The problem with history is that it takes so long to happen! By the time one generation has worked through the important lessons, another generation has replaced it, and we seem doomed to do some of the same stupid things over and over again! You’d think we’d learn, or at least you’d think we’d learn some of the basic lessons.
In a country based on freedom, equal opportunity, and democracy, you’d think that lessons related to social justice would not need to be re-hashed so often. But that does seem to be our fate. And so, in every generation, we’ve witnessed one group after another struggle to claim their own share of the American dream.
This was true in the Civil Rights era, when after one hundred years of waiting patiently for the rights black people had been promised with the 13th and 15th ammendments, it took marches, assassinations, riots, and legislation, to begin to deliver justice to African Americans. The women’s suffrage movement began in the mid-1800’s, and it took nearly 70 years before women got the vote. Women still don’t receive equal pay for equal work. That battle is still being fought. Every immigrant that has ever come to this country has had to fight, tooth and nail, to move up the economic ladder. It isn’t right, it isn’t fair, but after so many historic boomerangs, it isn’t any surprise either. It’s the 21st century and, in too many places, women are still having to fight so they don’t have to raise their skirts before they can move forward. Our Hispanic citizens have also had their own share of fighting for the rights and equality that the Constitution promises every citizen.
Music has had a huge role in raising awareness, unifying people, inspiring empathy, and challenging the status quo in every major social wave of change. Today, we’re looking at how American music was used, like the trumpets at Jericho, to knock down the walls that separated Hispanic Americans from the promises made to all Americans, beginning in 1776. In many ways, this is a fight that continues today. There aren’t enough people out there who have a ‘giver’s gain’ mentality. When people actively deny others the opportunity to rise, they’re behaving like it means they have to lose. Why is that?
Welcome to American Song and the Fight for Hispanic Equality.
The Mexican American war, in the 1840’s, was a land-grab by the United States to increase its territory toward the west. At the time, a US President went and provoke a fight with Mexico to create the opportunity to seize Mexica land. If it happened today, people would be talking about it like we’re now talking about Putin’s attack on Ukraine. It’s an uncomfortable truth, but it’s accurate. Sorry if you don’t’ like it. I didn’t start that war.
It ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and we swallowed up basically two-thirds of the land that was then part of Mexico. But what good is territory that doesn’t have anyone you can tax? So we promised Mexicans that we’d treat them nicely if they’d stay put. We’d even make them U.S. citizens with all the rights and privileges. But the United States has made lots of promises it never kept.
Bound by politics, life is like chess with two egos pitted against each other, and lives and fortunes being moved around on the game board. The Mexicans living in California, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada went to bed one night in Mexico, and the next morning, woke up in the United States. Checkmate. Think of this, if you will. Santa Fe, New Mexico, for example, was founded in 1610 – 230 years before this treaty. Los Angeles was founded in 1781, two years after Nacogdoches, Texas.
The California Gold Rush attracted millions of whites into lands that used to be dominated by Native Americans and Mexicans. The next wave brought white farmers who bought up the land. The wealthier, more powerful ones also bought the local courts and law enforcement. To drive wages down, they greedily recruited way too many migrant workers and then used the labor surplus to set wages at poverty levels, turning Mexican workers into feudal serfs – creating a class of sharecroppers, just like blacks had been since the end of Reconstruction.
As white American families migrated into what used to be Mexico, Hispanic families that had been making their living, and living their lives for already hundreds of years began experiencing a gradual reduction in rights. They experienced discrimination, loss of voting rights, unequal education, and unfair wages.
Somewhere along the way, things have been confused. There’s a lot of people in America who don’t remember that white Americans were the intruders. Somehow, we believe that it’s the brown-skinned Mexicans that have unfairly taken from the whites. We slap names like ‘wetbacks’, and ‘beaners’ on them because we think those words justify our position.
Music, as a force to call attention to, unify people around, and inspire action about important social causes is a recurring theme in American music. And its as true about the Hispanic struggle for justice as its been for every group in our history. Hispanics have had a wide range of musical inspirations, including familiar faces such as Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie, and musical heroes from their own communities.
Music from the black civil rights struggle was also borrowed, early on. But the most important parts of the cultural foundations that the Chicano community drew from came from their own Mexican heritage – especially the corrido, which we talked about last month in the Roots of Latin American music episode. As the revolutionary tide of the 1960s began to swell in American culture, Chicanos resurrected the corrido, and added to it a new, political consciousness, giving air to their grievances and struggles.
Last month, in the episode, the Roots of Latin Music in the New World, we talked about Mexican American corridos. Jose Suarez was a Hispanic singer in the 1930’s and ‘40s who recorded songs that brought attention to the hardships faced by migrant workers of the Dust Bowl era. This is his song, “Yo Cuando era Niño - Mi Padre Querido...". It’s in a form called Habanera music, written in a meter where you can still hear the influence of North African music. This particular song dates back to 1939. This corrido is a narrative about picking cotton with his father as a boy and the struggles they lived through.
Slowly, momentum grew around the Mexican – or Chicano - civil rights movement, marked by strikes, demonstrations, and songs sung in both English and Spanish. By the early 1960s, a number of grass-roots movements that consisted mainly of urban working-class and agricultural workers in the Southwest grew frustrated with the slow progress that traditional, peaceful approaches were having. A more forceful movement was at hand, it was time to turn up the heat. College students were receptive to a new movement, and started calling themselves Chicanos – derived from Mexicanos where “XI” is pronounced as “she or Che” and the ‘me’ was dropped. As activists, they demanded CHANGE NOW, by building coalitions and gathering power.
The Chicano movement challenged “the assumptions, politics, and principles of the established political leaders, organizations, and activity within and outside the [Mexican-American] community.” Discrimination, educational segregation, voting rights, and ethnic stereotyping were the major issues of the activists, but minimum wages for migrant agricultural workers and citizenship for the children of Mexican-born parents were also important issues. Activist organizations, like Cesar Chavez’ United Farm Workers and his Crusade for Justice, as well as LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) and MAPA (Mexican American Political Association) represented the middle- and working-class Mexican Americans in the 1960s, as they continue to do today. Strikes and demonstrations helped them gain political ground, and songs helped them voice their concerns and air their demands.
The singer-guitarist-song writer, Agustin Lira was an early leader in the Chicano movement. Born in Mexico, he was raised in California as an undocumented migrant farmworker and eventually devoted his music to activism. His early life was lived in the fields, picking crops from age 7 and he grew up in poverty. He grew up around Fresno, and after high school, eventually joined up with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. He performed on picket lines, at meetings and rallies, and became a really important voice for the Chicano movement.
This is one of Lira’s first compositions. Its called Ser como el aire libre, (“Be like the wind”). It’s a song about freedom.
In 1966, Hispanic grape pickers went on strike over conditions and pay and they staged a UFW march from Delano to Sacramento. Cesar Chavez needed a song to rally his union members around, and asked Lira to write a song his marchers could sing the next day. This is that song - “La peregrinacion” (“The pilgrimage”) and it became the anthem of the UFW movement.
“I do not come to sing
Nor do I come to cry
about my bad fortune.
From Delano I go
to Sacramento,
to Sacramento
to fight for my rights.”
But what right are we talking about?
Lira’s entire family, all U.S. citizens, were deported in the 1930s under the Mexican Repatriation Program. This program forcefully removed over 2 million people of Mexican descent from the land their families had owned for generations.
During WW II, Lira’s uncles shared the same burden that all American soldiers who’d defended freedom had fought for. But – just like the fate that awaited black American citizens on their return home, - they were welcomed back with racism. Just like the Southern blacks they weren’t even allowed to eat at local restaurants or other use other public places.
Some people called the singer-songwriter, Jesus “Chuy” Negrete, the Mexican Bob Dylan.
The actor, Edward James Olmos, called Negrete, “the Chicano Woody Guthrie,” - someone who “was like a brother” to him.
Olmos said that Negrete’s “ability to make you laugh or make you cry was superb,”. His song, ”La Tragedia de Tucson” told the story of the 2011 mass shooting in Arizona in which six people were killed and more wounded, including former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords. He was part folklorist, part folksinger and he told stories about the Mexican-American experience and in the Latin American world, he was considered a super-star. Let’s listen to Chuy play:
https://edutube.hccs.edu/media/Jes%C3%BAs+%E2%80%9CChewy%E2%80%9D+Negrete/0_qynwkzd5/49139792
(16:00)
Most importantly, Negrete’s music and career was about giving young Chicano’s a strong belief in themselves. He’d often perform for prospective students at the University of Houston, and in one of his performances, he told the crowd “You are Olmeca, Tolteca, Azteca, Chichimeca! You are Mestizo!” He continued by adding that, in pre-Columbian days, “We were architects, engineers, mathematicians, botanists, surgeons, philosophers. Yeah, we had a lot going for us, not just frijoles and tortillas.” Juan Díes, co-founder of the Sones de Mexico ensemble, has said that “Chuy’s legacy will be reaching scores of young Latinos who felt lost in American society.”
Nahuatl Song
In addition to the Dylan-esque troubadors like Negrete and Lira, another popular music in the days leading up to rock and roll was the son jarocho, an Afro-Mexican song and dance form originating in Vera Cruz, Mexico. Son jarocho features a guitar-like instrument, called a jarana, that has between four and eight strings. The electric bass is replaced with a bajo sexto, a twelve-stringed Mexican bass guitar. The whole point of using these traditional instruments was to create a very definitely Native American sound. As the members of the Chicano rapcore band, Aztlan Underground pointed out in an interview, the political underpinnings of this music is to “emphasize the people’s connection to the land that was torn from us. To dissect the way in which they [the Spanish and the Americans] have colonized us and made us believe in the white ways and not our own. We wanted to resurrect our true identity.”
Son Jarocho Master Musicians: César Castro, Artemio Posadas & Luis Sarimientos
Besides the folk side of the Chicano music movement that we’ve been listening to, during the 1960s and early 1970s, East LA was ground-zero for a wave of Chicano rock bands and individual artists.
Come On Let’s Go
As Cesar Chavez, and other leaders within the Hispanic community helped their people reassert their place in society, some of the youth jumped aboard the late ‘50s/ early ‘60s youth movement. Rock and roll played an important role in it, and Hispanics looked within their own culture for additional idols and heroes. Richie Valens, originally born as Ricardo Valenzuela, was the most popular of the initial group that surged forward. But Chicano Rock was an umbrella that covered more than just what came directly from R&B (you’ll remember we talked about how R&B led the way into Rock and Roll during season one. Go back and check out episodes 12 and 13 from September and October, 2021 for lots of great stuff on that!
Links can be found in this episode’s notes.
The term, Chicano Rock, was actually applied to all the influences that played a role in the Chicano culture - including Mexican mariachi bands, country, blues and even the swamp-pop of Louisiana and East Texas. Valens was born in 1941 in a Mexican-Native American family, and we don’t know a lot about him – he was killed too soon after leaving his early mark, in that same tragic plane crash that took Buddy Holly, and a few others – also discussed in episode 13. With just a few really strong, stand-out singles – especially La Bamba – Richie, more than anything paved the way for other Hispanics to follow in later years.
Donna
At just fifteen years old, he formed his first band with a group of friends from Pacoima High School – how many of have similar stories about having played in garage bands with friends from school. His band started playing high school dances and local gigs, and they appeared on the radar of a local A&R guy named Bob Keene. He’d already signed Sam Cooke for instance. It was Keene who walked Valens into an LA studio to record “Come On, Let’s Go”. This original tune by Valens actually hit number 42 on Billboard. The next single though, a double “A” side with another Valens original on one side called “Donna” and the song that we really remember Valens by, “La Bamba” on the other.
Original versión La Bamba
Valens version La Bamba
With La Bamba, Valens gave this old, Mexican correo a whole new identity that literally defined the entire Chicano rock sound. Since the 1930s, there have been hundreds of cover versions of this song. Wyclef Jean, the Ventures, the Wiggles, the Sugar Beats – even Glen Campbell have covered it. Even Weird Al Yankoic’s version, “La Lasagna”
Lasagna – Weird Al
So, Richie Valens had his big hit Iate 1958 with it, and it eventually got to #2 on Billboard’s Top 100. Quick on the heels of that, in early 1959, Richie was booked to tour with Buddy Holly on a midwestern tour called ‘the Winter Dance Party’. If you don’t know that story – please check out my episode 13 from last fall, season one. It’s such a heartbreak of a story – Holly was only 22, Richie Valens was only 18…. And that was all the time we had with this bright light. Of course, we really don’t know what might have happened if he’d lived longer. He might have been a ‘one hit wonder’, or he might have been like a Paul McCartney. All we know is that by 18, he left us with a few great songs that lasted.
Chan Romero – Hippy Hippy Shake
Other Chicano rockers followed Valens in his passing, including Chan Romero (who recorded the original of ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’ – a song the Beatles played in Hamburg, and at the Cavern Club,
Wasted Days and Wasted Nights
the Texas Chicano blues-rocker Freddy Fender, who was born Baldemar Garza Huerta, and had two big hits with "Before the Next Teardrop Falls" and "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights", and Trini Lopez.
If I Had a Hammer
Trini Lopez was really big in the early 1960’s and had an original sound – kind of a mashup of folk, Latin and rockabilly. This song, If I Had a Hammer, was his biggest hit. It got to #3 on Billboard’s Hot 100. Lopez was a victim of Covid-19 in 2020; he was 83 by then.
By the 1950’s and 1960’s, Chicano records were selling really well – an indication of increasing Chicano pride and some improvement in their financial situation too. Depending on the artist, Hispanic music was finding its legs on a regional, or even – with artists like Richie Valens, for instance – a national and even international level.
And things were happening South of the border, too. Mexico produced two early Latin American bands. One was Los Teen Tops. Equally inspirational to the movement though were the Beatles, whose chain lightning drove bands out of the entire Latin world – from Spain to Argentina and many points in between.
Los Teen Tops
Valens showed us that modernizing a correo like La Bamba could make it relevant for Chicanos trying to forge their way through the ‘occupied territory’ of the American Southwest. On theh other hand, a Mexican band called Los Teen Tops brought American and English rock home to their Spanish speaking compadres. They reworked lyrics to make the songs work in Spanish, and they got huge in Mexico! Check out their version of Little Richard’s Good Golly, Miss Molly:
La Plaga
In Little Richard’s version, the original lyrics and the Teen Tops versions are pretty similar. In later versions they change though. For instance, verse one is:
But verse three is pretty different.
| Good golly, Miss Molly, you sure like to ball Good golly, Miss Molly, you sure like to ball When you're rockin' and a rollin' Can't hear your momma call (3) I'm going to the corner Gonna buy a diamond ring When she hug me and kiss me Make me ting-a-ling-a-ling | Here comes the pest She sure likes to dance Here comes the pest She sure likes to dance And when she's rock and rolling She's the queen of the place (3) Let's go and see a priest I want to get married now It's not that you're so pretty But you sure know how to dance
Corran Todos
Beatlemania ruled the world in these years, so it’s no big surprise that the fever ran high in South America. Chain lightning sparked a Uruguayan band called Los Shakers that made their career with Beatles-inspired songs like this one. But they weren’t the only ones. There were a who tried to rock out in this same Beatly way. The main guys in Los Shakers were two brothers, Hugo and Osvaldo Fattoruso who’d gone to the movies one day to see A Hard Day’s Night. Out of it, they wrote a hit called Everybody Run – Corran Todos – but their really big song was Break Everything – Rompan Todos which mad the Top 10 in Argentina, Uruguay’s much bigger neighbor to the east. Of these two songs, I think this one we’re listening to, Corran Todos, or Everybody Run, sounds even more like Help! era Beatles.
Let’s go back to the U.S. Back in Southern California, and in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there were hundreds of local, garage bands trying to follow in Richie Valens footsteps. Out of all of them, just a few actually made any sort of impact outside Southern California. These five, Thee Midniters, the Village Callers, Cannibal and the Headhunters, El Chicano, and Tierra were best known. Collectively, they formed a movement called the Eastside Sound.
As I’ve said, Hispanic kids playing rock and roll was a step forward socially. It showed a new-found confidence and brashness among Hispanic youth that was made possible because of the Chicano movement. It was the direct response to the encouragement and pride that guys like Chuy Negrete was putting out there.
Land of a Thousand Dances
Thee Midniters was probably the best band to come out of East LA in the 1960’s. Indisputably the greatest Latino rock band of the '60s, Their sound was a blend of British Invasion – think the Stones – and American R&B. They had two hits, one actually got big across the country. They had kind of an early proto-punk feel to their music, although their lead singer, Willie Garcia, could also do real justice to steamy, Latin ballads. You can still hear their echo in bands like Los Lobos. This is their song, Land of a Thousand Dances.
Hector
The story of the Village Callers would be familiar to anyone who’s ever had a garage band. They formed out of another band called Marcy & The Imperials. For a while, the Imperials went around as Them Iperials, because their business cards were mis-printed and they couldn’t afford to reprint. I think that’s pretty funny, actually. There’s no one still around who actually remembers how the Village Callers name came in, and anyway, their sound had changed from when they were Them Iperials. Like most garage bands, members came in and out of the band on the way to nowhere. By the mid ‘60s, they were getting gigs at LA clubs. They even won the battle of the bands at East LA College in ’67.
Evil Ways
The Village Callers first album was a live recording, made at a gritty, Pico Rivera (that’s a city in East L.A.) strip club called the Plush Bunny. Ike & Tina Turner used to have an annual New Years Eve gig their every year at this time. Anyway, the Callers had a regular set there, and it was all covers of other people’s songs. One of them was Evil Ways, a cover of a song written by a jazz guitarist named Clarence Sonny Henry, and it was that recording that inspired Carlos Santana to record his version of it later.
Cannibal and the Headhunters
If ever there was a Cinderella story – this is it. Imagine: you’re in a small band from the East LA projects, and a year after starting that band, you’re touring America as the opening band for the Beatles – the biggest band of all time - all the way through the end of the tour and the epic show at the Hollywood Bowl! Sounds like a fantasy, but it isn’t!
You’re now listening to that band! Unfortunately, they were pretty much a one-hit wonder, too. Their big hit ANOTHER version of Land of a Thousand Dances. Their version sounds like this. Unfortunately, their future was troubled almost from the very beginning. During that Beatles tour, one of the band members was called home by his girlfriend who missed him. When the tour was over, they made a few more recordings, but none of them had the same impact as this song, and the band faded out of history almost as quickly as they’d arrived on the scene. (DeNiro)
Viva Tirado
If Cannibal and the Headhunters time in the spotlight was brief, the opposite has been true for El Chicano, the most successful of the L.A. Latino Rock bands. With 10 albums released between 1970 and 1985, they’ve produced some classic music.
Their major influences were Santana, thee Midniters, Cannibal and the Headhunters and other Eastside bands. They had this very eclectic sound; a mix of rock, soul, funk, jazz, blues, Afro-Cuban soul-jazz and salsa heavyweights such as Tito Puente, Ray Barretto, and Mongo.
Keep On Moving
El Chicano fused a progressive mix of Afro-Cuban, blues and jazz. They’re one of the most successful of the Chicano bands, with Billboard and Cashbox magazines both voting them the number one jazz group of 1970, with their latin-based album, “Viva Tirado”. But the record that earned them the highest critical praise though was "Revolución", which came out a year later. It charted in the United States, Central and South America.
Over a 50 year span, they earned five gold records, and recorded twelve albums. Their music has been used on several big film soundtracks, they’ve been on television numerous times, and featured in various documentaries. You can hear it in tracks like this one, Keep Moving, from El Chicano’s “Revolucion” album.
Mamita Linda
In the late ‘60s and early '70s, as the Vietnam protest movement gathered energy, and the Cesar Chavez’ UFW grew in size and strength, artists like El Chicano, and this band, called Azteca, used their popularity to amplify the messages being expressed in Chicano communities. This is the first track from their debut album, Mamita Linda.
Mas y Mas
My personal favorite of the East LA bands is Los Lobos, super talented musicians, influential, and around since the 1970s. For a lot of people, they first got noticed in the early 1980’s with their song Will the Wolf Survive. One of the most important things I think they’ve done is to introduce traditional sounds to a wider, mainstream audience. For instance, David Hidalgo from Los Lobos played the requinto doble and accordion on this song, “Aqui No Sera” on an album by another East LA band called Ozomatli. For you musicians, a requinto doble is a ¾ sized version of a standard nylon string (classical) guitar, tuned a fourth higher – so, instead of tuning E-A-D-G-B-E, it’s tuned A-D-G-B-E-A. Another cool thing about this song is how it shows the influence Los Lobos have had on younger musicians; Ozomatli started nearly 25 years after Los Lobos put their first album out!
Over nearly fifty years, Los Lobos has earned numerous awards, including three Grammy Awards; induction into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame; and countless congressional and community recognition. These deep-thinkers are the pride of their community.
La Pistola y el Corazon
Growing up, the members of Los Lobos received a rich education in the blues, rock n roll, jazz, and doo–wop. Living in East LA where Latin music was everywhere, they complemented those sounds with the music that ran through their Hispanic heritage such as the bolero, rancheras, music Norteña, son jarocho, son huasteco, and cumbias. They learned to play and perform at back yard family parties, weddings, and Mexican restaurants. Their first album, released in 1978, was Just Another Band from East L.A. It pushed them into the spotlight, and the active L.A. punk scene of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s along with bands like the Plimsouls, the Blasters, X, and Black Flag.
Kiko and the Lavendar Moon
Los Lobos is a “musician’s band,” and their songs reflect the environment and consciousness of the barrio in relation to the world around it. They sing about important themes like humanity, pro-immigration, depression, love of self, community, and deep Mexican/Chicano culture and Spanish, Mexican, and Latin heritage. Like other great bands, they’ve changed and progressed from album to album both sonically and thematically. The one thing that’s been constant though is their ongoing dedication to their people and culture.
With all the success they’ve had, Los Lobos have never left their roots. They’ve maintained an ongoing commitment to elevating up-and-coming Chicano bands like Chicano Batman, and Quetzal.
I hope you’ll check out the full interview with Los Lobos done by Sound Opinions at City Winery, in Chicago. A link to it is on the American Song facebook page, and a link to it is also found in the notes that come with this podcast episode. https://youtu.be/fVR-ozfrQOA
Here’s a short excerpt from it.
Evil Ways
You can’t REALLY talk about Chicano rock without including Carlos Santana, who, for over 50 years now, has been a giant in the rock world. He took his early influence from the Chicano bands that came slightly before him, as well as blues. He’s recognized as one of the truly great guitar heroes of the rock age. Santana got his start playing in the bars of Tijuana, Mexico. Starting out on violin when he was five, he was taught by his father. He transitioned to guitar in his teens and quickly started playing with a few bands up and down the strip in T.J. right before the summer of love. He moved to San Francisco and started the Santa Blues Band, in 1966. In ’69, coming off a run of gigs at the Filmore West that started the momentum under his band, Santana were invited to play at Woodstock where they put on a legendary performance.
Under the conditions, that’s a pretty amazing statement. On stage under the influence of psychadelics, Santana was doing his best to control his guitar which, in his mind had become a live serpant. It was the ‘60s, man….
Oye Como Va
As a virtuosic guitarist, Carlos has infused the mainstream Anglo form of rock’n roll with Latin Pop vibes and a healthy dose of old‐school blues, R&B, and Afro‐Cuban rhythms. It’s a style all his own. He’s also championed important social causes, and by doing it, he’s worked to
reinforce the positive media profile of his community.
Black Magic Woman
A few of the events and causes he’s devoted his time to include the 1987 Rock’n Roll summit – a perestroika period festival concert featuring American and Russian bands. Benefit concerts have also been a major focus for Santana, for example, his appearance at the benefit for the San Francisco relief fund. Santana and his wife, Deborah, founded the Milagro Foundation in 1998 with millions going to support education, healthcare and creative activities for underprivileged children all over the world. In 2003, he donated the profits from his latest tour to help fight AIDS.
Santana has always had a clear vision about his music. His style is a bridge between the Anglo and Hispanic cultures, and through the decades, he has stayed true to that journey. Doing this, created a larger music for that style, and this made it easier for other Chicano musicians to carve out their own places in the music industry.
Smooth
Santana has had a career full of hits. “Black Magic Woman, “Smooth”, “Oye Como
Va”, and “Maria Maria” just to name a few. Over fifty years, he’s played for over 100 million fans, and sold more than 90 million records, with a top ten hit every decade since the 1960’s. In 1998, he was inducted into the Rock’n Roll Hall of Fame. In 2009, he received the Billboard Latin Music Awards’ Lifetime Achievement honor for all the success he has had in the music industry.