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Music

Never Heard of Narco Cinema? Watch Teen Flirt's "Welcome Home" Video

We discover the true story behind this visual rampage of tits, cocaine, and AK-47s.

Guns! Cocaine! Tits! Cocaine on tits! The music video for "Welcome Home" by Monterrey-based producer and DJ Teen Flirt (David Oranday) is unabashedly in the style of narco cinema—a Mexican film industry based on dramatizing the lurid exploits of drug cartels. If you're unfamiliar with narco cinema, it's okay. Just imagine daytime soap operas, but with more blood and pickup trucks.

When asked why he decided to go down the narco route, Oranday replied that he was sick of the cliched coupling of downtempo R&B music with images of long-limbed babes on the beach. "We were so bored of that misogynist shit, of putting half-naked girls on a pedestal," he said. (He has a point. Go to any YouTube channel specializing in easy listening slow jams, like Majestic Casual or Eton Messy, and you'll see what he means.)

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So for "Welcome Home," the first track off his forthcoming EP of the same title, Oranday decided to swing the camera from rose-tinted beaches to the tough streets of Monterrey, the city where he was born.

Oranday is quick to note that his music video isn't a satire of narco cinema. Rather, by pairing his moody, R&B-saturated bass track (which samples both a Wes Montgomery song with a T-Pain jam) with "really conflicted and hard images," he was trying to convey that "you think [this lifestyle] is cool but it's really so fucking sad. Watching these young boys give up their lives for three years of money and good living. For me, it's so fucking sad."

Back when Oranday and his friends were running a club in Monterrey, micro-militias of tough-guy teenagers would come around, trying to extort them for "protection money." Oranday found himself fixated on one particular wannabe gangster—a guy from a rich family who became a "douchey ass dude" after deciding to chase the lifestyle of drugs, guns, and girls. Although he has no clue how the guy ended up, Oranday started having vivid dreams of his untimely death. "And there was always this girl standing there," he says.

After sharing the dream with his friends at Finesse Records, a label that Oranday runs with five other Mexico-based dance music producers, the crew decided to base the music video on this guy's story. The result was a sort of pseudo-trailer for a narco film inspired by contemporary action movies of the Danny Boyle ilk. "Three quarters of the music video is based in things that really happened," Oranday claims.

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But "Welcome Home" departs from traditional narco cinema films in one important way: its production value. While most narco movies are low-budget affairs that go straight-to-video, "Welcome Home" is so lavish, it practically glows. This didn't happen by accident. Monterrey is a rich city; it has the country's highest per capita GDP. But it has also been traumatized by years of bloody warfare between the Gulf cartel and the ruthless Zetas drug gang. "When you can't go out and do shit," Oranday explains, "you put money into other things. Every single guy in that video is a friend of mine, and it's very DIY. But these guys make amazing music videos because they have all the lights and equipment for it."

Ultimately, the sleazy charm of "Welcome Home" comes from the many opposing forces embroiled within it: the soft melancholy of Oranday's music versus the hardened images of gangsters, guns and gams. The true story behind the video versus the inherently dramatizing impulses of the narco cinema genre it borrows from. The local context it was made in versus the international influences it speaks to.

When speaking about that last one, Oranday absent mindedly runs his fingers through his curly dark hair and gets very serious. "Look, I'm talking about myself now. You grow up and you're a thirteen-year old boy. You listen to Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac, who've been dealing since they were like, twelve. And this guy comes in and hands you an AK-47, says you're going to live the lives of your heroes. That's the whole cartel scene."

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"I'm not blaming hip-hop. I'm blaming the bad education that goes around."

@MichelleLhooq