Cafe Tacuba, Mexico’s rock ‘n’ roll survivors
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Ever since the Fab Four started playing the Cavern Club in Liverpool, certain rock acts have been linked inextricably with certain cities. It practically defies imagination to picture Lou Reed honing his downtown Manhattan hipster-poet’s chops in, say, Yazoo City, Miss., or Kurt Cobain and Nirvana slouching toward grunge-dom while drenched in the sunshine of South Florida, rather than soaking in Seattle’s melancholy drizzle, writes Reed Johnson.
For the last 20 years, the definitive Mexico City band Café Tacuba has set a series of high-water marks for progressive Spanish-language rock, collecting critical hosannas along with Grammy awards and other trophies by the truckload.
Constantly innovating while relentlessly assimilating new influences from hip-hop to traditional Mexican regional folk and indigenous music, the quartet — vocalist-guitarist Rubén Albarrán Ortega, keyboardist and guitar player Emmanuel ‘Meme’ del Real Díaz, guitarist José Alfredo ‘Joselo’ Rangel Arroyo and bass player Enrique ‘Quique’ Rangel Arroyo — has shed its musical skin and sprouted new ones as routinely as an iguana.