Americans love to label everything—that's why we need people like Lila Downs. She already eludes definition—she's just another ex-Deadhead-turned-diva daughter of a Minnesotan professor and a Mixtec mother—and thankfully for us, she uses her schizophrenic background to deliberately smash through fronteras cultural, musical and otherwise. And then she puts the shards back together into a new post-postmodern artifact that proves the inanity—indeed, the harm—of believing in borders.
“World Music” is where they like to keep her in the record stores, but Downs is no New Age chanteuse, peddling meditation medication to happy hippies. Instead, she's a goddess who laughs at her children as they insist on assigning a specific and immutable meaning to everything. She curses them with cantos at once disconcerting and breathtaking, offering salvation for those who seek it—and damnation for those who don't.
We're conditioned to catalog, of course, to search for a common musicological theme in her work; with Lila Downs, we're accustomed to frustration. One minute, she's singing a torrid English love song featuring a Paul Cohen (her husband) sax solo lifted from a Coltrane album; then she'll quickly switch to an indigenous language with instruments that haven't changed for millennia to retell the stories of America's vanquished people. And then this Frida Kahlo look-alike uses that same language to give a different twist to a nostalgic ranchera, recasting the bouncy Sinaloa-by-way-of Germany sounds of banda as ironic counterpoint. You listen despite the almost-annoying idiosyncrasy of the music; eventually, you entrust your soul to her. And she rewards your patience with harrowing yet inspiring stories of the plight of migrant workers both Mexican and American, the destruction of the planet, and the necessity that we connect with the past in order to learn how to live.
The only consistently definite trait of Downs' music is her propensity to amaze. She has a three-octave vocal range that can arc from a glass-shattering wail to a rumble so low and smoky you'd think Sarah Vaughn slipped her an extra set of vocal chords. But it's not just the choral gymnastics; it's how she becomes the lyrics she sings, switching cadences to inhabit each selection.
With ease, she'll play a coquettish vixen in “Hanal Weech” (a Mayan cumbia detailing how a man wants to leave his ugly wife), then immediately switch to a sardonic riff on two of Dust-Bowl-bard Woody Guthrie's bitter exposés of the migrant dream, “Pastures of Plenty” and “This Land is Your Land” without mussing her beauty. Or she'll play the Chicana academic with “Sale Sobrando,” a little marvel of a tune that interweaves the Conquest, Chiapas, the battles along the U.S.-Mexico border, Mexican self-hatred and American hatred of Mexicans into a song dedicated to la Llorona (the eternally damned woman of Mexican lore). And she'll make it work.
But her best song—one that Downs hopefully sings this Sunday in Long Beach—is a remake of the Las Jilguerillas classic “El Bracero Fracasado” (The Failed Bracero). In a voice that sounds both naive and world-weary and backed by the norteño rhythms of the border region, Downs is the chúntara who left her rancho for a better life and meets the reality of being an illegal immigrant in the United States. Her version is remarkable—not only because of its ironic referencing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” but also because Downs (while recording the track for her previous album, La Linea/Border) had the prescience to choose a song that pegged Orange County as a hotbed of discrimination.
“I got to Santa Ana with my legs scratched-up,” Downs breathlessly recounts in a nasal Spanish. “The sandals I was wearing wore out quickly/My hat and shirt I lost in the chase/that some güeros gave me and almost caught me/I ended up in the freeway, starving and exhausted.”
The incident could be a headline, but Downs makes into a relevant and still beautiful work of art and rightfully gives us a kick in the conscious. It's a repudiation of the idea of genre hole, and an example of the magic Downs works so ably. She's purposely indefinable—the better to show the world the beauty of a world without borders.
Lila Downs performs at the Long Beach Performing Arts Center's Terrace Theatre, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach, (562) 436-3661, Sat., 7:30 p.m. $25-$45. All ages.
