The Queering of Mexican Regional Music: The Intoxicating Stardom and Fandom of Grupo Firme
Yessica Garcia Hernandez
This paper considers the history of Grupo Firme, a Tijuana based norteño group whose stardom, popularity, and music skyrocketed throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, when fans could not attend concerts. The group is known for breaking many of the rules in Mexican regional music. In an industry where collaboration is not a common practice, Grupo Firme built its fame from recording covers and duos with other artist. They also claim to be the first group to have a gay third-voice singer in the group and their homosocial relationships with each other on stage create alternative forms of Latinx masculinities. Their transgressive sound, aesthetics, and queer affective relationships with their fans has made their popularity viral. In 2021, they won their first Latin Grammy for having the best Banda music album of the year and have sold out numerous concerts all throughout the United States. For instance, they broke a historical record of selling out the Staple Center in Los Angeles seven times. By examining fan rituals like the gifting of LGBTQ flags in their concerts to the marriage proposals that took place on stage, along with TikTok of fan’s gatherings during the Covid-19 shutdown, I show that Grupo Firme queers the Mexican regional music stage by giving their fans a space to voice out their queer visibility, solidarity, love and support. This presentation uses ethnographic fieldwork from their 2021 concert tour and borderlands theory to think about how Grupo Firme’s stardom negotiated numerous forms of home. First, the group used home surveys to create its identity. Second, it used virtual concert experiences to help fans feels connected to them and each other during the pandemic. Third, their United States tour have allowed them to expand their notion of home (Mexicanidad) to center a broader sense of Latinidad that makes space for their Central American fans.
Bio: Yessica Garcia Hernandez is an AAUW American Postdoctoral fellow and filmmaker in the Department of Latina/o Studies at San Francisco State University. Her research explores the ways immigrant communities create sonic identities within the genre of Mexican regional music. She has published in Frontiers, A Journal of Women Studies, Fat Studies, The Journal of Popular Music, and Sounding Out!
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“I Do the Rock”: A Stimulating Study of the Song That Defined the Pop Career of Musical Theater-Turned-Movie Star Tim Curry
Kathy Fennessy
No one has had a career quite like British actor, singer, and voiceover artist Tim Curry, and it’s unlikely anyone ever will again. His unique status owes partly to the hedonistic, yet closeted times in which he did his most iconic work, especially the role of the corset and fishnet stocking-clad Dr. Frank N. Furter in both stage and screen versions of The Rocky Horror Show. His rise was bolstered by way of a theatrically-trained voice, feline eyes, devilish smile, and unalloyed delight in gravitating towards the most mischievous roles, including the petulant composer in Broadway’s Amadeus, the amorous demon in Ridley Scott’s Legend, and the supernatural cellar dweller in the ABC adaptation of Stephen King’s It.
Curry’s larger-than-life presence, however, tended to detract from his pop music career, which revolved around three studio recordings released from 1978-1981. His stage and screen stardom surely encouraged fans to pick up a few albums and singles, but not enough to make him an enduring player in that arena. The highlight, erudite 1979 stomper “I Do the Rock,” may have peaked at a modest 91 onBillboard’s Hot 100, but the song encapsulates an entertainer who blurred boundaries between male and female, queer and straight, and good and evil, while otherwise keeping his private life private.
Like Freddie Mercury in his glam-rock prime, Tim Curry projected a decidedly non-heteronormative image of tawdry glamor, knowing intelligence, and raucous high spirits, manna to non-conformist young people in the 1970s and ‘80s seeking validation to be their best and truest selves--but one also fraught with danger and potentially even tragedy. On “I Do the Rock,” Curry finds succor and salvation in rock & roll. It may not cure all ills, but it beats philosophy and ideology, and most of all: It’s stimulating.
Bio: Kathy Fennessy is a Seattle music and film writer. Her byline has appeared in City Pages, Seattle Film Blog, The Stranger, and Video Librarian. In her radio days, she could be heard on KWHL, KNDD, and KCMU (now KEXP), where she served as music director. She works in development at KCTS 9, serves on the board of the Seattle Film Critics Society, and is a proud member of IBEW Local 46 and SAG-AFTRA.
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“Live Music in the Age of White Flight: The Amphitheater Boom”
Steve Waksman
In her study of American music festivals, Gina Arnold makes the case that festivals from Woodstock forward have been promoted in ways that have targeted white audiences and largely excluded Black audiences or other audiences of color. Central to her claim is the location of festivals in largely rural settings that have appealed to white fantasies “about nature, wildness, and a kinder, gentler, rural past.” (p. 85) Starting in the 1980s, however, a new setting became central to live pop and rock that was situated neither in city centers nor rural outposts but in the in-between space of suburbia: the outdoor amphitheater. Although amphitheaters have a long history, starting in 1980 there was a boom in new amphitheater construction that continued unabated through the next two decades. These venues, favored by music and events promoters for their relatively low construction and overhead costs and flexibility, reshaped the geography of live music in ways that reinforced the racially exclusive patterns that had already become entrenched in the U.S. concert industry. When the organizers of the touring Lollapalooza festival decided to rely upon this new wave of amphitheater construction almost entirely in mapping out their itinerary, the venues also became central to the reinvention of the American music festival that took root from the early 1990s forward. In this presentation I offer a brief history of the amphitheater boom of the 1980s and 1990s that highlights the way in which it marked a suburbanization of live music entertainment, shifting the focus away from arena structures such as the Los Angeles Forum or Madison Square Garden that had driven the preceding phase of economic growth in the concert industry and that were located more proximate to city centers.
Bio: Steve Waksman is the Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music at Smith College. He is author of the books Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience(1999), This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (2009), and most recently Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyoncé, which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in June 2022.
