NARCOCORRIDO

By Tripp Underwood

Gangsta rap isn’t the first music to be criticized for glorifying a criminal lifestyle — Mexican Narcocorrido singers have been doing that for almost half a century. And due to a recent surge in violence surrounding the genre and its performers, the Narcocorrido style has produced a body count far greater than the media-hyped hip-hop “coast war” of the 1990s.

Originating in the late 1950s, the genre is a mixture of Mexican music and accordion-based, danceable polka rhythms. Lyrically, Narcocorrido paints vivid, often celebratory, depictions of smugglers and bandits from Mexico, referencing real people and actual crimes. In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, the genre experienced a spike in popularity due to the rising success and sudden death of Rosalino “Chalino” Sanchez. Sanchez was a Mexican immigrant living in Los Angeles who wrote songs about the people he spoke with on the streets of L.A. Sanchez self-produced and sold thousands of cassettes describing the criminal exploits of those he met, before he was murdered after a concert in 1992. In death, Sanchez and his Narcocorridos became even more popular, produced many imitators and pushed the genre’s appeal to new audiences.

Despite more mainstream attention, violence continues to plague the Narcocorrido genre. Similar to the turf and drug wars the music describes, the Narcocrrido community has seen a drastic rise in bloodshed in recent yeas. From 2006 to 2008 there has been an alarming rise in murder rates among Narcocorrido singers, including the slaying of the Latin Billboard chart-topping singer Valentín Elizalde. Elizalde, his manager and his driver were brutally gunned down in 2006, shortly after a video surfaced online showing real life drug violence set to his song “A Mis Enemigos.” Though there was no proven connection between Elizalde and the gang in the video, it is widely believed that his killers are members of a rival drug cartel to those featured in his video.