Articles: Karma Comes Back to You Hard: The Tale of the Strangest Latin Hit in Years and the Dead Man Who Sang It

So far in 2015, six different songs have topped Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart. Five of them involved slick, established stars like Enrique Iglesias singing about love or dancing, but the sixth hit was different. It was a corrido, part of Mexico’s century-old ballad tradition about everyday heroes facing impossible odds; according to Salon’s Alexander Zaitchik, corridos are like “contemporary news reports—a Mexican version of Chuck D’s description of rap as black America’s CNN.” With the rise of Mexican drug cartels over the last few decades, corridos have largely given way to narcocorridos, story songs lauding the exploits of illicit kingpins and their employees. But before last March, no narcocorrido had ever hit #1 on the Hot Latin chart.

Then came “El Karma”. The song is credited only to a mysterious songwriter named El Diez and its eight short Spanish stanzas tell a tightly coiled story: After moving to a notorious cartel hub, our narrator starts earning money in the trafficking game. Someone envies his profits. They kidnap his daughters and demand a ransom. Instead of paying, the father goes to “collect the debt” with his gun, but his Browning is no match for the kidnappers’ Remington R15s. From beyond the grave comes the moral of the story: Karma comes and goes, but nobody can escape the reaper.

As though to prove this point, when the song hit #1, the man who sang it, 22-year-old Ariel Camacho, had been dead for a week.

With the song’s opening lines, Camacho places himself within a dangerous world somewhere between fact and fiction: “I was born in hot water, then I came to Culiacán.” But the Culiacán of myth is not where you usually go to escape hot water—it’s where you go when other options are worse, or when hot water feels like home.

Culiacán is the capital of Sinaloa state, home to the Sinaloa Cartel, birthplace of legends. Noted drug lord and prison escape artist “El Chapo” Guzmán sprang from its semi-arid land, as did the influential narcocorrido singer/songwriter Chalino Sánchez—although when Sánchez found himself in hot water, having shot the man who had raped his sister, he moved to Los Angeles. In 1992, Sánchez returned to his hometown to play a show. The next day he was found beside a ditch, shot twice in the back of the head.

Like Sánchez, Camacho died in the night after singing at a show in Sinaloa. He wasn’t shot, though. After spontaneously jumping onstage with the brass banda Clave Azul to sing “El Karma” at the Carnaval Mocorito, a big fair less than an hour from his home, Camacho and four friends packed into a 1994 Honda Accord, itself nearly as old as its occupants. Around 3 a.m. on February 25, the police received a distress call: The Accord had been going too fast and its driver lost control and crashed, killing Camacho along with 24-year-old college student Julio Valverde, and 22-year-old Melina Durán, who left behind a young son.

Though there was no evidence to suggest the incident was anything other than an accident, suspicions lingered. Following Camacho’s death, the award-winning journalist Sam Quinones, who wrote the definitive essay on Chalino’s legacy, tweeted two indisputable facts, one atop the other: “Dangerous job, singing drug ballads … Ariel Camacho, #narcocorrido singer, dies.” He then linked to a blog post that listed several other artists who had died of decidedly unnatural causes and went on to say Camacho was part of a subgenre of “menacing narcosingers” called the Movimiento Alterado, which titillated a lot of gringos earlier this decade. Everyone from Fox News to the documentary Narco Cultura wrung their hands over the stuff, sparking a characteristically forthright rebuke from OC Weekly’s Gustavo Arellano: “Yes, Mexican Music Is Violent. Get Over It”.

When I reached out to Quinones about his blog post, he noted via email that Camacho’s “altered” narcocorridos, some of which praise powerful cartel figures by name, are “a corruption of the corrido’s original intent,” which is to celebrate underdogs. He also clarified his take on the singer’s death: “I don’t imply Ariel Camacho was killed because he was a narcocorrido singer. I simply state it’s a dangerous profession. … [T]he last decade and more has shown that touring on the basis of these corridos is dangerous, particularly as the Mexican drug world has expanded and grown more brazen.” 

Mere hours after Quinones wrote his original post on February 27, news from Mexico bore him out. That night, an audience member shot the 22-year-old corridero Alfredo Olivas mid-concert; then, in Monterrey on March 15, 20-year-old Rogelio Contreras Rivera was playing timbales with his dance band when several men climbed onstage, kidnapped him, and murdered him outside; a week after that, the 23-year-old narco singer Javier Rosas was riding past a Culiacán mall when assailants fired AK-47s at his SUV, critically injuring Rosas and killing two of his companions. 

But even amid this bloody milieu, it’s hard to square the image of a “menacing narcosinger” with anything known about Ariel Camacho privately or publicly. Steve Weatherby, the Vice President of DEL Records, which released Camacho’s album El Karma last year, tells me, “He was a very talented but quiet individual, always kept to himself—very smiley, very positive guy.” Of course, the fact that Camacho’s label speaks of him in glowing tones should not surprise us, nor should a gap between private life and public image, since many narcosingers live genteel suburban existences. 

In Camacho’s case, though, even the public face is at odds with the narco stereotype: One of his videos of a violent narcocorrido, “Entre Platicas y Dudas”, shows us a calm, unsmiling young man with a perpetual squint and a keening voice, as though he’s peering into the distance to locate his story. In the clip, Camacho studies his instrument like he’s solving a puzzle, his elaborate requinto solos replacing the ebullient gritos and shoutouts of other, more gregarious corrideros. It all seems to back the singer’s cultivated image of quiet solemnity; he wasn’t your typical narcosinger, and “El Karma” wasn’t your typical narcocorrido.

When “El Karma” went to #1 in March, Billboard wrote, it was the first song in a “traditional” Mexican style to top the chart in five years. But even within the world of traditional Mexican music, “El Karma” sounds like the strangest thing on Earth. For a hit song, its combination of instruments had no precedent. The track features two acoustic guitars and a tuba; while one guitar maintains a strolling waltz strum, Camacho’s higher-tuned requinto guitar trades flamboyant gestures with the tuba, which is elevated from its normal role in the bass to a lead instrument, all triple-tongues and syncopated shoves up the scale. 

The use of rhythm guitar, lead guitar, and lead tuba that Camacho and his band, Los Plebes del Rancho, employed on the song might sound “traditional” to ears in El Norte, but the combo is a fairly recent innovation in Mexico. According to Elijah Wald, author of the book Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas, the particular style began as a novelty around 15 years ago but has since managed to stick around. 

The question remains: Why did that anomalous sound finally top the chart? The death bump helped, no question—“El Karma” had peaked at #16 the month before Camacho died, and you wouldn’t be reading about it here if people hadn’t streamed the heck out of it after his accident. It also scaled the list during a slow week, logging smaller radio audiences and fewer downloads than its neighboring #1s. Even so, during much of 2014 and the early weeks of 2015, this murder ballad with two lead instruments—one of them a tuba—had already found a surprisingly sizeable audience.

“I listen to a lot of songs in that genre, and whenever a new group comes out, it’s very rare that they stick out,” says Manuel Martinez-Luna, 31, who lives in New York City and makes regional Mexican compilations for The Orchard, a division of Sony Music. “But when I heard ‘El Karma’, I thought, ‘Somebody put some thought into the lyrics and the arrangement.’” Camacho early adopter Juan Carlos Ramirez, a 25-year-old who lives and works mixing chemicals in the Chicago suburbs, puts it plainly: “It sounds better because most of the groups play the same style, and Ariel Camacho plays his style.”

Los Plebes’ solemnly sinister, tuba-fied take on “El Karma” may be definitive, but theirs was far from the only one; other versions of the song underscore Los Plebes’ originality while pushing the original lyric into new and diverse directions. Released in June 2014, the second best “El Karma” boasts a furious duet between accordion hotshot Noel Torres and the quintet Voz de Mando, and plays like the movie Taken, only with no hope for sequels. Torres’ defiant take is the exception, though. When other small norteño groups cover “El Karma”, they tend to sound jaunty but distracted, as if to say: “This is but one sordid tale from our repertoire.” The banda versions, with their triumphant brass and swanky clarinets, sound upbeat but drunk. Camacho himself got sucked into one such remake with Banda Culiacáncito, which found him lapsing into vibrato crooning at the end of the song: You can picture him winking at a pretty girl in the front row.

Just as people disagree on Camacho’s place in the corrido universe, no one hears the story of “El Karma” same way. Is it a cautionary tale about the cosmic perils of joining a cartel or a defiant personal drama about a father’s love for his daughters? After building to its final, violent showdown, does it follow the Alterado playbook, reveling in gunfire and gore? Or is the finale a critique of the narrator’s violent surroundings? Maybe it’s simply a fatalistic retelling of Don DeLillo’s old truism: “All plots tend to move deathward.” The skillful songwriter can pack all these possibilities into eight stanzas, yes—but so can the simple one. What summary could be more obvious than the final line El Diez gave Camacho to sing, the final line Camacho sang onstage: Nobody can escape the reaper.

So which version of “El Karma” did songwriter El Diez intend? You would have to ask him, though he’s kind of hard to track down.

The database of the performing rights organization BMI attributes “El Karma” to one Priscilla Ruby Rocha, raising the tantalizing prospect that the composer of this wildly popular narcocorrido is a woman. But no. Both Weatherby and Jennifer Bull, Senior Marketing Manager at Sony Latin, tell me El Diez is a man named Diego, and Weatherby confirms Priscilla Rocha is a relative who collects his royalties. Weatherby also provides a statement: “DEL Melodies, one of many publishers who control songs written by El Diez, appears not to have any working phone numbers for Priscilla Rocha or Diego.” 

Scrolling through Priscilla Rocha’s BMI catalog reveals narcocorridos credited elsewhere to Diego Rocha and Diego Avendaño, but El Diez gets public credit for the rest—a blood-spattered lot that includes, for example, much of the band Otro Nivel’s 2013 album Prendiendo El Motor, aka Turning on the Motor. The title song begins with a revving chainsaw and goes on to tell an extremely sick story of evisceration and dismemberment. Say this for El Diez: He shows rather than tells.

Though he is elusive, even having El Diez on speed dial wouldn’t settle all of his songs’ possibilities. The path from author’s pen to listener’s imagination is forever twisted by mishearings and personal obsessions. Take the composer’s biggest release this year, “No Andan Cazando Venados”, a minor airplay hit for Noel Torres. It’s a tribute to a man who was once one of the Mexican drug world’s big shots: Rafael Caro Quintero, now a 63-year-old fugitive. (El Diez likens him to a beast stalking the edge of the Sierra; hence the track’s glowering title, “Don’t Go Hunting Deer”.) Torres augments the song’s banda arrangement with some intricate requinto/tuba interplay, an effect both cheerful and haunting. When I suggest the requinto might be paying tribute to Camacho’s style, Gabriela Lopez, the Head of Marketing and PR at Torres’ label, demurs: “I’m sorry—with all due respect to Ariel Camacho, how do you make a tribute to someone that had one song on the radio?” 

Well, now he’s got two. In August, Camacho’s finely wrought romantic plea “Te Metiste” made it up to #2 on Billboard’s Hot Latin chart. “Te Metiste” was briefly the most played song on Regional Mexican radio, where it brought to mind nothing but “El Karma”—a song that continues to court listeners by casting a jaundiced eye upon anyone who would try to evade a spectre of death that shows no favoritism.