It is a Sunday night at the Rosemont Horizon and more than 10,000 Mana fans are squeezed into metal folding chairs across the length of the floor and into the rafters. They are in a sing-along, lighter-waving, foot-stomping frenzy.
“Tu tienes lo que quiero/ me prendes como el fuego” (You have what I need, you light me like a fire), sing the tousled-hair guys on the stage.
For two hours, the fans brandish their lighters and concert-bought sparkler bouquets in coordinated waves, like an undulating sea.
It is the kind of sustained, over-the-top enthusiasm rarely seen in big rock concerts anymore, not since the mid-’80s, before U2 discovered irony and Bruce Springsteen cut loose his E Street Band.
It’s also something like the big noise that precedes an invasion.
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Commercial rock stations barely recognize its existence. The North American version of MTV is still reserving judgment. And white suburban teens-the key to the commercial success of any form of pop music in the U.S.-still haven’t snapped it up in numbers comparable to their insatiable appetite for inner-city hip-hop.
But make no mistake: Latin rock, or rock en espanol, has not only arrived in the U.S., it has become the voice of a new and rapidly expanding underground. Rock bands from Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela and Colombia have gained a major audience in North America not by catering to the Anglo-dominated rock industry but by taking their music, largely sung in Spanish, directly to the young, rapidly expanding U.S. Hispanic population. The number of Hispanics in the U.S. is expected to reach 40 million in the next decade–two-thirds of them under the age of 35–which would surpass African-Americans as the nation’s largest minority.
“You’re looking at an audience that will consist of 20 percent of the United States by the year 2005,” says Mirabel Schumacher, a vice president of marketing at Warner Music Latin America, one of the world’s top distributors of rock en espanol. “These bands don’t have to even think about `crossing over’ or compromising their music in any way because they already have a marketplace hungry for what they have to say in Spanish.”
Alex Gonzales, the drummer for Mana, concurs: “We always wanted to be rock stars, but we also wanted to incorporate our Latin heritage as much as possible. I don’t think we’ll ever sing songs in English, because that would be an insult to our audience.”
Right behind Mana are dozens of Latin rock groups just starting to taste success in North America: Bloque, Plastilina Mosh, Molotov, Aterciopelados, Ely Guerra, Cafe Tacuba, Fabulosos Cadillacs and scores more. They are young men and women from Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and, increasingly, the barrios of Los Angeles, Miami and New York. Aside from the usual polemics of love, they sing about political freedom, immigrant rights, the environment and sex. And their audience has not only remained loyal, it is expanding worldwide.
The mainstream record industry is taking notice. Latin music is now a $400-million-a-year industry, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, and Latin rock has surpassed genres such as banda, boleros, salsa, cumbia, merengue and Mexican traditional music. Now the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences has recognized this emerging style with a Grammy award for best Latin rock band, presented last year to Argentina’s Los Fabulosos Cadillacs.
Henry Cardenas, president of Cardenas/Fernandez & Associates of Chicago, is so gung-ho on Latin rock that when he launches his own Chicago-based Jefe Records next year, he plans on promoting several rock en espanol acts.
“There’s so much Latin rock out there, I can’t produce it all,” says Cardenas, who for years enjoyed a near monopoly on Latin music shows in Chicago. It was Cardenas who first brought Mana to Chicago in 1991, drawing only a few hundred fans to the Apollo 2000 in Little Village. “It’s a much more competitive market (than other Latin music genres), with a much greater profit potential.”
Even mainstream rock promoters, once skeptical of the drawing power of non-English-speaking groups, are regularly booking rock en espanol bands in venues such as the House of Blues in Los Angeles and Chicago.
“I was doing maybe five of these shows three years ago, now I’m doing 40 to 45 and averaging 90 percent of capacity,” says John Pantle, talent booker at House of Blues in Los Angeles. “Business is great right now with very limited radio. Imagine how this will break open in 10 years when it starts getting that kind of mainstream exposure. Any record company not involved in Latin-rock music now will soon be. It’s not a question of `if’ but of `when.’ “
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But in Latin America and among many Latinos, there’s a skepticism about rock en espanol. The notion of being true to one’s culture while using a style derived from another culture is often seen as contradictory. To make matters more complicated, every single Latin rock band with any impact is signed to a U.S.-based multinational company, such as Warner Brothers or BGM. MTV Latino, the most widely watched network in Latin America and the main vehicle for rock en espanol acts, is U.S.-owned too.
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“That’s the traditional triangular commercial model of colonialism,” says Felix Masud-Piloto, director of the Center for Latino Research and a professor of history at DePaul University. “You take the raw material, bring it someplace else for manufacturing, then sell the finished product back to the home country.”
Consider the trajectory of Bloque’s new, and critically praised, album “Bloque.” After its November release in the U.S., it will be launched in Europe, then Japan. It won’t hit Colombia, the band’s home country, until next year. In the meantime, it’s available to Latin Americans only as an import.
Masud-Piloto points out that the U.S. has such a phenomenal cultural influence in Latin America, that often Latinos do not appreciate their own talents until they’ve been approved by Americans. “Just look at the phenomenon of (Ry Cooder’s Grammy-winning album of Cuban all-stars) `Buena Vista Social Club,’ ” he says. “Nobody cared very much about that kind of music at the popular level until it became a big hit in the U.S. It’s nothing new. It was the same way with the mambo and the cha-cha-cha.”
Bloque’s Ivan Benavides argues that while rock en espanol may inadvertently accelerate assimilation, or at the very least, promote certain aspects of American culture, Latin rock acts have little choice in promoting their music this way.
“There is a very small record industry in Latin America, certainly that’s true in Colombia,” he says. “And the few national record companies that do exist don’t record much rock. More importantly, they’re all trying to get affiliated with multinationals, which are all U.S. or European based. The lack of real cultural identity in many parts of Latin America, with the exceptions of Brazil and Cuba, hasn’t really allowed us to develop national modern styles. In that sense, the phenomenon of Latin rock is very important, because that’s starting to happen, we’re making it our own.”
At WRTE-FM 90.5 in Pilsen, general manager Yolanda Rodriguez explains. “Sure, rock’s origins are American, but it also true that it is universal music for young people, who have always identified with it,” she says.
At WRTE, a not-for-profit youth-operated neighborhood radio station owned by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, the playlist, contrary to every other Spanish-language radio station in town, offers mostly rock en espanol.
“There are whole movements in other countries where rock is developing with a different voice, and expressing the concerns of those young people,” says Rodriguez. “This music makes you think a little more. It comes in one way, but leaves you thinking in another way.”
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Mana has come a long way to reach its current adulation; a decade ago they were a “starving” band playing a style of music–rock ‘n’ roll–that had once been banned in the barrios of Guadalajara, Mexico, where they grew up. Now the quartet is touring the world, selling out arenas in no less than 25 countries–a level of popularity achieved by only a handful of major rock bands, such as the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd. Mana is also the first rock en espanol band to have back-to-back gold records (500,000 sales) in North America.
Mana’s swarthy lead singer, Fher, is a throwback to a more grandiose age, when rockers struck poses like martyred romantics and tossed their poet’s tresses in time to the back beat. Surely, one thinks, this band has spent many hours studying Led Zeppelin’s “The Song Remains the Same” concert video. But for all the dinosaur-rock cheesiness, Mana also brings undeniable craft to their sweeping melodies and poignance to lyrics that are full of yearning for what once was–whether a lost love or a once pristine environment.
Mana’s global view is in many ways typical of the new breed of rock en espanol bands that have emerged after decades of suppression in their native countries. Rock bands were essentially banned in a number of Latin American countries for much of the ’70s, and even as restrictions relaxed in the ’80s there was no industry or support network for aspiring rock ‘n’ rollers.
Still there were occasional solo efforts such as that of Brazilian Caetano Veloso. During the ’70s, he released an electric album while in quasi exile in England, which caused a sensation nearly on a par with Bob Dylan’s own plugged-in controversy the previous decade. Few musicians were able to follow because rock instrumentation was financially prohibitive in most of Latin America.
“In America, to be a musician in a rock ‘n’ roll band is a hard life when you’re starting out–but in Latin America, you could multiply the difficulty factor 20 times in the early ’80s,” says Mana’s Gonzales. “To say you wanted to be a rock ‘n’ roll musician you might as well be saying you wanted to starve yourself.”
No wonder much of the rock music out of Latin American countries in the ’80s was derivative, a clumsy combination of Hispanic lyrics and Anglo rock. “All I remember were 200 bands that wanted to sound like Rush,” sneers Plastilina Mosh vocalist Jonas, 22, of the scene he encountered while growing up in Monterrey, Mexico.
But Mano Negra, a Paris-based band formed by teenagers of Spanish ancestry, signaled a new direction for Latin rock with its 1990 album, “Puta’s Fever” (Virgin)–an explosive mix of punk, ska, Arabic and Latin rhythms. Young Mexican bands such as Plastilina Mosh, Cafe Tacuba and Molotov borrowed this high-speed-blender approach to rock, and in the last few years have become superstar acts in Latin America, selling hundreds of thousands of records and playing to arena-size audiences.
Says Pantle, who has booked Molotov several times at House of Blues in Los Angeles: “They’re doing for Latin American music what the Beastie Boys did for American pop 10 years ago. They’re creating a whole new wing of music.”
“At first there were no places to perform this style of music,” says Molotov’s singer-bassist Mickey Huidobro. “But when we were coming up there were hundreds of bands playing the same thing and we were bored. We played live and built our audience that way.”
While retaining elements of their indigenous cultures–the folk melodies, tropical rhythms and language–these bands are filtering in influences from rock, funk, ska and hip-hop in a way that hasn’t been heard before in Latin America. Now the question is, will rock en espanol build a commercial future in North America, or will it remain an exotic fringe movement? Its rise recalls the promise held out for reggae when Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff emerged in the ’70s, and for world music in the ’80s, when Paul Simon’s “Graceland” brought it unprecedented attention. But both reggae and world music soon fizzled as commercially viable movements. Will rock en espanol be different?
The signs are mixed. While Mana has had smashing success worldwide, sales for other significant rock en espanol acts have been outstanding in Latin America but less than stellar in North America, according to SoundScan: Cafe Tacuba’s 1996 release, “Avalancha De Exitos,” has sold 36,000 copies, Molotov’s “Donde Jugaran Las Ninas?” 21,000 and Plastilina Mosh’s “Aquamosh” 6,700. Cafe Tacuba, Molotov, Plastilina Mosh, Aterciopelados, Cassia Eller have all sold in the hundreds of thousands in their home countries.
But Warner’s Schumacher is optimistic: “The audience for rock en espanol makes it a real movement, as opposed to a flash in the pan. I would compare it to the audience for hip-hop 20 years ago. People said rap wouldn’t last, but it’s continued to flourish because it speaks to a significant and otherwise ignored segment of the American population, a loyal audience that is only growing.”
As Hispanics continue to be assimilated into the culture, they’re introducing young Anglo listeners to their world. And once these young listeners discover new bands such as Bloque and Cafe Tacuba, they may discover something truly fresh.
“Right now, our sound is pretty new for any audience,” says Bloque’s Benavides. “In the U.S., we’re finding very mixed audiences, Anglo and Latinos from various countries, African- Americans, Africans. And when they get together and there’s no majority group, everybody has to interact and you get a whole other vibe. I never imagined that.”
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Bloque, “Bloque” (Luaka Bop): Sarcastic, agitated, charismatic front man Ivan Benavides emotes over a brilliant shotgun marriage of folk melodies and Led Zeppelin riffs, salsa and rap, Latin horns and churchy organ riffs. The best rock album of 1998.
Cafe Tacuba, “Re”(Warner Music Mexico): The rosetta stone of Mexico’s alternative-rock renaissance, a dizzying array of styles played with fervor and chops. One of the essential rock albums of the ’90s.
Los Amigos Invisibles, “The New Sound of the Venezuelan Gozadera”(Luaka Bop): Hormones working overtime in this giddy, salsified brand of dance-funk.
Mana, “Suenos Liquidos”(Warner Music Mexico): Dramatic anthems dressed up with reggae, Beatles-pop and metal, even as the sweeping melodies suggest Mexican folk ballads.
Molotov, “Donde Jugaran Las Ninas?”(Universal): Molotov address hometown issues-voting rights, birth control, political scandals-with a feistiness that suggests Rage Against the Machine with a sense of humor. The album title (“Where will the girls play?”) even tweaks the self-righteousness of the exalted Mana, who represent an older classic-rock generation in Mexico.
Plastilina Mosh, “Aquamosh”(Capitol): Beck-influenced, multilingual rap-rock with a playful pop sensibility.
— Greg Kot
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