Each Friday I pick a song–new, old, borrowed, blue–that’s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.
This is “Frijolero” by Molotov:
I’ve been doing a lot of research into Mexican-American culture and history over the past several months, so my ears pricked up when an excerpt from this song crossed my path on Twitter earlier this week. There’s a lot to like about this song from 2003: its blending of styles, its playfulness, the way in which the chorus recalls and parallels Sly and the Family Stone. It’s that last thing that hits the hardest: the 1969 message of Sly and the Family Stone filtered through a different lens in 2003, and a history that stretches at the very least to a border drawn in 1848 that when you listen to it in 2017 takes on even more meaning.
