The legacy of Mexican rap innovator Lefty SM, in 5 songs

Much has been made over hip-hop’s supposed decline in 2023, but if you look past what we conventionally define as “rap,” the genre’s influence is all over the charts. Nowhere is that more evident than the meteoric rise of regional Mexican folk, a sound that’s steeped in over a century of musical traditions while refreshingly open to the new. While American pop can feel so processed and mechanical, regional Mexican music maintains an organic warmth, full of 12-string guitars and brassy horns. But its appeal isn’t just pure nostalgia; artists like Peso Pluma and Junior H have transformed regional Mexican by fusing folk styles with a modern hip-hop sheen.

As forms that prize storytelling, there’s a natural kinship between rap lyricism and the corrido, the narrative-driven style of ballad that’s long defined Mexican songwriting. But this new generation has fully embraced the aesthetic texture of hip-hop, in much the same way their musical forefathers incorporated electronic drum kits and synthesizers into live bands. Sometimes you hear that influence explicitly in the use of trap snares or a syncopated cadence; other times, it’s a looser vibe, an artist’s personal style or the artwork on an album cover. Natanael Cano, the godfather of the “corrido tumbado” — a distinctly contemporary twist on the corrido that takes inspiration from trap music — dresses more like a hypebeast who listens to Yeat than the buttoned-up gauchos of old.

This month, the scene lost one of its most promising young voices with the passing of rapper Lefty SM, who was pronounced dead on September 3 after a shooting near his home in Zapopon. Lefty didn’t yet have the stateside recognition of Peso Pluma or Natanael Cano, but his death is particularly shocking as it comes only a month after his appearance on That Mexican OT’s “Barrio,” Lefty’s first feature for an American artist. Few details have been released regarding any investigation, but the loss of Lefty SM is the kind that feels uncomfortably familiar to fans of American hip-hop and regional Mexican music alike.

Though more of a straight-up MC than many at the forefront of regional Mexican music, Lefty truly embodied its stylistic hybridity, dabbling in multiple genres and constantly pushing his voice in surprising directions. Like “urban music” in the United States, “regional Mexican folk” is an umbrella term that speaks more to how the music is marketed and sold than what it actually sounds like. That kind of catch-all descriptor, much like the concept of Latin music itself, has a tendency to flatten regional specificities into a homogeneous mass, lumping radically different artists together just because they perform in the same language. Within a single category, you have big band norteño waltzes, sensual cumbia, synthesizer-heavy Duranguense music, and countless other flavors. The breadth contained by regional Mexican folk in some ways encourages genre-bending collaboration — a link-up like Grupo Frontera and Bad Bunny’s “un x100to” expresses a sense of solidarity across the Spanish-speaking world, as two musical dialects join as one.

Lefty was born in San Luis Rio Colorado in the state of Sonora, right across the border from the sister city of San Luis, Arizona. The northern part of Mexico, where disparate cultures collide, has long dominated its music industry, and Lefty’s music reflected the stylistic bilingualism that thrives in the region. His earlier releases stick to a stricter hip-hop sound, favoring slow G-funk beats ideal for lowrider cruising. In the years since his last full-length project, 2020’s Necesidad, Lefty broadened his palette, increasingly favoring the live “banda” sound that defines so much of Mexican music. You could always hear a wide range of influences in his beats, from dub reggae to drill, but Lefty’s sound deepened as he worked more often with major singer-songwriters like Luis R Conriquez and full bands like Engima Norteño. Lefty could spit unrestrained bars just as easily as he could croon and ache, like a wild coyote howling at the moon.

Though Lefty SM may have only released two full-length projects in his lifetime, he leaves behind an almost prolific body of singles and collaborations, which speak toward the breadth of modern Mexican music. These five tracks offer a sampling of his breadth as an artist.

Rap Column is a column about rap music by Vivian Medithi and Nadine Smith for The FADER.