From Bad Bunny to Featherweight: what the elongated corrido is and how it became the music of the moment

It’s one of those typical stories of the digital age, where an artist’s life can change at any moment, just because of a hit. This is what happened to the band Frontera, a regional Mexican music group formed in 2022 in the municipality of MacAllen, Texas. Today they are in vogue thanks to the simplicity One x100to a lively collaboration with Puerto Rican idol Bad Bunny that puts them at the top of the lists of digital platforms.

Everything happened like a flash. Like any band, the quintet started out playing cover songs at bars and weddings, but they quickly turned a corner with the success of their version of He does not go, of Murten. Then begins a meteoric rise that surprises the musicians, who do not even devote themselves 100% to music, but rather rehearse in their spare time after having freed themselves from their usual duties.

The band hasn’t released its debut album yet, but it’s already won a Latin American Music Award for Best Regional Mexican Song of the Year, entered the Billboard 200, and already hit the stage. at Coachella, with Bad Bunny. “The truth is that I think we weren’t looking for fame, but rather we did it for the love of music” singer Adelaido “Payo” Solís III told Rolling Stone in Spanish.

This is how, unwittingly, they came to work with Bad Bunny in One x100to , which is supposed to be the lead single from their debut album. The key was producer Edgar Barrera, who was the link to the Puerto Rican. The group had already recorded the song when the meeting took place.

“Edgar Barrera comes in, who’s the composer, and he said we’re going to change it, we’re going to change the song. We stayed like ‘but how? what’s going to happen?’ We weren’t prepared. And he said, ‘Trust me, trust me. Everything will be alright. It’s for the good. AND then Benito (Martínez, the real name of Bad Bunny) arrives walking in slow motion towards us and we ended up with the faces of lovers. And that’s how the topic was born, ”Adelaido himself recalls in a conversation with Rolling Stone. In its first week, it reached the Billboard Top 5.

The group had good words for the encounter with Bad Bunny. More when he invited them on stage to do three songs during his recent presentation at the Coachella festival. “He is super simple, humble, a very cool person, very talkative, who lets you be . Because of its fame, we thought it was more exclusive,” Juan Javier Cantu, the band’s accordionist, told Rolling Stone. But from taping to rehearsal the night before Coachella, the simple fact that he said to us, “You can play three songs. And, let’s see, how do you want to do it? and he was listening to them in a corner. And we told him that we wanted to do it like that and he ‘whatever you want’ and I’ll do what you want “.

This isn’t the first time Bad Bunny has ventured into other genres. In the famous album a summer without youhighlighted his versatility by seamlessly passing from the dembow (titi asked me), meringue (after the beach), and al bossa (I am not jealous). And he’s already had a foray through the Mexican regional. True to his adventurous spirit, in 2019, before becoming the phenomenon he is today, he released the single I’m the devil in collaboration with Natanael Cano, one of the names that became key to the sound called Corrido elongated. It’s a cross between rap and regional Mexican, which is all the rage among young people in the southern United States, especially those with Latin roots.

The success of One x100to comes just as other gender-related names have gained ground . Names such as Junior H, Grupo Firme and Featherweight stand out. The latter, born as Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija, is a singer from Zapopán, Mexico, who recently hit the charts with titles like She dances alone (with Eslabón Arnado), which reached No. 1 on the Sptify platform’s Top Global Songs, a list that also includes the single The baby, in its remix version with Yvng Lucas.

Like the Frontera group, Featherweight also took part in the recent edition of Coachella (where he got to meet Bad Bunny) performing the song Chanel, during the presentation of Becky G, who -of course- wore a corridos-style hat; Something like that, like an updated look at the phenomenon that Selena Quintanilla has been pushing before. The 23-year-old Mexican’s rise continued with a participation in Jimmy Fallon’s famous Late, where he performed the hit She dances alone. Now, like Bad Bunny said, everyone wants to be Latino.

And of course, critics flew. In particular, the references to the culture of drugs, very present in Mexico, a country plagued by cartel violence and which has even generated the already famous narcocorridos. So, in the featherweight videos, in addition to the usual cars and girls, we see weapons, bulletproof vests and other tools. Very similar to what emerged in Chile around urban music. “Peso Pluma sings what interests it and its millions of listeners celebrate it -says the critic of El País, Antonio Orutño-. If for his detractors it looks like an apology for crime, it does not have exactly the same importance for him.

But that in no way slowed down the rise of the lying corrido. “I think it was time Julián Peña Jr., the percussionist of the band Frontera, told Rolling Stone, analyzing the good timing of the corrido. Now we are more Mexican everywhere and you don’t have to be born in Mexico to be Mexican, Mexicans are born wherever they want. I think the music is starting to touch a lot of people who, to be honest, haven’t paid attention to that style of music, haven’t paid attention to the lyrics, the style that Mexican regional music is loaded with and I think that has reached the point where people are waiting for the Mexican regional to bring something out”.

Spotify platform data is clear . As of mid-April, there were 20 Latin songs in the Global Top 50, and among the top 20, at least 10 are Latin. A phenomenon that immediately follows the rise of the commented session of Shakira and Bizarrap, in addition to the hit THQ by Karol G and Shakira. A season marked by the Hispanic accent, which found a new vein in the elongated corrido which allowed it to refresh the rise of urban music. And those with business acumen, like Bad Bunny, have taken advantage of it.