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The music industry is going through an unprecedented time. It can be seen on the various digital platforms, where thousands of songs are published daily, whether from new projects, established artists, emerging bands, our favorite lifelong groups and of course, also from women. It is a fabulous scenario for anyone who calls themselves a music enthusiast and is eager to discover new projects or have a new career. playlist endless with songs of all kinds constantly playing on their speakers. The problem is that, given the sea of proposals, many of them run the risk of getting lost or simply going unnoticed.
In this context, a proposal has emerged that gives visibility to valuable projects, with the particularity of being made exclusively by women. With a name that refers to the mythical song by the Mexican musician Juan García Esquivel, the father of music lounge, Lots of girls is a podcast directed and hosted by Paulina García, also known as EsaMiPau in its role as DJannouncer and personality of the night, since it is the name with which she has given life to several projects, all of them about music, specifically genres related to cumbia, reggaeton or the so-called urban sounds and their derivatives.
Some of them include programs such as Twerking Fridaywhich was broadcast on the radio station Ibero 90.9 and as host of the Perreo Millenial parties, one of the spaces that has the most visibility in the nightlife of the Mexican capital, when it comes to going to let loose and move your ass without prejudice or remorse. García explains: “Lots of girls “It came from my need to return to a space where I could talk about music. Not just about a specific genre, but about many styles. I have been doing radio for many years and I like to talk about the subject, but today finding a space in traditional media is a bit complicated, which is why I considered the idea of doing a podcast.”
Bringing the periphery to the center, indie to the neoperreo
Paulina García’s spirit has always been dissident: she was a pioneer in opening spaces not only on the radio, but also on the nightlife scene in Mexico City in the mid-2010s, for genres that until just a few years ago were disdained by an entire sector of society, managers and consumers of stereotypical cultural products of what we could call “the era indie” in Mexico.
By the mid-2010s, the large audience of stations like Ibero 90.9 was a type of middle-class listener, who had grown up immersed in the bubble of the Roma-Condesa corridor and was a faithful believer that the rhythms related to the rock and Anglo-Saxon sounds were the only thing that should be considered “high culture” and at the same time synonymous with “youthful rebellion.”
Initiatives such as Heavy Perreo Rosa Pistola, the parties of the NAAFI collective and of course those of Perreo Millenial, added to the influence of other latitudes such as neoperreo, by Tomasa del Real or the trap Ibero-American (Pxxr Gvng, Füete Billete, etc.) were making a strong entrance into the nightlife of this sector. It was a generation in full transition, which did not have access to the true germ of these expressions, which emerged a few years earlier in the cultural and geographical periphery of Mexico City, but which was already looking for new identity symbols and suddenly found them in spaces that were previously unthinkable.
Radio programs such as Twerking Fridayled by García, were among the few who risked broadcasting what was happening in real time in the midst of a transition that was very similar to what previous generations had experienced with the rock. That is, go from searching toquines that were made in the so-called holes funky —as the writer Parménides García Saldaña called the places where music was played rock in Mexico in the 1970s—from the periphery (Aragón, Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, etc.) to finding established spaces in the city center, where these types of rhythms could already be heard between the 80s and 90s.
This openness that urban rhythms have in the media, blogs and websites, as well as in clubs, bars or traveling parties in the mid-2010s and up to date, caused Latin music to begin to be seen more seriously by a generation that had already mutated, although it hereditarily comes from the same places as the generation that preceded it, the same one that saw these phenomena as simple curiosities. kitsch or as banal expressions, attributed more to the frivolity of the night than to a symbol of generational self-affirmation. It is through this music that a whole new generation decisively denies everything that came before it to give meaning to its existence.
The differentiator is feminine
In the search to maintain the same spirit for her new podcast and with the love that Paulina García has for music, the answer about the identity that the project should have was intuitively clarified with an idea as simple as it is powerful: “When I imagined the project, I wanted it to have something different. I don’t mean something innovative, but something that would give it a particular color. I remembered that when I started playing, it’s not that there weren’t women’s projects, but they were separate, there wasn’t a community as strong as the one there is today. I mean that today there are not only women making music, but there are women supporting each other, making incredible music and sharing it,” she explains.
Although Garcia comes from a very particular musical scene, the intention with Lots of girls It is about opening the spotlight to a vast variety of genres, but always from a female perspective: “I am in a WhatsApp group in which there are only women who make music and we have it to share things and support each other. One day I realized that if I wanted to paint a sort of musical map of Mexico through women it could be something positive, because there are many making music in many genres, so many that I would probably never finish drawing it, but the idea is already very motivating,” she says.
Another reason for García to make a podcast exclusively for women is the genuine interest that can be generated by a space in which the particular way in which women perceive music is discussed: “I don’t want to say that women are better than men. I just think that women digest music and regurgitate it differently and I think that is very valuable to explore, especially if it is in a space in which you feel that you are with someone who speaks your same language, that you are among friends and everything is fine.”
Redirecting the spotlights
When talking about the role that the male gaze of the industry can have on an exclusively female space, García is very clear in her concepts: “I don’t have any specific thoughts about how men see us. What we have to do is simply open up spaces for women and show ourselves. I’m not looking to raise my fist and shout for men to go away, what I want is a place to talk with the same seriousness with which we talk in other spaces about music, not only about men, but in general about music that has more exposure in the media and that perhaps no longer needs the spotlight as much.”
For the driver, the reason for being of Lots of girlsthere are countless female projects that are worth looking at, but that do not receive the media spotlight regularly. The goal is to shed light in the right places.
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