This May Be the Most Dangerous Gig in Music

There’s a brand of Mexican popular band called narcocorridos, bands that sing of the culture surrounding the country’s horrific drug wars. Their closest cousins would be the hardest of the hardcore gangsta rappers.

Singing about the exploits of the cartels and the people who operate within then can get you killed. And it doesn’t take much.  From Billboard:

“It’s like a horror movie,” says one independent promoter. “Artists get killed because they played at a party for a [rival] drug dealer; because they looked at a dealer’s girlfriend; because they get paid to write or record a song about one dealer and a rival gets upset; or because they somehow piss off the dealer who’s funding their career.”

Indeed, Rosas (who sang songs about the Sinaloa cartel) and Lizarraga are rumored to have been targeted by rival gangs, and Olivas is said to have been flirting with the girlfriend of the man arrested for his shooting.

“When a singer gets shot, it gets bigger headlines than a police chief getting shot,” says Elijah Wald, author of Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns and Guerillas.

Read the whole story at Billboard.