http://www.laweekly.com/music/will-...an-american-singer-from-compton-video-5771044
It's a muggy Sunday afternoon in Boyle Heights and 19-year-old Rhyan Lowery is dressed for showtime: Italian shoes, black pants, a black long-sleeved shirt and a white blazer with black trim. He's standing outside the historic El Mercado de Los Angeles, singing his heart out with closed eyes to a small crowd of curious onlookers. A camera crew from Univision is filming his every move.
"Mas vale solo que andar mal acompañado/Si un amigo pesado de Tijuana y no le busquen ..."
The song is a cover — "El Cholo," a corrido by Larry Hernandez, one of today's top regional Mexican singers — and Lowery's voice perfectly mimics the original. Customers emerge from inside the historic mercadito, many of them first-generation Mexican, and are startled to see Lowery is the singer. Because although Lowery sounds and even dresses like other norteño stars, he is not Mexican, or even Latino.
Lowery is African-American — a baby-faced black kid born and raised in Compton, who moved onto his family's land in Perris as a young teenager and fell in with the rancheroswhose culture dominates the small Riverside County community.
"There were no streetlights, no sidewalks. It's like Mexico," says Lowery, who performs under the name El Compa Negro. In Perris, he was able to keep roosters, birds and his favorite animals, horses, which he trained and rode around the dusty town every night after school. "Yo soy de rancho. I can actually say that."
During his a cappella performance at El Mercado, Lowery is closely watched by his manager, Antonio Lopez, a 30-something producer and singer originally from Mexico City, who last year left a career as a financial adviser to pursue music full-time. Lopez wrote all of the original songs on El Compa Negro's debut album, Negro Claro,
and performs onstage as Lowery's segundo voz, a backup singer/hype-man role common in bandas.Lately, Lopez has kept El Compa Negro's schedule full. Lowery has been interviewed on most of the major Spanish-language TV networks and made several appearances as a guest performer with Hernandez. At least three nights a week, he also performs at large-capacity nightclubs across Greater Los Angeles, where second-generation Mexican-Americans come to dance and drink Buchanan's Scotch at private tables. Sometimes Lowery and Lopez travel to Chicago, Texas or Arizona and play similar gigs there, with a group of backing musicians called Los Mas Poderosos.
"When I first started playing with Rhyan three years ago, a lot of people laughed in my face, but they didn't see my vision," Lopez says.
"I think that being an African-American singing corridosmakes him different. That's what's attracting people to him," says Edgar Muñoz, a Jalisco-born reporter with Telemundo who recently interviewed Lowery and produced a segment on him. "Nevertheless, it feels to me like he's missing the feeling of what he's saying. He learns the songs, he's in tone, but you need to feel the lyrics of the songs when you sing them. You carry that in your blood."
When Lowery performed on the Mexican television competition Tengo Talento, Mucho Talento last month (and won third place), one of the judges gave the young singer a stern reality check. While the other three judges cheered Lowery, music producer Pepe Garza refused to support what he said was not talent but instead a joke. He called Lowery a word that comes up a lot when talking about a black guy singing corridos — un novedad, a novelty.
Lowery laughs at that word. "I don't give a fukk what anybody thinks," he says. "I always compare myself to Elvis. He sounded black and everyone wondered how that was possible. People tell me all the time, 'If I didn't know who you were, I would think you were Mexican.' Music has no color."
For now, Lowery is just doing what any other 19-year-old musician on the rise would do — taking advantage of the opportunity to drink, pick up girls and relish the attention being heaped upon him. If rappers can do it, why not young black corrido singers?
"The more time goes by, the more genuine he gets," Lopez says. "It takes more balls to be born American and say, 'I want to be Mexican, I want to speak Spanish and sing corridos.' We respect that if it's done right."
These c00n have no shame
title of this thread
