Los Tigres del Norte

Los Tigres del Norte have been on our radar since 1990 when we got in the LP  ‘Para Adoloridos’ (uh, ‘For Shaking You Up’?).   These Californians are in the news this week as Juarez, the capital of Chihuahua State and a major city for drug trafficking and violence, has banned them from appearing.  The reason is their penning and performing so many ‘Narco Corridos’ – songs that offer a backhand glorification of the drugs trade.  As early as the 1970s this long-lived band were facing calls for censorship with the release of ‘Contrabando y Traición’ (1972, ‘Smuggling and Betrayal’) and ‘La Banda del Carro Rojo.’

Corridos are story-songs chronicling outlaws, rebels, lovers, losers, heroes and villains, with roots in medieval Spain, new world Amerindian culture, and revolutionary fervor.  Only natural that one branch of these epic song cycles would touch on the latest wave of real hoods and Robin Hoods.

To get an idea of the genre have a look at the youtube video mix for ‘Corridos Prohibidos‘ (CD on the Fonovisa, USA label).  Along with a rogues gallery that acts as a warning label, there are beautiful prancing, dancing horses and a catalog of automatic weaponry, some firing so fast and so hot, the barrels catch fire.  Like Hollywood and Telemundo, the band likes to please their audience.

But little known is Los Tigres’ sterling academic contribution to popular music scholarship.  One of the best sites on the Internet is Frontera.  It is the brainchild of musicologist and Arhoolie label pioneer, Chris Stachwitz.  Chris has taken his exhaustive collection of Mexican and Mexican-American 78s and posted the history and music for us to enjoy with the help of UCLA.  And who paid for a great deal of this?  The Los Tigres del Norte Foundation.

Numerous articles about the band and the genre abound, and I would recommend Elijah Wald’s ‘Narcocorrido’  (Rayo, USA, 0066210240, hardcover, 333p. 2001 –  Rayo is a division of Harper Collins + this is our version, but also avail. in paperback)  and Américo Paredes; ‘With a Pistol in his Hand’  (University of Texas Press, USA, 978-0-292-70128-1, paper, 275 pp.,1958).

Revolt Into Style

Looking around the ARC for some interesting things to show visiting fashion students from FIT I picked up Revolt Into Style, by a typically pompous and penetrating Brit, George Melly, in 1970.  The title by the way was later a song by Bill Nelson, a Glasgow record label, the headline over an endless number of music articles, layered upon political and pop stances taken before and after it’s publication, and now available as a Faber reprint.  Here’s a few very nice fashion statements:

“Hapshash and the Coloured Coat” is the curious trade name of two young men called Nigel Waymouth and Michael English. They are musicians in the avant-garde pop idiom, but also, and it is this aspect which is relevant here, poster designers. They are cool, polite and very beautiful to look at with Harpo hair styles, unironed marbled shirts, tight trousers, loose belts and two-tone Cuban boots. I talked to them in their house in Notting Hill and within a few sentences felt, as is usual when in conversation with the Underground, that I had tumbled into a world where time operates at a different speed.  [p. 136]

And on Mary Quant and husband-bankroller Alexander Plunket-Green:

“They opened Bazaar in the King’s Road, Chelsea, on a comparative shoe-string in November 1955. They had no business experience but a lot of flair. Mary Quant’s genius was to stylize the clothes of the poor but imaginative art students, to throw a custard pie in the face of every rule of what up until then had constituted British fashion, to spell ‘chic’ as ‘cheek’.

She was lucky in her moment. She and Plunket were at the centre of a small social group which became known as the Chelsea Set, and whose parties and general way of carrying on had won the total attention of the gossip-writers of that period. Quant’s clothes received an extraordinary amount of publicity. She was seen and rightly as a concrete expression of something new. The Chelsea Set carried on in the classic smart upper-class way reminiscent of the ‘ Bright Young Things’ of the 20s. It had many of the same traits : a tendency to tease the lower middle classes by showing off and to patronize the working classes.”  [p.145-146]

Noticing the intriguing and elaborate “Plunket-Green” I said, “I know a Plunket-Green.”  So I called Sooze Plunket-Green, Nile Rodgers’ right-hand woman, and sure enough, from that side of the family, Mary Quant a makeup mentor in her youth.

“Male pop fashion was a different case. Admittedly by the late 60s it had assumed its place as parallel and almost inter-changeable with its female counterpart; but at the beginning it was more of a genuine pop manifestation, a general upsurge rather than the work of any one man.

The Teddy Boy style of the middle 50s I have already described early in this book as an example of how pop culture operated in its primitive days. It is perhaps worth repeating and stressing, however, that what made it significant was that it represented one of the first successful attempts to establish a male working-class fashion with a symbolic rather than a functional raison d’etre.

Yet not all the elements that fused together to make up male pop fashion came up from the tribal life of British working-class adolescents. The other principal source was based on the East End Jewish tradition of good tailoring, as exclusive in its way as Savile Row, if based on a different premise: the necessity to reveal conspicuous expenditure rather than to conceal it.” [p.148]

The above revelation could easily describe the styling and stance of inner city youth in America at this time, both Italian and African Americans.  And just for fun and my absolute final fashion statement of the year …

FASHION + MUSIC

Grad students from FIT will be visiting the ARC next week to get a tour and look at some fashionable things from our collection.  So we thought we’d pull a few covers by groups who have a strong or ever-so-weak link to clothing, style, mode, fashion and fabrication. These students in Fashion and Textile Studies: History, Theory, Museum Practice, will be presenting a symposium @ FIT on Saturday, May 5, “Two-part Harmony: Music and Fashion.”

Monday night was an opening of “Youthquake! The 1960s Fashion Revolution” by another group of grads @ the FIT Galleries.  The show is beautifully mounted, Eurocentric and London specific.  If you’ve ever seen the poor clothing displays at some other institutions – ill-fitting and badly draped – you can appreciate the care.  The Bob Dylan face-dress is a revelation.  With an emphasis on Mod, what people wore here in the States is only lightly touched on, with nary a tie-dye in sight – let alone a Velvet Underground all-black beat leftover.

This is not a survey of my sixties: long hair, flowers in your hair, Afghani coats, embroidered Indian shirts, Amerindian fringe, macramé, granny dresses, granny glasses, peace signs, bra-less, boas, beads, bellbottoms, headbands, sandles, guitars, sitars and some rockabilly beat-girl skiffle styling.  Or some Rockers to battle those Mods.  But they do mention Françoise Hardy (THE “Ye Ye” Girl), display some extraordinary leather boots and Beatle booties, and offer a loop of fab vintage pop shop footage.

I would recommend a viewing of “Comic Strip” by Brigitte Bardot and Serge Gainsbourg for French TV, (worst jumpsuit ever by a major designer – you do the research) and a little more about the music that accompanied the look.  But this is a fine overview of Eng-a-land Swings and the kids who made designers pay attention to the street, be it Carnaby or Haight.

Click on any cover to see the slideshow…