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Hip-hop, Tejas - Latinos take on rap music and make it their own
As it happens, hip-hop is thriving across the border. Mexican groups such as Molotov and Control Machete are legendary names on both sides of the Rio Grande, but increasingly, so are black American rappers such as Big Moe and Ludacris. The Beat -- the McAllen sister station to the Party -- can claim credit for that.
Chingo Bling's family is from northern Tamaulipas, well within earshot of McAllen radio. "There's this circulation of music and culture and all that stuff because it's so close to America," he says. "If you cruise out there on Saturday or Sunday night, half the cars have Texas plates, and you hear Lil' Troy, whatever's hot here in Houston. Hip-hop's the voice of the youth, and the Beat's signal reaches about an hour's drive into Mexico. The Beat's taking over."
So now hip-hop's making inroads on certain elements of the norteno market, much the same way norteno and hip-hop ganged up on and all but destroyed Tejano's presence on the radio. Jumpin' Jess Rodriguez is one who knows this all too well. Like Arias, Rodriguez sees the death of Selena as being vital to hip-hop's rise in popularity. He says that after Selena died, Tejano radio ratings flatlined. The playlists stagnated, and program directors at the stations -- most of which were bought and sold a few times in the '90s media consolidation boom -- thought the easiest way out of the rut was to tinker with the format. They started adding norteno tunes -- music from across the border -- in an effort to broaden the market. Tejano-norteno playlists pleased nobody -- neither the first-generation immigrants nor the Tejano fans whose families have been in Texas for decades or even several centuries.
"When the big corporate companies came in with all their research and the tight rotations and the same music that they're playing over and over again, then the young Hispanics and Tejanos tuned out," Rodriguez says. "My children grew up with Tejano, but after Selena and Emilio's heyday, radio stations didn't promote new artists. That prevented growth. Consultants like Bob Perry at KQQK started mixing in more norteno music because they thought the Mexican national market was bigger than the Tejano market."
Rodriguez says that idea only seems true. Mexican nationals are merely more apparent than Tejanos because they are more concentrated. "A lot of Tejanos are culturally assimilated. They're living in Clear Lake, Spring, The Woodlands and everywhere else. There are Tejano listeners out there, they just aren't coming out to the Saturday-night dances the way they used to. They're out there golfing, Boy Scouting, soccer and everything else, just like mainstream America."
Chingo Bling's family -- much more recent immigrants to America than Rodriguez -- are typical of many relative newcomers to America in that they never had much love for Tejano anyway. "I never did really like Tejano," he says. "That music was kind of annoying to me. And my whole family kinda feels that way. Culturally speaking, my family always looked at Tejano as music by people who were born here and grew up here. That's not a bad thing, but if you're not a Tejano it kind of stands out in your mind."
But for the English-speaking Hispanic kids out there, the way forward more often lies with hip-hop than with either norteno or Tejano, or with the ass-waggling rico suave lover-man stereotype of the Ricky Martins of the world. And now, thanks to people like South Park Mexican and Baby Bash and Frankie J., they see a way to make it big on their own terms. Even the joker Chingo Bling is part of the solution -- part of the method behind his madness is to help light the way, to show them that they can be "street" American-style and Mexican-style at the very same time.
"This is just a theory -- I'm not in every kid's head -- but I think what's going on with a lot of Hispanic kids is something, I don't know what the word is, 'displacement' or something like that," he says. "We can never envision ourselves as president. That's why I did this whole Chingo for President thing, as a parody. We can't really see ourselves going all the way platinum next to Nelly. I mean, yeah, you got all these fools like Enrique Iglesias, but that's love music, and we don't care about that. That's not some fool from the hood."
But others can see Hispanics going all the way platinum, just like Nelly. One such is Avery Lipman, the president of Universal Records. A few days after our initial interview, Charles Chavez called back following a discussion with Lipman. Bash and Frankie J. had just slipped into the Billboard top ten. "We were kicking around names to call this music, and he kept coming up with a bunch that I thought would be limiting," Chavez says. Eventually they settled on a genre name you just might be hearing a lot of over the next few years: "new urban Latino."
"Everybody asks me what kind of sound this music is," he says. "Is it Latin rap? No! It's bigger than Latin rap. Is it R&B? Yeah, but it's done by Latinos. Is it pop, is it hip-hop, what is it? It's our sound, that's what it is.
"Take it or fuck yourself," he says, breaking into a cackle.
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