The New Yorker:

“Regional Mexican” music is booming, but one young singer is in no mood to celebrate.

By Kelefa Sanneh

Four years ago, when Ivan Cornejo was a junior in high school, he had a meeting with his family to announce that he was dropping out. His parents were alarmed, of course, but his older sister, Pamela, had a more sympathetic reaction, because she also happened to be his manager, and she knew that he wasn’t bluffing when he said that he had to focus on his career. By the time of his announcement, Cornejo was becoming a star on Instagram, where he posted videos of himself singing and strumming his guitar. But, unlike many Instagram kids, he hardly seemed like a kid at all. His specialty was plaintive love songs, delivered in a voice that suggested he was already starting to suspect that romance might be more trouble than it was worth. Not long after he quit school, he released “Está Dañada,” the lament of a boy hoping to make an impression on a hopeless girl. “Está dañada del amor / No siente ningún dolor,” he sang—“She’s damaged by love / She doesn’t feel any pain”—emphasizing the sentiment by enveloping himself in reverb and bending his notes downward, as if he were literally melting with heartache.

“Está Dañada” was a hit—and a demonstration of the rising importance of two overlapping musical domains. One was the frictionless world of streaming, where there are scarcely any limits to how widely a song can spread. The other was the world of Latin music, which was once treated by the American recording industry as a peripheral enterprise but increasingly occupies a place near its center. In the late twenty-tens, a visionary from Puerto Rico known as Bad Bunny began reeling off a string of danceable hits, transforming the locally grown genre of reggaetón and achieving the kind of Anglophone cultural dominance that had generally been denied to Spanish-language performers. (Last fall, Bad Bunny hosted an episode of “Saturday Night Live”; Spotify currently lists him as the twenty-first most listened-to musician in the world.) A song like “Está Dañada,” an acoustic recording with traditional Mexican guitars, might not seem closely related to Bad Bunny, but in fact it was a sly tribute to the growing success and interconnectedness of Latin music. 

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