The cover piece for the week of January 31 (“Rockeros on the Rise” by Sergio Barreto), although I would hope well-intentioned, contains several mistakes that do not quite capture the complexity of the problem at stake when it comes to what’s being referred to as “arena ready Latin rock stars.”
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Yes, there are weekly gigs at La Justicia. The particulars of what a rock show in that venue is like are kind of accurate. I don’t know if La Justicia was opened in 1995. What I do know is that “the first area concert by pop-rockers Mana” was not in 1997 as reported, but in 1994 at another venue in the Little Village area (Apollo’s 2000) with a sold-out crowd of over 2,500 people. Barreto also writes that La Justicia’s owner, Julio Martinez, “saw Jaguares fill the Aragon twice. In just a couple of years, he says, those bands had achieved the sort of popularity it took well-known traditional Mexican singers decades to build here.” Jaguares actually had been playing in Chicago since 1991 in their first incarnation as Caifanes at the Viva Chicago Music Festival in Grant Park (to this date they still use the same font that they used for Caifanes). After that, they headlined a show at Metro a decade ago alongside Maldita Vecindad with hundreds of people standing outside without a ticket. In 1994 they were booked to play at the Park West and then the show was moved to the now defunct Oak Theatre, months later they headlined the Aragon Ballroom, and from then on they have played in Chicago about every six months, either at that venue or at the House of Blues (their fee for playing at the Aragon Ballroom last year was about $200,000). Not exactly a success coming out of nowhere especially considering that these guys have been around since 1984.
The main problem is that there is no such thing as a scene, but these people want the benefits of being called a scene. Unfortunately, due to the complexity of their culture clash, a great majority of these musicians are bent on copying other acts Anglo or non-Anglo due to the lack of musical culture that they possess. Do they know who Fela Kuti, Iggy Pop, Brian Eno, Serge Gainsbourg, Miles Davis, Kraftwerk, the Fall, Caetano Veloso, Neu!, T. Rex, etc., are (just to name a bunch of mainstream acts that are kind of important if you are going into music)? Bands like Vendima suck big time. Did you listen to their record? They might want people to think they are the big shit, but if they stumble upon someone who knows about music then they are at a loss for words. Bands like Planeta de Crystal have been able to fool people like Achy Obejas, telling her that they are big in Spain and Argentina. Sure, it’s easy to just print some bullshit and not do the research. I think the only person taking care of not writing someone else’s delusion of grandeur in the Latin Alternative marketing world is Peter Margasak. At least he asks around and he has the musical culture required to identify some of the stuff going on. What does he think of the local bands “ready to fill arenas”?
Rogers Park
