A bloody free-for-all has broken out in Mexico City. Gangs of young
women punch and claw each others' faces. Office workers suddenly explode
into rages and start attacking colleagues. A restaurant kitchen bursts
into a fiery melee.
Cutting through the music-video carnage, a
woman's voice, tender and empathetic as a grieving angel's, laments the
shocking scene. "Everything was joyful in my city/ My tree flowered/
Everyone wanted to come here/ But my blood spilled..../ Now I breathe
fear."
Aficionados of rock en espanol will instantly
recognize the distinctive sound of Mexican-American singer-songwriter
Julieta Venegas, who's glimpsed a few times in the video for "Tuve Para
Dar" (I Had to Give), the first single off her latest album, "Los
Momentos" (The Moments).
Passing through L.A. recently to
promote her new disc, Venegas, who was born in Long Beach, Calif., and
raised in Tijuana, said the metaphorical references to Mexico's recent
epidemic of drug-related violence in "Tuve Para Dar" reflected her
desire to "talk about things that were mas profundidades" - more
profound - "maybe even harder themes like sadness or loneliness or
fear."
An intensely introspective quality has been associated
with Venegas ever since she started performing and recording in the
1990s. It helped her become both a fan favorite and a critics'
sweetheart, with landmark albums like "Aqui" (1997) and "Bueninvento"
(2000), as well as a powerful female presence in the still macho-centric
world of Latin rock.
As her new album's title suggests,
Venegas wanted the songs in "Los Momentos" to feel personal and
immediate. She wrote and recorded the album while raising her 3-year-old
daughter as a single mother, and several songs allude to the challenges
of negotiating a space between one's private and public selves.
"Having a child kind of gives you like a good - ack! It totally
shook me up and just took all my fears away creatively. It just made me
fearless, somehow," she said during an interview at a publicist's loft
downtown.
She paused, as if reconsidering. "I don't know if
it has to do with being a mom or it just has to do with growing up, I
guess, just being able to express different things. And I realized that I
wasn't in the mood for easy songs at all."
Maturity seems to
have settled comfortably on Venegas, 42, who recently opened a tour in
Brazil that she expects will bring her to Los Angeles this fall.
A precocious talent, she grew up in Tijuana playing piano and
studying music theory. Later, jamming with various bands, she became
part of the border city's first-wave forays into aggressive fusions of
ska, reggae, rock and Mexican regional music.
But it wasn't
until she moved to Mexico City, where she continues to live, that
Venegas began to seriously pursue her own songwriting, which led to her
first album, "Aqui," produced in L.A. by Gustavo Santaolalla. Along with
bands like Cafe Tacuba, Venegas helped invent Mexican alternative rock
by introducing a more worldly sensibility and traditional instrumental
textures to a Mexican rock scene that too often had simply mimicked
Anglo-American guitar-god swagger.
Her new album retraces
part of that evolutionary path through collaborations with old friends
such as the Mexican singer-songwriters Ceci Bastida and Natalia
Lafourcade, Cafe Tacuba lead singer Ruben Albarran, and Ana Tijoux, the
French Chilean rapper-chanteuse. Fittingly, the song on which Albarran
and Tijoux appear, "Vuelve" (Come Back), deals with themes of
friendship, exile and reconciliation.
"As soon as I wrote
'Vuelve' I thought of Ana," Venegas said, "because I thought that she
could give another vision to the song. Because the song is about telling
somebody from out of Mexico to come back to my country."
Produced by Yamil Rezc, who has teamed up with Mexican progressive bands
like Zoe and Hello Seahorse!, "Los Momentos" follows the current global
passion for electronic dance music. The record derives its subtle power
from the tension between its dreamy, electro-pop surfaces and the
pensive lyrics often rumbling beneath them.
Longtime
followers of Venegas may regard "Los Momentos" as residing somewhere
between her early records and later, more commercially oriented releases
such as "Si" (Yes), from 2003, and "Limon y Sal" (Lemon and Salt),
which came out three years later. Those albums, packed with catchy love
songs, were greeted with approval by Spanish-language radio programmers,
but with less enthusiasm by those who thought that Venegas was moving
away from her indie roots.
Venegas, for her part, seems
unconcerned with such chatter, maybe because she's too busy with her new
projects. They include contributing "four or five" songs to a Mexican
animated children's film, and working on music for another film, which
she said she's not yet at liberty to name.
Lending her
efforts to other peoples' creative ventures has been liberating, she
said, "because it takes me out of my own space and it takes me out of my
own stories and my dramas."
As for her private world, she
finds it rewardingly absorbing - especially since she built a recording
studio next door to her house.
"When we were doing the album,
everything just felt so natural," she said. "I would say, 'You know
what, guys, I'm going to go bathe my child and put her in bed, and I'll
be back,' and I'd come back, and it was great because I didn't have to
disconnect one thing from the other. It was all kind of interconnected."
The grisly discovery was made Sunday night in the community of Santa Clara, the Tamaulipas Attorney General’s Office and the Public Safety Secretariat said in a joint statement.
The Gulf and Los Zetas drug cartels have been fighting for control of Tamaulipas and smuggling routes into the United States.
Police received a tip from a caller that the bodies were inside a GMC Yukon SUV, the state agencies said.
“The remains of nine unidentified males, the majority of them dismembered, were found inside the vehicle,” the AG’s office and the secretariat said.
The bodies were taken to the morgue, where specialists will try to identify them.
A Mexico City newspaper reported Monday that 1,025 people died in drug-related violence in March, making it the deadliest month since President Enrique Peña Nieto took office.
A total of 3,919 people have been killed in drug-related incidents since Dec. 1, 2012, the day Peña Nieto took office, the Milenio newspaper said.
The war on drugs launched by former President Felipe Calderon, who was in office from 2006 to 2012, left about 70,000 people dead, or an average of 32 per day, in Mexico, officials say.
Calderon, of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, deployed thousands of soldiers and Federal Police officers across the country to fight drug cartels.
Peña Nieto, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, has continued the strategy implemented by Calderon of taking on the cartels, but he has also called for bolstering intelligence capabilities and attacking criminal organizations’ entire structures, not just kingpins.
The grisly discovery was made Sunday night in the community of Santa Clara, the Tamaulipas Attorney General’s Office and the Public Safety Secretariat said in a joint statement.
The Gulf and Los Zetas drug cartels have been fighting for control of Tamaulipas and smuggling routes into the United States.
Police received a tip from a caller that the bodies were inside a GMC Yukon SUV, the state agencies said.
“The remains of nine unidentified males, the majority of them dismembered, were found inside the vehicle,” the AG’s office and the secretariat said.
The bodies were taken to the morgue, where specialists will try to identify them.
A Mexico City newspaper reported Monday that 1,025 people died in drug-related violence in March, making it the deadliest month since President Enrique Peña Nieto took office.
A total of 3,919 people have been killed in drug-related incidents since Dec. 1, 2012, the day Peña Nieto took office, the Milenio newspaper said.
The war on drugs launched by former President Felipe Calderon, who was in office from 2006 to 2012, left about 70,000 people dead, or an average of 32 per day, in Mexico, officials say.
Calderon, of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, deployed thousands of soldiers and Federal Police officers across the country to fight drug cartels.
Peña Nieto, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, has continued the strategy implemented by Calderon of taking on the cartels, but he has also called for bolstering intelligence capabilities and attacking criminal organizations’ entire structures, not just kingpins.