Rocktober Song #8: "Good Morning Aztlán" by Los Lobos (2002)

Chicano rockers Los Lobos are probably best remembered for their #1 hit cover of Ritchie Valens's "La Bamba" in conjunction with the 1987 biopic of the same name, but the band was around for over a decade before that and have continued to make music since then, releasing their 17th studio album last year, a covers album called Native Sons that won a Grammy for Best Americana Album.

Anyway, the band has delved into many genres over the years, and the title track from their 2002 album Good Morning Aztlán is a great little rock song that really fit in well with what was going on in the early '00s.  I'm not sure how I came across this song back then, but I know I used to have it on my first gen iPod Shuffle for when I would workout.  However, over the years of transfers of music between computers and devices, it got lost at some point and is no longer amongst the tens of thousands of songs now in my digital collection.  I guess I'll have to download it again, although this time I'll actually pay for it!

Anywho, the song captures you from the get-go. It has a driving, punchy beat and a great crunchy, fuzzy guitar riff that could have easily fit in on a White Stripes or Black Keys album.  So yes, the song is punchy and crunchy.  Of course, the band didn't abandon its roots all together, as Aztlán is the ancestral home of the Aztecs.  The term has also been used in the Chicano Movement to refer to the Mexican territories gained by the United States as a result of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed by the U.S. and Mexico at the end of the Mexican–American War, under which the U.S. acquired what is now California, Nevada, Utah, large swaths of what is now Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, and portions of what is now Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming, the U.S. was given undisputed control over Texas (which had been annexed into the U.S. as a state three years earlier after nine glorious years as its own country), and the U.S. and Mexico established the Rio Grande River as the border between the two countries.  You didn't think you were going to get a history lesson today, did you?

Based in part on the album cover, I have always taken the lyrics as being about East L.A. -- where the band members grew up -- and referring to it Aztlán, as the lyrics describe normal every day happenings in a neighborhood.  Whatever the lyrics are about, the song rocks.  In addition to the great guitar riff that repeats throughout the song, there are a couple great guitar solos, and overall, it's just a really infectiously catchy rock song.  I dare you to listen to it and not have the line "I gotta say one, two, three more things before I go on" stuck in your head.  Hell, I've listened to the song about five times in a row while writing this.