The Brooklyn Rail

Until recently, the audience in this country for the musical genre loosely known as rock en español was defined almost entirely in demographic terms, with little attempt at circulation beyond urban centers with large Spanish-speaking populations. After all, if listeners don’t understand the language enough to grasp the lyrics, why follow an artist whose love songs aren’t able to touch your emotions? But today, that linguistic hurdle has been unceremoniously kicked aside by the prominence of the Spanish language in everything from one-off summer hits to ubiquitous reggaeton crossovers. Turns out you don’t actually need to even be an hispanohablante to be a fan, since music with Spanish lyrics has now assumed an inherent cool factor. This in turn may have opened up space for a broader range of musical artists than have previously been able to make a claim on our collective attention.

Rock en español, in its endless variants and mutations, is the music most listened to at my home for what seems like forever. When we first met thirty-four years ago, my now-husband—who’d recently moved from Honduras and basically lives for music—couldn’t wait to play me all his favorite artists, just as I played mine for him. I soon grasped that his listening covered a broad a gamut of styles, danceable and otherwise, which were the product of dozens of different countries, from Spain across the Atlantic through the Caribbean, and encompassing all of South and Central America, especially Mexico. In fact, labeling it rock can be misleading, since the genre covers a more far-reaching and culturally diverse geographical area than its English-language counterpart, which tends to be dominated by two countries. In the mid-1990s, I was also honing my own Spanish-language skills, while becoming more serious about working with Latin American artists, so it didn’t take long for Cafe Tacuba, Susanna Baca, and Los Fabulosos Cadillacs to become as much a part of my daily listening as Prince, Lucinda Williams, and Radiohead.

Which is why the flood of Spanish-language music into previously monoglot listening spaces comes as welcome news to those of us who’ve come to enjoy our bilingual musical universe, especially if we’ve also been biding our time for the chance to share all the music we know and love in the varied cultural circles we occupy. However, with people’s attention spans already crammed with so much information, a seminar in the glories of Fito Paez or Chico Science may not succeed in winning over converts as much as elevating something which is emerging at the present moment. In that case the standard thought experiment on such occasions would be, “If you could take everyone whose opinion you respect to one live show that’s guaranteed to upend their world, who would that be?” In an ideal world, the perfect candidate would be an artist or group that is unapologetically working-class in its politics and world view, as well as pioneers of their own genre, not to mention purveyors of an unabashedly folkloric sound that represents a form of ancestral knowledge that is also irresistibly danceable.

Son Rompe Pera is a five-piece cumbia-punk band hailing from the Mexico City suburb of Naucalpan, made up of the three Gama brothers—Kacho, Mongo and Kilos—and two longtime friends, bassist Raúl Albarran and drummer Ricardo López. Since 2020, they’ve been touring out of a van more or less continuously, steadily growing their audience using the time-honored formula of relentless performing, playing hundreds of gigs a year as they systematically crisscross the Americas and Europe, winning over hearts and minds one sweat-soaked gig at a time. And in an age when the media obsesses over record-breaking tours underwritten by corporate sponsors, Son Rompe Pera has done all this with no major label support, instead charting an alternative path that involves embracing every venue imaginable, from impromptu flea market shows to sold-out stadiums, and transforming themselves into one of the most dynamic live bands today. Famed for explosive, tightly-packed sets that gallop through a range of genres and tempos without a blink, from Jesús (Kacho) Gama’s lyrical marimba solos to punk headbangers that churn swaths of the crowd into instant mosh pits, they are, among other things, the great party band you’ll want to share with your friends before this coming weekend.

My first encounter with SRP was at the 2022 New Orleans JazzFest, where the band’s appearance was as startling as their sound: tatted and shirtless on a sultry Louisiana midafternoon, they bent over their instruments with the laser focus of The Misfits or Rancid, punk bands they looked to for inspiration when they first started playing together as teenagers. There’s always a blast-off moment at the beginning of every Son Rompe Pera set, when the full band suddenly lurches into a cumbia delivered in double-time, and half the audience instantaneously jumps to their feet and begins cheering. Leading the charge are the two marimbas played by Kacho and Mongo, the driving wedge of a bright, resonant sound that flaunts its carnivalesque timbre with a flash of cultural defiance. Just as it’s impossible not to dance to Son Rompe Pera, it doesn’t escape the attention of many that their fusion of folklore and punk is also a proud symbol of a Mexico of endlessly layered subcultures that feels rebellious, giddy, and startlingly vivid.

Colombia, which lies at the center of the map of rock en español’s pan-American cosmopolitanism, also exerts a form of soft musical diplomacy across the Spanish-speaking world, due to the massive and growing popularity of cumbia, the Colombian folk-based dance music whose origins among enslaved Africans go back centuries. Cumbia is now a musical lingua franca across a wide swath of countries, but the cultural impact of major Colombian artists like Totó la Momposina is mostly local, while international pop stars like Juanes and Shakira reliably weave cumbia rhythms into their hits. Like ska and reggae before it, cumbia is easily adapted to a variety of other genres, and, as with so many inherently Black musical forms throughout the Americas, it has long been freely adapted by artists outside of Colombia, which is more or less how Son Rompe Pera came to embrace it.

Like cumbia, Mexican marimba music has a historical trajectory which is also connected to the conquest, as the wooden adaptation of the xylophone is believed to have been brought to southern Mexico by enslaved Africans, then adapted into Indigenous musical traditions. Through their father, José “Batuco” Gama, a bandleader in the more traditional style of marimba who passed his musical skills on to his sons, Kacho and Mongo have played since childhood, and the original Son Rompe Pera came into existence as a traditional marimbero combo. Over time, however, the brothers drifted toward playing punk, and the instrument began to seem like an artifact from another age. It wasn’t until after Batuco passed away unexpectedly in 2016 that the band went on a forty-city tour with the Chilean group Chico Trujillo, whose lead singer and musical catalyst, Aldo “Macha” Asenjo, had successfully retooled cumbia, mixing hard-driving horn arrangements with elements of ska and rock. By the time the tour finished, the current version of Son Rompe Pera was fully formed, with the separate punk, cumbia, and marimba layers of their sound seamlessly woven together.

After seeing them a couple more times in NYC clubs in 2022 and 2023, I caught up with SRP this spring at the Big Ears festival in Knoxville, where they’d cheerfully accepted the newbie challenge of performing five sets across as many locations during one long weekend. I gleefully attended three of those shows, including one at a pizzeria and another at a Scottish pub. By now it was all too obvious that if I’d been following this band for a while, which isn’t something I normally do, I’d already put them on some kind of pedestal. In fact, I was determined to decide if the previous times I’d seen them live were mere flukes, or if something of potentially greater cultural significance was taking place with Son Rompe Pera, and I just happened to stumble into the midst of it. The third alternative—that they really were just an epic party band, making me an extra-enthusiastic fan—never occurred to me. 

The more I pondered their unique sound post-Knoxville, the more Son Rompe Pera began to embody an enduring punk spirit of defiance that they project through outward appearance and attitude. But they also do so counter-intuitively, by using the marimba’s lighthearted sound as a bracing vessel of a relatively marginalized folk sound in the face of music’s increasing homogenization. As it happened, the way the Gama brothers chose to preserve their father’s musical heritage was by grafting his genre onto two other styles—one ascendant and the other slightly past its prime—leading to the band’s motto, “Cumbia is the New Punk.” While I have no idea if that’s actually true, and I can’t proclaim with any pretense of authority that Son Rompe Pera somehow represent the future of rock, I do believe I have enough direct experience to argue with full conviction that the world would be a much better place if everyone went to see them live.