The other is an equally superficial portrait of the embattled Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso. One is a shallow pop-music documentary focusing on Mr. “Narco Cultura” feels like two short films sandwiched together to make a feature. These unsophisticated polkas and waltzes sound as stylistically remote from hard-edge, beat-driven hip-hop as any music could be. The film doesn’t explore the history of this outlaw folk music, with its roots going back to the 1930s. Quintero, who lives in Los Angeles, researches the songs, often on the Internet, to authenticate the argot and the gory details of the thug life and feed the narcocorrido genre, which flourishes on both sides of the border and beyond.
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The movie has several scenes of audiences excitedly singing along as the band performs these stories of murder and mayhem. One talking head calls narcocorrido the “new hip-hop,” for its unabashed glorification of the violence of Mexican drug lords. But that’s a contradiction built into the Mexican folk style known as narcocorrido, in Shaul Schwarz’s documentary “Narco Cultura.”Īs presented by the film, the content of these deceptively jolly guitar-and-accordion-based songs - performed by Edgar Quintero and his Mexican-American band Buknas de Culiacán - is hard to reconcile with their traditional Mexican flavor. If you don’t know Spanish and hear this rollicking waltz, it sounds more like a happy wedding song than a celebration of murder. “With an AK-47 and a bazooka on my shoulder/Cross my path and I’ll chop your head off/We’re bloodthirsty, crazy and we like to kill.”