Molotov Cocktail

To listen to the members of hot Mexican rap group Molotov talk, you’d think it’s a band that just wants to have fun.

“Listeners should keep in mind not to take everything [we say] real serious,” drummer Randy “El Gringo Loco” Ebright, 20, said in a recent interview. “We like to have fun. We talk about things that bother us in our lives as a way of release. But we do it in a sarcastic way.”

Nevertheless, Molotov’s fans and detractors take the politically charged rap of its debut album, “Donde jugaran las ninas?” (Where Will the Girls Play?), quite seriously. (The album’s title is an open jab at “Donde jugaran los ninos?” [Where Will the Children/Boys Play?], the catchy tropical pop 1992 album by Mexico’s best-known rock en espanol band, Mana.)

“Songs like ‘Voto Latino’ [Latin Vote] or ‘Gimme tha Power’ are songs that we can identify with here,” said fan Juan Garcia, 23, at a Molotov show earlier this week at the House of Blues in West Hollywood. “They talk about ending discrimination, people’s impotence over government corruption and about empowering us as Mexicans, as Latinos.”

Such themes don’t sit well with the Mexican establishment.

“[Molotov] is harmful and offensive trash,” the Mexico City daily newspaper Variedades wrote in 1997. “This is a nasty musical production that’s polluting Mexico.”

Several major record stores in Mexico refused for a time to carry Molotov’s album because of songs that challenge most every aspect of Mexican--and Latin American--tradition: church, state and family.

Variedades fueled the ban using the type of rhetoric about Molotov that the Mexican press used nearly three decades ago when rock music was perceived as a threat to national security, effectively helping the government censor rock for nearly 15 years. It embroiled Molotov in a controversy similar to the one in the U.S. in the ‘80s sparked by the sexual and abusive language of rappers 2 Live Crew and Ice-T.

After a few months, the retail ban was lifted by a popular Mexico City record store, then alternative radio stations broke the air-wave silence. Molotov has since sold more than 300,000 copies of the album in Mexico.

Such success puts Molotov, which plays Sunday at J.C. Fandango in Anaheim, at the forefront of a hip-hop scene that has caught fire from the tip of South America to across the Atlantic. It joins Mexico’s other top billing hip-hop group, Control Machete (slated for a performance at J.C. Fandango in May), Argentine group Illya Kuriaki & the Valderramas, the two-sister team Actitud Maria Malta and Spain’s Latino Diablo as the newest generation of rockers in the Spanish-speaking world.

Less than a year ago, the four musicians were peddling their album on Mexico City street corners. Molotov played about 120 shows last year, including dates in December throughout South America with David Bowie, No Doubt and Bush. The group’s album received a Grammy nomination in the new Latin Alternative rock/pop category.

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Except for Ebright, who was born in Louisiana and raised in Mexico, Molotov’s members--bassists Mickey Huidobro, 24, and Paco Ayala, 25, and guitarist Tito Fuentes, 23--were born in Mexico, met in high school and shared a taste for the music of Run-DMC, Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys and Rage Against the Machine.

“Donde jugaran las ninas?” was produced by legendary Argentine rock producer Gustavo Santaolalla for his new label, Surco. It was recently released in the U.S. with expanded liner notes and packaging.

The notes are helpful even for bilingual listeners; some lyrics have Mexican colloquialisms, and there’s a slew of switchbacks between Spanish and English.

The chorus for the gangsta rap-style “Gimme tha Power,” which calls for a fairer justice system for Mexicans, goes: “Dame, dame, dame/Dame todo el power [Give me all the power]/para que te demos en la madre [so that we can hit you where it hurts]/Gimme todo el poder/So I can come around to [Spanish expletive].”

True to American hip-hop tradition, Molotov’s album has only two songs that are FCC friendly. Its best-known song translates roughly to “Coward” but in Spanish is an expletive.

“Coward” was taken by some in the Mexican press as homophobic because the term had been associated with gay-bashing. Yet the song has been embraced by the Mexican gay community as an insult toward anti-gay conservatives.

At the House of Blues show, fans chanted for “Coward” during a set that featured heavy-metal chord progressions that gave way to funky drums-and-bass, while sizzling bilingual lyrics of political statement burned with ironic humor.

“Voto Latino” looks at acceptance of another stripe through the issue of racism along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Said Ebright of his band mates: “If they can treat me like their brother, why can’t Americans treat Mexicans like brothers?”

As for pinpointing the group’s place in rock en espanol, Ebright demurred.

“We try not to represent [anything],” he said. “It’s a fresh scene. We are kind of living through a renaissance.”

* Molotov performs Sunday at J.C. Fandango, 1086 N. State College Blvd., Anaheim. 8 p.m. $16. (714) 758-1057.