Jellybean
The Mexican (Dance Mix)
The Mexican (A Capella)
The Mexican (Funhouse Mix)
Hip Hop Bean Bop (Bonus Beats)
The Mexican (Short Version)

It’s funny how you stumble upon, discover, or even re-discover songs sometimes. I’m absolutely certain I had heard this song before last month, but it took a fluke discovery of a disco cover for me to fall in love with it finally.

 

“The Mexican” is a classic for a lot of people, but just as many people don’t know anything about it, so I thought I’d touch upon its history here. The song was first written and recorded by the band Babe Ruth, a British prog/blues band who released a few albums of moderate note in the mid-70s. “The Mexican” was a minor hit, but not a breakthrough smash by any stretch of the imagination.

 

But it somehow quickly found a second life, not as a rock tune, but as a club track. That’s how I re-discovered it, hearing it on a goofy disco record by a Canadian disco act called Bombers. Their version is good, it’s a pretty hard song to fuck up to be honest, but the second I heard it I realized that I had heard a different version of it at some point in my life, a version that was better.

Thanks to never deleting any song from my iTunes ever, I quickly was able to figure out where I first heard the track; on The Prodigy’s Dirtchamber Sessions mix CD. That’s two dance acts (albeit of very different types) to cover/sample “The Mexican,” but little did I know that just scraped the surface.

“The Mexican” sounds instantly familiar to almost anyone because of samples, not only because of who has sampled it, but because of what it samples as well. The track is built off of a riff from a Morricone tune, the theme music to “A Few Dollars More.” Like the theme to “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,” that music has been used so often as homage and/or parody that it’s just ingrained in the public psyche. Anyone listening to “The Mexican” for the first time will get to the part that uses that famous Morricone riff and instantly recognize it.

In turn, “The Mexican” has been sampled and remixed by seemingly countless other artists. Parts of it were sampled in “Planet Rock” by “Afrika Bambaataa, and it was even sampled by Sugar Ray in their shitclassic “Fly.” And if you fancy yourself a fan of The Jungle Brothers, Grandmaster Melle Mel, GZA, R. Kelly, Kool Moe Dee or Doug E. Fresh, then you’ve probably heard a sample of “The Mexican.”

 

A lot of people would probably credit the version I’m sharing tonight for popularizing “The Mexican” in hip-hop and dance culture, but as the version by Bombers shows, that’s clearly not the case. This song was floating around in the club and dance scenes almost immediately after its original release. It was a disco staple, despite not being a disco song at all.

Still, without question, a big factor in long-lasting appeal of “The Mexican” is because of this version by Jellybean, aka John “Jellybean Benitez, the superstar producer and remixer of the 80s who worked with Madonna, Sheena Easton, Fleetwood Mac and about a billion others. This version was a number one single on the dance charts and is the one that most often pops up on mixes like The Dirtchamber Sessions. It was a prog/blues song that happened to have a good beat before Jellybean got his hand on it, he turned it into a dance track, one that breakdancers still pop and lock to the beat of to this very day.

However, even though it’s been an incredible influence on the dance scene, (not to mention that it just kicks all kinds of ass) Jellybean’s version of “The Mexican” is not an easy track to come across legally these days. You can find it on some compilation albums, although they usually only feature the short version. The full-length mix was included on Jellybeans’ 1984 album Wotupski!?!, but even that’s a little hard to find these days, and the CD version apparently has all kinds of problems. How holes like this in the digital marketplace of 2018 continue to happen are beyond me, but as long as they exist I guess this blog will have a place.

And someone tell Muse to cover this, that would be amazing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2018 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Jellybean, remixes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.