The sound of regional Mexican music has endured for centuries and Mexican artists from both sides of the border are helping the genre evolve and enter mainstream pop culture.
In 2022, Gabito Ballesteros, Peso Pluma, and Natanael Cano teamed up for what would be a smashing success and their entries into the Billboard Hot 100 chart. AMG has garnered attention far and wide, and has demonstrated how far Mexican regional music is internationalizing.
The Billboard Hot 100 chart is currently the standard music chart in the United States.
Regional Mexican music is a term that encompasses all music that is native to Mexico, including banda, norteño, rancheras, and mariachi. Most of modern regional Mexican music entering mainstream pop-culture is the Mexican corrido.
The Mexican corrido emerged as a distinct style in the 19 century and reached popularity during the Mexican revolution. The song style has evolved over the last 200 years in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, but the traditional nature of storytelling remains the same.
During the Mexican revolution, corridos were stories used to commemorate major figures in battles. It became more romantic as the style evolved.
The corrido is a product of culture, time, and landscape. What started out as poems or oral history told on trails or around campfires soon became paired with string instruments to develop the folk ballad style known today.
Nowadays, this storytelling format of corridos has been adopted by hip-hop and trap musicians who have named a distinct subtype of the genre known as corridos tumbados. It remains an art format uniquely tied to Mexican and Mexican-American culture.
Corridos tumbados is a modern take on the corrido style. The music is linked to intricate acoustic and bass guitar playing, usually in the minor key and ¾ key rhythm taking a melodic sound.
Mexican and Mexican-American youth fused trap influence into the genre, and it can mostly be found in the boastful, overall hazy, culture surrounding it. The vocals are in-between singing and a slow rap-like fashion, and the lyrics deal with life experiences, boastful hustles, and drug consumption.
This fusion of trap and regional Mexican music has been linked as far back as 2018, but it was cemented as a musical genre by Natanael Cano, who showcased his talents for Rancho Humilde Records.
Cano released his eponymous album Corridos Tumbados under Rancho Humilde Records and further baptized the genre.
Rancho Humilde Records started out as a homegrown independent label, but over the last couple of years, it has dominated and disrupted the competitive world of regional Mexican music. The record label shares more than 80 acts that all aim to expand the genre.
All of these champion artists have music that narrates the lives of immigrants or ordinary people and hustlers, trying to survive, through the gritty folk ballads, and mixing the sound of a young generation’s favorite rappers.
Cano is a charting singer and songwriter who is at the forefront of the 21st-century corridos tumbados movement. However, despite being one of the artists tied to the rise and origin of the genre, he has only charted on the Billboard Hot 100 chart once previously, aside from his new release of AMG, which became the singer’s second appearance on the chart.
AMG’s appearance in the Billboard Hot 100 chart is an affirmation of regional Mexican music’s rise to mainstream popularity.
The trio released the song on November 24, 2022, and it garnered 5.8 million official U.S streams by the January 20-26 tracking week, said Luminate.
The track jumped onto the multimetric Hot Latin Songs chart 15-10, becoming the first hit for Peso Pluma and Ballesteros. It also ascended 62-50 on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. chart and 71-50 on the Billboard Global 200.
Corridos Tumbados, performed by Cano, spent 31 weeks at number one on the Regional Mexican Albums chart – the fourth-longest reign in the chart’s history, after Selena’s Amor Prohibido.
The appeal of corridos tumbados is that the genre reflects ideas of culture and the lives of people in areas like Compton, California – the birthplace of West Coast hip-hop. New corridos tumbados offer a different style of storytelling music to a new generation.
However, regional Mexican music has also been linked to stories of violence.
Corridos have always told stories of political and cultural conflict and regional Mexican music of today tells the story of violence in Mexico.
Narcocorridos are a controversial contemporary music genre that can mislead listeners who are unfamiliar with its complex history and the social realities surrounding it. Some say the genre glorifies violence and romanticizes narco culture because it celebrates the deeds of drug lords.
Nevertheless, narcocorridos or alternative corridos offer an unofficial harsh truth. The music reflects and mirrors the harsh reality of violence Mexico has suffered in the last decade, considerably after the war on drugs launched by President Calderon in 2006.
Despite attempts to ban the genre in several states in Mexico, this particular corrido style has become radically popular in Mexico and the USA, for the most part, because of the Latino diaspora.
As tied to the culture as corridos tumbados have become, narcocorridos are an extension of the gritty political world Mexico suffers, and in turn, bleeds into the community in the United States who may have family members with roots in Mexican countries, or who want to have a stronger tie to their heritage.
During most arguments surrounding this controversial subgenre, people’s judgments either condemn the style for its often negative effects on youth or applaud it for its showcasing of reality and truth.
Sociologist Luis Astorga views the new compositions as a symbolic product that can create a collective catharsis but also increases acknowledgment and visibility of what has been allowed and tolerated by modern society.
The world of Mexican cartels is private, and this led to commissioned corridos that narrated – what is often fabricated – stories of their social life as well as the construction of their social image. Thus, vehicles of mass media then spread these stories and aided the plurality of voices and expansion of these ideologies.
Ultimately, though, narcocorridos cannot be entirely blamed for drug violence. Drug violence is to blame for narcocorridos.
In any case, the narcocorrido is a sociological phenomenon and object that allows us to explore the contradiction of Mexican modern life. Moreover, it also forces us to examine the inescapable violence of Mexican reality.
The recent rise of regional Mexican music has made corridos jump to mainstream pop culture similar to genres like Reggaeton, which have risen to popularity thanks to Latin artists like Bad Bunny, Rauw Alejandro, and Karol G. It has become a global powerhouse and has grown exponentially over the last five years.
Taking a look at Spotify data, corridos have seen a 53 percent growth within the last five years. Globally, it has increased 91 percent, reaching 24 billion streams in 2021. Spotify data also showed that corridos made up half of the streams in 2021, supporting the fact that the genre’s popularity is soaring.
The comeback of the corrido is supported by Gen Z listeners. On social platforms like TikTok, the subgenre of corridos tumbados has found an audience that increases the popularity of this new fusion of corridos and trap music.
Some of the most prominent artists on Spotify are Calibre 50, Grupo Firme, Natanael Cano, and Fuerza Regida. Peso Pluma is a new up-and-coming artist that has already seen several hits.
In addition, the importance of this rise in popularity is attributed to the fact that these artists are inspiring a generation to return to their roots to generate different identities.
Another key reason for its jump to mainstream pop culture is that this new age of Mexican music allows collaborations with no boundaries. For example, Cano collaborated with Bad Bunny in 2019 for a remix of Cano’s hit, Soy El Diablo.
The evolution and expansion of regional Mexican music into the mainstream have allowed a home for young Mexican and Mexican-American individuals who are often trapped in between worlds of influences in a variety of ways.
Specifically, it has allowed Mexican-American youth to tie back to their roots and find influence in a style familiar in America.
The result of this fusion and popularity is a narrative that reaffirms the identity of its generation in a multicultural landscape.