In the video for his ballroom-tinged single “Contramar,” singer and producer Blue Rojo plays the deranged maître d’ of the famed Mexico City restaurant, catering to a crowd of nightlife starlets through strobing lights, cascading wine, and gorging maws. “Selfie con Dua Lipa en el Contramar,” he muses over a thumping catwalk beat, winking at the radical optimist’s frequent Tenochtitlan visits before poking fun at his own hedonistic habits, cautioning, “No me des perico, estoy con mi mamá.” The cheeky track is a centerpiece off Blue Rojo’s latest album, CDMXXXXXXXXXXXXX – 13 Xs in total – an incisive and hyper-specific study on the chic and frivolous lives of Mexico City’s artsy denizens. Weaving reggaeton, trip-hop, Molotov samples, and heaps of queer camp, the irreverent fashion boy arrives as a fresh chilango interlocutor, swapping romanticized metropolitan decadence for the thrill of finding high quality fakes at the tianguis.
“Sometimes I worry that I’m too serious,” Blue Rojo tells Remezcla with a chuckle, tracing his love of pop theatrics from Ana Gabriel to Britney Spears and María Daniela. “I wanted to be provocative and talk about the world I inhabit, because, la neta, what’s happening in Mexico City is super fun and cool. I’d hear Nicki Minaj or Kanye West rapping about restaurants in New York, and I wanted to do that here. I was living in el Centro at the time, hanging out in la Roma, in Condesa, in Perisur, and yeah, I surround myself with avant-garde types who take me to fancy restaurants and art galleries. Culture is a protagonist in Mexico City, so this record is about how I experience it, but sometimes about parody, too.”
Born in Chula Vista, CA, and raised in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, Blue Rojo is the alias of Santiago Ogarrio, a border kid who grew up singing in church but also nourished by ‘90s MTV and his mother’s love of Sinead O’Connor and choral music. These latter influences laid the groundwork for his uniquely sorrowful voice — a melange of R&B, soul, and the exploratory cadences of Björk and Grimes. When he first emerged on SoundCloud, a decade ago, he bore the MSN-esque handle bluerojo23x, gradually evolving from a witch house sound into neoperreo, and scoring his first underground hit with the lurching drums of “sOy Tu PaYaSo papi.” Sad reggaeton became his calling card, which led to a record deal with Void Records, a sublabel of Universal, followed by his 2021 debut album, Solitario, as well as a newly streamlined stage moniker.
“Making Solitario was a really cool experience, because I had to learn to be collaborative and release the musical reins,” he says, highlighting a team that included creative director Diego Urdaneta and buzzy producers Diego Raposo, V1FRO, and Ulises Hadjis. “We drifted into sadder territory than I anticipated. I was getting over this guy who was straight and didn’t pay me any attention, so the record was about dying in that hell and telling myself never to chase after heteros again.”
And yet, heartbreak yielded big rewards. The following year, Blue Rojo went viral with the gay soccer romance of hyperpop torch song, “No Te Kiero Olvidar,” followed by a performance at Festival Ceremonia, one of Mexico’s first major post-pandemic events. Snowballing hype put him at the forefront of a queer nightlife renaissance, which mutated from Traición’s boundary-pushing fêtes and Barragán’s horny fashions, into the circuit bacchanals of Por Detroit and the rise of Mexican art superstars like La Bruja de Texcoco and Fabián Chairez. Most significantly, a call from Academy Award-winning composer Ludwig Göransson resulted in his inclusion in the soundtrack for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, broadcasting his fallen angel vocals to audiences around the globe.
“Wakanda happened because someone sent Ludwig Göransson a list of emerging artists from Mexico, and on there was ‘sOy Tu PaYaSo papi,’ which he liked,” he remembers. “They brought in lots of artists, rappers, and producers for sessions, many of them more famous than I, but not everyone clicked. However, everyone liked my song, ‘Inframundo,’ which Ludwig and I wrote and produced together. Nobody gave me that, nobody paid to make it happen. It was magic that happened in the moment.” “Inframundo” echoed the film’s Mayan themes, unfolding like a dream of a crumbling romance between an ancient couple. Other Mexican artists featured on the soundtrack included Foudeqush, Mare Advertencia, Snow Tha Product, and the rapper Alemán.
“They brought in lots of artists, rappers, and producers for [the Wakanda Forever soundtrack] sessions, many of them more famous than I, but not everyone clicked… Nobody gave me that, nobody paid to make it happen. It was magic that happened in the moment.”
Soon, Blue Rojo began sketching the themes of his sophomore LP, CDMXXXXXXXXXXXXX, collaborating with producers V1FRO and Saga, as well as creative director Santiago Martínez Alberú of the magazine Suave and fashion stylist Rogelio F. Burgos. The lead single, “Chisme!,” a deconstructed perreo about delicious scene scuttlebutt, was accompanied by a black and white short filled with snarling models and street couture. Months later, he dropped the video for “Fashion Boy,” a dive into military pageantry perverted through homoerotic choreography and sly winks to the martyrdom of Los Niños Héroes. The album strikes an extraordinary balance of silly and cool, poking fun at branded consumerism (“Destellos de Prada***) and catty muscle gays (“GYM. tengo que brillar”), while evoking beloved crooners like Frank Ocean (“CDMXXX”) and Jon Secada (“Tercera Guerra Mundial”). The result is a surprisingly accurate depiction of the contemporary chilango underground in all its faddish glory.
“Reggaeton mexa, Latin Mafia, that song ‘Secunena’ by Sayuri & Sopholov; they’re mainstreaming aesthetics we in the scene were creating like five years ago,” reflects Blue Rojo, noting the many upcycled, Tepito-found pieces sprinkled throughout his music videos. “Now, the new underground is about rock, with Clothing MX, Diles Que No Me Maten, Mint Field, Luisa Almaguer… Who knows, maybe I’ll take that on next.”
