Café Tacvba's Re (33 1/3)

This book is about unveiling and exploring the many layered gestures of Re. Re, the 1994 album by the Mexican group Café Tacvba, is a spectacularly unique musical object that adopts and adapts myriad musical genres with the pulse, the attitude, and the energy of punk and rock. Mambo and ska, samba and salsa, punk and industrial, disco and Mexican banda, are but a few of the genres in this musical trip. But Re is not appropriation, but rather transformation: 20 original tracks of music that think through the music created and consumed in Latin America. The lyrics add layer after layer of either nuance or shock, as they play with the cultural and musical expectations of the many genres included in the album. Re, in a very real way, displays the post-punk origins of the band—loud, thoughtful, nerdy and quirky, irreverent—and it does so by creating songs that represent the historical, cultural, musical and political complexity of Mexico and Latin America. The general reaction of Re in the Anglo world is that this is Café Tacvba’s ‘White Album’, but the album far exceeds that simplistic comparison.