Mexico City --


Once the equivalent of country music, with lyrics about rural life sung by men from Mexico's western badlands, it is more and more being produced in the suburbs of Phoenix and Los Angeles, and sung by Mexican Americans who grew up speaking English and listening to rock and rap.

And as U.S.-born singers gain prominence, it's becoming more akin to gangster rap, with a slicker sound, lyrics that praise drug traffickers, and videos with guns and expensive cars filmed on Los Angeles' palm-lined streets.


Billboard's No. 1 Mexican regional song is "Quien Se Anima," or "Who Will Dare," a tune by baby-faced 24-year-old Pasadena native Gerardo Ortiz that asks who will dare enter a business where "there is lots of money, pleasures, banda music and women."


"The King of the Drunks," by Lupillo Rivera of Long Beach, has also been among Mexico's top 10 songs.

It is a reversal of musical direction for a genre in which Mexican bands traditionally sang tunes popular with immigrants in the U.S. nostalgic for their homeland. Young Mexican Americans have embraced banda, and many musicians now first gain success in the United States before heading south to sing in dirt-floored rodeo arenas and auditoriums in Mexico.

"These singers were born (in the U.S.), but their parents instilled the love for Mexico in them," said Stephanie Himonidis, morning drive-time DJ for La Raza, a Los Angeles radio station that plays Mexican music.

Ortiz spent his childhood in the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa, the birthplace of both banda music and many of Mexico's top drug traffickers. But it was upon his return to Southern California that he found fame and fortune after self-promoting his ballads and narcocorridos on YouTube. Narcocorridos are songs about drug traffickers that often glorify them and their lifestyle.




Ortiz said some of his narcocorridos were inspired by those shows.

While singing narcocorridos is relatively safe north of the border, it carries risks in Mexico.



Not all banda musicians sing about drug traffickers.

Luis Coronel, an 18-year-old Tucson native who won the new artist of the year trophy at this year's Billboard Latin Music Awards, only sings about love and heartbreak. He is attracting a new generation of fans, mainly teenage girls who follow his every step on Instagram and Facebook.

"Like their parents, these new generations have a need to listen to music that can bring them a little bit of Mexico, and that's why you have more and more young singers in this genre," La Raza's Himonidis said.