No Chihuahuas

MTV heads south of the border

by Josh Kun

When it started cropping up during Real World reruns and MTV Jams countdowns earlier this year, the promo spot for MTV's Road Rules Latin America didn't tell you what it was for until the very end. Its central image was a sombrero-clad, Charo-outfitted DJ cutting up a record on a turntable. For a second, I actually thought MTV was going to "uncover" the existence of, say, Mexican beat smugglers. I should have known better: "Road Rules Latin America. An entire culture awaits."

As much as the phrase "an entire culture awaits" immediately got under my skin (as if Latin Americans were on the edge of their seats waiting for a bunch of annoying gringos to arrive in a Winnebago), it was the Charo-as-DJ that was the real problem. I suppose it was supposed to be funny -- Hollywood TV star Vicente Fernandez juggling beats on an SP 1200 mixer, how culturally improbable! -- or just MTV's way of marketing touristic Mexico to the AMP generation. At least they waited for the first full episode, set in a Chihuahua bullring, to bring out the talking Taco Bell Chihuahuas. Predictably, they gave the dogs voices instead of the DJ; as in the Taco Bell commercial, the dogs speak so an actual Mexican doesn't have to.

All the MTV execs had to do was check in with their colleagues at MTV Latin America to discover that Mexican acts have been busy playing with breakbeat sensibilities siphoned from El Norte since long before the Winnebago crossed the border. It's a difference worth making extra clear: the Road Rules DJ is the Hollywood Mexican re-pasted into American pop culture (America recycling Mexico); the rapero crew is the Mexican using American pop (Mexico recycling America) to comment on Mexican culture.

In Mexico, no old-school conjuntos I know of are actually using DJs. But plenty of post-rockero hip-hoppers are doing it for them: reviving and simultaneously revising Mexican styles from the past, throwing rancheras, boleros, cumbias, and corridos up against sequenced walls of electro-beats. In the past few months alone, Maldita Vecindad rearranged the old standby "El Barzón" over buoyantly looped beats on Mostros (BMG Mexico), Molotov unwisely retooled their own tracks into a half-baked Molomix (Surco), and on Un Tributo (BMG US Latin), an homage to José "the Prince of Song" José, Control Machete and Molotov excise bits and pieces of "Payaso" (a chorus line) and "Amnesia" (a piano drizzle) in their respective disco-hardcore and swooning slow-hop makeovers.

We might as well as follow the lead of Monterrey's conjunto b-boys El Gran Silencio and bill the whole thing as "Guacaracha Scratch." The scratch in question could be either the traditional guacaracha -- a percussion instrument played by scraping, heard most frequently in Colombian vallenato -- or the scratch of a turntable stylus. El Gran Silencio don't choose one over the other on their debut, Libres y Locos (EMI Mexico). Scratches from New York's DJ Wally bounce in and out of the band's dancehall and hip-hop-strewn takes on norteño, vallenato, polka, and cumbia.

On the album's split-image cover, their five fresh twentysomething faces, beaded braids, goatees, and shaved heads share equal space with their predecessors: a norteño quintet of cowboy hat-wearing sunbaked viejos playing on the streets of Monterrey. As they sing on "Con Sangre del Norte," they play their "ragamuffin norteño," their "cumbia overturned by rap," their "bugi-bugi with a Michoacan guitar" with enough "blood of northern Mexico" to take from the US, and then in the same breath shout, "Chanki go home!"

In El Grand Silencio's first video, for the song "Dormir Soñando," they spit rhymes and toasts over hyperspeed accordion rolls while dressed as a Vegas conjunto in matching pink glitter suits and cowboy hats. There are also a lot of dogs running around.

For the record, not one of them is a Chihuahua.

On the radar

* Yard MCs, sound-system plate spinners, and Jamaican radio jocks are expertly compiled for DJ cut-ups on Soundbwoy Super Status Reggae Breaks and Beats (SBWOY) -- worth the hunt.

* Afro-Filipina Inga Marchand, a/k/a Foxy Brown, volunteers herself for the Orientalist fantasyscape as a sex-obsessed Chyna Doll (Def Jam).

* LA avant-hopper Abstract Rude plays on his split-word experimentalist personality by releasing two albums at once with Abstract Tribe Unique: the out-verse of Mood Pieces (ABSCORP/Mass Men Pro) and the riskier soft-core soul poetry of Thynk Taynk (Ocean Floor).

* Public-access porn icon Robin Byrd turns a trashy and shameless Latin papi fetish into a must-have anthology for aspiring brown drag queens, Lie Back and Get Comfortable: Robin Byrd Presents Latin Songs To Make Love To (BMG).