Great Movie with a lot of cultural music

Rating: 9/10 (23 April 2018)

The movie Coco is an animated movie based off of the Mexican culture and the day of the dead. The movie includes a lot of musical references based off of the latino culture. But are these references accurate? Does this misrepresent the Mexican culture through music?
In my opinion, I think the songs played in the movie were very representational of the modern Mexican culture. A lot of the different songs played are based around the modern era with a lot of rustic touch, which is still used today in a lot of modern time real Mexican songs. Coco's pace and thought behind each and every song was very accurate as to how the story relates to modern day Mexican culture.
In the movie, there is a lot of Corrido music, which is a Mexican genre that tells a story, similar to a song of American culture called, Growing Up, by Macklemore and Ed Sheeran. Arhoolie Records from American Sabor says, "Corrido is similar to Ballad. Tales of heros set to waltz and polka rhythms performed by small acoustic bands became popular during the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century" (1). A lot of Coco consists of storytelling songs such as Remember Me or Un Poco Loco, which are in that same format of Ballad or Corrido. The songs played both told stories such as when Hector played Remember Me to Mama Coco before he left her for good.
In a lot of the songs in Coco, there is a good balance between instrumentals and vocals. Just about every song starts off with a strong instrumental and blends into a vocal masterpiece. Cynthia Colón from the Latino Author writes, "History of Latino music has exceptional rhythm and character, with a rich mixture of vocal and instrumental leads" (1). There is a lot of different styles in the movie, but most of the songs consists of the same structure, and tempo, relating back to everything in the modern Mexican and Latino culture.
Some people may say that to be a modern day Mexican or Latino song, it needs to be about love, or current events, or heartbreak, but in reality, there are a lot of songs today that relate nothing to those topics. Some people also might say that the songs in Coco are very stereotypical, but like I said, a song can be about anything. They can be as stereotypical or as specific as you want them to be. Carlos Quintana argues, "Traditional and modern day Mexican Music is largely defined by a feeling of national identity that was incorporated into Mariachi Music after the Mexican Revolution" (1). This basically means that there is more of a specific category for today's modern Mexican and Latino music, but that's not true. There are a lot of different stereotypical and specific things that can be talked about in songs. There are no defined rules.
In the end, a lot of the music played In Coco was a very good representation of the Mexican Culture today. Sure, here and there there might be a couple of songs that don't directly relate to it, but the overall picture has good examples.