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    The World Loves Corridos Tumbados. In Mexico, It’s Complicated.

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    Inspired by a century-old genre from the Mexican countryside, the latest pop music phenomenon is drawing thousands of young fans — and criticism for its violent references.In many Mexican towns where wars between drug cartels continue to wreak havoc, the sight of a young man at night dressed in black and donning a balaclava would be terrifying. On a recent Saturday in Mexico City, Peso Pluma strutted across the stage in the same outfit, to excited cheers: It was time for the corrido tumbado concert.The 24-year-old breakout star, who makes a modern take on traditional Mexican music, wore a glamorous Fendi version of a sicario (or hit man) uniform. He faced a stadium full of fans and shouted, “Are you ready to witness the most warlike concert of your life?”The crowd roared back: It was ready. Later, during “El Gavilán,” the audience sang in unison, “I’m of the people of Chapo Guzmán,” a reference to one of Mexico’s most notorious drug lords.Peso Pluma, along with acts like Natanael Cano, Grupo Firme, Eslabon Armado and Banda MS, is at the forefront of a musical movement that has found growing audiences this year in the United States and beyond. The artists perform corridos tumbados (or trap corridos), which combine singing and rapping familiar to fans of hip-hop and reggaeton with instrumentation and melodies common to traditional Mexican music, along with lyrics inspired by narcocorridos — songs that tell stories of the drug trade.But even as Peso Pluma racks up millions of streams and Grupo Firme tours arenas in the United States, these artists often find themselves in contested territory at home, where the drug war isn’t a dramatic fantasy but a bloody daily reality.“They are striking a nerve of Mexican culture,” said Camilo Lara, 48, a music producer, composer and former label executive with extensive film credits. He cited how the artists have tapped into “the relationship with violence, the relationship with the street, with politics, with what’s happening with fashion,” and added, “It’s the most exciting moment in Mexican music in 20 or 30 years.”Peso Pluma’s stadium show at Foro Sol, a venue that holds more than 60,000 people, was the last of his concerts in his home country after several cancellations over security threats. Days earlier, authorities in Tijuana had banned corridos tumbados in all public spaces with fines of up to $70,000.While the sounds and the faces may be fresh, these artists are heirs of a musical tradition that has long attracted controversy. In 1987, the governor of Sinaloa asked local news media to stop the broadcast of music that made reference to drug trafficking. In 2002, radio stations in the border state of Baja California agreed not to play songs that exalted narcos and asked their U.S. counterparts to do the same. In 2010, conservative Mexican lawmakers presented a bill that would have sent artists who glorified criminals to prison.Natanael Cano onstage at Coachella in April 2022. Cano is known as a pioneer of corridos tumbados, which contain many elements of old-fashioned corridos.Scott Dudelson/Getty Images“The decision to ban these corridos tumbados is to protect the mental health of Tijuana’s children,” the city’s mayor, Montserrat Caballero Ramírez, said last month through a spokesman. In May, Cancun banned public shows “that foster violence,” saying such events contradicted the pursuit of peace and security; Grupo Firme canceled a concert there shortly after. Two months later, Chihuahua’s City Council voted unanimously to fine public shows promoting violence.Officials contend it is not censorship. “They can sing whatever they want,” Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said this summer, “but we are not going to keep quiet when they say that Ecstasy is good, that they have a .50 caliber gun and the most famous narcos are their idols.” A month later, perhaps in tacit recognition of the influence of corridos tumbados, the government released its own kind of tumbado: a song warning of the dangers of fentanyl.The artists have pointed out that their lyrics aren’t aimed at children. “I know sometimes it’s not OK for kids to see or hear this,” Peso Pluma said in an interview, “but it’s a reality.”The reality is also that this type of music, once very locally rooted and associated with an older generation, is attracting global attention for its catchiness and cachet. The songs are not only fixtures of radio stations in Los Angeles, but are draws for concertgoers in Lima and Madrid and have made fans of celebrities like Mike Tyson and the band Maneskin.“I heard it at a wedding,” said Javier Nuño, a partner at Indice, a company that has licensed Peso Pluma’s and Cano’s songs for HBO. Once you cross over into wedding D.J. playlists, “you are at another level,” he added.At Peso Pluma’s Mexico City show, kids arrived in droves — mostly teenage boys dressed in Air Jordans, oversize hoodies and outfits featuring Nike, Gucci, Fendi and Burberry logos in models, colors and materials Nike, Gucci, Fendi and Burberry have probably never manufactured. Some dared to sport Peso Pluma’s signature mullet.Oliver Medrano, 35, said his 9-year-old, Sofía, had asked for tickets. The two gave up their seats close to the stage and watched instead from the bleachers after the girl’s mother protested. “They say the songs are too war-driven,” Medrano said. Sofía said she had become hooked on “El Belicón” (“The Belligerent”), Peso Pluma’s song about a man who boasts of owning sports cars, bazookas and Kalashnikovs.“I was a bit worried about security,” Medrano said. But mid-concert he felt confident enough to ask the couple next to him to watch his daughter while he made a quick bathroom run.Leonardo Manuel, 12, attended the show in a blue velour tracksuit with rhinestones arranged in the Fendi logo with his aunt, Elizabeth Rubí Cruz, who works at a jewelry store; she said there was a high demand for Cuban-style chains, thanks to the influence of Peso Pluma. Clients “like how he dresses,” she said. The pair’s favorite song? “Lady Gaga,” about a dealer hanging out with influencers (“none of them post to Instagram”), with mentions of Cartier, pink cocaine and Louis Vuitton.The excitement, and controversy, surrounding the lyrical content of corridos tumbados in Mexico in many ways mirrors decades of debate in the United States over the real-life implications of rap lyrics. From N.W.A to Jay-Z and Rick Ross, many of the most popular hip-hop artists have relied on the imagery of drug kingpins for both glitz and grit. Beginning with the gangster rap of the 1980s and ’90s and continuing through the 21st-century hip-hop subgenres of trap and drill, lyrics that document — and some say glorify — the drug trade, its attendant violence and its spoils have remained a cultural and political battleground. Currently in Atlanta, music by the rapper Young Thug is being used in court as evidence of his membership in a criminal street gang.“You see these guys partying with these luxuries and suddenly it’s, ‘How can I get this?’ especially in this country, our country, which has some very strong social limitations,” said Graciela Flores, a professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila.Dr. Flores, who specializes in 19th-century crime and justice in the Mexican borderlands, organized a series of events this past fall at the university focused on corridos tumbados at the behest of one of her students. She was overwhelmed by the attendance. “People were eager to talk about what they had seen” in terms of daily violence in their communities, she explained. The songs had moved people to share their experiences, something that Dr. Flores found “valuable, but at the same time very disturbing.”This past spring, the steps of the National Auditorium in Mexico City were filled with mothers waiting while their children attended a Natanael Cano concert. Cano, 22, is recognized as a pioneer of corridos tumbados, which absorb many elements of old-fashioned corridos: nasal voices, tololoche, accordion or brass instruments, strummed guitars.“At the beginning I was freaked out a bit” by the lyrics, said Dolores Saldívar, 47, who sells balloons. “But now I like them.” She had paid about $120 each for her two teenage children to attend.Juan Bosco de la Cruz Rangel, 23, the student who had urged Dr. Flores to put on the conference, said that when he and his friends started listening to tumbados, he looked up the artists online and found them relatable — skinny guys who liked to party and saw the police as hostile — to a point: “We’re literally them,” he said. “We’re their age, but without money, bands and that life.” Though he faces daily dangers, he finds songs about gangs and guns provocative and unsettling. Still, he added, he understands where the lyrics are coming from. Critics of the genre “that have never been hungry, it’s easy for them to say ‘there’s a different way’” to make a livelihood, he said.Bringing Cano to the stage in Mexico City, Peso Pluma proclaimed that his fellow artist had “paved a road so all of us could be here” to wild cheers. Just a few days earlier, Peso Pluma had notched another milestone: his first ever Grammy nomination. More

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      Peso Pluma Is Helping Mexican Music Find More Ears

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      An alternative to nearly all the other best-selling 2020s pop is surging, as acts including Grupo Firme and Natanael Cano present corridos with fresh perspectives.“Génesis,” the album released on Thursday by the Mexican songwriter known as Peso Pluma, could easily become a blockbuster. Its advance singles have already been streamed tens of millions of times. Other songs that Peso Pluma has released this year have racked up hundreds of millions of plays — among them “Ella Baila Sola” (“She Dances Alone”), his collaboration with the band Eslabon Armado, which reached No. 4 on Billboard’s mainstream pop chart, the Hot 100.Peso Pluma — Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija, 24, whose stage name translates as Featherweight — is at the commercial forefront among young Mexican and Mexican American musicians who are updating vintage sounds for a broad new audience, in songs known as corridos tumbados, or trap corridos.He’s not alone. Acts like Natanael Cano, Grupo Frontera, Banda MS, Grupo Firme and Junior H have also lately been expanding audiences for the variety of styles that get lumped together, in the United States, as “regional Mexican music.” (In Mexico, there are nuanced distinctions among styles and song forms.)Regional Mexican music is a folky, organic alternative to nearly all the other best-selling 2020s pop. It relies not on computers but on hand-played, largely acoustic instruments: guitars, accordions, brasses, reeds. Many of the biggest hits, like “Ella Baila Sola,” are actually waltzes.In Mexico, the Southwest and California, regional music has already been popular for decades, with elements slipping into country music and rock. Mexican-rooted performers — like Selena, Ritchie Valens, Question Mark and the Mysterians, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, Freddy Fender, Carlos Santana and Los Lobos — have long made clear that music in the United States has elaborate, though rarely celebrated, Mexican connections.Grupo Firme in 2021. The band is one of several that has been expanding audiences for what is known in the United States as regional Mexican music.Alberto Tamargo/Getty ImagesIn some ways, the broader audience for Mexican regional music seems like a demographic inevitability. The 2021 United States census counted 38 million Americans of Mexican origin, by far the largest Latino subgroup. Obviously, their music wasn’t going to stay under the pop radar forever.The old story of pop — one of them, anyway — is of music that emerges locally and somehow, despite considerable odds, manages to reach ever-widening audiences. It starts with scrappy fledgling songwriters, do-it-yourself production, inside references and hometown slang. Then, as it gathers momentum, the music adapts to new listeners who may not know or care about the initial context. The sounds get slicker; the lyrics grow more generalized. Some kind of crossover takes place.Regional Mexican music hasn’t ruled out crossover possibilities. Cano, a pioneer of corridos tumbados in the late 2010s, split his 2022 album, “NataKong,” between electronic, trap-influenced productions and acoustic songs; he tapped the electronic dance music producer Steve Aoki for one track, “Kong 2.0.” Bad Bunny has brought his own reggaeton-style verses — very different from corridos tumbados melodies — to Mexican regional songs by Cano and by the Texas band Grupo Frontera, which had one of its own hits by cannily reworking a Colombian hit, Morat’s “No Se Va,” into a Mexican-style cumbia.Before the release of his album, Peso Pluma showcased style-hopping collaborations: joining the Mexican singer Yng Lvcas in a reggaeton song, “La Bebe”; releasing a single with the Argentine electronic producer Bizarrap (“BZRP Music Sessions, Vol. 55”) and rapping in “Plebada” alongside the Dominican dembow rapper El Alfa.But to have a song like “Ella Baila Sola” in the United States Top 10 proves crossover tactics are no longer mandatory. The lyrics are in Spanish; the instruments are acoustic, far from pop’s electronic norm. And while there are plenty of other straightforwardly romantic love songs like “Ella Baila Sola” among regional Mexican hits, others proudly flaunt street slang and drug-trade references, like Fuerza Regida’s new “TQM,” which has amassed more than 100 million Spotify streams in a month.English-language pop’s timid longtime gatekeepers — radio stations — have been outflanked by audio and video streaming services. As with K-pop and reggaeton, language barriers have been challenged by corridos tumbados. And while streaming algorithms remain hidden, it’s entirely possible that listeners trying out the world-conquering songs of Bad Bunny have been led toward more Spanish-language pop, including regional Mexican music.Natanael Cano became a pioneer of corridos tumbados in the late 2010s.Pedro Mera/Getty ImagesThe corridos tumbados that international audiences are now discovering are a 21st-century evolution of a venerable tradition. Corridos are storytelling ballads, a staple of Mexican music since the 19th century, when songs carried news in nearly journalistic fashion. Early corridos were often titled simply by the date of the events they reported; they were tales of folk heroes, bandits, laborers and revolutionaries.Later, fictionalized corridos tightened and sensationalized their plotlines; some were adapted into Mexican movies. The long-running band Los Tigres del Norte — which has filled arenas north and south of the border for decades — has corridos devoted to immigrants who are navigating lives that straddle Mexico and the United States.In the late 20th century another variant emerged: the modernized bandit songs called narcocorridos, which tell stories of the drug trade. Some were commissioned by drug lords as praise songs. “Just as rap was forcing the Anglo pop world to confront the raw sounds and stark realities of the urban streets,” the music historian Elijah Wald writes in his book “Narcocorrido,” “the corrido was stripping off its own pop trappings to become the rap of modern Mexico and the barrios on el otro lado.”“El otro lado” is “the other side”: the United States. Plenty of nominally “regional Mexican” music now comes out of California and Texas. And music with deep rural roots now regularly tells urban stories as well.Current corridos tumbados bring together multiple elements of regional Mexican styles like ranchera, norteño, banda and mariachi. The music is lean and nimble, with improvisatory guitar filigrees, leaping and slapping bass lines, darting accordion countermelodies and huffing brass-band chords, all delivered with pinpoint syncopation. Pop hooks — perhaps from a trombone or an accordion — support raw, seemingly unpolished voices, even as the band arrangements demand real-time virtuosity.Corridos tumbados carry forward a core element of Mexican music: a stoic sense of irony. A tale of heartbreak or betrayal is likely to be punctuated by hoots of laughter or mocking cries of ay! And a jaunty brass band might be oom-pahing behind a tale of a bloody shootout.Narcocorridos and corridos tumbados have also borrowed strategies from gangster rap. Lyrics flaunt drugs-to-riches stories of hard work, overcoming odds, facing down haters, partying and flaunting designer labels. And as in hip-hop, performers constantly boost one another’s careers — and their own — with collaborations and guest appearances. On “Genesis,” Peso Pluma shares tracks with Cano, Junior H, Jasiel Nuñez and half a dozen others.Mexican regional music, like far too many other pop styles, is largely a man’s world; videos by groups like Grupo Firme are filled with boozy macho camaraderie. But that is also evolving. One of the recent successes of regional Mexican music is the group Yahritza y Su Esencia, from the agricultural Yakima Valley in Washington. Yahritza Martínez — her parents are from Michoacán in western Mexico — is still in her teens.Yahritza is backed by two of her brothers on her 2022 EP, “Obsessed” — the title is in English but the songs are in Spanish — with tracks including “Soy El Único” (“I’m the Only One”), a raw-voiced waltz about lost love that she wrote when she was 14. Yahritza has the heartfelt but crafty skills of songwriters like Taylor Swift; her voice is hurt, intimate and strong, pushing past language into feelings. The long-ignored promise of Mexican regional music, as it reaches the wider world, is that it will restore human-scale emotion to pop — defying technology, touching every listener directly. More