It wasn’t long ago when the century had just turned and the post-Ricky Martin music industry was looking for direction, for a life preserver to hang on to.
And because self-launched shooting stars often appear to be even better than the real thing (Remember the boy-band revolution of 1997?), the folks in Hollywood and New York latched onto the term “rock en español” and christened it the next big wave to cross over into American streets and commercial life.
“At the time there was this huge rock en español fashion,” said Alfonso Andre, who brings his Latin rock band Jaguares to the Gothic Theatre on Saturday. “It was hip and fashionable and on the radio, and there was this big hype.”
While rock en español has grown over the past decade and created its own niche in North America, it never became the cross-cultural behemoth many predicted.
“Six or seven years ago, this was all like electronic music in terms of the big expectations,” said Josh Norek, co-founder of the Latin Alternative Music Conference, the sixth edition of which takes place in New York this weekend. “People thought it was going to be the next big thing, like you’ll be hearing rock en español songs on commercials. And I wish I could say that happened, but no.”
The music – born from kids who listened to Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones in their Mexican, Nicaraguan and Argentinian homes and later formed bands – has maintained its popularity in Latin American countries. But regardless of the burgeoning Latino population in the United States, it hasn’t exploded as expected – or even found a radio home like reggaeton has.
“It doesn’t look like (the music) is rising as fast as the Latino population is,” said Ramiro Burr, author of books on Latino music and a music reporter at the San Antonio Express-News. “The numbers for what sells in this country tell us that 50 percent of the Latin music sales are regional Mexican, which outsells pop and tropical salsa. But if you go by the TV shows, it’s the pop artists that get all the exposure.”
Regional Mexican music includes the Norteno and Tejano developed and popularized in northern Mexico and southern Texas. And the genre’s sales make sense, Burr said, because of the booming immigration into the United States.
“We’re not getting an explosion of the upper class from Mexico,” Burr said. “We’re getting the blue-collar workers, and like the blue collar-types over here, they’re listening to music like country.”
It turns out that despite the hype, there was no rock en español big bang. Like most subgenres, there was a gradual incline that is still on the rise.
“If anything, the appeal of this band has been broadening gradually and constantly – and not only as far as ethnic groups are concerned,” said Andres Levin, the native Venezuelan producer and frontman for the Latin pop band Yerba Buena. “It’s also age groups, because we have everybody from senior citizens to kids coming to our shows.”
While record sales are an excellent indicator of what sells where, it’s important to look at the live arena. Tours are expanding, artists are reaching out, and cities are learning and becoming more familiar with rock en español.
“The Carolinas are very strong Latin rock markets, and 10 years ago I would have never dreamed of seeing a Latin band selling well in the Carolinas,” said John Reilly, the vice president of the music department at the PR firm Rogers & Cowan. “You definitely had the pioneers 10 years ago – Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, the Molotovs – who were out there touring, but now you have so many bands sustaining themselves as artists through touring and drawing audiences in much whiter markets.”
It’s the same story for Jaguares, which used to rock the California-Texas-New York circuit with regularity but have since expanded to playing towns such as Oklahoma City. When Andre first started playing with Jaguares frontman Saul Hernandez in Mexico more than 20 years ago, it wasn’t so easy.
“It was impossible to make a living in Mexico with this type of music,” Andre said. “All the doors were closed, and it was really hard to play anywhere.”
Their early bands played parking lots with limited results, but they persevered, developed an audience and eventually landed in the right place at the right time. Suddenly labels were paying attention. As with so many rock en español bands, Jaguares’ sound was culled from a multicultural youth completely unlike anything in the U.S., Andre said.
“Here in Mexico, we grew up listening to music in a lot of languages from a lot of countries from a lot of different cultures,” said Andre. “But it’s not that way in the U.S. People there are used to hearing music in their own language and are not open to what’s going on in other parts of the world.
“Mexico’s always been more cosmopolitan, getting music from Cuba and Latin America and Europe and a lot of music from Brazil.”
The Latin Alternative Music Conference’s Norek understands this. He saw the light on a trip to Argentina during college.
“I grew up in Albany, N.Y., a small city and not necessarily a hotbed of Latino culture, so I knew Tito Puente, and that’s about it,” Norek said. “But when I was in Argentina, I was hearing punk and hip-hop and all this music where they were combining cultures, and I was so angry that nobody ever told me that Latin music was all of this including Café Tacuba and Mana.”
Many people simply haven’t discovered rock en español. But there’s also a healthy segment of the Latino youth population that has heard it but instead opts for rock en inglés. Norek’s Salvadoran-American girlfriend’s family typifies this modern phenomenon.
“She’s 25, and she grew up listening to music in English,” he said, “but we have this great station in L.A., KCRW, and through that she heard Julieta Venegas and loved her. But her sister, who’s 15, only listens to Mars Volta.
“She doesn’t want to hear anything in Spanish, but I have to venture a guess that some years from now she’ll want to connect with it.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
Jaguares
ROCK EN ESPAÑOL|Gothic Theatre, Englewood; 8 p.m., Saturday|$35, all-ages|through TicketWeb, ticketweb.com
