two book reviews

[February 13th, 2002]

narcocorrido: a journey into the music of drugs, guns and guerrillas
by Elijah Wald
(HarperCollins/Rayo, 333 pages, $24)

In the Mexican state of Sinaloa, Saint Jesus Malverde enjoys a growing cult following. You won't find this patron of poorfolk and drugrunners in the Vatican's official canon, yet the people of Sinaloa honor him at an ad-hoc chapel in the state's Wild West capital, Culiac‡n. The tribute left at this gunslingers' shrine includes bottles of beer and whiskey, fresh fruit and fully functional automatic rifles.

San Jesus' chapel is just one of the strange places visited by Boston music writer Elijah Wald in Narcocorrido. The book examines the current commercial craze for the corrido, a Mexican folk-ballad style with medieval pedigree and potent contemporary sales power. Wald, once the Boston Globe's world-music writer, compares the corrido to both old-fashioned country music and gangsta rap, and uses the genre as an entree to the wooly backstreets of Mexican music culture.

Wald discovers in Mexico a parallel pop universe, where assassinated idols inspire lore of Tupac Shakur proportions and illiterate songwriters earn millions for ballads paying homage to drug lords. In his hitchhiking hunt for great corrido songwriters, Wald encounters a Chaucerian cast; all the same, he examines his subjects with an unsentimental eye. However much Narcocorrido's backcountry troubadours and bandit-heroes recall a seemingly lost epoch, they are very much 21st-century people. Corridos sell by the millions from Chiapas to Chicago. Mexican stars like Los Tigres del Norte fill arenas on both sides of the Rio Grande and, as Wald reports, the toughest corridistas enjoy more street cred in East L.A. than most rappers.

Wald's epic chronicle is a gift to anyone sick of the glorified PR that often masquerades as music "journalism." And if you've surrendered to the gloomy prediction that nothing outlawed or outlandish can survive in globalization's new gilded age, this is a book you really need to read. Zach Dundas

tokyoscope: the japanese cult film companion
by Patrick Macias
(Cadence Books, 240 pages $19.95)

It would be really easy for me to sing the praises of Tokyoscope: The Japanese Cult Film Companion. I could talk about how this is the book that hardcore fans of Japanese cinema have been waiting for--filling in the missing pieces of a puzzle that consists of more than just Godzilla and Akira Kurosawa. I could turn into one of those annoying geeks who babble on incessantly about how cool actors like Sonny Chiba and Bunta Sugawara are, and how director Kinji Fukasaku is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. I could assure you that Tokyoscope is the sort of film book that makes you want to run out and watch all the movies it talks about.... I could do all of that, but first I just have to make one complaint: Most of the movies it mentions are unavailable in the United States.

Author Patrick Macias explores the amazing world of Japanese B movies, where actors like Sugawara and Chiba are as popular as Clint Eastwood and men in rubber monster suits threaten to clobber Tokyo on a daily basis. Macias writes with an authority that is informative without ever being academic, and with an enthusiasm that's infectious. But, most important, Macias respects his subject.

Here in the U.S., Godzilla-style monster movies are often thought of as jokes, while in Japan, they are no less important than Universal's Frankenstein and Dracula are here. Macias knows this, and that's what separates his book from others that treat Japanese cult films as cultural jokes. David Walker