primera vez

Siempre hay una primera vez. Nunca habia sido citado en el New York Times, que dice que ahora la onda esta en el D.F. en este articulo que les dejo por si les interesa leer mas. Seguro provoca ardor de cola....

May 13, 2007
MUSIC
Mexico City’s Indie Rock, Now Playing to the World

By JOSH KUN
MEXICO CITY

IN the 1990s to be an alternative rocker in Mexico City usually meant a few specific things. You made music about the unchecked chaos of your home megalopolis. You threw the occasional lyrically coded stone at corrupt politicians and corporate media clowns. You embraced traditional Mexican music but then turned it inside out using ska or hip-hop or your favorite goth moments from the Cure. And most important of all you sang in Spanish. You made music that had its ears open to the world but that could have come only from Mexico City.

A decade later the city’s musical ethos couldn’t be more different. Thanks mostly to the downloadable avalanche of globalization and the rise of MySpace the current independent rock scene is full of artists who may be from Mexico City but sound as if they could be from New York, Stockholm or Paris. “There were bands that lived by a checklist of what it meant to be a Mexican rock band,” said Armando David of Chikita Violenta. “Now everyone is throwing that checklist out the window.”

The shift speaks volumes about how digital technologies and social networking sites are altering the character of independent music scenes across the world. Once defined by the built-in limits of nationally based industries, indie bands everywhere now have unprecedented access to global influences and global exposure. For the campy Mexico City dance-pop duo Maria Daniela y Su Sonido Lasser, it means the chance to enjoy cult status in a trendy neighborhood like Williamsburg in Brooklyn, where the band was brought to perform last fall by the Brooklyn party promoters Fresa Salvaje.

“Mexico City has one of the most cutting-edge scenes right now,” said Dulce Pinzón, a founder of Fresa Salvaje.

When Mexico gets its own version of MySpace later this spring — MySpace México — the internationalism and stylistic diversity of the Mexico City scene are bound to push artists even further from the more locally skewed alt-rock blueprints of the recent past.

Take the members of Los Dynamite, one of the city’s leading indie acts. They sing in English, idolize the New York City band Interpol and embrace a version of Mexican identity that is tied more to their MySpace page than to local culture or national tradition. The “Top 24” of the band’s 14,000 or so friends has been home to a smattering of Mexico City alternative bands (Zoe, Bengala) and also indie bands from Denmark (Wolfkin) and Sweden (Dungen). Los Dynamite’s debut album of jerky post-punk, brashly titled “Greatest Hits,” may still be available only in local shops via Mexico City’s top indie label, Noiselab, but because of MySpace, its music is now accessible to fans all over the world.

“We released our first single through MySpace,” said Diego Solórzano, 22, the band’s lead singer, who was wearing vintage sunglasses, a retro leather jacket and the perfect amount of morning-after scruff during a recent interview at Noiselab’s offices. “We got so many gigs from our page, and that was all before we had a label.”

Mr. Solórzano and his bandmates are typical of this city’s new wave of indie musicians: middle-class 20-somethings who grew up surfing Web pages, watching MTV in their bedrooms and thinking about music as a vehicle for instant — albeit virtual — global connection. And for these young bands whose sound may not easily fit within the suffocating commercial confines of the Mexican music industry, the rise of MySpace has been an invaluable career alternative.

Though MySpace México is still only in its Beta stage, there has already been a “MySpace México” band compilation CD, and last week the site was an official sponsor of this year’s edition of Mexico City’s biggest alternative music festival, Vive Latino.

“As soon as we started talking to people in Mexico about launching here, everyone in the music scene told us that we already had a huge presence,” said Travis Katz, the senior vice present of international operations for MySpace. “That’s where all the traction first came from. The bands were the earliest adaptors. They all have a site. It’s pretty incredible.”

The debut of MySpace in 2003 couldn’t have come at a better time for the Mexico City indie scene. In the 1990s major labels could still afford to be interested in a diverse swath of rock and alternative acts, but by 2003 they were no longer signing bands whose sales weren’t projected to reach gold in their first month or who weren’t easy matches for telenovela soundtracks. In response a string of indie labels emerged to fill the void, and suddenly it seemed that there were more bands than ever. There were more young people making music on home computers, more places to play (galleries and storefronts as much as clubs) and more international acts — like the White Stripes, which made Mexico City a heralded early stop on a 2005 tour — coming to town.

Most in the scene agree that the watershed moment came in 2004 with the appearance of Reactor, a taste-making, state-supported radio station. Unlike previous Mexico City alternative rock radio ventures, Reactor made breaking independent and underground bands from Mexico as central to its mission as playing the latest from Franz Ferdinand. “If a band has a strong following, we take notice,” said Raúl David (Rulo) Vázquez, the station’s lead programmer.

Everything, then, was in place for an indie explosion. MySpace just struck the match.

“There’s always what we call the Mexico City lag,” said Luis Arce, a member of Chikita Violenta, whose debut album, “The Stars and Suns Sessions,” was recently released on Noiselab. “In the U.S. there was the college rock boom — Pavement, Sebadoh, even Nirvana — and now in Mexico City we have our own version of that. This is our own ’90s indie boom, just a decade or so late.”

When it was time for Mr. Arce and his bandmates to hire a producer, they followed the trail of their Internet-spawned influences. They sent an unsolicited e-mail message with a few demos to the Canadian producer David Newfeld, whom they admired for his work with the Toronto collective Broken Social Scene. Mr. Newfeld invited them up North, and soon they had an album of muddy low-fi rock that includes appearances by members of Broken Social Scene.

“In previous generations the goal was to present yourself as part of the city, to define the city and express the city,” said Jorge Hipolito, a veteran of the Mexico City scene who works at Noiselab. “Now that doesn’t matter so much.”

Mr. Solórzano couldn’t agree more. When he talks about his influences, he seems almost proud that they do not include any pioneering Mexican alternative rock bands of the ’80s and ’90s. “When I was young, I wanted to listen to Nirvana and Guns N’ Roses,” he said, also name-checking the French groups Air and Daft Punk and the British bands Primal Scream and Inspiral Carpets. “I knew Mexican rock existed, but it never really caught my attention.”

Many here attribute this shift in consciousness as much to the arrival of the Internet as to the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, which thrust Mexico into the promises and pitfalls of the global market. Nafta led an unprecedented influx of foreign, but especially American, popular culture. The aftershocks are particularly strong in the ultra-hip neighborhood of Condesa, which serves as the indie scene’s unofficial epicenter: You can eat at the 50 Friends pizza parlor, buy limited edition Nike sneakers at Shelter and then stop at Starbucks for a latte.

“We live in a different country now,” said Camilo Lara, the head of EMI Mexico, who also records for Noiselab as the kitschy digital-collagist Mexican Institute of Sound. His 2006 debut, “Méjico Máxico,” became a cult favorite in American electronic music circles last year. The follow-up, “Piñata,” is due this spring from the Los Angeles-based indie Nacional and includes a guest appearance by Chris Frantz, the former Talking Heads drummer.

One particularly controversial result of Nafta has been the growing number of young bands choosing to sing in English, even if the members don’t speak it particularly well. Most of these bands claim that it’s not a bid for crossover success, but a direct reflection of their musical upbringing. “We’re more comfortable singing and writing in English,” said Mr. David of Chikita Violenta. “We’re proud of being from Mexico, but this is the way we like to do music. It would be dishonest for us to sing in Spanish.”

While singing in English was commonplace for Mexican rock bands in the ’60s and ’70s, it became taboo in the ’80s and ’90s. Back then even if the members were middle class (as most were), street-level populism was still a primary goal. Why sing in English if few people in your audience could understand you?

“I didn’t grow up like these new bands,” said Joselo Rangel of Café Tacuba, avant-rock innovators who started playing in 1989. “We didn’t have the Internet back then. Very few international bands ever played here. This new generation has grown up with so much information all around them that I guess they think singing in English makes sense for them.”

Mr. Rangel, 39, experienced the generational divide firsthand last fall when he was asked by Noiselab’s founder, Hector Mijangos, to be one of the judges for Rockampeonato, a major battle of the bands. Groups submitted mp3s, the contest was run through a MySpace page, and it was judged online.

“We’re talking about 20,000 kids making independent music,” Mr. Mijangos said, munching on a scone in his Noiselab office. In his signature black fedora and black overcoat, he is the scene’s fast-talking, larger-than-life Svengali.

The Noiselab offices are on a prime piece of real estate, a corner lot smack in the middle of Condesa and perched just above the shady oasis of Parque España. A former art gallery, the loftlike space is now laid out in textbook cooler-than-cool minimalism, complete with concrete floors, white plastic chairs and neat stacks of international music magazines. “We only put out albums that we like, albums that fit with our taste and our image,” said Mr. Mijangos, who also licenses albums by hand-picked international indie acts like Cat Power and Arcade Fire.

The same attitude fuels the city’s other main indie enterprise, Nuevos Ricos, Spanish for nouveau riche. The label’s co-founder, Julian Lede, looking appropriately kitschy with his bushy mustache and chemistry-lab eyeglasses, plays guitar in Titán, a mostly instrumental band that on its new self-titled album blends grungy ZZ Top blues with electronically minced prog-rock. (The group was once signed to the Beastie Boys’ now defunct label, Grand Royal.) When he dons his alter-ego, Silverio, he switches into provocateur mode, taunting audiences over noisy beats, often wearing a ’70s perm wig and little more than very revealing underwear.

He started the label in 2004 with Carlos Amorales, the Mexico City visual artist. “We were tired of all these timid and bland rock bands who were just selling clothes without even realizing it,” Mr. Lede said. One of his artists, Miki Guadamur, frequently performs dressed as Captain America, complete with an American flag draped over his back, a gesture that usually ends with him being pelted with beer bottles.

“None of us takes ourselves very seriously,” said Emilio Acevedo, a member of Maria Daniela y Su Sonido Lasser. (He’s also a member of Titán.) That was certainly clear on a freezing night in November when Titán played as part of a local-meets-international bill (including Soulwax from Belgium) at a swanky two-level nightclub in Polanco, the city’s version of Beverly Hills. Mr. Lede, Mr. Acevedo and the bassist Jay de la Cueva took the stage in a cloud of Spinal Tap smoke, then plunged into a tornado of futuristic roadhouse blues that could have been the score to a ’70s Mexican sci-fi film.

“A night like that never would have happened 10 years ago,” Mr. Lede said the next morning. “Now we all just have to figure out what to do next.”