Music

In December 2014, I saw Ariel Camacho perform at Guelaguetza, a popular Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles. He was making the rounds as the emerging sierreño act to watch from Sinaloa, known for his extraordinary guitar skills and striking vocals. In his early 20s and on the brink of stardom — signed to the indie label DEL Records — Camacho stood confidently in the middle of the stage with his band Los Plebes del Rancho with a pumping tuba that commanded attention and his mesmerizing requinto. All eyes were on this new artist, who had modernized a música Mexicana subgenre that was mainly popular in the Northern regions of Mexico, and played in the rancho.

Two months later, in February 2015, Camacho died in a tragic car accident in his native Sinaloa at age 22 and instantly became a legend. While the young signer’s career was extremely brief — he had only emerged in the musical spotlight in 2013 — he’s had one of the most consequential careers in Mexican music since corridos icon Chalino Sánchez. Ask anyone from Peso Pluma to Fidel Castro (Grupo Marca Registrada), Christian Nodal and Jesús Ortiz Paz (Fuerza Regida), and they will all categorically say that it was Camacho who paved the way for them. In fact, Castro, Peso and Paz all spoke at the 2024 Billboard Latin Music Week about how the late artist has impacted their respective careers.

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“Ariel Camacho was the pioneer of everything,” says Ángel del Villar, CEO of DEL Records, the label that signed Camacho early on and eventually brought Ariel Camacho y Sus Plebes del Rancho to the United States for promo and shows. “Only someone with his essence could take such a local genre to an international level. What we are living now in the regional Mexican genre has its roots in the music he created. He led the way for a revolution in the genre.”

Ariel Camacho y Los Plebes Del Rancho earned their first Billboard chart entry, and top 10 hit, through “El Karma,” which debuted at No. 40 on the Latin Digital Song Sales in August 2014. The song returned to the chart seven weeks later, for its second week, peaking at No. 7 in March 2015, a month after Camacho’s death. The track earned Camacho his first No. 1 on any chart: the posthumous champ surged 30-1 on the multi-metric Hot Latin Songs chart in March 2015. Overall, Ariel Camacho y Los Plebes del Rancho’s albums have earned a combined 2 million equivalent albums units, according to Luminate, and 2.7 billion on-demand official streams in the U.S.

When Camacho launched his career in 2013, regional Mexican music wasn’t the global force that it is today. The genre was mainly dominated by corrido singers and banda ensembles like Banda MS and Julión Álvarez y su Norteño Banda led by a frontman — most were older men that didn’t play an instrument onstage. Camacho — who was managed by Jaime González (Christian Nodal’s father) — was refreshingly different. He was very young compared to his fellow genre mates, he sang romantic songs and he brought along his requinto (a six-string guitar), which he learned to play thanks to his father, also a singer and musician.

“He was a boy with his guitar,” Nodal told Billboard during his interview for his 2024 Billboard SXSW cover story. “It was something so simple that made such an impact at the time that, when Ariel passed away, he invited me to dream. It was because of him that I started listening to regional Mexican music and began to write songs.”

The guitar part of it all is “extremely notable,” says Tere Aguilera, Billboard and Billboard Español‘s correspondent in Mexico who has covered música mexicana extensively. “It was no longer just about wanting to be a singer or the vocalist of a group. All the kids who were looking for a start found a reference point in Ariel because he was a young person singing something that wasn’t just their parents music anymore. It’s also important to note that because Ariel was mainly successful in the U.S., aspiring Mexican-American artists took note. They too could succeed outside of Mexico, it was no longer a ‘regional’ thing.”

It’s precisely what Paz, frontman of Fuerza Regida born and raised in San Bernardino, Calif., saw in Camacho. “He really lived life to the fullest — doing his thing, getting on radio shows in L.A, and pushing a genre that was part of our childhood. He was making space for us outside of Mexico, and as someone from California with Mexican roots, that hit close to home,” he tells Billboard, adding that his favorite Ariel Camacho song is the emotionally-charged “Hablemos.”

Marca Registrada’s Fidel Castro was perhaps one of the few artists who actually met and hung out with Ariel Camacho. They also recorded together. “The first time I heard Ariel’s voice it caught my attention,” Castro remembers. “It was a voice with a lot of feeling. And whatever song he sang, it was beautiful because he had the talent to not only feel it but make it his own.”

Castro and Camacho met in Sinaloa through a colleague: “When he arrived to the house we were meeting at, he was listening to a song of mine called ‘La Vida Ruina,’ and in fact we re-recorded it together. For me it was an honor, it was immediate chemistry and we became friends. After that we went everywhere together.”

Castro’s relationship to Camacho is peculiar, in the way that not many in the industry had the chance to meet this ephemeral talent. “Ariel was super humble, but had a lot of personality. He was a great friend, he loved jokes, and he was a big foodie,” Castro shares. “If we were in Culiacán and all of a sudden craved something from Guamuchil, where he lived with his parents, we had to travel from Culiacan to Guamuchil just for a torta from Tortas El Rey. If something got into his head, there was no one to stop him.”

It’s hard to pinpoint just one reason why so many artists that are ushering a new generation of regional Mexican music look to Camacho for inspiration. Whether it was because he was young, successful outside of Mexico or because he dared to refresh a decades-old genre with his requinto and the mighty tuba, it’s clear that Camacho left a blueprint for hitmakers today.

“Even if they don’t sing the same style as Ariel, those new artists are influenced by what Ariel did,” Castro adds. “Today, Peso and Fuerza Regida are monsters in music, and their foundation is Ariel Camacho. That’s his legacy: starting a new era of Mexican music.”

Read manager Jaime González share his first-hand memories of Camacho here.