Overstating Natalia Lafourcade’s greatness risks undercutting the genuine-seeming spirit of joy and playfulness she brings to the stage, but it’s just a fact that Natalia Lafourcade is the best singer in the entire world.
She’s Édith Piaf de la Veracruz. But, instead of luxuriating in the torturous aspect of love in her torch songs, she emphasizes the life-giving fires of passion and the eternal flame of hope. And though she’s been belting out folk standards from all over Latin America (as well as original songs inspired by folk music), she’s not lost in the past. In her contemporary pop songs, she integrates those folk forms and rhythms into music you have no choice but to love automatically like the stars.
In Mexico and in some parts of the U.S., the fact of Lafourcade’s greatness hardly needs to be mentioned. But it’s worth repeating at least until I stop getting puzzled looks from people in Seattle when I mention her name. In the last few years, she swept the Latin Grammys with her pop album, Hasta la Raíz, and her homages to Latin American folk music, Musas: Vol. 1 and 2. She also sang “Remember Me” from the movie Coco with Miguel and Gael García Bernal at the Oscars this year.
You should watch this:
You should play this at the next picnic:
You should dance yourself around the apartment and make seductive faces in the mirror while listening to this:
If you haven’t already been doing all of that, then you have a very good summer ahead of you. And if you weren’t one of the 800-plus people at the sold out show at the Neptune last night, then here’s what you missed.
The crowd seemed to be majority Latino with a strong Mexican contingent. A mix of men and women, families, teens, and white people who listen to NPR (me).
Consul Roberto Dondisch of the Mexican Consulate in Seattle introduced a long but upbeat commercial for CDMX (Ciudad de Mexico), which set the tone for a night of celebrating Latino culture in general and Mexican musical traditions in particular.
In his introduction, Consul Dondisch mentioned the importance of bringing more Mexican artists to perform in Seattle, and thanked Seattle Theatre Group for partnering with the Consulate to promote Mexican culture and arts. He also announced the upcoming MEXAM Northwest Festival, which kicks off in late August.
Anyway, after Consul Dondisch left the stage, the lights dimmed and people screamed louder than I’ve ever heard anyone scream for anything. The Neptune sounded like it was the size of a football stadium. A singer-songwriter from the Bay Area, Diana Gameros, played a few hauntingly beautiful opening numbers before making way for Lafourcade.
If you’ve been to any non-Jason Isbell country music performance of any kind over the last two years, you’ve likely noticed that nearly every piece of art and nearly every artistic event has oriented itself around condemning the abominable actions of our terrible president. We’ve got plays, novels, anthologies, books of poems, art shows, all reminding us how important it is to stand strong against authoritarian rule, how important it is to use the powers of art to heal and to unite against injustice, or else how necessary it is to divert our attention away from national politics and just bliss out to some dumb bit of popular entertainment for awhile.
But nearly two years after Trump called Mexicans rapists while announcing his run for the presidency, over one year after the indignity of his inauguration and the uptick in ICE raids that followed, nearly 10 months after he threatened to render 800,000 DACA recipients stateless, almost a month after the Department of Justice instituted its barbaric separation policy at the border, and only a few days after news that hurricane Maria killed an estimated 4,600 people in Puerto Rico due largely to the administration’s sluggish response, watching Natalia Lafourcade walk onstage in a floor-length red dress and crack the hushed silence with the heartbreaking lament, “La Llorona (The Weeping Woman)” felt like a significant moment in cultural history. A palpable sense of pride permeated the room. Shouts of “Viva México” rang out. In the face of this country’s inhumane treatment of Mexicans and other people from Central America, here was this Mexican woman with her hair in a Frida Kahlo crown braid, standing in the spotlight and singing contemporary Latin pop / folk music better than anyone ever has. Every song, every note, every joke felt like a complete refutation of any attempt to flatten or distort the character of our southern neighbors. And the performance oriented our joy around her rather than focus our scorn around him, which just felt good.
I realize I have gone a little bit overboard with the praise here. Lafourcade is an internationally famous pop star who’s been playing music her whole life. She delivered a generous and smartly arranged but pretty standard set, starting with some of the more impressive folk songs from her latest, Musas Vol. 2, switching midway to the crowd-pleasing pop bangers, and then returning finally to the folk homages. She did some gags to keep the mood light. (At one point she and the entire band started slowly lying down on the ground until they were all flat on their backs as they played the fade-out to a song.) But people were just into it in a way that seemed particularly intense. During the encore, she asked the crowd to pick the penultimate song, and the crowd overwhelmingly chose “Un Derecho de Nacimiento (A Birthright),” a political anthem.
Because I really didn’t know anything about Lafourcade’s career before her last couple records, I e-mailed the Mexican consulate and asked about her connection to Mexico and to her fans here. Cultural Affairs Coordinator Moises Himmelfarb explained the room’s passionate response to Lafourcade in terms of scarcity and contemporary politics.
“The Mexican community in the Seattle area is larger than most people realize, and the appetite for Mexican art, music, and food in Seattle are overwhelming, however, events like this one are not as common as we would like them to be,” Himmelfarb said.
“In the aftermath of the earthquake that shook Mexico City last November,” he added, “Mexicans everywhere experienced a dramatic, unifying moment; a sense of togetherness and solidarity broke through all social divides. Natalia’s song “Ciudad Hermosa” (Beautiful City) was a response to this moment; it’s a proud homage to her City. In this moment when Mexican-Americans face unsettling rhetoric in the public discourse, having such sources of pride is fundamental. She makes us all proud.”
There were maybe four English sentences spoken onstage the entire evening, and one of them was an impassioned call for unity from Lafourcade. “Mi philosophia es we are all one thing,” she said. To grease the wheels of oneness, perhaps, she then passed around a nice bottle of Mezcal. Hers is a philosophia I can get behind.
