized boom-box speakers – to create artistic excess. They start with bilingual beatboxing, get dizzy on cumbias and Jalisco romance, and end up in a borderless West Side Story, wanting to live in Zacatecas instead of America. The Nortec Collective, based farther west, in Baja California, put the norteño Stetson on the heads of rave kids and run norteño through the techno mill on their first audio manifesto, The Tijuana Sessions Vol. 1 (Palm). Crews such as Bostich, Fussible, and Plankton mainly fiddle with street-musician recordings from downtown Tijuana and old banda sinaloense and norteño records, cutting up tubas and accordions over warm, chiseled beat programs that open up to house, German techno, and acid jazz. As Hiperboreal put it, it's "Tijuana for Dummies" taught by the border's next generation of visionaries.

Round three: The other Europe

The Fuerza! compilation (Higher Octave) is ground zero for an introduction to the Latin alternative scenes that have been brewing in Spain and France – in politically charged postcolonial and immigrant pots – over the past decade. Familiar names such as Manu Chao, Mano Negra, and Fermin Muguruza give us a Europe of street violence and Franco-Basque border crisis, and U.S. newbies King Mafrundi (from Irún) and Dusminguet (from Barcelona) keep their fists in the air with reggae tributes to Che and cha-cha-chas without papers. Also onboard is Tonino Carotone, the 29-year-old Spaniard gone 65-year-old-Italian, whose colorful debut, Mondo dificile (Virgin Spain), is full of flying grandmothers with big mustaches and provincial hicks let loose in the discotheque. Switching between Italian and Spanish, Carotone throws himself back to the days when songs lived in the glass-raising debauchery of cantinas, in the mandolin smoke of cigars and the clarinet blur of "whiskey en soda e rock en roll." Carotone also shows up on Rey de la rumba (Narada), the return of Barcelona legend Peret. The sideburned architect of the rumba catalana sound in the '60s and '70s, when flamenco got made over by rock and mambo, Peret revisits some of his biggest gypsy pop hits in a series of duets with the best and brightest of Spain's next generation of hybridizers. Carotone and his producer, prolific Spanish composer and horn stylist Nacho Mastretta, laugh as much as they swing on "Es preferible," and even El Gran Silencio get a word in on "Borriquito," giving a flamenco shuffle a cumbia face-lift.

Round four: Continente electrónico

A crew of DJs in Guadalajara who rally round the Nopal Beat flag say they are searching for their Mexican musical identity. Acid Cabaret (Opcion Sonica) gathers their first batch of discoveries. Where Nortec put the Mex in front of the tech, Nopal Beat work the opposite angle, starting with solid but indistinct icy techno, downtempo house, and crackling jungle and then bringing in Prado-in-Mexico mambo (Sussie 4's "Electric Casino"), '50s cabaret tunes (Luis Flores's "Soul City"), and pre-Hispanic industrial ambience (Axkan's "Viztla nomac temi"). The Madrid-based Professor Angel Dust works with some of the same source material but gets kitschy with it. His dazzling debut of chunky Iberian big beat, Guapacheando, is what Fatboy Slim would sound like if he were a Mexican expat in Spain, knew how to rock a mambo over hip hop-juiced go-go and boogaloo rhythms, or was blunted on bits of Gil Scott-Heron and loops of "Oye como va." Professor Angel Dust's survival tips for the new milenio latino: take a Soul Train time warp, flow beats for a duende-rapping Andalusian MC, and brandish a customized leaf blower as a weapon of survival.

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