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The Thrills and Los Tigres del Norte recall their separate Californias
BY JOSH KUN
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Early last month, Arnold Schwarzenegger made a campaign stop at an Inner City Games softball tournament in Santa Fe Springs, where he told the crowd that though he opposed undocumented immigrants, he was a friend of the Mexican people. "I love Mexico," he said. "I’ve done four movies down there." It was an act of great rhetorical improv: pledge support for Mexicans in California by erasing them. There are no Mexicans, there is only Mexico — the Mexico of soundstages south of Tijuana, desert back lots south of Juárez, expanses of Cabo that double as Mycenæan battlefields in the soon-to-be-released Brad Pitt epic Troy. In other words, who needs Mexicans when you’ve got Antonio Banderas? Mexicans in California have long lived at the surreal junction between cinematic imagination and brutal political reality — and to be fair, so has California itself. For all of the recall’s conservative scheming and tax-dollar drainage, at least it opened the floor to much-needed debates over just who the state belongs to. The Irish band the Thrills seem to think it’s theirs. Their debut album, So Much for the City (Virgin), is all about California. The cover is designed to look like a behind-the-scenes studio press shot, with the band lounging in director’s chairs on a plot of vacant farm land beneath the blinding white glow of set lights. The song titles — "Santa Cruz," "Big Sur," "Hollywood Kids" — recall Mel Tormé’s 1957 California Suite, a fawning jazz symphony that name-dropped Huntington Park and Modesto, squeezing California locales into swinger rhymes like "Got the date on the Golden Gate" and, my favorite, from the song "La Jolla," "La Jolla won’t annoya," But whereas Tormé was writing a sweeping tourist postcard that doubled as go-west boosterism, the Thrills keep it personal and escapist. California is where they run to, where they recover by the sea. So Much for the City is a sun-kissed Byrds-sounding valentine to an endless summer that’s never existed except in the realm of romance and myth. The album would go down a lot smoother if its release hadn’t coincided with a recall election that thrust the state’s racial politics and economic inequalities center stage. The California of So Much for the City is what the dead-in-the-water "racial privacy initiative" Proposition 54 wanted to make California sound like: an imaginary place where differences don’t matter, where a person can still believe that race is private and everything’s good in the sun’s warmth. With the ghost of Proposition 187’s denial of health and education benefits to the undocumented still haunting us (former governor Pete Wilson is, after all, riding shotgun in Arnold’s Hummer), and with a new governor whose palatial West LA homes make the Sacramento mansion seem like a guest house, the Thrills’ California is the last thing the state needs right now, no matter how refreshing its nostalgic coastal breezes feel. After all, this was an election that affected enough Mexicans in California that it had an effect on Mexico, too. And the increasingly interconnected fates of California and Mexico are precisely what you hear in the music of Los Tigres del Norte, the Sinaloan norteño kings who call Northern California home. Their new 20 Corridos Involvidables (Fonovisa) may be a greatest-hits package, but it’s also a great soundtrack for the California that nobody in the recall biz could afford to get too nostalgic over. Los Tigres’ California is immigrant California, and they treat the state as an extension of Mexico (what many dub "Mexifornia"), a place crossed by migrant workers, corporate administrators, and drug smugglers alike, where single families have dual residences, often claim dual citizenship, and fight daily battles to balance cultural traditions. Corridos — narrative ballads set to accordions and acoustic guitars — are the perfect form for grass-roots truth telling. They are the songs of the people, not the politicians. Los Tigres sing of Tijuana ("El hijo de Tijuana"), and rather than lounging at Big Sur, their protagonists move between La Puente and Zacatecas, between Michoacán and Redwood City. It’s a California best seen in the six music videos included on Inolvidables. The most moving, "Mi sangre prisionera," is set in suburban San Jose, where a Mexican father gets a call in the middle of the night from the jail where his distressed teenage son is being held. In this way, the videos perform their own kind of recall, replacing myths with realities that — unlike anything Arnold’s ever gone to Mexico to make — are worth watching. The Thrills perform next Friday, October 24, at Axis, 13 Lansdowne Street; call (617) 262-2437.
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