The first thing I saw when I hit the curb outside the Mexico City airport was two bodyguards in beige suits flying out of the doors of a tinted-window Suburban. Doors slammed, traffic stopped, horns blared, and they ran up to the front of another Suburban that had just pulled up right behind them. They folded their arms as a groomed and chiseled telenovela star made his way from the car into the terminal. Once he was safely delivered, more doors slammed and the Suburbans pulled away, just two more luxury tanks for personal hire merging into the mess of the Mexico City auto crunch.
It was the perfect greeting to a city that runs on the energy of its own sensory overload. Mexico City is pure sound and vision, a screeching and choked cloud of smog and hot cement that’s all eyes and ears. Nothing happens there — from assassinations and robberies to street-corner fresh-fruit blending and poet cab drivers spewing verse while changing lanes — that doesn’t make either a scene or a noise.
Many cities could role-play as one of Italo Calvino’s famous "invisible cities" — magical and mysterious wonderlands of underground labyrinths and hidden infrastructures — but Mexico City is not one of them. It is, instead, a visible city, an outward city, a city of endless and ecstatic exteriors where everything — even its secrets and undergrounds and masked realities — ends up making itself seen.
So much so that a group of Mexico City artists have created a "graphic dictionary" of the city: ABC DF (Fundación Televisa), a book of 2000 photographs divided up among 250 A-Z alphabetical word listings. The result is, like the city itself, overwhelming and impossible to register and index with one pair of eyes. I could tell you about the stacked towers of wooden food crates or the fat, chopped root of a giant palm tree wedged into the side of a building. I could tell you about the hanging meat, the rusting vans, the airbrushed taxi door art, the lines of tuxedo’d waiters, the Tlaloc stone statues. And I could tell you about glowing clouds and electric skies and white linens hanging luminescent in the afternoon sun. But that wouldn’t convey the main pleasure effect of ABC DF: the feeling of opening your eyes and being confronted with immensity, accumulation, and multiplicity, of opening your eyes and being asked to visualize the infinite.
"Mexico City is the choreography of the unemployed at stoplights," one of ABC DF’s accompanying texts reads, "it is a theater of ubiquitous stages, it is the crowding of bodies in the Metro, it is the historical depository of smells and tastelessness." Yes, this is the same city where Jack Kerouac went to find Buddhist silence and inner Beat peace back in the ’50s. In the poetry cycle he wrote about his stay, Mexico City Blues, he said he wanted to hear "the silence you hear inside the emptiness that’s there everywhere." The only radio he wanted to tune into played "the music of the uninhabited spheres."
What he got instead was what he called "aztec radio," a street broadcast full of thick sounds and inescapable noises like the scraping of chairs, the clanging of iron pot lids, and the grating of dimes on ice. Even the quietest of Mexico City neighborhoods (try La Condesa just before the city breaks for lunch) has a daily soundscape of audio announcements: the high whistle of bicycle-riding knife sharpeners, the train whistle of plátanos vendors, the bell of the garbage collector, the morning pounding of drummers looking for donations.
That everyday clatter — some of which shows up on ABC DF’s companion CD-ROM — also runs throughout Nuevo (Nonesuch), Kronos Quartet’s new avant-classical tour of Mexican music past and present. Mexico City street noise — the horns of passing cars, the "veinte, veinte" shouts of peso-questing hustlers — is what ties the record together. It connects the Kronos’s roaring, fuzzed-out take on Severiano Briseno’s "El Sinaloense" to compositions as varied as Alberto Domínguez’s classic "Perfidia" (which features Carlos García blowing the swooning chorus on a "musical leaf") and Café Tacuba’s electro-folkloric Mexican raga "12/12." The best use of found Mexican sound, though, comes when Kronos transform the rural lull of "Cuatro Milpas" by splicing a studio organillo (a barrel organ or hurdy-gurdy) into organillo street recordings until we’re left with a chorus that sounds like the chaos of blaring car horns.
Kronos don’t think of Nuevo as an audio dictionary of Mexico or even of Mexico City. But listening to it can produce an effect similar to flipping through ABC DF, a kind of aural vertigo that sends you reeling on an era-hopping road trip from Ensenada down to Veracruz, that asks you to flow from Chalino Sánchez’s gangsta norteño into Juan García Esquivel’s skirt-chasing lounge without forgetting who you are. It works because Kronos don’t treat Mexico as a country with music. They treat Mexico as a country that is music, and by playing what they hear, they make all that accumulation, all that infinity, far easier to face.
