Grupera

History#

The original wave of Mexican rock bands got their start mostly with Spanish covers of popular English rock songs. After this initial stage, they moved on to include in their repertoire traditional ranchera songs, in addition to cumbias and ballads. Thus, the 1970s saw the rise of a number of grupera bands that specialized in romantic ballads and songs that up to that point had only been sung with mariachi. The name comes from the fact that many of the bands had names starting with (Group). Most of these groups had a rural origin and many previously played rock music. According to Madrid, cited by Rivera Godina, In the 1990s, the term grupero and its variations started to be part of Mexico’s music industry and began to receive media attention, and, as the first American artist popular on both sides of the border, Selena. The media industry popularized this term to generate products based on grupera, such as the radio station XEQR-FM, whose slogan was (savagely grupero), specialized magazines like Furia Musical and cable channels like Bandamax. Enterprises like Televisa included bands from the grupera wave like Bronco in telenovelas such as Dos mujeres, un camino. In the early 2000s, in Mexico the term Regional Mexican began to be used. Regional Mexican music had already been used for several years in the United States to refer homogeneously to the regional variations of rural Mexican music and avoid including tropical music artists under the label. Meanwhile, grupera came to refer specifically to the bands and solo artists that use electric guitars and basses, electronic keyboards and drums, but that played ballads, cumbias, rancheras, corridos, boleros and huapangos, with said genre being one of many styles under the Regional Mexican umbrella.

Awards#

*Latin Grammy Award for Best Grupero Album

External links#

• Gruperas.com: music
• Juarol.com: Regional Mexicana