Chicano Batman on Selena, Touring with Jack White, and the Politics of Bringing Cumbia to Coachella

Photo courtesy of Chicano Batman

With lyrics in English, Spanish and sometimes Portuguese, L.A. quartet Chicano Batman has a sound that is hyper-local but also global in a very deep way. Their laid-back tunes mix well with sun and summer, but underneath the surface lies a deeper dimension of sly pop culture references, unapologetic Latin pride, and the thoughtful exploration of popular music’s all pervasive black roots.

The band’s 60s and 70s pan-Latin influences include everything from the subversive psych-pop of Tropicália to the grupera sound of Mexican bands like Los Angeles Negros. It’s all tied together by the attenuated notes of band leader Bardo Martinez’s vintage organ. Drummer Gabriel Villa draws on his Colombian roots and musicial training to cut in cumbia and salsa rhythms. The tempo and romantic lyrics nod to lowrider oldies—smooth R&B and soul sides ideal for slow cruising that have long been the soundtrack to old-school Chicano culture. There’s a lot going on with these guys, but the mood stays chill.

Their surrealist name grabs attention, but it also suits them. Like superheroes, the band pair cool outfits (bowties and tuxedo shirts, yaass) with high ideals. And they’re proving to be a formidable team. They recently supported Jack White on his Lazaretto tour, and just played Coachella.

Martinez wrote about the good, the great, and the xenophobic of opening for White in Sounds and Colours Magazine—it seems not everyone appreciated their Spanish-language songs.

In between Coachella dates, Martinez got on the phone from his home in Los Angeles’s El Sereno neighborhood and offered his thoughts about being a multilingual band on the rise in America. He also explained the tuxedo shirts.

Noisey: How was the first Coachella show?
Bardo Martinez: We had a great time. We had a soundcheck and just kind of setting everything up and we were the first band to play, so we had a little bit more time to set up. We played right after a DJ and so we just set up our stuff and we kind of saw people trickling up. We saw people with our bat symbol, you know? If you’re not familiar with what it is, it’s basically our logo, which is a combination of Batman and the UFW [United Farm Workers] eagle. So, it has the pointy ears like Batman and the wings are kind of like Mesoamerican eagle wings, if you could imagine that.

We have T-shirts that we’ve sold throughout our career, so there’s plenty of people who rock that symbol. So, folks came out and were supporting as we were setting up. We had a good two rows. When it came time for us to play at one, we had like three or four rows of people that were there supporting us. It was good. At one o’clock, some bands don’t have anybody there; it’s an empty field. So, we were blessed by the fact that there were a good amount of rows that were there. By the time we were into our first song there was good five rows of people stacked up. I think my dad estimated–my dad was in the crowd as well—he estimated a crowd of like 500. In any case, it was definitely a good vibe and folks were enjoying it and we were feeding off of them.

You also had tour dates with Jack White. I read your piece in Sounds and Colors about that. I was a little surprised that some journalists seemed irritated that you had songs in Spanish.
It was a blogger.

Do you often encounter negative responses like that?
No, usually not. Usually, it’s positive and reactions are good. We we’re performing for an audience that was not accustomed to hearing bands play in Spanish. It was just new for a lot of folks. Some of those reactions were to be expected, you know, from certain audiences, but I definitely feel that the outcome was more positive than negative. As we played up there, we got a lot of good vibes from all kinds of crowds, even places where it’s like “ok, we’re gonna go to the South,” we’re gonna play Mississippi, there’s gonna be all kinds of crazy folks throwing bottles at us. And it’s funny because I think I did mention the reference of Ritchie Valens or Selena. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie Selena?

Oh, yeah.
You know that scene where they’re throwing beer bottles at her dad’s band, because they’re playing in some cowboy town? My mind went to that point. We were a little nervous, but the Mississippi folks were super nice. We definitely felt the Southern hospitality. It was refreshing. Folks made us feel good in the South. In places where we thought “It’s gonna be kinda weird out here,” no, folks were really warm. We have this song called “La Manzanita,” it’s a cumbia, a Mexican cumbia type of song, and folks were grooving to it.

You wouldn’t describe singing in Spanish as a political statement, would you?
It really isn’t, you know what I’m saying? What it really is, is I speak Spanish and English because I grew up in L.A., and I learned how to speak Portuguese too because I love Brazilian music. I compose songs in all three. But it’s funny because, whether we like it or not, everything we do is political … our way of dressing … whether we’re conscious of it or not. At a certain point, you become conscious of it, because somebody else makes you conscious of it. So, yeah, I think it becomes a political statement, because you are conscious of it.

So, do you think you’ll continue writing songs in both English and Spanish?
Most definitely, and I think that also springs from who we’re inspired by. For me, people have already done amazing music. It’s just about trying to tap into the soul and the energy that folks brought before us. In the ’60s and ’70s people were just on another field of energy. Not only were folks from the United States doing that, whether it be James Brown or Otis Reading, but it was also people in Brazil like Caetano Veloso, and also people in Latin America like José José, who is an amazing singer.

There’s a lot of stuff that’s cooler than a lot of people realize that you are trying to bring to light.
Yeah, like people are hip to Os Mutantes, right? That’s a Brazilian psychedelic band, but there’s all kinds of other acts that are just as cool, and just as amazing and super deep and real and rhythmic. We just happened to be inspired and moved by all of that.

Would you say you take inspiration from the Tropicália movement that goes beyond its sound?
Yeah, I think the name is kind of like a play on that, because what they were trying to do was change things with their music on a political spectrum and they did that through different avenues. For us, for example, Chicano Batman, the name itself is political, it’s a political statement. It’s a whole project within itself. It brings to light a particular group of people but also a pop cultural symbol like Batman.

The way we dress, for example, it’s an homage to bands like Los Angeles Negros or Los Pasteles Verdes. Our whole project as a band has different references culturally, politically, I guess, and musically, and I think that’s what the Tropicália movement was doing. Caetano Veloso for instance, every album has very deep meaning, within not only the songs… every song you could just tear apart and it means all these different things. He was trying to communicate a particular ideology through that song. They were trying to change things and referencing not only just music but also film and culture and politics at the same time. With Chicano Batman, we do that well with our name. The name makes a splash on its own.

What is it about those older groups that inspires you?
They’re just so musically tight. I was thinking about this earlier. Everybody knows James Brown; everbody know Otis Reading, and all these soul bands, and we love that stuff. We grew up on oldies, growing up here in L.A. I wanted to do soul music when I first got together with the guys. But the music from these bands from Latin America, whether it’s Chile or Mexico, they’re just as soulful because they were influenced by the sound. They we’re influenced by black music, so you hear the same beats. You hear the same heaviness in the bass. You hear funky bass lines; you hear funky organs. There’s an ethos there that connects both styles. Obviously, they’ve different in some of the forms, but musically there are a lot of similarities, just as like if you listen to music from Indonesia at the same time period I sounds very similar. There’s a similarity between all these different threads of music going on throughout the world, that, at the heart of it, it’s all the same. And, yeah, a lot of it springs from black music, from black roots.

Catch Chicano Batman on tour:

5/14 Sol Collective, Sacramento, CA
5/15 Brick & Mortar, San Francisco, CA
5/16 Leo’s Music Club, Oakland, CA
5/22 Underground Wonder Bar, Chicago, IL
5/23 Mole De Mayo Festival, Chicago, IL
5/24 Loisaida Festival, New York, NY
5/24 Brooklyn Bowl, Brooklyn, NY
5/26 TBA 5/27 Subrosa, New York, NY
5/28 The Trocadero, Philadelphia, PA
5/29 Tricky Falls/ Bowie Feathers, El Paso, TX

‘Cycles of Existential Rhyme’ is out now via El Relleno Records.

Beverly Bryan is staying posi on Twitter: @DJBBCheck