The Prepaid Musician Plays Bad Music

I started by watching movies about San Francisco.

In 2016, I went on a road trip informally visiting the Spanish missions along California’s El Camino Real, from San Diego to San Francisco, and ending in Sacramento. Even though I had a flimsy guidebook for the United States with me, I ended up using a method I came up with…

So I had studied the formation of Spanish Alta California in the context of Russian expansion southward from Alaska in the 18th century, the colonizing “adventures” of Father Junípero Serra, the loss of (most of) California as part of Mexico after the Mexican-American War, the Gold Rush, the conquest of the “Wild West,” Manifest Destiny, Chilean and Mexican migration in that context, the Asian American diaspora, the earthquakes, etc.—but I wanted to turn my brain off for a bit and take a slightly more gullible approach to the place.

Because of how overrepresented the both real and fictional daily life of the United States is in global film, I easily found a glut of movies that, at least superficially, capture the mood of nearly any American city. Whether blockbusters smashing through big cities or sentimental Hallmark flicks oozing saccharine through picturesque country towns, American movies give you some sense of place. Prismed through an old-timey anthropologist’s gaze and that passionate exoticism of how Latin American countries get portrayed, in movie after movie, I watched San Francisco play itself.

This alternate, reduced, ignorant, and biased —but far more fun—theoretical framework had me searching for movie locations where San Francisco’s steep streets were traversed by characters like Bruce Lee, Clint Eastwood, Sharon Stone, Steve McQueen, and Kim Novak.

This approach, deliberately lacking any academic rigor, led me to construct a version of San Francisco that doesn’t really exist. While I expected to stumble upon historic car chases and micro-state princesses with royal crises, I instead ran into my art history education once again —almost instantly— when I climbed Coit Tower and found the murals decorating its lobby, which were produced under the supervision of Diego Rivera. After a long walk through Haight-Ashbury, the Castro, and around Mission Dolores, I took the Market Street trolley back to Chinatown and realized that these same streetcars still running through the city center are the exact same model that used to run through Mexico City in the last century.

Now it’s 2025 and I’m 30, and I’ve spent the past 10 years working in art. That sort of cinematic vision of San Francisco has slowly crumbled, just as the relationship between my country (Mexico) and yours (forgive my assumption that you, reader, are probably American) has also deteriorated. It is in the protests on your streets in defense of my compatriots, and in gentrification and displacement in mine. But that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped looking for bridges between our daily lives. And during the last Mexico City Art Week, I found another.

International art people bounce around—ending up in Miami the first week of December and then heading somewhere warmer after. For many years, I believed Mexico City’s art week in early February was the first of the year. My new San Francisco friends tell me that their own is actually the first. Although art workers, collectors, and jet-setting scenesters from all over the world come to Mexico City, and a lot of locals get really excited about this; personally, I just really didn’t feel like going out.

I was late helping with an install. Between the high fatigue and low morale, all I really wanted was to go to sleep. Besides, it was Z’s birthday (an Aquarius, early February), who I would continue seeing for a few more months despite the distance between Guadalajara and Mexico City. (Around April, I’d stop being Z’s semi-partner—on good terms.) But that night was their birthday and we were at the peak of our “dating” phase, so I was heading to their party after work.

One of the few shows I went to that first day of art week was Samuel Guerrero’s solo exhibition at Lodos gallery. The afterparty for the opening was at the same trendy spot where Z was having their birthday. That overlap between my personal and professional life worked out well. Walking among people dressed far better than me, I ran into Francisco, who said, “Hey Luis, do you know Nico?” I replied that I did, through two friends—one Peruvian from Lima (Alonso Leon-Velarde), and one Mexican from Ciudad Obregón, Sonora (Leonel Salguero). We chatted for a bit and didn’t speak again (much) until my departure as director of a gallery whose name combines a pop singer and a Dadaist babble became official.

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I was invited to participate in a summer show at Climate Control, which was the first time I’d been invited to do anything in the US. And honestly, when he called, I felt much too lazy to even think about mounting a show based on anything beyond the room I was in. Because of that—and because Nico is actually an artist—I accepted, on the condition that we’d approach the group show the same way we approached making art: experimentally, intuitively, and without hierarchy.

He shared contacts for some of the artists he was thinking about, and in the following weeks I called them during the few breaks I had at the gallery office in Guadalajara. I called the Bay Area, Paris, and Mexico City. I told Nico that while things tend to happen more “civilized” and bureaucratic in the U.S., he’d need to be patient because in Mexico art projects develop in a more Mad Max fashion. 

The curatorial work came out of artist interactions. When I was offered the chance to either curate or participate as an artist, I chose the latter. Even though I’ve curated for galleries and projects in Mexico, organizing shows feels like my “office job,” and I wanted to do something that would let me connect with San Francisco artists as more of a peer. So the role of curator kind of dissolved into a series of phone calls and visits between me, Nicolás, Angelique Heidler, Keith Boadwee, Lucia Aguilar, Morgan Corbitt, Juni Aranda, and Scott Galván. 

Later I proposed the title “Músico pagado toca mal son”—which translates (in my preferred translation) to “The Prepaid Musician Plays Bad Music”—because my friends and I often joke about how Mexican-Americans tend to use Spanish words without context in the U.S., creating a vibe similar to when someone gets a tattoo that just says “onigiri” in kanji. 

At first, I thought the title referred to how “prepaid musicians” were the formal artists working inside the official art world (especially in the U.S.), “playing” meant producing, and the “bad music” was the kind of boring shows my American friends often complained about—that nothing excites them anymore. 

As the project evolved, with Nico running around the Bay Area and me answering calls while saying goodbye to Guadalajara and moving back to my hometown of Mexico City, we realized none of the artists involved were actually “prepaid musicians,” and no one was really playing bad music. San Francisco (through conversations with its inhabitants) started to reveal itself as a city that shares many similarities with Guadalajara, Jalisco, where I’ve built most of my career. Both cities concentrate a lot of cultural activity and rich artistic output historically, without necessarily being at the center of their countries’ art markets. That paradox seems to give both cities more freedom in how their art scenes develop. 

Angelique told me horror stories about working in the Paris restaurant scene, as we searched for middle ground between time zones through photographic overlaps, abstract painting, and silkscreen hybrids. Juni and Scott sent me ideas from a semi-abandoned office floor in downtown Mexico City. Both work with flora and fauna filtered through the big city—Juni reimagining “cute” tropes with hardware store materials and obsessive technique, Scott doing a kind of cartoonish and pre-Hispanic-mythology reinterpretation of Mexico City’s public transport system. Nico sent me photos of Keith’s pieces taken during a studio visit, showing a poetic morbidity built through relational collaboration. Lucia and I discussed by phone the possible serialization of her textual paintings riffing on pop-meme images. Morgan described how she builds her paintings from image fragments scraped from online marketplaces and her phone—a process close to the readymade, but firmly pictorial—which reminded me of religious paintings found in the surviving Spanish missions of this geography. 

As for me, my painting came from conversations around the story of Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco, who lived in San Francisco for a few years, and whose works were burned by U.S. border agents upon crossing. I wanted to make a historically charged painting that broke from the nationalist solemnity of Mexican muralism. 

And maybe that “music” coming out of the commercial art machine isn’t really bad—it can work like a perfectly tuned symphony, but it leaves no room for surprise. By contrast, bringing the chaos of the studio into curatorial work felt more like a 1960s free jazz session—or a drunk banda in Sinaloa.