Elijah Wald
Narcocorrido - A Journey Into The Music Of Drugs, Guns, And Guerliias
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- Primary Artist
- Elijah Wald
- Description
- Fitst Editon, Hardcover with intact dust jacket, illustrated. Condition: Very Good, some minor rippling at top and bottom areas of dust jacket. Some occasional pages have light pencil ticks in the margin. This is the first full-length exploration of the contemporary Mexican corrido, blended with a travel narrative and digressions on Mexican and Mexican immigrant culture. Corridos account for some of the biggest sales in the Latino market, both in the US and points south. While the Anglo media pretends that the boom in Latin music is driven by salsa and Afro-Caribbean rhythms, most US Latin sales are of Mexican music and a large proportion of these are drug trafficking ballads, played in polka or waltz time by accordion combos or brass bands. Many of these ballads are in the classic Medieval style, and are a direct link between the earliest European poetic traditions and the world of crack cocaine and gangsta rap. Narcocorrido is a series of visits with corridistas, from the most popular urban composers to rural singers documenting current events in their communities. It was researched over roughly a year, traveling all over Mexico and the southwestern US, largely by hitchhiking. I went up into the drug trafficking regions, searched out the foremost composers in their homes, and listened to every cassette the truck drivers threw on their tape decks. This book should be available from all better bookstores, but if your local store can't get it for you, you can buy it online by clicking this link. "Through the stories of the corrido-crafters themselves, Wald uncovers a world desperate for heroes. At once tragic and hopeful, the result of his journey holds a mirror up to life on both sides of the border." --Louie Perez, of Los Lobos "Narcocorrido is more than an exposé of a musical genre and a contemporary problem, it is a journey into the complex nuances of Mexican social and cultural history. Wald's book is a most significant contribution to the bibliography on travel literature by foreign observers to Mexico since colonial times. It will...
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