Smells Like Teen Spirit and Other Mexican Variations of American Songs

Classic rock, Eighties butt rock, and American pop are all very popular among the folks I have met in Mexico (although the rock lovers avoid the pop like the plague). Which makes sense, class ic rock is good, eighties butt rock will never lose it's appeal to the cheese in all of us and, as my sister puts it, pop is like bubble gum, almost everyone secretely likes the taste of bubblegum once in a while (although no one would ever want to chew it all of the time). They hand out fliers for death metal nights at clubs here in Leon.



There was an older man in Guanajuato who wore a beret-type hat and had a warm face with a huge smile. He sang songs for money. His repretoire included the best of Tom Petty, Elton John, The Rolling Stones, and all of the other best of classic rock songs that you listened to over and over again when you were young ad didn't know about music that wasn't on the radio. The funny thing was that he sang the words as though he had memorized the way that they sound without knowing any English (like the way an American Opera singer sounds when she sings an aria in Italian, or Britney Spears when she decides to start appealing to a larger audience by singing in Spanish, a language she can't speak). Thus, although he had the appropriate tonal quality and even mood to match the songs (something I am guessing he learned from listening to the original), his phrasing was not always right, and, consequently, the emotion imbued into the song was often slightly off. It was (here's that word again) surreal. This was compounded by the fact that he varied locations and never had consistent scheduled appearances, so I would hear him early in the morning and late at night, or in the middle of the day as I walked home from class. Sometimes it felt like he was following me, playing my own personal Guanajuato soundtrack. Think The Life Aquatic and the Brazillian David Bowie.



Speaking of opera, in Reanimation Class on Tuesday, someone in the hospital started blasting opera so loudly that I swear it was over the intercom system. Think Shawshank Redemption for this one. It lasted for several hours and was a pretty awesome backdrop to reanimating the babies.



But best of all is that in Leon we live right next to a cover band that practices several days a week for several hours at a time. They are loud and, well, they are not very good. But not for lack of trying - they are so dedicated. And they are rock to the core. They are classic rock (the hard kind, not the wimpy hippy kind), eighties rock, grunge rock, and even a little bit of indy rock (I swear I heard a White Stripes song in there my first weekend here). Last week I heard a song played over and over again. The singer was doing the mimic sounds thing I talked about above and, although it was familiar, I couldn't place it.



Finally it clicked. . it was Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana. . off key and out of rhythym (which may actually be a great theme song for my time here, but I will refrain from forced, bad metaphors).