Manero

The 16th edtiion of the Latin Alternative Music Conference, LAMC, took place last week in New York City, with industry-oriented panels at a Midtown hotel and concerts and showcases all over town. In this episode of the Manero Pop Podcast, José Manuel Simián and Marcelo Báez talk about their favorite artists in the conference's lineup, the state of Latin alternative music and their own narcissistic personality disorders.

The recent tour of Mexrrissey —a Mexican indie supergroup playing the songs of The Smiths and Morrissey in Spanish and with Latin arrangements— revived the flames of one of pop culture's most interesting phenomena: the devotion the Manchester singer generates among Latinos in the United States, Mexico and the rest of Latin America. On the surface, it is a paradox: a gloomy, tortured and over-sensitive singer-poet from England would have no possible appeal to hard-working and tough macho men...

Recent album releases by a number of female singers that can loosely be grouped under the pop umbrella —from Ximena Sariñana to Lila Downs, Natalia Lafourcade and Natalia Jiménez— are the excuse for José Manuel Simián and Marcelo Báez to talk about the status of female Latin pop. Can these artists really be grouped together as pop artists? Are some of the singer-songwriters in this group taking themselves too seriously? And also: is a good pop song one that you end up liking even in spite...

It all started with a press release announcing that Maná's latest album, Cama Incendiada, had gotten a four-star review. (Well, our distaste for Maná started years ago, but that's a different story.) The fact that a respectable music site like AllMusic would give the most notorious cheese rockers south of the Border such a high rating made us remember other similar cases of great reviews of mediocre Latin pop music by otherwise respectable American music writers. Even when AllMusic expressly...

You've probably heard the news by now: the variety TV show Sábado Gigante will end his record-breaking 53-year run on the air come September. The show started in Chile in 1962, but after moving to Miami in 1986, it became an institution of Latino television in the United States, and a cultural touchstone of the immigrant experience. But Sábado Gigante was not free of controversy: even when the immediate reactions after the news of the show's cancelation broke were cries of "devastation,"...

Papi chulo. Hey, papi, ven p’acá. That guy is such a papi. Ay, papi. There’s so many uses for that word, but what does it mean? Is it a distinctive form of Latino manhood? Is it a stereotype emanated from our pop stars? Is it a good or a bad thing? What’s the difference between being a papi and a Latin lover? Or is it just a Latino twist on being a metrosexual? More importantly, if it is a cheesy attitude or style, can Latinos make fun of other Latinos? Listen to José Manuel Simián and...

Former Playboy models making all the kids (and dads!) of Latin America sing and dance? An orphan kid living in a barrel while everyone acts like it’s no big deal? Talking turds? Suicidal tías? A puppet mouse speaking with sexual innuendos? A rip-off of Miss Piggy that made kids watch in a strange mix of morbidity and pleasure? Yep, those are some of the things Latin American kids of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s were exposed to through television programming apparently devised for them. José...

Is there a particular brand of Latino cool, different from the mainstream American one? Which icons define coolness in the Latino world? What is the opposite of Latino cool? And more importantly: what does all of this have to do with Willie Colón and Marc Anthony? These are some of the questions that José Manuel Simián (Executive Editor of Manero) and Marcelo Báez (DJ, musician and contributor to Manero) tackle in the first episode of the Manero Pop Podcast—a free-form biweekly...