Stuff You Should Know - Mariachi: The Rodney Dangerfield of Music

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

Mariachi bands have a bad rap as nothing more than "restaurant music." But there is a rich and long cultural tradition many people are missing and the music deserves our respect. Listen in today!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Find the Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hi, hi, hi, hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's hanging out here wearing a giant sombrero and that makes this Stuff You Should Know. I was actually gonna sing that and it's funny that you thought of the same dang thing. That's the one. That's the one that I've, you know, I grew up on.

Yeah, I think I told the story once before about when, it's funny how these things you remember from your childhood. When I was in kindergarten, they taught us the Mexican hat dance. And we danced around, not hats, but spray can lids. Like, like spray paint lids. Why? Because, you know, we didn't have little sombreros and it's one of those things where looking back, like God bless them, they were teaching us about another culture, which is great for

a five-year-old, but like looking back, all these, you know, white, suburban Atlanta kids dancing around spray paint, spray paint, can lids, little, little cringe. It's a weird, like, added detail, but I'll bet it was still adorable to see, you know. It's an odd substitute. Like, we didn't decorate them. I would get that. They were just the lids. No brims or anything like that.

So it was more of like a Fez dance. Yeah, sure. It was like a Fez dance, minus the tassel. So Chuck, I just want to say, if this pic is from your recent trip to the Yucatan, that is the vacation that just keeps giving. No, it's not at all. We heard no mariachi down there. No.

I don't know why I thought of this. I'm not sure, other than the fact that it's a music that I like and it's a fun like when people are over and it's a Friday night where happy hour and up some cocktails. Putting on a mariachi mix is always a good move. Sure. And, you know, when I lived in LA, I lived in a Mexican neighborhood, in a largely Mexican neighborhood and a 100% Mexican or Mexican American apartment complex. I was the only gringo there.

And so the music was just blaring out at all times. And I really got tired of it for a while, but it was in getting tired of it that I got an appreciation for it and ending up loving it, if that makes sense. That's really cool. Yeah, it does make sense, actually. You have subsumed it. By attrition, I guess, yeah. Yeah, sure.

So, yeah, this was your pick. I don't know that I ever would have gotten around to this one because I'm not like a huge mariachi fan. I've got nothing against it, but like my exposure to mariachi is sadly like speedy Gonzalez cartoons and like Mexican restaurant visits. But now that I've researched it, I have kind of developed more of an appreciation of it than I had before. But one of the things that struck me about it, Chuck, is that if you listened to like

old mariachi and like relatively new mariachi, like there's something about, there's like a through line where it's very clearly the same kind of music after decades and decades, centuries, really, you could say. And I think that's really cool that it's not like, like I went to look for disco mariachi. Of course you did. Yeah, it doesn't exist. Like I found like a mariachi band doing covers of some disco favorites, like, you know, but it was still mostly disco with a little bit more horn than normal.

But it's like a really like, I don't want to say unchanged because it's definitely evolved in other kinds of merge with other kinds, you know, but it's, you can recognize it from 1900 to 1990 as mariachi music. Yeah. You know, I think one of the through lines that I saw, and this is something we talked a little bit about before we recorded was, and I think the name of this episode I've already titled the Rodney Dangerfield of Musical Genres. But it's a genre that I think is always worked at gaining respect globally and among, you

know, the intelligentsia and the classical community. And I think part of that is rooted in some just inherent racism that America feels toward Mexico, which I think is just something that's just there. It's a country that is our closest neighbor, obviously Canada as well, but it's an interesting place in that, you know, 50% of the country, I think since the pandemic lives below the poverty line, but it's also like a top 10 country economically globally, which was hard to believe. So it's Mexico, I think has a lot of people living in poverty and a lot of very wealthy

people. So a big wealth gap there. And this music is a part of their proud tradition. And I think little things have happened over the years, and we'll talk about a lot of them that have helped kind of up the respect ante, where it's not just Mexican restaurant music to people here and around the world. And I think like movies like Coco coming along, like just little things like that have happened over the years.

It really helped kind of bring it to the fore where people realize what a kind of cool music it is. Yeah, for sure. And yeah, that's just because, you know, people's exposure to it is strictly a Mexican restaurant. It doesn't mean like that's where it exists. Like it's moved into concert halls. It's moved into like schools and colleges.

Like it's definitely gained a lot of respect. But I think what you're saying is correct, you know, largely that there is a certain sense of, if not racism, at least xenophobia or a sense of foreignness that probably prevents like the average waspy American from getting really deep into mariachi. But I think also in this, this stands for Mexico too, that it's a, it's a classicist thing too, because mariachi music is rooted in the rural areas. It's a proud rural worker tradition. It's like super egalitarian in that sense and, you know, people of, you know, certain

classes, they don't like that kind of stuff. They find it lowbrow or they, they, it doesn't appeal to them or whatever. And so I think that even as mariachi has evolved over the decades, that same old kind of grudge or view that's become outdated over time to a large extent still remains among some people. Agreed. This is one of our best intros yet. All right. So let's go back to the beginning.

Where'd mariachi come from? Well, and by the way, I've really worked on a lot of these pronunciations. I'm going to do my best, but as always, we try. We're going to try, but yeah, there's a lot of pronunciation challenges up in this one. All up in here. So we got to go back to colonial Mexico and the original form of the music came, and this is pretty obvious, is obviously some Spanish influence, but something that may surprise folks is that also enslaved Africans that the Spanish brought to the colonies, a lot

of the rhythmic traditions of that music is present in the origins of mariachi as well. Yeah. And there are a lot of people say plus there was indigenous music at the time. So those things always just kind of blended and gelled together, which is pretty appropriate for mariachi as we'll see over the decades. Like it's, they've not hesitated to be like, oh, I really like that sound or I didn't think of using that instrument and incorporating it to make a new sound. Yeah.

Yeah. Totally. You got to go to Western Mexico to Jalisco where we talk about a musical form called Son Jaliciense. I know I got that one right because it breaks it over and over. Me too. I want to take a crack. I don't want to have practice for nothing.

Jaliciense. Yeah. Very nice. Okay. I think we should each pronounce everything. And then Jerry can just blend them together. Add a little guitar on on top of it and we're all set. So that music was happening in Jalisco and Western Mexico, but it was, you know, similar

kinds of music were happening in other places in Mexico. And like you said, these were farm workers. They would play for special occasions. They would, it's interesting in the early mariachi did not have horns, which is almost hard to believe because horns are so vital to it now, but violins, guitar and harp were sort of the first mariachi instruments. Yeah. Mostly string, string ensembles, right?

And they were, they were songs performed by the peasant class working on haciendas. And at the time before the, the Mexican revolution that ran roughly from 1910 to 1920, there was a feudal system, essentially that, that, that was the hacienda. And the people who worked on those haciendas were very much exploited, but one of the jobs you could have is a mariachi performer. I got the impression like if you were a mariachi performer, that was your job. You didn't necessarily work in the fields or do anything else. That was the role you played on the hacienda.

And the thing is that kind of inequality is just unsustainable. It doesn't matter what century you live in, it doesn't matter what country you live in. Eventually as one group is just so thoroughly exploited by another group, the, the exploited groups going to revolt. And that was the basis of the Mexican revolution that it was a class revolution where the workers rebelled and said, no more, you're not going to exploit us anymore. Right. And as you'll see, they wrote a lot of music about this stuff in the form of the mariachi

songs. But Cocula, which is in Jalisco outside of Guadalajara, is where some people say it started even though you can't draw like written history there. If you want to look at the word in print, which is something we always seem to talk about first time we see things written down, it is a letter from a Catholic priest in 1852 that was denouncing it, basically saying, you know, these big drunken festivals and this music that you're doing is a problem. Please cut it out.

Right. Signed local crank priest. Exactly. So that was the, like you said, the first time in print, right? Yeah. And before that it was a local place name. But really mariachi is we understand it. The word, the etymology, I guess, has long been kind of disputed.

And here's the little fun fact I had no idea about. The French, as in France, occupied Mexico from 1862 to 1866. Did you know that? Sure. You knew that? I did. I think I've seen that in movies. I had no idea.

That's the only reason I wouldn't know anything. So during that four year occupation of Mexico by the French, apparently local musicians would be hired to perform at weddings. Because there was a long standing myth that the word mariachi was a kind of a local butchering of the French word mariage. Yeah. Not true. No, that's not it.

There's actually the answers a lot cooler, I think. Well, they still don't know for sure. I mean, my money is on the tree. Is that what you were talking about? Yeah. What else could it possibly be? I don't know because there's a tree. It's separated out differently, but it is the word mariachi.

It's just mariachi. That sounded Italian. Although that's totally Italian. That's a spicy mariachi. Probably put the stress on the wrong thing, but that was a tree that legend has it, or people say at least, was the wood that they made the instruments out of. And that seems pretty convincing to me. For sure.

It was an indigenous Kora word too. So hats off to them as well. There's another, there's one more that I'm like, I don't know about this one, but they're like, no, the chi is from the Kora language, but the mariah refers to the Virgin Mary and that these were religious songs at first. I didn't see anything about these being particularly religious at any point in time, did you? Not really. I mean, I'm sure they're religious mariachi songs, but most of the stuff I've seen is

about like working on the farm or these love ballads and stuff like that. Yeah. Or just getting, you know, crunk. Getting down. Yeah. Like I said, the Hacienda system, I don't believe it actually ended, but I think it was very much disrupted during and right after the revolution. And as a result, there was, you know, a lot of people who were displaced as workers, including

mariachi musicians who no longer had like a regular gig on the local Hacienda. And so whenever there's a disruption in the countryside, those people tend to make it toward city centers to see if there's work or other ways to support themselves. There's a big influx of people to Mexico City around the 19 teens and 20s. And a lot of them were mariachi musicians and they brought their different traditions with them because depending on what state you're talking about, each state has its own kind of musical mariachi tradition. And in that era in Mexico City is when they first started to really kind of blend together.

Yeah. I think, I mean, I love this kind of thing where different, whether it's food or musical styles when different people of different cultures all of a sudden are living among each other and start sharing opinions and ideas. That's just, I don't know, I think the best stuff in history is created that way. And that's what happened there. And they brought their musics together. This is when band sizes grew.

It was not necessarily like a quartet like it had been. All of a sudden you could see mariachi in the, you know, like 12 people playing in a band. This and big time game changer, this is when horns came into the mix and, you know, basically this was what, 19 teens you said? Yeah. And 20s maybe. Yeah. Mariachi would never be the same after the introduction of those trumpets.

No, for sure. And apparently in pretty short order, they figured out how to do, you know, more than one trumpet as we'll see. There's actually one band that was responsible for that, but one of the other things they started doing too was wearing charos, those cowboy outfits, the very like slick cowboy outfits with like the short waistcoat and the tight pants and the ankle length boots and a wide bow tie and a big sombrero. That emerged from this era as well too, where all of a sudden these guys were in the big

city wearing peasant garb with straw hats. This was probably a little gauche all of a sudden. And they were making pretty good money. So you could outfit like a dozen Mariachi musicians in matching outfits and, you know, probably attract even more money because people would want to hire you because you had that kind of thing going on. And it became a tradition pretty quick. Can I admit something?

Yeah. If it were not for being accused of cultural appropriation, I would wear chateau clothing at every fancy event I ever went to. So. I think it's so cool looking. I love it. And I think I might just have to settle for a nudie suit. You know what those are?

Oh, a birthday suit. You mean? No, you probably do. It was, there was a tailor and he was a lot of things. In fact, he might make an interesting episode one day named nudie cone and he made these suits that like Grand Parsons wore and rhinestone cowboy type stuff with like roses embroidered on the suits and all that stuff. So nudie suits became really popular with like the earliest alt country scene and like

rodeos and stuff. So I think I could get away with a nudie suit. Okay. But why? You're not part of the cowboy culture. You're appropriating that. Why is it any different? Like, why couldn't you just wear a Charo suit?

I think that if you think something is I don't know, and you're wearing it out of respect and because you think it's super cool, not because for whatever reason, if you're just positively wearing something, I don't see how somebody could legitimately accuse you of cultural appropriation. And if they did, I think they'd be wrong. No, I'm with you. It would be from fear of being accused of that more than anything. Just being accused.

I think because people would probably think like Tom Hanks showing up in big in that thing, they would think I was being funny or making a joke where I'm like, no, I actually think I look really cool because this is a really cool suit and the tailors that make this stuff are amazing. And I would love to show it off. The difference would be you would show up and just not say anything about your Charo suit. I don't know.

That would be the way to do it. Because you're not trying to be like, hey, get a load of this get up. You're just like, this is what I'm wearing. If I were wearing a regular suit, I wouldn't say anything about that. So I definitely shouldn't have a squirting flower in my little belt. No. Or like a little spray paint can cap that you do a little hat dancer on. Yeah.

I would have a little elastic cord that hangs like a little tiny bell hop hat. Totally. No. Anyway, I just think those are super cool and I think nudie suits would be maybe a short stuff. Okay. I'm glad you explained nudie because I didn't get that tea the first time. No, there's not a tea.

It's N-U-D-I-E. Oh, okay. So yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about. That was a guy's name. Hey, do you want to take a break and come back? Because we're like 18 minutes into this great one. Hey, let's do it. Okay.

We'll be right back, everybody. Hey, everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too.

Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep.

We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. Radio will never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever

you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology and lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast.

Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your

podcasts. So one more thing, Chuck, about this kind of diaspora toward Mexico City, there was a change in how they performed too. They started performing in public places, in bars, in plazas. And they also started to be more mobile. They would move around in part because they were busking basically. So if there was somebody that looked like they might be a paying customer, they might follow them around for a little bit and see if they could get them to pay for a song or

request a song or something like that. So that mobility, the charo suits and the expansion and like rearrangement of instruments, including the horns, those were all big things that happened in the 20s. Yeah. And I think that tradition, when you see a small mariachi quartet moving around a Mexican restaurant, it's sort of rooted in that tradition. And I think that's another reason I didn't have an appreciation now that I remember back is whenever that happened, when I was at dinner with my family and I was a kid, I could just

see the air leave my dad's body and just like, he hated it so much. He hated any attention at all being like pointed publicly his way. Like at Disney World. They were like, let me pick somebody from the audience if they ever looked at my dad, he would just shake his head. I can totally identify with that. Not smile or anything. Whereas I could not be more different.

I'm like raising my hand wanting to jump up and volunteer for whatever. And I love it when the mariachi comes by the table, even though Atlanta doesn't have nearly enough of that. And I think just word of advice, if you never, if you feel awkward and you don't know, like, do I eat or not, yeah, you just keep eating and like smile at them and just enjoy the whole thing. I don't think it means, hey, stop what you're doing and only look at us. It's a part of the lively atmosphere of enjoying the food.

You can also, if you're in your dad's mindset, order a double margarita stat. Yeah, he didn't drink though. Oh, well, yeah, I'll bet he was super uncomfortable. He really didn't know how to do life. He was just letting us do in the discomfort. So we're talking 1950s about this time and this is when we had a couple of trumpets come on the scene. And again, we'll talk about the two gentlemen who worked out how to do that.

You had a few violins usually, and then you had two really key instruments that are basically ubiquitous in any mariachi. One is the Viguela, which you might call a guitar, but it's a little different. It's smaller. It's got five strings. It's higher pitched. So the GD and A strings are all tuned in octave higher. So it sounds a little different, but it's got those nylon strings.

Don't you also pick it? Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you can strum it with your fingers as well, but finger picking and strumming. And then you've got the, really the heart of the band and the most important instrument is that guitar on that I talked about. And that's that it sort of looks like a stand up bass with a super, super short neck that you were playing. It's really, really big bodied.

And this thing though is not plucked like a standard bass. It also has five strings, although there are some five string basses, but traditionally you think of a four string bass, but it's not plucked. You're playing octaves on the strings with a guitar on. Yeah. And you're playing it like a guitar. So it looks like a hilarious oversized novelty guitar until you hear it. And then you're like, oh, okay.

It's pretty awesome. Yeah. But that's the whole rhythm section because one thing you will never hear someone say is, did you get a load of that drummer in the mariachi band? Right. Yeah. It's true. Yeah.

Because that huge deep hollow body like produces all of the sound you need from that. Yeah. It's pretty great. And it's really a key. Some other things though, you might overhear people saying at a mariachi show is, wow, wasn't that accordion player amazing or the French horn dude or the floutest even? Because they like wind instruments and they like accordions. And one of the things that they'll play as we'll see are things like waltzes, polkas.

And that was because of the influence of German immigrants to northern Mexico and southern Texas in the 19th century that that music influenced mariachi as well. That's right. One of the big respect boxes was ticked in 2011 when UNESCO came forward and said mariachi, the string music, the song and the trumpet is now officially added to what is called the representative list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity, which is a great sounding list. I love the whole intangible aspect.

For sure. I went to a place in Kyoto that was like a bamboo forest and UNESCO added the sound of wind moving through that bamboo forest to that same list. So it's kind of... Do UNESCO at some point? We should. At the very least, we should do this list. We could just read it off and be like, that one's awesome too.

Here's another awesome one. Yeah, I love it. So yeah, that's a huge deal. I mean, and that was 2011. So mariachi, it's like, this is never going anywhere. And it wasn't going to anyway. There was a guy who ran Jalisco's Ministry of Culture, his name was Alejandro Cravioto. And he said at the time that there's no Mexican musical expression more widespread throughout

the world. And he also said that it's so much a part of Mexican people's lives that they hear it. It's played from their baptism to their burial. And it's absolutely true. They play baptisms. They play funerals and they play everything in between too. Yeah. But it's interesting when that happened, there was a TV musician and a TV host named Cornelio

Garcia. You like that? That said, when this happened, they said, you know, mariachi still isn't getting the respect among academics here in our own country. And you'll see that's one of the sort of recurring themes over and over is within Mexico itself. It's gained more acceptance in the U.S. than it has in some parts of Mexico among higher classes. Yeah.

And I think that's that kind of classic grudge that I was referring to is still around. Because again, it's the music of the revolution and the revolution was the revolution of the peasants and it's really prideful, patriotic music in a lot of ways too. And it's the music of Mexico. There's a mariachi song called El Sandel Anegra and it's considered Mexico's second national anthem. So it's like it's just so woven into the fabric that, yeah, it's pretty tough. If you live in Mexico, if you're born and raised Mexican intellectual and you don't

like mariachi, I'm sure you just have a miserable life down there. You're the Mexican version of my dad. So you mentioned the different musical sounds incorporating things like waltz and polka. Andango is also another like these African rhythms that we were talking about. And they have, you know, obviously the ballads and the waltzes and things like that. But some other sort of song styles, one of them is called a ranchera. And these were very much songs of the Mexican Revolution. These are the ones that are really the patriotic songs of the peasant class talking about how

great. And that's what's so cool about it too is like these songs weren't talking about maybe some did, but it seems like they were never talking about oppression. They were celebrating the farm and celebrating ranch life and stuff like that. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I'm romanticizing it.

You could even say. There's a very famous song called Valvera Valvera. I think it's maybe how you'd say it. Sure. I didn't practice that one. It's a very famously performed by a guy named Vicente Fernandez, known as El Rey de la Musica Ranchera. And this guy is my speed.

Like he looks like a total tough guy from the seventies, but he also looks like he probably smells really good. And he's like singing this like one plaintive love song, where his heart's clearly broken, in a Mexican restaurant with a horse in there with him. And he plays his song on the jukebox and starts singing it and it's really awesome. So I really kind of like Vicente Fernandez as of yesterday. Yeah. That's a good song.

I remember hearing a lot of ballads when I lived in Yuma. My sort of best friend for that year was this guy named Mark. And this was like a big cultural shift for me to all of a sudden my best friend was this Mexican guy and I hung out at his house a lot and just got kind of thrown into like the real deal culture as opposed to the kid dancing around the spray paint lid. And it was just, they were all so sweet and so nice and Mark's dad, like I remember seeing this picture on the fridge of Mark's dad in the seventies and he was like, he had these sideburn chops and was riding a chopper motorcycle and was wearing like a beaded vest.

And I was like, do you have any idea how much cooler your dad is than mine? And I was like, your dad is just like the coolest looking dude I've ever seen. And I remember like his mom would play these great Mexican mariachi ballads. And I like the ballads. Okay. I really like the upbeat stuff a lot more, but it's kind of fun. It's like these, these ballads are so like sort of slow and languid and syrupy and you could, they just feel very sincere.

Yeah. For sure. Like in some places, gut wrenching, in last June, a bunch of mariachi, I think something like 50 of them showed up at Uvaldi to basically sing and just to mourn with everybody there. And there's plenty of videos on it. And if you want to just have your guts wrenched, like go watch that. It's just really amazing how just applicable this music is to all these different like events or, or occasions, you know, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. That song you were singing, by the way, the, are you kind of Lee Reed saying it with the I, I, I, I, that is very famous ranchera. And that song is see a little lindo. That's the one that everyone has heard. Everyone has heard either that or la cucaracha, which is not a ranchera. That is called a corrido. Yeah.

I am not a hundred percent certain that there's a clear dividing line between rancheras and corridos because that vulva, vulva song is, it tells a story. So that's one of the defining characteristics of a corrido. It's a ballad and it's not necessarily just about like love loss or even love game. They can be about crime. It can be about heroism. And I saw it on a site called a remescla that, that's usually paired with like a moral lesson of some sort.

So it's like a ballad basically is the, is the best way to put it as we already did. Yeah. And you know what? This is a great time to mention that I was wrong. We had our sort of ballad disagreement a while back when I said that ballads were love songs. And we had a lot of people right in that were like, no, no, no, like your own Billy Joel Chuck saying the ballad of Billy the kid and the ballad of Curtis Lowe by Leonard Skinner. They're like these, they're just story songs, but I think I just was thinking more love

ballads and that's a sub genre. Sure. Yeah. So correction made. So wait a minute. Were they saying Josh was right? Oh yeah. You were way right.

How did I miss this bunch of emails then? I had, I forgot to frame them and send them to you. Yeah. But I have like a filter set on my outlook anytime it says the phrase Josh is right or any variation and it goes right to the top of the line. You have, you have searches out for the words correct. Sometimes I hit up people who've already sent in listener mail just to kind of goad them into sending those kinds of emails.

And then the final little style that we'll cover is one we mentioned at the beginning, the son Halacin Silencia and that is the original folk style. Yeah. That's that. Yeah. The El Son de la Negra, the second national anthem of Mexico and that's usually accompanied by a dance called Zapa Tiedo. Hey, I nailed it first time.

I would say Tiedo. Oh man. I actually surprised myself, I had that like, like little orphan Annie, like, like surprised look and I still didn't get it right. Come here Sandy. Come here girl. Right. But that's like a heel stomping foot dance.

That's pretty cool. If you just look that up. That's what we were doing in kindergarten. Okay. Okay. Gotcha. I got you. You're doing this.

It's still so embarrassing. Zapa Tiedo. I guess we called it the Mexican hat dance, which is probably wrong too. I'm quite sure it was. It sounds, yeah. Of those two, I'm pretty sure Mexican hat dance is the wronger in 1970s America of those. That's right. I guess the last thing we should mention about the music itself, like the sound, is one of

my favorite parts of this or any music, which is multiple voices singing together. I love choral music. I love three, four, five part harmonies. I love, there probably is no such thing as five part harmony. Why not? I don't know. Is there a limit? I don't think so.

Only in your mind. Oh, whoa. Hold on. Yeah, but there's, there aren't, I mean, there are, there are singers that have backing mariachi bands, but they're in a mariachi band. There's typically not what's called a lead singer that someone may take a lead on the song, but it's usually a lot of people singing at once. Yeah.

It's like Chicago. Basically, everybody can sing, right? And they take turns. That's right. Robert Lam. And you'll actually, you'll actually see, like, you know, a guy stop playing his trumpet and move to the front and start singing on a new song. Like that's just kind of how laid back it is.

One of the other cool things about mariachi too is if you watch, like, if you watch the violinists, there'll be like three or four of them just standing there potentially. And they'll all start to bring their bow to their instrument at different times. It's not, it's not this precision timing. And because there's multiple instruments, one can come in like, you know, a half measure late or something like that. And it makes no difference whether you can't hear it in the first place, but it's just like, it's not meant to be this intensely perfect and precise music.

And that's actually seen in the way that it's passed along. Like you, you don't, you can now, as of I think the 60s, you can go to schools, sometimes public schools like elementary and middle and high schools. But there are some college curricula that teach you mariachi. But traditionally it was passed down just by practicing, like it wasn't written down and it was like, here's how you play Cialito Lindo, you know, and you would pick that up or else you'd go watch your favorite mariachi band in the town plaza and, you know, basically be a groupie long enough that they'd let you start playing with them, that kind of thing.

That was Coco. Did you ever see Coco? I did not. No. One of the best movies, animated films. It's just fantastic, definitely the best looking animated film I've ever seen. Wow. And that was the kid and Coco was like a little mariachi groupie and would just like, and you

know, his parents didn't want him hanging around. Like all of this stuff is kind of spot on. Really good movie though and great music. But mariachi finally would make its way to the United States long before Coco in the 1940s in Los Angeles. Obviously has always had a strong, proud Mexican American community there. And then up through the 1960s, which during the Zoot Suit episode, we talked a lot about the Chicano movement in the 60s where Mexican immigrant communities all of a sudden kind

of stood up for themselves and organized and it was very much akin to the black power movement and they adopted a lot of mariachi songs as kind of part of their movement. Yeah. And some of the repurposed, there's a famous song called De Caloris that talks about how beautiful the landscape is in spring. And they basically repurposed it to be more of a metaphor for how, you know, the beauty of different people of color, you know. Other ones were actually written.

There's a song called El Picket Sign, which is hilarious. Did you listen to it? I did. And it doesn't sound very mariachi. It more sounds like a 1960s acoustic guitar protest song, which is exactly what it was. But it was, you know, part of the United Farm Workers Union strike and the larger Chicano movement, too. A big respect box, again, was checked in the 80s when Linda Ronstadt came out with her

album, Cancionas de mi Padre. And this was a very big deal. I don't know if you remember this at the time, but Linda Ronstadt was a huge star and I can't recommend the documentary about her enough. It's called The Sound of My Voice. One of the great singers of all time in any genre is Linda Ronstadt. And she has Mexican heritage. And not many people know this because she's very fair skin.

Her name is Ronstadt, is German. But she, that's why she made that album. And she did interviews at the time and the documentary talks a lot about her Mexican heritage. And it was, I think she's part German, too, and there was, like you were talking about, the German influence in Mexico. It was a big melting pot and she was a part of that melting pot. I think her either father or grandfather was Mexican. And so she came out with this album and it was huge.

It went double platinum. And this was in the like mid-late 1980s and it gave a huge boost to the mariachi music. Yeah, and she was playing with like some legit mariachi bands, I think she hosted basically three of them on her album. She played with one of them, Mariachi Vargas, on Saturday Night Live. Yeah, I mean, it was a giant, enormous thing. I don't remember when it happened, but I can just imagine America being like, wait, what? And then listening to it and being like, oh, this is really good.

But that also explains a longstanding mystery that I never understood before, which is why on the Mr. Plow episode of The Simpsons, when Barney is hanging out with Linda Ronstadt, she tries to adapt the Mr. Plow song into Spanish. Really? Yeah. Or she's like, oh, that's funny. Señor Plow no es macho solamente un baracho, which means Mr. Plow is not manly, only a drunk.

And like it lasts like two, three seconds, but I had no idea because that was so random. God, don't you love that when a Simpsons joke hits 20 years later? Exactly 30 years, actually. That episode came out in 1992. That is crazy. Yeah. All right. Well, let's take another break.

I'm going to go get my spray paint can lid out. That's really tough to say, isn't it? It really is. I'd stumble. You say it. Spray paint can lid. I've been practicing in my head because I knew this moment would come. I've been stumbling over the whole time, so I'm going to keep practicing saying that.

And we'll be right back. Hey, friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too.

Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously. I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me.

Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. And so tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for

it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. The Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. Spray paint, can lid. Very nice, everybody. Very nice. All right. So now we are in the mid 20th century and in Mexican cinema is all of a sudden finding its way into theaters all over the world.

And that means Mexican music is going to be introduced in more places all over the world, which includes mariachi. And depending on where you are in the world, it might have taken hold more than others. And this is, I think it is a really cool thing when something from one disparate culture makes its way to another place and for some like Hasselhoff in Germany, like all of a sudden that place really loves this thing. And that happened in Yugoslavia, one of the reasons is at the time political leaders there didn't want a lot of Soviet music.

They didn't want a lot of American music. And they saw this Mexican music as neutral politically. So it was a little more, not encouraged, I guess, but not shunned. And all of a sudden there were some parallels being drawn between the revolutionary traditions in both of those countries and even today in places like Serbia and Croatia, there are mariachi bands that play. Yeah. And this wasn't like a fringe thing like mariachi from what I can tell, there's a really interesting

Rhodes and Kingdoms article that Olivia dug up that basically says like mariachi was as big as any music in Yugoslavia in like this, I'm guessing 50s, 60s and 70s is the impression that I had. Have you ever heard Yugoslavian music? I listened to a little bit, well, I listened to a little bit of the mariachi. That's the other thing too. It doesn't matter if it's a Serb playing mariachi, a Japanese band playing mariachi or somebody from Texas playing mariachi, it is the same music.

It's pretty cool. Yeah. I think honoring that tradition, like no one wants to put a spin on something that is so much just what it is. Does that make sense? I have a video spin, I've looked. There are Japanese mariachi, one called mariachi samurai, has been around for 20 plus years. There is a confirmed mariachi band in China.

As we will see, they're in the big festival happening this year. There is one from Sweden that's showing up. So it definitely took hold in different parts of the world in the 20th century. Yeah, for sure. So Chuck, I feel like we should talk about some notable mariachi. Yeah, and we should also point out that when we say mariachi, that can be a band, that can be an adjective describing the music, or it can be, as in the case of the great Robert Rodriguez film, El Mariachi, it can be a single individual as a mariachi.

I still never saw it. I've only seen Desperado. I've seen it like 50 times, but I never moved on to El Mariachi. Well, move back. El Mariachi was the first one, and then Desperado was kind of a remake, but kind of not. Like Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2. Yeah, very much. And yeah, in a lot of ways.

You should check out Mariachi. It's the one he made for like $8,000 or whatever. I'll check it out. I'll check it out. Don't pressure me. It's good. Back off, Bob. All right, go ahead, tough guy.

Fine. Tell me some notable mariachi. All right. Well, one of the first, actually, was the Quarteto Coculense. Okay. No, I think that's good. There's a guy named Gusto Villa, and he was the first mariachi to perform, or his quartet was at the Mexican capital back in 1905.

They were also the first ones to put this on wax as early as 1908. So these guys were holding it down. Because remember, mariachi, it had only been 50, 60 years old tops when it was first being started to be played in the rural areas. So these guys were the first in Mexico City playing this stuff at the turn of the 20th century. That's right. We could also mention mariachi Vargas.

This is a tough one. Teca Tietlan. Tecala Tietlan. Teca, we'll say it again. Tecala Tietlan. Okay. Tecala. Is that right?

No. I added a T just to make it easier. I think you said it right the first time. That's a tough one. But this was one of the more famous, maybe the most famous and longest running mariachi group ever. They were founded in 1898, and it's still around today, obviously, over the years. They're just swapping people in and out, but it's still the same band under the same name,

which is pretty cool. They really kind of established the mariachi style from that region and used that harp early on. Yeah. So they've been playing since the 19th century. In the 30s, they made their way to Mexico City because again, this is like now the epicenter of mariachi music. And I don't know how or exactly what they did, but they were named during that decade

the official mariachi of the Mexico City Police Department. I thought that was really funny. Like, did they follow them around on like raids and stuff and like play some background music? I don't know. That would be pretty great. They also started to show up in movies, and they would back up a guy named Pedro Infante who was like a pretty huge star during the Mexican golden age of the 30s to the 50s.

And these movies were typically vehicles of his, and I'm guessing those were a lot of the ones that made their way to Yugoslavia. Yeah, probably. Let's just pick out a couple of more of these because we could just list people all day long. Well, since we mentioned these guys earlier, we need to shout out Miguel Martinez and Jesus Cordoba who were from the band Mariachi Mexico de Pepavia. And they were from the 1950s, and those are the two guys who worked out how to use two

trumpets together. And it sounds like, oh, you just played the same thing at the same time and the same melody, but that wasn't exactly what they did. They mixed it up, and I think they played in harmony, and all of a sudden, two trumpets were a thing. Yeah. And there's another group, Mariachi Los Camperos that was founded by Nadie Cano, and he really kind of whipped this existing band into shape and got them into Carnegie Hall in 1964.

They were the first Mariachi group to perform there. They opened their own restaurant, La Fonda de Los Camperos in LA, and that explains why Vincente Rodriguez was basically in a Mexican restaurant, or I guess just a restaurant in the two videos I've seen of his. So that became kind of like a thing. You would have your own home base where you could perform every night of the week if you wanted to, and also probably attract more business, plus you're making that restaurant money on the side too.

Yeah, and I highly recommend if you go to Los Angeles, you want to do something fun one night. There are quite a few restaurants there that have not the roaming, the tables Mariachi, but the full 12 to 14 symphonic on a stage performance scene, and it is a lot of fun to go to these places and get some great food and margaritas and listen to these performances. So look it up. It's online. I don't have any.

I texted my friend, but he never answered, so I can't remember the name of it. I'll tell you another place to get all that same experience is Epcot Center. Are you talking about Mariachi Cobra? Yeah, they've been the house Epcot, Mexico Pavilion Mariachi band since 1982. Not a bad gig. That's a pretty good streak. That's a 40-year streak. Well, I love that they're just like, why are these guys are great, so let's just keep

them on forever. Yeah, exactly. And that band was like, Florida's pretty great, we're just going to move here. If you notice, we keep talking about men, like many, many musical genres have we seen that we've covered throughout the years, except for disco, actually, notably, is that women have had a harder time getting a toe in the pool, and Mariachi is no different. At the beginning, it was exclusively men, and they were playing in these sort of rough and tumble places where people were getting boozed up on Surveysa, and it was not seen

as an acceptable thing for women to do in the mid-19th century in Mexico. But as Livia is keen to point out, there always have been exceptions. Beginning in the early 1900s, there was a 13-year-old named Rosa Querino, who had played with male Mariachi bands, but eventually went on to lead her own group, and apparently used to carry a piece to protect herself on the road, because it was dangerous business. I also saw that she would threaten hecklers and people who harassed her while she and her band were playing with it. She would say, gentlemen, we are working, and she would produce her gun and just let

them see like she was not to be trifled with. She also wore like bandoleros, like Pancho Villa. Oh, cool. Yeah, she sounds pretty cool, for sure. In the late 1940s, you started to see some bands that were all women, some Mariachi groups in Mexico City, eventually they would make their way to Los Angeles. In the U.S., the first all-female Mariachi group was Las Rancheritas, and this was in Alamo, Texas, in 1967.

And I believe there is even now an all-LGBTQ-plus Mariachi group with the very first transgender woman in the history of the genre with Natalia Melendez. Yeah, Mariachi are curious. Yeah. I mean, things have come a long way. Yeah, there's also another one worth mentioning, Florida Toloache. They're from New York. I think they're a four-piece, and they are really amazing, too.

But even still today, even with all of these really great all-female Mariachi bands, they still are just kind of viewed differently than the male performers are. There was an anthropologist in 2013 named Mary Lee Mulholland, and she basically just started studying the difference between male and female Mariachi performers and found that the male performers are typically expected to represent that kind of rural, rough and tumble, bawdy, humorous sometimes, like just macho kind of vibe, while the female performers were expected to be sober and dignified and pretty. Don't forget, pretty had me pretty, too, and they were judged on that.

And I mean, I guess it's to be expected, but I get the impressions that the female performers were still just treated differently, depending on where they performed. And they said, by and large, they tended to prefer performing at weddings and baptisms, that kind of stuff, rather than at bars and the public plazas where the male performers typically go. Who wants to be heckled and objectified. And have to flash your gun. Yeah, exactly.

What else you got? I think that's about it. I mean, the last section here is just where to hear some Mariachi music. And I think you can hire them out in your town to play a party if you want. I bet you every big city in many small towns, if you look up on the interwebs, will have Mariachi that you can hire. You can go to look up and see if there are Mexican restaurants that have that music. You can go check out.

There are festivals now, and certainly in Mexico and all over the world, where you can go hear lots of Mariachi or just dial some up on your favorite music service. Yeah, you could do a lot worse than starting with Vicente Fernandez. Is that your guy? He is, definitely. He's a good gateway Mariachi performer, I think, you know? Yeah. Oh, by the way, shout out, since I mentioned Women in Disco, Rolling Stone Magazine just

came out with, they're doing a bunch of Top 200 lists, and they came out with their Top 200 dance songs of all time, and not just Disco, just like Club, anything. And Donna Summer was number one. Oh, nice. With I Feel Love, one of the greatest songs ever. That is a good one. That is a great one, you're right. Well since Chuck doesn't have anything else, and I don't either, I think that means to

everybody that it's time for Listener Mail. Yeah, we're going to call this Breaking News. It's fun when stuff you should know mystery is eventually solved. Oh yeah, holy cow. And Australia woke up and started emailing us one after the other around midday Georgia time today because the Summerton Man has been solved. Yeah. The Summerton Man mystery.

I'm like, I'm bivalent about this, I don't know how I feel. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Did you want it to remain a mystery? Yeah, I think I did, actually. Oh, I'm sorry. I don't think there was any harm in it remaining a mystery forever, and I almost feel like this guy just kind of cheated.

All right, well here we go, long-time Listener, first-time writer from Adelaide. Australia, I've got an excuse to write in. I thought you and your listeners might be interested in Breaking News. After exhuming the body last year, Professor Derek Abbott, boo, a researcher at the University of Adelaide has completed DNA matching. Oh, I get what you mean. He didn't do like just good detective work unless you want to discount DNA as good detective work.

There's that show called The New Detectives, and it's all about this kind of thing, but I don't know. All right. So we like the old detectives. Yeah. In this particular case, I got no problem with using DNA evidence to capture contemporary murderers. How about that?

All right. Or to exculpate and exonerate. Yeah. He's not like Jackie Childs all of a sudden. I don't even know who that is. Oh, Jackie Childs from Seinfeld? Yeah. Yeah, totally.

All right, creamer. Number two man was Carl Webb, an engineer and instrument maker from Melbourne, who came to Adelaide seeking a reconnection with his estranged wife. The name of the tie, T. Keen, was his brother-in-law. The book of Persian poetry is still a mystery, so you got that going for me. Okay, that's good. And thanks for the show, and that is from Rafe and many others, but Rafe was the first person we got to.

Yeah. Or they got to us. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Rafe, and everybody for sending that in. Yeah. Who knows? Well, at least the Tammam shoot part is still a mystery, okay? Yeah, that's right.

Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Rafe did and kind of bring us down, at me at least, you can do that via email. Send it off to stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want

to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Introduce the Biz Take, your all things music, business and media podcast. Join me, Joe Wasleski and my co-host, Colin McKay every Wednesday, where we discuss the breaking news, changing the music industry, and what your favorite artists and creatives are up to. Listen to new episodes of the Biz Tape every Wednesday on the Nashville Podcast Network, available on iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.