Narcocorridos New Rich in Mexico (bootlegging)

                         

      Narcocorridos is a Mexican style of music that originated in the north of Mexico. Before Narcocorridos, the term used to be known as "corridos," which is traditional folk music played with an accordion accompanied by other instruments. The main rhythmic sound comes from the accordion. But after the drug dealing business increased the style of corridos developed into the new style called Narcocorridos. Narco means smugglers.Nowadays both styles are still played. Narcocorridos has gained popularity but mostly comes from the smugglers. The smugglers like to hear Narcocorridos because the songs are made for them to promote them and to help them show their lives.

                                               "A La Moda" by Gerardo Ortiz

A la moda y en buenos carros                  

y mis plebes bien armados
bien vestidos y de trajes
y por fuera empecherados
lestes Prada y sus rosarios              Translation ----->
brillantes por todos lados


Asi se navega el jefe
a la moda trabajando
ya lo conoce la gente
y tambien a sus muchachos
lanza granda y bazuca
devolada arremangamos


Hugo Boss, Dolce & Gabanna
y en su cara lentes Prada
con un Rolex de diamantes
y la Chayenne blindada
entrando al hotel de lujo
junto con sus guarda espaldas


Hay miraron al muchacho
en un ferrari del año
hiban camionetas duras
y varios encapuchados
y la moda ke no falla
andavan edhardysados


Los miraron en un antro
por cierto muy alterados
con botellas en exceso
y las plebes por un lado
con ese porte elegante
protegiendo akel muchacho

                                             "A la Moda" Filmed in San Antonio, Texas


The Narcocorridos is a really similar genre to Ganster Rap music. The difference is that Narcocorridos are from Mexico. And like any other rapper they talk about their personal materialism to shock people and show off money. This is also known as "conspicuous consumption."  "A la Moda" starts talking about how his helpers or "plebes" are dressed luxuriously. Showing off that his helpers have great clothes reflects his wealth in that not only does The Boss/ El Jefe buy luxurious items for himself but also the helpers get luxurious items. The 2nd stanza is when he introduces himself, saying that he works dressed in high fashion and that everyone knows him. Then he describes that he uses Hugo Boss, Dolce & Gabanna, Prada and Rolex with diamonds just as rap music describes too. He mentions going to a luxurious hotel with his body guards following him with a bullet proof car. The fact that he is being escorted by two bodyguards increases the gaudiness but of course he has to do that because he is a smuggler and enemies might harm him. His conspicuous consumption shows that he got his money by bootlegging. At the end he says that his "plebes"  are protecting the boss with class.

The song reminded me of when Gatsby used to work for Dan Cody, the wealthy man. Gatsby, a "plebe" in this case, help this man Dan Cody because only the really wealthy like him would help a poor man like Gatsby. Similar to "A la Moda," the guy shows the big amount of money he has by spending money not only on himself but also on the helpers. Dan Cody left Gatsby with some money just like "A la Moda" talks about the money spent on the boss's servants. Cody hires Gatsby so he could be taken care of by Gatsby. Gatsby "was in turn steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even jailor, for Dan Cody," just how the body guards are with the boss in the "A la Moda" song/video (100). In the last stanza the song describes the scene in a night club drinking and being taken care of by the servants, similarly to the Dan Cody and Gatsby relationship.

In the song "A la Moda" the word "plebes" is being used a couple times. In the song the word means servants/plebeians. The boss states that his "plebes" take care of him similarly to the Feudal period. During the Feudal period the low class would work for the nobles because the "plebes" depended on the money that the royal family owned. In "The Great Gatsby", the first owner of Gatsby's house had a story that he  would pay for five years the tax of everyone in the neighborhood just so their houses could have straw made roofs. The houses around his house would look low class and poor. His idea were similar to the ideology from Feudalism era. The old owner of the house wanted to be seen as the royal family of the neighborhood. In the song "A la Moda" the boss purpose is to be seen as the royal lord with his "plebes" around making him look glorious.

   

Jay-Z and Jay-Gatz, "Niggas" and Nouveau Riche in Paris and West Egg

This growth of punctilious discrimination as to qualitative excellence in eating, drinking, etc. presently affects not only the manner of life, but also the training and intellectual activity of the gentleman of leisure. He is no longer simply the successful, aggressive male,—the man of strength, resource, and intrepidity. In order to avoid stultification he must also cultivate his tastes, for it now becomes incumbent on him to discriminate with some nicety between the noble and the ignoble in consumable goods. He becomes a connoisseur in creditable viands of various degrees of merit, in manly beverages and trinkets, in seemly apparel and architecture, in weapons, games, dancers, and the narcotics.

- Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)

What's Gucci, my nigga? What's Louis, my killa?
What's drugs, my dealer? What's that jacket, Margiela?

- Jay-Z, "Niggas in Paris" (2011)

Thorstein Veblen's concept of "conspicuous consumption" is as easy to apply to the quote nouveau riche unquote of hip hop as it is to fictional West Eggers like the theatrical eponymous MC of Fitzgerald's Great American Novel. Certainly Jay Gatsby has much in common with hip hop impresarios like Jay-Z himself--"The Great Gatsby" surely would have been a rap name if Fitzgerald had not taken it first; it even references the gatling gun popular both among the gangsters of the 1920s and the gangsta rappers of 1990s. More to the point, both Jay-Gatz and Jay-Z came from humble origins, both rose to prominence in part through nefarious means. As newly rich, then, they also share what Thorstein referred to as a "punctilious discrimination as to qualitative excellence." In short, they both know, and demonstrate their knowledge of, the best brands to buy in fashion, cars, and houses (see my reading of Jay-Z's reading of New York architecture). We might, then, view the extravagance of "Niggas in Paris," and Watch the Throne more generally, as hollow yet hopeful in much the same way that Fitzgerald seems to view Gatsby's manifold displays of wealth.

"Ball so hard, this shit weird
We ain’t even s’pose to be here,
Ball so hard, since we here
It’s only right that we be fair."

When Nick and Gatsby are passed on the Long Island Expressway by a limousine full of African Americans, the narrator thinks, "Anything can happen...even Gatsby could happen" (73). Fitzgerald thus aligns Gatsby's mysterious wealth with that of these newly and upwardly

mobile blacks--of course African Americans were making great strides during the Harlem Renaissance just as industrialists were achieving success during the "boom" of the Roaring Twenties. Again, Jay Gatsby and Jay-Z in particular share similar rags to riches American dream narratives. In telling his own success story, Jay-Z aligns himself with the era of the robber barons, naming his brand after the famous industrialist of the early twentieth century. In a way, so does Gatz in his reinvention of himself as Gatsby. Like the lower class Gatz, Jay-Z "ain't spose to be here"; he was born working class and they were born black. There is something that defies the odds in Jay-Z's success: as a young black man in postindustrial America--growing up in the Marcy Projects of Bed-Stuy--the statistics outline a grimmer fate. As he raps, "I'm supposed to be locked up," that is, in prison. Similarly, as a young working class man in industrial America, Gatz should never have made it even to West Egg.

The "spectroscopic gayety" of Gatsby's house parties is matched by the kaleidoscopic (almost epileptic!) bling bling of Jay and Ye in concert in the video for "Niggas in Paris" (49). Models and Gothic architecture are multiplied fantastically through digital effects throughout what is essentially a concert film. While Gatsby's mansion is a "factual imitation of some Hotel de Villein Normandy," it is Notre Dame de Paris that is appropriated by the rappers to evidence their presence in Paris and, more broadly, their "punctilious discrimination" (9). At roughly the 3 minute mark, the Parisian landmark is offered as bridge to Kanye's intro to the "Watch the Throne" theme. The whole Watch the Throne album at once a parallels Gatsby's celebrations of himself through his house parties and offers a social commentary on the meaning of such wealth similar to that in Fitzgerald's novel. While I for one was one of the first haters of the seemingly uncritical pomp of "Watch the Throne," like "East Egg condescending to West Egg," there is a social statement in the fact, as Jay raps in "Otis": "not bad, huh? for some immigrants" (49).

"Ball so hard, got a broke clock, Rolleys that don't tick tock

Audemars that's losing time, hidden behind all these big rocks."

Listening to Jay-Z and Kanye West's "Niggas in Paris," like many of their respective songs, requires a connoisseur's annotations for the multiple allusions to fashion and other luxury industries. We may know Gucci and Louis, at least by name, but Margiela? He's a Belgian fashion designer. Does Beyonce, like Daisy, cry at the beauty of Jay-Z's shirts? We may know about Rollex, but Audemars? Audemars Piguet is a Swiss luxury watchmaker with its origins in the nineteenth century. Jay's particular Audemars is so blinged out with diamonds that he can't even tell the time. We similarly need an encyclopedia to understand the many aristocratic allusions used to describe Gatsby's wealth: the "Marie Antoinette music rooms and Restoration salons" and "Adam study" of his West Egg mansion.

"I’d seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory, we started to town."

Gatsby's Rolls-Royce is an emphatic display of his wealth, an attempt to prove his financial prowess and taste to condescending East Eggers. His choice of Rolls is a classic one, though he may have chosen too many options to the point that the car appears garish rather than staid, its "labyrinth of windshields [mirroring] a dozen suns" (68). Something different is going on in Jay-Z and Kanye West's destruction and recreation of DaimlerChrysler AG's Maybach 57 in the video for "Otis." The car cost $350,000 to buy and $150,000 to take apart. They literally dismantle a symbol of old wealth and rebuild it according to their own specs, and then proceed to joy ride with a four models precariously piled in the back seat. As "gentleman of leisure," West and Z prove themselves "connoisseur[s] in creditable viands of various degrees of merit," but they also rewrite the book of etiquette for such conspicuous consumption. With their joyous chopping and then joy riding of the Maybach 57, Z and West flaunt their own misappropriation of old wealth; unlike Gatsby, they are not trying to be anything but themselves. The Maybach 57 was sold at auction with the proceeds benefitting East African drought relief.