The “future of music”, that is how the Rolling Stone Magazine presents Mexican singer Peso Pluma. Gto News presents this extract since the singer is
The “future of music”, that is how the Rolling Stone Magazine presents Mexican singer Peso Pluma. Gto News presents this extract since the singer is an icon for millions of Mexicans and fans from all over the world.
Peso Pluma rocketed to superstardom with a signature brand of musica mexicana. Now, can he navigate a new stratosphere of fame? Only he knows where he’s going next, reports Rolling Stone.
The Streets leadfing up to the Lab Studios, a recording complex in Miami’s lush Coconut Grove neighborhood, are full of bright, iridescent peacocks. Peso Pluma has set up a weeklong writing camp here in late January to work on his new album, which, he reveals later, is called Éxodo and will be out this summer.
The Mexican artist, whose real name is Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija, has blasted to global stardom by writing about things like heartbreak and romance, but his swaggering, streetwise songs about high-luxe, extravagant living are among his most popular. Today, he’s about to make a few more, reports Rolling Stone.
Corridos tumbados are a strikingly modern version of corridos, folksy, narrative-driven ballads that have told some of Mexico’s most epic stories and reflected complex realities for more than 200 years. Traditional corridos, which play a big role in musica mexicana, an umbrella term used to describe the many different genres within Mexican music, are often seen as old-school, honky-tonk soundtracks for grandparents.
That changed in a big way around the mid-2010s, when a bunch of kids, including the then-17-year-old Natanael Cano, brought out their sharpest, prickliest guitars and started borrowing influences from trap and other forms of hip-hop. The result shaped the music for a hyper-online, genre-agnostic generation, reports Rolling Stone.
Peso followed shortly, and shot out of the pack, a skinny kid whose stage name literally means “featherweight.” Over the past few years, he’s added his own energetic style to the movement: His songs have emphasized chunky trombone lines and intricate guitar arrangements that set the stage for his spiky vocals, though he quickly showed he could go beyond this sound and slide into any style of music, from pop to reggaeton.
For the next few hours, Peso bobs around like a ball of electricity, bursting into different rooms and jumping onto different songs. When I find him a little while later, he’s thrashing away on a guitar, demonstrating an idea to some of the best songwriters in all of musica mexicana. There’s Edgar Barrera, the 33-year-old producer and songwriter who was nominated for 22 Latin Grammys in the past two years alone, reports Rolling Stone.
Peso has finished most of a corrido that he wrote on his own, but he wants to develop it a little more. “Maybe we can add a pre-chorus or something,” he suggests, fiddling with the guitar. He sings what he has so far, and his voice, in all of its rich peculiarity, fills the space. His tone is so unvarnished and raw, it can be either grating or captivating, depending on the listener. Overwhelmingly, people are drawn to it. “It doesn’t sound like any other voice in the industry,” Barrera says. “When you hear him, you know immediately that it’s Peso Pluma singing”, reports Rolling Stone.
That voice was everywhere last year. In March, he joined forces with the Mexican American band Eslabon Armado for “Ella Baila Sola,” a googly-eyed ode to a pretty girl on the dance floor that became the first musica mexicana song to reach Number One on Spotify’s Global chart and to crack the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 (Rolling Stone named it the best song of 2023). At one point on the track, Peso bleats out “Bella!” with such force that it spawned TikTok challenges and tons of impersonations.
Next was “Bzrp Music Sessions Vol. 55,” part of a popular YouTube freestyle-type series, which scored Peso a second Number One on Spotify’s Global chart. Then Génesis, his breakthrough album, debuted at Number Three on the Billboard 200 in April — the highest-charting regional Mexican album ever, reports Rolling Stone.
A bunch of wild milestones followed: In September 2023, Peso and his bandmates became the first musica mexicana act to perform at the VMAs. He beat out Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, and everybody else in the world to become the year’s most-viewed artist on YouTube. He ducked in and out of studios with some of his rap heroes, A$AP Rocky and Travis Scott, among them. And then, in February, he won his first Grammy, taking home a trophy for Best Musica Mexicana Album, capping the night with a couple of photos alongside Jay-Z.
Part of the appeal is that, unlike many musica mexicana artists of the past, Peso traded cowboy boots and sombreros for high-end sneakers and baseball caps, looking more like an iced-out rapper than a Mexican crooner. “I’m proud to wave my flag up high and to be the first to do a lot of things, to be able to show my roots and where we’re from and what we like to listen to and what we do,” Peso says, reports Rolling Stone.
His live performances are a big part of the draw, too. Onstage, Peso is hyperactive, unconstrained, explosive: He’ll stomp his feet and jump up and down, scrunching up his face into impish expressions that fans have immortalized through memes and GIFs. “The first time I saw him perform, on a stage, even in a practice, I was blown away by the charisma that he had,” his manager, George Prajin, tells me. “I always told everybody, ‘This is the Mexican Mick Jagger’”.
The pace and the pressure of his tours are undeniably intense, particularly for an artist carving out a tricky, polarizing path that has never quite existed before. Despite the fact that Mexico shares a border with the U.S., few Mexican artists, much less ones making musica mexicana, have blown up in the pop mainstream this way. Where Peso goes next is uncharted Territory, reports Rolling Stone.
Peso joins his band in the recording room to check out the progress of the horn-filled song. The creative process is testament to the intricacy of recording musica mexicana: No one is making a beat on a computer or synthesizer. Instead, each member of the seven-piece band perfects complex arrangements for every track, then records their part individually. Some songs are labored over for days and don’t even make the album.
He makes his way back to the songwriters room. On his way, he asks Valeria Murillo, who does artist relations and management at Prajin Parlay, if she can bring tequila and shot glasses to the room. Then he sits, going line by line, working enthusiastically on the corrido he’d played them earlier. Barrera says later that the studio time with Peso felt special: “I’ve never been in a writing camp where the energy was so, so, so high”, reports Rolling Stone.
“The delivery is here,” Murrillo announces after a while, walking in with a hand-painted bottle of Clase Azul tequila. The room fills with cheers as the bottle is sloshed around. Someone asks me if I want a shot, and I politely turn it down. Peso whips around with a giant grin on his face and points at me. “Siiii, Rolling Stone,” he singsongs in his signature croon. In seconds, I have a glass in my hand.
Then Peso stands up in the middle of the room and starts to speak. “Tonight, we’re making history with two songs that are really epic,” he says.
Everyone lifts up their drink. “Salud” , as reported by Rolling Stone.
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All Credit To: Rolling Stone Magazine
Text: Julyssa Lopez / Photos: Gustavo Soriano
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