Red Cars & Accordion Riffs:
My Early Lesson in Nihilism:
With the world circling the drain, I’ve been wondering about the beginnings of my own nihilism — or maybe my fatalism, or just my skepticism toward people and their claims of truth. It didn’t begin with philosophy books or politics. For me, it goes back to music, one song: a narcocorrido, accordion-driven and polka-inflected, written by Paulino Vargas and made famous by Sinaloa’s Los Tigres del Norte — La Banda del Carro Rojo.
I’ve always felt a particular affinity for Sinaloa, my mother’s home state, which I claim as my own point of origin. The song, loosely translated as The Red Car Gang (though it sounds better in Spanish), was released in 1975 — the year of my birth — on the album of the same name. In that sense, it was already part of my earliest soundtrack.
I vaguely recall lying on the floor, forced to watch Siempre en Domingo, the Mexican variety show hosted by Raúl Velasco, with my family. Even as a young boy, I found the show intolerable, but it was our ritual. One night, during a commercial break, a trailer came on, and I was enthralled. Already a fan of the song, I watched in disbelief as the red car I first heard in the song, scorched the earth, gunshots blared, and a bloody mess capped it all. I announced to my parents that I wanted to see the movie. They complied — and it was glorious. I’ve resisted the urge to look for the trailer now; I’d rather preserve that childhood memory than risk a letdown.
What I do remember clearly, however, was my obsession with La Banda del Carro Rojo. By the time I was four, it was already my most requested song whenever my father put music on, which was often. What hooked me wasn’t just the story — it was the music itself. Jorge Hernández’s accordion at the beginning is a hook you can’t escape, both melody and engine, driving the song forward. The best comparison would be Marc Bolan’s riffs in T-Rex — the kind of line that is both catchy and inevitable (but I digress). Hernández’s singing was the same: urgent, deliberate, every word articulated as if life depended on it. That urgency demanded attention — and I gave it, even as a child.
The song tells a story about an ill-fated drug run from Mexico into Texas. The production had a cinematic quality unlike anything I’d heard: it used sirens, gunshots, and sound effects that made you see the drama in your mind. For me, this was more than music — it was a movie in sound.
The lyrics are stark. The red car, loaded with a hundred kilos of cocaine, heads north toward Chicago. The traffickers slip past customs in El Paso, but the Texas Rangers lie in wait near San Antonio. A siren cries, orders are shouted to stop the car, but instead an M16 erupts, headlights fly through the air, and a massacre begins. Four men from the red car die, along with three government agents. Lino Quintana, one of the traffickers, accepts the outcome as inevitable: “This had to happen. My companions are dead, they can no longer testify.” Then he adds a line that collapses the moral order: “Don’t worry about the government men — they’re coming with me to hell.”
As a child, I heard adventure. As an adult, I hear something else: a philosophy smuggled into song. This is where the corrido becomes more than outlaw storytelling. It collapses the line between good and evil. The government agents, supposedly forces of order, are lumped together with the traffickers. Everyone dies. Everyone goes to hell.
The song ends with ambiguity. No one even knows where the dead men came from — some say Sonora, others Altar, others Parral. The truth was never known, and no one came to claim the bodies. That’s the last line: no families, no friends, no mourners. Just bodies unclaimed, truth unresolved, and then the song ends abruptly, almost coldly.
The “red car” becomes a symbol of outlaw identity, pride, and defiance. The lyrics mix admiration for bravery with a fatalistic recognition that violence and death are inevitable in that world. It represents both freedom (movement across borders and checkpoints) and imprisonment (they die inside it, trapped in their own symbol of power).
For me, that ending belongs to the canon of great nihilistic finales in art — like Buñuel’s Simón Del Desierto or Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop. In each, the world burns down, and it doesn’t mean anything. What mattered — the certainty, the truth, the narrative of good versus evil — evaporates. What remains is legend, rumor, the accordion groove still stuck in your head.
Looking back, I realize this was the seed. Lying on the floor as a child, restless yet spellbound, I was absorbing not just a song but a worldview: that truth is slippery, that good and evil are indistinguishable, that stories end without resolution. My nihilism didn’t begin in books. It began with an accordion, a red car, and a corrido that refused to tell me the truth.
By the way, most of the cars I’ve owned — including my first and my current one — have been red. That can’t be a coincidence.