You Know You’re My Sueño
When I was a small boy, growing up in the industrial suburb of Fontana a few miles from L.A. in Southern California, I found myself spending hours upon hours wandering around the long stretch of pavement that encircled the labyrinth that I called home. I was so young, so innocent, and I had no friends, no technologies, nothing that I could call a distraction. I did, however, feel love, feel words, and I looked to the birds that sat perched on the trees that surrounded the apartment complex I lived in, and I sung every made-up song about love that my child-heart would allow me to sing.
I sang about the warmth of love, the butterflies in my stomach that were a consequence of love, and of the dreams I would have about being in love. My lungs crooned in two different languages, one being my family-sown Spanish and the other being E.S.L. English — not simply just Spanish and English (there was a difference). I was perhaps around eight years old.
My whole world spun in a new axis when the universe introduced me to pop music. Now, I’m not one to dice words, so I’ll get to the point of this romantic dialysis: I was enamored by the pop machinations of Jesse McCartney’s landmark 2004 album Beautiful Soul. I understood that this album wanted to explore the different angles of love, lust, obsession, and heartbreak. At that age, I'd barely been able to grasp a comfortable level of English, yet at their core, these were ideas and emotions that resonated with me on a plane beyond language. I fanatically absorbed this album, almost as if through osmosis. The yearning my heart had for love finally had a soundtrack, and my dreams would exhibit gusts of color and emotion that the Latin crooner inside me would internalize and sing out for years.
I never sang these songs to any one person, however. Sure, I would fantasize about wanting to serenade a ballad like “Why Don’t You Kiss Her?” on guitar while my lover sat a few inches from me, those inches feeling like islands apart from each other, but I didn’t attach these songs to anybody. I think that was a result of my wanting to revel in the idea of romantic love — simply put, my obsession with love was theoretical, far from praxis.
I did try, however! I remember carrying the energies I found in those love songs and wanting desperately to put those ideas to practice. Birthdays and weddings happened all around me, meaning that I would find myself, a dapper version of myself that wore uncomfortable shoes, and I would be encouraged to find a place in the center of the ballroom and dance. Ándale, Alex. ¡Vete pa’lla a bailar! Those moments were mortifying.
In the moments where this did happen, though, I used the romance I absorbed from the love songs of my youth and I would try to apply them to the girls that would catch my eye. The DJ’s would play cumbias and bachatas that every Latin kid grew up listening to (songs like “Suavemente” and“Vuela Vuela” immediately come to mind) and I would try to build up the courage to ask that pretty girl in the corner to dance. Those nights always ended, however, with a drive home filled with clouded thoughts and tumultuous What ifs…? and some hard gazing at my reflection in the backseat mirror.
As I grew older and the pangs of love inflicted my heart in hyper-dramatic fashions, I never let go of that child-hearted desire to love and be loved. In my investigations of my family’s history, a thread of loving and being loved were the exact things that permeated into the present day. I came to realize that I was yet another manifestation of mestizo blood that felt a tingle of love from the moment I was born, the first word in Spanish that ever came out of my mouth, and from the revelation that every Spanish word that has come out of my mouth since would be soaped in a bathtub of love.
I was introduced to the music of Hawthorne, CA-based musician CUCO (@Icryduringsex) in early-2018 and those memories of love suspended in youth came gushing into my thoughts in the months since. His music does very weird things to me. For one, his music ranges from songs sung in all-English, all-Spanish, or all-Spanglish. All it took was listening to him sing the phrase Oye, cariño, solo pienso en ti / When I wake up in the morning until I go back to sleep to know that another person on this earth had felt the hypersensitive beast that was love within the backdrop of the Chicanx experience. I was struck by the reality that my obsession with singing and crafting love songs at an early age was something that other brown boys like me could relate to. I felt, in effect, less alone.
It’s early-April, I feel particularly vulnerable after having shared an interaction with someone whom I’d only talked with for a few days, and I have a CUCO song cued up while I wait for my Uber to take me back to my apartment. It’s those types of interactions where you end up not feeling any better about yourself. Where you come to the realization that perhaps you’re not the type that can handle emotional and romantic disconnect. Where, even though it’s one in the morning and you probably shouldn’t have your headphones out in the open, you need a space, a sanctuary, to reassess every inkling of connectivity that you may have felt throughout the night, whether intentional or not.
In the first five seconds of CUCO’s Audiotree Live version of “Lover is a Day,” frontman Omar Banos’ aching Time changed / We’re different, / but my mind still says redundant things… sings suspended in reverb. Ishmael’s (@thanxlavida) organ synthesizer soothes the vocals; bassist Esai (@ChicanoGod) plucks his way around the melody. Throughout the song, Banos sings of the never-ending maze that one’s mind goes through when a heart is unequipped to handle a potent drug like love. It worries me almost, hearing just how much I could relate to CUCO wanting to make the love he feels balanced, yet he acknowledges that the center cannot hold: Sick in the head for you and no cure has been discovered like a / Plague hitting my body except if I fall I’m just fallin’ for you.
There’s no justice to be met with even if CUCO was straight-up about his mental illness to his lover. I’m standing there in cold Northern California temperatures waiting to be taken home, and I can feel my mind being dragged across the wall as it tries to process CUCO’s emotions. There used to be a default setting to love, it seems. When an admittance of I love you meant nothing more than just that. When, if a girl ever broke my heart as a little boy, my mamí could rock me back and forth on the sofa and tell me that everything would be alright. When love meant nothing more than singing made-up or concrete love songs to the void and hoping that someone, somewhere, would shout these songs back to us with a vindication that our love was far from juvenile or stupid.
I would get home that night, tucked into sheets that would soothe my numbness, and think about lovers of past, present, and future, as merely days that make my whole universe spin a moderate spin around a stoic axis marked on blank calendars.
It’s not all heartbreak and stones, though! Aided by the fact that Banos has yet to reach the prime of his life, the music that he curates under the CUCO persona moves my soul in rhythmic ways. His music makes me well aware of my diaspora, of the worlds my family have voyaged in order to get to where we are.
Though his creative outputs are devoid of explicit political subtexts, his very dominance in today’s alternative music scenes are, in and of themselves, a political victory for the Latin fight for representation. I don’t expect CUCO to take a deep dive into the political realm, nor do I think he really needs to. By now, CUCO has successfully managed to tap into una herida, a wound, that has been present in the soul of the Southern California experience. The Chicanx narrative has historically been devoid of an accurate call for open safe spaces for Latinx peoples. Given that many families of Latin descent that immigrated to the U.S. during and after the Clinton administration were able to send off their children to college as first-generation students, a lot of space has opened up for this new generation to re-contextualize the mezcla, mixture, of cultures that inevitably orient their own world view.
Those children, the generation of Latinxs that I am hailing from, continues to rethink the ways machismo and toxicity affects our Latinidad. To me, CUCO reflects this change in atmosphere, simply because of the fact that he chooses to appropriate traditionally western music genres like Chill-Wave and Dream-Pop in order to craft music that speaks to an audience of Latin-Americans that have felt as though their emotions didn’t matter, as though their emotional range was nothing more than an afterthought in the American popular zeitgeist.
When asked about where he would cast himself in the umbrella soup of musical genres on the podcast Alt.Latino, a popular Latinx-oriented podcast on NPR, Omar Banos had this to say about where he feels his music lies under:
Aw, dude, I hate [descriptors]. I mean, I get it. It kinda is [Chill-Wave or Bedroom Pop]. But, I feel like anyone just calls any type of, like, alternative at this point Chill-Wave…
I honestly feel like I get where he’s coming from, though. As artists and writers of color, our content has to pass a litmus test to see where our art weighs in comparison to the hegemony of art in our global marketplace of ideas.
In this post-Junot-Díaz landscape, the need for Latin men to find spaces for them to be vulnerable has never been higher. This new wave of Alternatinx art calls upon the artist of color in order to decolonize and queer their creative outputs. These artists are continuing to think outside of the box and are blurring the lines between genre and labels. These are important parameters to establish because it allows Hermanxs from all walks of Latinidad to reject traditionalist machismo culture in favor of a space where our innermost emotions and conflicts can be nurtured in healthy manners.
In mid-April of 2018 I got the chance to see CUCO perform at my university in Berkeley, California. There was an air of pandemonium that filled the atmosphere because it also coincided with the annual Cal Day extravaganza that the university throws each year. Families of incoming freshmen and transfer students could traverse the vast labyrinth of the university and have any fears dispelled about the new adventure their children were about to embark on.
Perched on the outside steps of the Doe Library, a crowd of young people from all walks of the Latin diaspora huddled close together as much as possible. In front of all of us, the band that accompanies CUCO began to set up their instruments. All the while, a wave of murmurs began to make their way through the audience. Some girls were discussing how many CUCO songs they knew — one knew each song by heart and the other only knew one song of his — , a group towards center stage carried golden-colored balloons of the letters ‘C,’ ‘U,’ ‘C,’ ‘O.’ An Hermano a few feet away from my side was donning a shirt with the iconic The Queen is Dead (1986) album cover by The Smiths. A sporadic amount of Unknown Pleasures (1979) shirts were worn. One thing was clear: we were all ready to be crooned by the one, the only — CUCO.
To this day, I’m still not sure if whether it was the hordes of teens screaming their heads out while waving Mexican flags, the floating away of the ‘CUCO’ balloons throughout the set off into the ether, or the already hectic conditions of CUCO performing on an already busy day on campus, but I was transfixed upon the wonders that Omar Banos performed on that very small stage, and I went back to my youthful memories of love in those moments. While Banos sang the song “Amor de Siempre,” he sings a line in Spanish: Cantando pensamientos libres siempre fue mi favorita. This translates, roughly, to Singing freed-up thoughts was always a favorite thing of mine. When I listen to CUCO, this is exactly how those memories of childhood feel to me. My thoughts and memories feel unrestrained, uncaged. When CUCO writes a song about love, it feels as though he’s singing out to all the homies of the Latinx diaspora. As if to say, Hey, I see you: It’s a’ight to love, it’s a’ight to feel, we’re in this together.
