Rancho Alegre

To me, Tejano is a genre in transition, struggling to reconcile its storied past with an uncertain future. And there are two young artists in particular who symbolize the dilemma the music is facing: AJ Castillo and Chente Barrera. I'm not trying to create an artificial rivalry or anything, because I know these guys have recorded together and they probably get along really well, but the difference between the two is rather striking, in my view.

alright now, we all know that piracy, as in making copies of cd's and selling them is wrong, it takes money away from the record company as well as the artist.

BUT!?!, what if the record company has quit producing copies of cd's or is out of business? i mean EMI Latin, Sony Discos, have all stopped producing Tejano music, so lost are a lot of great titles by Chente Barrera, Hometown Boys, David Lee Garza y Los Musicales and La Tropa F among others.

okay now, i seem to be picking on "para la gente 95.1" in Austin,Texas, but i have noticed that joe the kidd has been saying "Si Senor" during his live remotes, as well as when he is at a local club called "Tejano Ranch", the only problem i have with it is that this saying belongs to the great late Conjunto legend Ruben Naranjo, so what i guess i want to say to mr. jk is...if you're gonna say that, then play some fucking Ruben Naranjo or at least Ricky Naranjo.

Look, I'm a guera. I don't speak a lot of Spanish (although I did pretty good when I got my haircut a few weeks ago...) And it's only been a couple of years since I started listening to Tejano. But in that short amount of time, I have fallen completely in love with it.

okay now, it may seem that i am picking on "95.1 para la gente", but c'mon people, what message are they sending? so they have added country to their tejano catalog play-list, basically telling the listener, tejano is not good enough, so here's some country and a little bit of hip-hop.

so, i read castillo's interview on the Austin American Statesman the other day, and i read on how new tejano music should be pushed by radio stations, and that's fine....but!, his thoughts on radio playing tejano classics kinda rubbed me the wrong way.

ya' see, the 90's were the glory days of tejano, EMI Latin,Sony and all the big record companies stood up and noticed tejano music.

ok raza,

so Austin went for a couple or 3 years without a tejano station, and the so called tejano coalition claims to have helped bring in "para la gente". problem is that para la gente is really not doing all it could to promote tejano music in Austin.