Two Pop Stars Try to Revive Mexico's Good Old Days, in Song at Least Jonathan Bogart - The Atlantic
go to original April 18, 2013

Julieta Venegas (L) and Natalia Lafourcade went retro for their latest releases - in part as a reaction against the grim headlines often seen as defining their country in the present. (The Atlantic)

The news from Mexico for the past six years has often been horrific. Rival drug gangs slaughtering one another and innocent civilians. The Mexican Army and state officials waging their own war against (and according to rumor, sometimes on behalf of) the cartels. Political leaders taking advantage of unrest to curtail the freedom of the press and intimidate opponents, youthful protests against violence and corruption being ignored or sidelined. And, as always, the poorest, most vulnerable communities in the border states bearing the brunt of the wars that have left, at recent estimates, 100,000 dead and 1.8 million displaced.

Julieta Venegas - Tuve Para Dar (julietavenegasVEVO)

"If you live your life according to the news, you'll never go outside," said Mexican singer-songwriter Julieta Venegas in an interview with the Mexican newspaper La Jornada last month. "What the news says is never the whole truth; a little bit of it, no more." She was promoting the new album Los Momentos, her seventh since 1997 and something of a sonic departure for her: a musical madeleine that evokes and urges a return to Mexico's once-peaceful past.

Natalia Lafourcade, Meme - Limosna (NLaFourcadeVEVO)

... Ten years younger than Venegas, Lafourcade has been a force in Mexican music since 2003, with her small voice and wide musical imagination providing hits like "En el 2000" and "Ella Es Bonita." But her current album, Mujer Divina, is a collection of duets covering songs written by the Mexican composer Agustín Lara (1897-1970), one of the towering icons of 20th-century popular music. If Irving Berlin had also been George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, the U.S. might have a comparable figure. The years of his primacy, roughly 1930-1960, are widely thought of as a Golden Age in Mexican cultural, economic, and social achievement.

Read the rest at The Atlantic

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