Pop life: David Rimanelli on Los Super Elegantes

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by David Rimanelli

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In 1997, Muzquiz and Lopez-Crozet moved to Mexico City. "Milena starts calling BMG," Lopez-Crozet tells me. "She would say, 'Hi, this is Monica, Los Super Elegantes's secretary, and I just wanted to let you know they're in town and would love to meet with you.' We started very folklorique, doing traditional Mexican music, '40s corridas, but the San Francisco musicians on our demos and home videos were punk. So the music was mariachi-punk." BMG signed Los Super Elegantes, and they seemed destined for a mainstream career, at least in the Latin American market. "We went back to San Francisco to record the songs, but by then we were more interested in other kinds of music, and we added three hardcore punk songs. BMG hated it and canceled our contract." They did complete the album, Devorame, but Hollywood, their proposed telenovela, never progressed beyond the pilot. Soon thereafter, in 1998, they decided that Los Angeles might prove more congenial territory. Muzquiz pursued an MFA at Art Center in Pasadena, and Los Super Elegantes thrived in LA's art and alternative-music scenes. But when Chrysalis, a major UK-based publishing label, signed them, their abortive experience with BMG was weirdly repeated.

"KCRW [the Los Angeles pop/alternative radio station] played all of our songs as soon as we finished recording them," Lopez-Crozet relates. "Two executives from Chrysalis heard them and thought they had made a discovery." But their find turned out to be rather at odds with their expectations. "This coincided with the Latin-music trend in mainstream American pop," Muzquiz says. "When they heard us they thought, Perfect, more Ricky Martin shaky-shaky-boom-boom sounds. But with the advance, we bought all of this sophisticated musical equipment and started writing very different, electronica-inspired dance-hall songs. We were getting tired of the shaky-shaky-boom-boom thing; it was always a parody for us, but maybe a really good parody because it did reflect our 'culture.'" Needless to say, Chrysalis was exceedingly disappointed when the duo finally turned in their songs.

Perhaps the most enthusiastic early Super Elegantes fan and promoter in LA was legendary performance artist/drag queen Vaginal Davis, who wrote a short article about them for Index magazine in 1999. Davis's account is, appropriately, replete with prima facie unbelievable stories mixed up with the truth. This doesn't preclude some astute comments on the Super Elegantes style in its "early LA" period: "Their basic structure for writing songs is a musical retablo. You're never sure when one song has officially ended. Most are sung either in Spanish or Italian, but it doesn't matter if you can't understand what's being said word for word. The lyrics are abstract, they act them out." Mike Kelley, one of Muzquiz's most steadfast supporters at Art Center, comments: "The aesthetic is pure pop, but it has a degraded side--slightly punk.... The crumminess of their performance technique is less satire (or Jack Smith-style countertechnique) than an additional coat of degradation to sweeten the mix." Kelley speculates further, "I am left wondering if it is only crumminess that makes it art, that separates it from pop culture--and what, then, crumminess means. Is it a kind of populism? A sign that everybody can make pop culture at home?"