Café Tacvba

Singer Rubén “Cosme” Albarrán, keyboardist Emmanuel “Meme” del Real, guitarist Joselo Rangel and bassist Enrique “Quique” Rangel formed the band in 1989. They initially chose as their name the Spanish title of a Martin Scorsese film, “Alicia ya no vive aquí”, before changing it first to Café Tacuba and then, definitively, to Café Tacvba.

The name was borrowed from a historic restaurant located in the Centro district of Mexico City, several kilometers from the homes of the four musicians, who all came from Ciudad Satélite, a futurist-inspired urban development (a sort of neo-Aztec take on Brasília).

In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País in 2004, del Real stated: “Coffee is a word – and a seed – that the Spanish brought over [ed.: to America from Africa], and tacuba was, for the Aztecs, the place where wicker grows.”

On the subject of the aforementioned eatery, Albarrán reportedly added: “We thought that place represented very well what we wanted to do with music, since the recipes were Spanish but used local, indigenous ingredients. The architecture, the paintings, were perfect for the mix we wanted to express” (from “Bios. Vidas que marcaron la tuya”, National Geographic, 2019).

It's said that the graphic switch from “u” to “v” was meant to avoid a legal dispute with the restaurant, something that never actually happened over the course of their career. It's worth noting, however, that the vocalic use of “v”, derived from the ancient Roman phoneme, only reaffirms the project's Latin identity.

At the dawn of the Nineties, Argentine musician and producer Gustavo Santaolalla frequently traveled to Mexico, mainly to oversee recording sessions for local band Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del Quinto Patio, whose blend of ska, alternative rock and Ibero-American folk was effectively paving the way for what would come to be known internationally as the “latin alternative” genre — the same one Café Tacvba would later become leading exponents of.

The four musicians managed to get in touch with Santaolalla and send him a demo. Despite the recording's poor quality, the Argentine producer was able to spot the potential behind those rough-edged songs and worked to get them signed by Wea.

“Café Tacvba” came out in 1992 and immediately caught the public's attention, prompting the band to tour extensively across Mexico — an experience that would prove formative.

Sessions for the follow-up album, recorded between Mexico City and Los Angeles, took up all of 1993. Having encountered, over the course of the tour, worlds different from their own and the rich, varied heritage of Mexican folk music, the band decided to fold those elements into their sound, raising the bar in terms of ambition.

Santaolalla could hardly have been a better fit as producer: besides having worked with the aforementioned Maldita Vecindad, in the Seventies he had been a member of Arco Iris, among the founders of Andean rock, a fusion of prog from English-speaking countries with the folklore of the nations along the South American cordillera.

The new album, “Re” [note 1], finally saw the light of day on July 22, 1994. The title is heavily conceptual: it derives from the prefix “re-”, which indicates repetition (and, in colloquial use, also reaffirmation), thus standing as the barest literal expression of everything cyclical about existence. The album's stylistic multiplicity thus follows a deliberate back-and-forth path between tradition, innovation and futuristic flights of fancy.

The cover art features a snail shell – which encapsulates that same notion of circularity and harmonic design running through the album's content – set against a red background, itself embroidered with engravings reminiscent of pre-Columbian symbols.

Furthermore, in a limited edition of the album, the artwork includes the words “repetición”, “reiteración”, “reciclaje” and “resistencia”, along with a kind of spiral-shaped calligram bearing the words "Everything that once was will be again, and everything that is will cease to be" (a proverb from náhuatl culture) as well as a quote from Mexican anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla addressing the cyclical notion of time.

The opening track is “El aparato”, a statement of intent that underpins the whole record, with its eclectic mix blending electronic sounds – as with its predecessor, the entire album rests on a drum machine – and local influences over a ternary rhythmic base, common to all folkloric genres across Latin America, from the Bolivian highlands to Baja California.

Indeed, the folk style the track most closely resembles is the jarana yucatanina (typical of the Yucatán peninsula), a rhythm akin to the jarana limeña of Peru's Pacific coast. The lead instrument is the jarana jarocha, a Creole descendant of the five-course baroque guitar, as are the Andean charango and the Venezuelan cuatro. The ethnic-tribal-flavored choruses evoke African music, whose echo can be heard across many Creole cultures of Latin America.

The lyrics recount the alien abduction of a certain Pablo, likely as an allegory for a mystical-hallucinogenic experience:

Oh, there's this man who controls the device,

when I turn around, it's above me, it's a light,

for a while it left me motionless,

all that was left was the buzzing of the light.

I heard it in my head,

it spoke to me in a strange tongue, but I understood it,

I swear I hadn't been drinking,

I was simply dazzled, I lost all sense of time.

Oh, I know it will come for me

and take me to a garden, yes.

It was when I met Pablo

that he told me this story, I didn't believe him.

It was a few months ago,

but we haven't seen him around here since.

I don't know what to think anymore,

ever since a letter arrived from the hospital.

Pablo has burns and permanent blindness,

he doesn't want to talk

“Ingrata” is the track that made them known even outside of Mexico, thanks in part to the hilarious video showing Albarrán with a fighting-rooster hairdo, thrashing about hysterically among real butcher-shop chickens: an eloquent image, meant to satirize the usual machista themes of the norteñas, rural dances from northern Mexico, whose already agitated native rhythm, close to polka, is further sped up by the ska beat.

Since 2017 the band no longer plays the song live, except by changing the original lyrics, in which the male protagonist's unrequited infatuation and wounded pride are inexorably resolved by punishing the ungrateful woman with gunshots. Clearly, it was meant as a satirical denunciation, and that's how audiences understood it at the time, but given the current state of global culture and the evolution of the debate in the media and on social networks, the band felt it could be read as trivializing violence against women, or worse, as a direct apology for it.

“El ciclón” boasts one of their most interesting lyrics: first a list of elemental images that seem to encode, like a Rosetta Stone, various keys to interpreting the whole project, then a discourse on the concept of God [note 2]. Worth noting is Albarrán's shift in vocal timbre, singing the intro in a clean, delicate tone before launching into a hoarse, jarring rap.

The music, built around a funk groove and a Clavinet à la Stevie Wonder, flows into a ring-around-the-rosy chorus, reinforcing the idea of circular energy already hinted at by the title:

I, arrow, flower, pollen, arrow, bee, bear, fish,

arrow, water, rise up, cloud, it rains, tree, arrow, oxygen, arrow, lung.

Nopiltze [note 3], my daughter, does God never die?

Which God are you referring to? It all depends on that.

There are gods who thought the world was infinite,

and there's no balance among the kingdoms, my son.

It turns and turns around, and spins turning,

it turns and turns around, and rolls and rolls

In "El borrego" the band examines the identity void of postmodern youth through its trademark debunking lens. A blast of industrial metal laced with parodic acidity, aimed at the adolescent urge — often shallow and fickle — to identify with a given social clique or received opinion, even when it means embracing blatantly contradictory ideologies. The term "borrego" (literally "lamb") is indeed used colloquially to mean a naive youngster, a greenhorn, and in this song specifically to describe someone who sees themselves as a rebel while remaining just another anonymous creature, subject to the rules of the flock:

I'm an anarchist, I'm a neo-Nazi,

I'm a skinhead and I'm an environmentalist,

I'm a Peronist, I'm a terrorist,

a capitalist and I'm also a pacifist.

I'm an activist, a unionist,

I'm aggressive and very alternative.

I'm a sportsman, from the Rotaract,

polytheist and I'm also a good Christian,

and at concerts what matters is the pogo.

But when I'm at home, what I really need is some tropical music.

I like jevimetal, I like jarcor,

I like Patric Miler and I like gronch too. [note 4]

I like Maldita, I like Lupita

and I listen to Magneto when my girlfriend's around. [note 5]

I like dressing in black with painted lips,

but always looking good at the office, well adjusted.

I like throwing stones, I like picking them up,

I like painting fences and then going to wash them clean

The musical style and poetic vein of "Esa noche" clearly align with the ranchera (a form of Mexican popular music that took hold at the start of the twentieth century, one of the main forces behind the urbanization of rural traditions). The most obvious point of reference is Chavela Vargas, so much so that when she died in 2012, Joselo Rangel (not only the band's guitarist but also a skilled essayist) wrote in his regular column for the Mexican newspaper Excélsior that the core idea had come to him in the middle of the night, and that it took him several days to make sure it wasn't an unintentional lift from Vargas's repertoire: "She planted seeds in our minds and hearts that never stop blooming."

Closer to English music is "Ixtepec", with a programmed rhythm not unlike that of New Order and an acoustic guitar driving a fast rumba, reminiscent of Aztec Camera.

In literary terms, we're in the territory of Latin American magic realism, of which the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo was one of the leading exponents. The story is explicitly inspired by Elena Garro's novel "Recollections of Things to Come": wandering aimlessly through Ixtepec (a city on Mexico's southern Pacific coast boasting a vast cultural tradition inherited from the native Zapotec people), Juan falls under the spell of Marta, "...the dark-skinned girl from the coast who wanted a Spanish lover." Yet the protagonist's aimless steps and the girl's influence are nothing more than a representation of the march of time and the unsolvable mystery of existence: "I can already hear footsteps on my roads, but it's not because of Marta, it's me. It's my clock that's traveling."

"Trópico de Cáncer" employs a classic protest-song format: a dialogue between two voices representing opposing archetypes and interests within a social conflict, such as the well-off and the working class, or, more specifically, the plundering of nature in the name of progress versus the progressive who champions conservation in the name of the common good.

Musically, it's another vividly colored Latin canvas, with touches of bossa nova on the six strings, an alternation of flamenco and jazz harmonies in the vocals, call-and-response backing vocals in the style of Uruguayan carnival murgas, and glissando bass lines (worth noting that there's no electric bass anywhere on the album: Enrique Rangel replaced it with double bass or local equivalents such as the tololoche).

Why are you leaving the company, Salvador,

if there's still a lot of green out there?

If progress is our trade

and there are still so many Indios out there

who don't know what it means to live in a city (like decent folk do),

don't you see you're a bridge

between the wild and modernity?

Salvador the engineer, Salvatore of humanity. [...]

Dear fellow Mexican oil professionals,

don't think I won't miss the smell of crude oil,

but the fact is I think we humans

no longer need hydrocarbons.

That's why I'm leaving now,

I don't want anything to do

with that ugly cycle of action, construction, destruction

"El metro", electropop cut through with occasional funk syncopation, paints the amusing tale of an ordinary man perpetually stuck in the subway. A sort of contemporary Sisyphus, shut away among the carriages of that urban underworld, yet with an ambivalent state of mind, caught between the anguish of captivity and the pleasant serenity of isolating himself from conflicts on the outside:

I got on a subway car

and I haven't been able to get out of here.

I've spent more than three or four months

living down here underground, in the subway.

[The stops] Zocalo, Hidalgo, Chabacano,

I've passed through them a million times.

I wanted to get out the door,

but there's always someone pushing me back inside.

And when at night I think of you, I know you remember me,

but trapped in this car, I don't know if I'll ever get out again.

I chew pills, popsicles, chocolates, chewing gum and gummy bears,

I've already got six sets of needles, eight box cutters, and lighters (to sell).

I think my hair has grown, along with my beard and wrinkles,

I don't know when it's day or night,

I don't know if it's already been a hundred years in here.

And there are moments when I start to miss you

and I feel like crying,

I can't remember your face

and I don't know if I'll ever kiss you again

“El fin de la infancia” blends the brass bands of the quebradita sinaloense (a dance typical of the state of Sinaloa) with injections of ska rhythm, while the lyrics are both a celebration of dance and a denunciation of the malinchismo typical of Latin American societies (“malinchismo” is a derogatory term denoting a preference for what is foreign over what is native to one's own country. The name comes from La Malinche, a native woman given as a slave and concubine to the conquistador Hernán Cortez).

“Madrugal” (a play on words between “madrigal”, the musical and literary compositional form that spread during the Renaissance, and “madrugada”, meaning the hours between night and dawn), is a Mexican bolero that casts a mocking eye on the megalopolis in the early morning, when: “All splendour fades, people drink in the streets, the cathedral vanishes amid smog and pigeon droppings.”

“Pez” opens with a snare roll in rockabilly style (perhaps a nod to Eddie Cochran's “C'mon Everybody”), which fades out within five seconds only to return later, blending into a fabric of clean, barely effected guitars. The jangle tones would seem to be drawn from Anglo-American rock of the Sixties, but it's worth noting that style was itself originally shaped by a considerable influence from Hispanic-American music: it's no coincidence that arpeggiated guitar technique can still be found today in Latin subgenres such as Tex-Mex, Caribbean bachata or South American cumbia.

“La negrita” tells the life story of a working-class woman who sells fried fish at a big-city market and dreams of returning to her homeland. Here too we find that characteristic bright, sunny sound of arpeggiated chordophones (typical across the whole continent, whether it's the guitarrón of Mexican mariachi, the Colombian tiple, the Venezuelan cuatro, the Andean charango and ronroco, or the Paraguayan harp), laid over a samba rhythm.

“El tlatoani del barrio” (the “tlatoani”, in the Nahuatl language, were the indigenous rulers of Mesoamerica) is a funk track driven by a piano groove and streaked with breakbeat infiltrations, telling the story of how Albarrán's parents met.

“Las flores” opens with a 3/4 time signature drawn from Venezuelan llanero or joropo, but within seconds settles into the 4/4 of a ska midtempo, carrying through to its abrupt ending, while “La pinta” is an alternative rock track with distorted guitars, providing the frame for lyrics that run through every cliché of romantic ballads, perhaps in an attempt to reinterpret them, as in the direct quote of Ricky Martin's contemporary hit: “Fuego contra fuego es amar, fuego del que no puedo escapar”.

The word “pinta” is used in various Spanish-speaking countries to denote beauty and elegance, but also brashness, when that beauty is only skin-deep.

“El baile y el salón” is a polished piece of dance-pop and remains one of the audience's favourite tracks, thanks in part to the onomatopoeic chorus that opens it. The lyrics, which describe a young gay man falling in love, have made it one of the anthems of the Latin American LGBTQ+ community:

We kissed while dancing, in the middle of the venue,

the music was already reaching its final bar.

Silent glances, but who would have ever guessed,

that after this first dance,

I would fall in love.

[…] Life is a great dance and the world is a ballroom

and there are so many couples dancing

around us.

[…] I was a lone dancer, I was left speechless,

while you were showing me

that love is dancing.

[…] And so, dancing,

I want you to make love to me,

man to man,

voleuz-vous coucher avec moi?

In "El puñal y el corazón", forever balanced between parody and homage, the obsessive passion of the Latin man dances to the beat of salsa caribeña before drifting almost imperceptibly toward bossa nova in the line that echoes the title: "…and not even with a dagger will you be able to remove me from your heart".

To close, the brief coda of "El balcón" offers one last, unexpected lounge-jazzy caress, complete with a tropical, erotic and familiar postcard:

You and I on the balcony

overlooking the banana plantations,

the masters are dead and you

are still there scrubbing the checkerboard floor.

Come here, from here you can see

all the lands that are now ours,

and a zambo child will be the heir, [note 6]

since this is what comes from an indigenous man and a black woman

“Re” sells 125,000 copies in Mexico and a few tens of thousands more across the rest of Latin America and the Spanish-speaking community in the United States. A considerable result, though not as overwhelming as the current popularity of several of its tracks would suggest. This is probably due to the band's enduring popularity and the esteem in which the album is held by local media, who, because of the breadth of its influences and the cultural impact it generated, almost unanimously point to it as the greatest album in the history of Mexican music.

[note 1] Not to be confused with the Italian noun that is a synonym for monarch, which in Spanish is “rey”.

[note 2] In the fragmentary nature of the lyrics and in the allusions to the whirlwind, to God, to flowers and so on, one can trace something similar to “En remolinos” by the Argentine Soda Stereo, part of the album “Dynamo” (1992). Since Café Tacvba are big fans of the band, the connection isn't so far-fetched.

[note 3] “Nopiltze” is a greeting and a call in the Mayan and Náhuatl languages, roughly equivalent to “hey” or “hola”.

[note 4] In order to convey a certain provincial aspiration to status and awareness of trends and fashions, all the English-language terms are comically mangled: Rotaract (an organization for young Rotary Club leaders), heavy metal, hardcore, grunge and Patrick Miller (the alias of Roberto Devesa, a famous Mexican DJ).

[note 5] In this passage, what one claims to appreciate is contrasted with what one is willing to stoop to in order to please others: Maldita Vecindad and La Lupita are in fact two alternative music groups, while Magneto is a boy band.

[note 6] “Zambo” refers to anyone of partly African and partly Amerindian descent. The term is often used pejoratively, but here it is flipped into a symbol of pride and belonging.

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04/08/2024