The Hardcore Rap Nexus
As narcocorridos were gaining popularity in both Mexico and the United States in the early 1980's, another genre of music was beginning to garner a lot of attention as well, hardcore rap. As artists like N.W.A., Ice-T, Tupac, and Dead Prez began gaining popularity within the rap genre, Chalino Sanchez began his rise to the top of the narcocorrido genre.
While Chalino was already an accomplished artist, his rise to stardom occured in a club in Coachella, California, when "someone came up to the stage and shot Chalino on his side. Chalino pulled out his gun and shot back. By the end of the shootout, the would-be assassin would end up dead, shot in the mouth with his own pistol" (Daniel 2015). Several months later Chalino Sanchez's luck ran out and he was assassinated after a concert in Culiacan, Mexico. The previous shootout and subsequent assassination cemented Chalino Sanchez's legacy as an anti-hero, "the Mexican version of Tupac Shakur" (Daniel 2015).
The idea of the anti-hero is nothing new in either the rap or corrido tradition, as Amanda Morrison (2008) states in her article, Musical Trafficking: Urban Youth and the Narcocorrido-Hardcore Rap Nexus, both the narcocorrido and hardcore rap originate from the same socio-economic conditions: "confrontation with the global forces of deindustrialization, which have since the '70s displaced the blue-collar jobs that once stabilized American working-class minority communities. Many of these jobs have moved to Mexico, where the labor is cheap, poverty is high and thousands are forced to immigrate north, only to confront the same blighted, crime ridden conditions facing the jobless and working poor in major American cities, as well as massive cutbacks in social services, re-entrenched racial segregation and increased anti-immigrant sentiment" (Morrison 2008:383). These political and socio-economic conditions have created anti-heroes out of such figures as El Chapo Guzman, Pablo Escobar, and John Gotti; figures who have garnered fame and fortune outside of the traditional bourgeois economy. Aside from the political and socio-economic conditions that narcocorridos and hardcore rap share, they also both fit into Richard Bauman's framework for verbal art. Bauman's main theme in describing verbal art is "that verbal communication carries an artistic or esthetic dimension that is connected to the specific setting and culture of those participating in the communciation" (Sims & Stephens 2011:136), it just happens that this culture is one that glorifies the criminal element of our society.
WARNING: The following video is explicit, but speaks to the some of the socio-economic conditions that precipitated both the narcocorrido and hardcore rap genres.
