“Por destino soy americano”
How Los Lobos’ The Neighborhood Predicted Bad Bunny’s “Nuevayol”
With Bad Bunny taking his Super Bowl set to new heights of Latino resolve, Los Lobos celebrates more than 50 years since forming in East L.A., with four Grammys, including the quietly defiant all-Spanish album, La Pistola y El Corazón. Though I hedged at calling them great back in 1990, I'm ready to pile on now. Too many good records stacked in a row, enough great ones to make peers nervous, and enough live thrust to keep everybody guessing. They have announced tour dates for 2026, and Louie Pérez stands as one of rock's most improved percussionists. Don't miss any of Hidalgo or Rosas's many worthy side projects either.
ALTHOUGH IT GAVE them their first number-one hit in 1987, Los Lobos' re-creation of Ritchie Valens's "La Bamba" made such piddling use of the band's talents that you began to wince every time it rang its radio rotation bell. Even though they were perfect for Valens covers (especially "Come On, Let's Go"), the movie La Bamba (1987) was so dismal compared to their playing that it reeked of Hollywood tokenism. Had the project been produced ten years earlier, El Chicano would have been riding the success instead. On a Tonight Show appearance, you could see how the song grated on Los Lobos: David Hidalgo anchored it with his high, effortless vocals and Cesar Rosas took a guitar solo that was easily the most deliberately alien playing on network television until Neil Young cut loose with "Rockin' in the Free World" on Saturday Night Live a year later.
When Los Lobos returned from touring behind that number one hit, they relaxed at home and recorded La Pistola y El Corazón, a quiet set of acoustic Mexican favorites, as if to spite the hit machinery that had reduced their music to its lowest common cultural denominator. Anyone who had heard Los Lobos before they revived Ritchie Valens wasn't surprised. With 1986's By the Light of the Moon, this East Los Angeles quintet, who have just issued a new album, had proven themselves worthy of the contemporary roots-rock mantle their debut record had helped invent. How Will the Wolf Survive?, the 1984 title that put their record company Slash on the map, was equal parts hoot ("I Got Loaded") and chagrin ("Our Last Night"), and it brought the Spanish-speaking immigrant influx into pop's foreground. There was plenty of American-minority music to take heed of before you got to Africa or Brazil, the record argued, and the groundswell success of Los Lobos dramatized the way Mexican laments and morning-after songs could assuage Reagan-era hangovers. With telling social anthems like the title track, the accordion suddenly made perfect sense as a link between tradition and retro-chic.
..the groundswell success of Los Lobos dramatized the way Mexican laments and morning-after songs could assuage Reagan-era hangovers. With telling social anthems like the title track, the accordion suddenly made perfect sense as a link between tradition and retro-chic.
On their new The Neighborhood (1990), Los Lobos supply the second chapter to By the Light of the Moon's cultural vignettes. They don’t want to be just another rock band, but by tending their own garden, they’re persuasively realistic about whether rock can save the world. The songs jump between social consciousness and roughneck partying in ways that are convincing and heady.
Hidalgo and Rosas play the mama's boy/tough guy shtick to perfection: Hidalgo with his spotless tenor, Rosas with his break-away soul and no-remorse shades. Instead of a split personality, the record shows off musicianship that's happy to let a singer as consummate as Hidalgo deliver a lighthearted sermon like "Deep Dark Hole" or Jimmy McCracklin's "Georgia Slop" while allowing polar opposite Rosas to camp out on the roof, heaving his left-handed guitar into rockers as if he were tossing firecrackers onto the street. Hidalgo boards often: in a duet with Levon Helm on "Little John of God," in the ladder-climbing melody of "Angel Dance" that sounds like a vocal pirouette. Rosas digs his heels into "I Walk Alone" and a stomp-crunch tune he penned with Willie Dixon, "I Can’t Understand." Their personas give the lighter material something greater than rock-out distraction, and their weightier tunes a healthy sense of perspective. "Little John of God" would be unbearably smug if it were surrounded by similarly icky sentimentalism. When they join voices on the refrains of the ballad "Take My Hand," it’s like brothers making up after an argument…
more
Los Lobos official page, tour dates, discography
National Endowment for the Arts, National Heritage Fellows 2022
As the Latin Playboys, the band dabbled in experimental gestures
Los Super Seven: Supergroup with Rosas on three albums (Los Super Seven 1998, Canto 2001, Heard It on the X 2005
Texmaniacs: With Rosas and Flaco Jiménez on 2006’s Tex-Mex Groove, Soul Disguise (1999), followed by touring
Custom playlist: Wayward Los Lobos (duets, guest appearances, side stages)
More on Bad Bunny: Jon Caramanica on “Bad Bunny’s Halftime Lesson,” Ben Sisario, “The World Will Dance,” and several voices in “Delivers Joyful Super Bowl Halftime Show. Finally, Owen Myers in the Guardian.
To the NYTimes Book Review:
In his review of Until the Last Gun Is Silent, by Matthew F. Delmont ("The Battle That Raged Under the Vietnam War," Feb. 8), David Greenberg writes that Ken Burns's films treat critics of America's wars with "respectful but piteous" sympathy, making Vietnam the "biggest exception," when historians and chroniclers have celebrated the antiwar movement. But that misses a key contradiction.
What kind of historian recounts the Vietnam epic only to land on a peacenik’s apology? All those old white, male Pentagon officials huff and puff and make their explanations for civilian massacres and chemical warfare and illegal secret bombing, but the apologies should come from the left—that’s what counts for balance in Burns’s sensibility…
In The Vietnam War (2017), Burns and Lynn Novick portray student protesters and draft resisters not as principled dissenters but as radicals who owe U.S. soldiers an apology. Among many veterans offering searing testimony, Burns highlights a lone, tearful peace activist who regrets how troops were treated after returning home. That hardly fits the idea of a historian who "decried the war and valorized its detractors."
Far from sustaining the consensus Greenberg describes, Burns's film recast protest as guilt. Many veterans and critics saw it, like Henry Kissinger’s Nobel Peace Prize, with weary cynicism.
noises off
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