Mariachi on the Downbeat

In this new millennium, the market for mariachi music poses a paradox.

On the one hand, the lively and tradition-rich genre will draw thousands of fans this weekend to the Hollywood Bowl for the Mariachi USA Festival, the annual showcase of Mexico’s exquisite cultural export. But across town at a large Latin music retailer on Whittier Boulevard in East L.A., the current best-selling mariachi CD has nothing to do with tradition.

In fact, the recording barely has anything to do with Mexico. Called “Mariachi Pop,” it’s a collection of mostly instrumental covers of pop songs like--you better sit down, mariachi lovers--”Livin’ la Vida Loca,” “Mambo #5” and “We Like to Party.”

Cross-cultural comparisons are always risky, but that’s like the New Christy Minstrels singing the Beatles songbook. Or better yet, like crossing two John Travolta movie soundtracks to get disco-goes-country.

Despite the growing popularity of mariachi festivals and music classes across the American Southwest, the success of “Mariachi Pop” signals a sad shift in the market for recorded mariachi music. With its vapid recycling of other genres, the album represents a desperate attempt to make mariachi records sell again.

Though the news may be a surprise to anyone who sees traffic jams outside the Hollywood Bowl on Saturday and Sunday, the format has almost disappeared from the pop charts in the past several years, both here and in Mexico. Some observers see the slump as cyclical. Others see the end of an era.

Gone for sure are the great stars of Mexico’s golden age of music and movies. The greats like Jorge Negrete, Pedro Infante and Miguel Aceves Mejia, rousing and accomplished singers who also filled the silver screen with their dashing personalities. The greats like singer Javier Solis and composer Jose Alfredo Jimenez, who both left behind a lifetime of classic work before dying relatively young.

Last week brought the death of yet another mariachi star from the pre-World War II generation. Amalia Mendoza, member of a famous musical family who was known for her passionate live performances, passed away in Mexico at age 78.

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Who is on the horizon to take their place?

Nobody. Only a few top names are still working regularly in the format. You can count them on one hand. And if you eliminate vocalist Vicente Fernandez and his talented son, Alejandro, you’re down to three digits.

Who’s to blame for the commercial decline? Depends on whom you ask. Mariachi artists blame record executives for not backing them. Record executives blame radio deejays for not playing this style of music. And radio, of course, claims it just gives people what they want.

“It seems like everybody’s focus is on a crossover,” said Ralph Hauser, the Whittier-based agent who represents such major Mexican stars as Vicente Fernandez in the U.S. “Everybody wants to become a bilingual superstar.”

Idol Fernandez Refuses to Cross Over to English

Everybody, that is, but Vicente Fernandez, the biggest mariachi recording artist of the past 30 years. The Mexican idol is not interested in switching to English, said Hauser, because “he just never really felt that his music translates properly.”

What? No habla Ingles? And no hoochie-coochie, bump-and-grind shtick to push on American talk shows? No wonder our entertainment conglomerates aren’t too keen anymore on this quaint folk music understandable only in a foreign language.

At the Bowl this weekend, mariachi fans will be treated mostly to familiar numbers from a repertoire also known as rancheras, or ranch songs, because of their rural roots. They’ll be celebrating this graceful and emotional music so full of bravado and tenderness, evoking a bygone Mexico of haciendas and revolutions, of honorable peasants and of gentlemen-cowboys known as charros who risk it all for ideal women of beauty and virtue.

Significantly, there are no celebrity headliners on the bill as there were when Linda Ronstadt and the regal Lucha Villa starred in the first mariachi festivals at the Bowl in the early ‘90s. The stars have been replaced by several generic mariachis, musical groups composed of guitars and violins that normally serve as accompaniment to superstar singers.

“In my show, [the audience] doesn’t even know who the mariachis are,” said veteran Latin music promoter Rodri Rodriguez, the Cuban American founder of Mariachi USA. “People are coming for the love of the music.”

The event is almost ritualistic. Before the show’s customary finale with fireworks, the jubilant crowd will again sing along to two great mariachi standards, “Volver, Volver” and “El Rey,” both popularized by Vicente Fernandez in the 1970s, the last great decade for mariachi music.

The songs contain classic mariachi themes: an aching nostalgia for lost love and homeland, and a fiery defiance in the face of poverty and rejection. The satisfied fans will drive home enriched anew by an art that holds a perennial appeal for people of all ages and nationalities.

But if they turn on their car radios, they’re not likely to hear a single mariachi song on Spanish stations in Southern California. In fact, even if they drive to the border and cross into Mexico, they’re still not very likely to catch a mariachi song on the airwaves, jammed as they are with pop music, rock en espanol , tropical-style cumbias and accordion-accented bandas .

“Radio programmers don’t support mariachi music [by new artists] because they’re looking for the newest pop hit or the familiar standard,” said Abel de Luna, Sony’s director for regional Mexican music. “In Mexico City itself, with 60 radio stations, not a single one plays a mariachi music format.”

De Luna said his firm released three mariachi recordings by Ismael Gallegos, a local artist. They got no airplay and went nowhere.

Nydia Rojas, another young L.A. artist with an exceptional voice, recently switched from mariachi to pop on her latest Hollywood Records CD, a collection of songs by her new mentor, superstar Juan Gabriel, who also switches back and forth between genres.

For what good does it do Rojas to sing so well if nobody hears her?

Nowadays, Spanish radio listeners may hear an occasional old mariachi number by Fernandez, father or son, or by singer Juan Gabriel, Mexico’s most prolific living mariachi composer. But it certainly won’t be a new ranchera by Gabriel. His last mariachi-backed CD was released six years ago, an eon in the music business

Significantly, that excellent Gabriel recording from 1995 was titled “El Mexico Que Se Nos Fue.” Literally, it means the Mexico that left us. In essence, Gabriel refers to a lost lifestyle, of dying traditions.

There is an abyss, he sings in the title song, between the lovely Mexico of old and the one of today. It’s not just the music that has changed, Gabriel concludes pessimistically. The Mexican people themselves have changed, and for the worse.

Men have shed their indigenous clothing and their civility; women their rebozos and their polite speech.

Mexico today is a place of pollution, devalued pesos and growing unrest, his song says. And he yearns for a time when village bands played in picturesque plazas on weekends, and when folks spoke of harvests and dancing, of home and of love.

He yearns, in other words, for the age of the mariachi.

But Gabriel’s no dummy. His latest album is a top-selling collection of pop songs, including the romantic title cut, “Abrazame Muy Fuerte,” used as the theme of a soap opera on Spanish television. Nothing like a good hit to cure nationalistic nostalgia.

Commercial TV Blamed for Demise

Ironically, some blame Mexican television and its monopoly on show business for the current dearth of good new talent in Mexican popular music. (Except for those ripping Mexican rock bands too subversive to get on TV anyway.)

“I think commercial television in Mexico has done terrible damage,” said Gregorio Luke, the Mexican-born director of the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach. “For many years it was absolutely dictatorial in its structure. A notoriously corrupt system in which everything was connected--nightclubs, radios stations, television shows.”

The result has been the degrading of popular tastes and decay of musical standards, said the former cultural attache at the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles. Television pushed prefab, teeny-bopper groups such as Menudo and Timbiriche in the ‘70s and ‘80s and created a many-headed monster that still roams the countryside in the form of grown-up graduates of those groups.

Ricky Martin emerged from Menudo, and Timbiriche produced pop singers Thalia and Paulina Rubio, a sexy singer with a current hit album and a concert scheduled Saturday at the Universal Amphitheatre.

“What is promoted is image,” said Luke, an expert in the golden age of Mexican cinema. “People who look good, but who are totally a media creation, who can’t sing and can’t compose .... It’s as if the entire music establishment in Mexico had been hijacked by the Monkees.”

Paradoxically, Luke and others believe the future of the music rests in the United States with young students forming new mariachi groups in cities from Los Angeles to San Antonio. These aficionados are filling after-school music classes and raising the bar of mariachi musicianship.

“The audience is getting younger and younger,” said Jose Hernandez, head of Mariachi Sol de Mexico, a leading local band that plays at Cielito Lindo Restaurant in South El Monte. “They go dancing and come back to close the night with mariachi music.”

One thing about mariachi music. Don’t dare try it if you don’t have a great--even an operatic--voice. Unless, of course, you happen to be composer Jimenez, the George Gershwin of the genre.

The late mariachi icon couldn’t sing so well, but he carried the heart and soul of Mexico in his songs. They have penetrated the culture so deeply that even second-generation Mexican Americans who barely speak Spanish can sing along to “El Rey,” an anthem for the marginal man who has nothing but his word and an ingrained sense of self-worth, slightly aggrandized.

Just the opening lines--” Yo se bien que estoy afuera ... “ (I well know I’m on the outside ...)--can spark hollers and whoops at Chicano parties on campuses from UC Berkeley to UCLA.

Jimenez, who launched his career in 1947 with the classic “Yo,” wrote scores of songs of such lasting resonance that they are still making stars out of young performers today. Singer Lupillo Rivera, the Long Beach youth who started out singing corridos about drug-smuggling and money-laundering, emerged this year as a top-selling recording artist on Sony Discos with a new album titled “Despreciado,” backed with Ganda Sinaloense.

The title cut was written by Jimenez, as was Rivera’s previous hit, “Tu Y Las Nubes,” another classic about the heartbreak of love crossing social classes.

During a recent performance in Hollywood, Rivera switched the lyrics to El Rey. His tinkering was another symptom of the decay.

The original alludes to the wisdom of the wanderer, who learns from a sheepherder that it’s more important to arrive than to arrive first:

“Una piedra en el camino me enseno que mi destino era rodar y rodar. Tambien me dijo una arriero que no hay que llegar primero, pero hay que saber llegar.”

Rivera, who adopts the demeanor of a drunk as part of his act because he thinks it’s part of his appeal, substituted cheap slang terms in the classic song. In his version, a girl (morra) along the road showed him his destiny was to drink and drink (pistear y pistear) . It was the live degradation of mariachi music not only as art, but as a way of life.

Jose Alfredo rolled over in his grave.

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* Mariachi USA with Mariachi Campanas de America, Mariachi Los Arrieros, Mariachi Imperial de Mexico, Mariachi Mujer 2000 and Danza Teocalt, Saturday and Sunday at the Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., L.A. Saturday 6 p.m., Sunday 5 p.m. $10 to $127. (323) 850-2000.