Mexican Slang Lesson from Punk Band Molotov

Molotov are a great Mexican punk rock band. One of our favourites in Spanish music. They have many great songs from a few great albums they have released like 2 of our favourites; Donde Jugaran Las Niñas, and Dance and Denso.

The 4 Molotov members (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I first started getting into their music, and living in Spain, there were a few wordsof their lyrics, I couldn’t understand. Why? I asked my Spanish friend what the word puñatero meant. He couldn’t give me an answer. As I found out much later, they were actually communicating their message through Mexican slang, and also Spanglish. Yes, they often change from Mexican to English in the same song, and not even all Spanish speakers like those from Spain can understand it all.

As my Spanish improved and was getting used to Latin American Spanish, I started to build up a vocabulary to decipher more and more.

So here is some of what we have deciphered in Mexican slang

1 Yo estoy hasta la madre– as I found out in Latin America, the word madre is not often used and is often considered something like a taboo word, máma is used instead and madre has then become a swearword. Estar hasta la madre- to be sick and tired or fed up, as is the first line of the song Frijolero from Dance and Denso.

A point to note in this song is that most of the singing in Spanish in this song is sung in a gringo accent (instead of Mexican), and sounds funny

2 Puñetero– as from the same song pinche gringo puñetero; damned bloody gringo
puñetero- means damned,lousy,despreciable

3 Baile rica nena, sabrosito– dance hot chick, lewdly or salaciously, I’m not sure if they mean to include sabrosito into the dance hot chick danse, meaning dirty dance hot chick! A note is that these 2 words sabroso and rico are thesafe words to use when calling a sexy girl hot. Never translate hot from English to caliente, which to them means more or less that a person is on heat. A lot of the lyrics on the rest of the song are a bit too lewd to translate

4 para hechar desmadre– echar desmadre, like we previously noted the word madre, this combined word means a mess or chaos, and is usually used to say to create chaos or a mess, but can also mean to throw a crazy party

From the song Mas Vale Cholo

5 ahí conocimos a unas muchachas que no estaban buenas tampoco estaban gachas– the strange word there weren’t gachas, which means we met some girls there that were neither beautiful nor ugly

6 que no wachas los puestos del gobierno– pure Spanglish here, wachas is the Spanglish version of the English word to watch, meaning “if you don’t watch the governments position”

from the popular song Gimme Tha Power

7 Dame dame dame todo el power para que te demos en la madre- I’m going out on a limb here and guessing that this one means

“gimme gimme gimme all of the power, so that I can leave you in the shit”

8 Ese mamarrano come cacahuates pide pizzarin pero no invite su cuates- this is from the song Cerdo and is quite full on with Mexican slang- that fat guy eats peanuts, he orders genitalia and doesn’t offer any to his friends. What is being said here is very ambiguous.

Mamarrano is a fat guy, cacahuate is the word for peanut in Mexico and Spain only, pizzarin is either a cars accelator or male genitalia (but here they want it to sound like it food, like it’s a big pizza), and cuate is the typical Mexican word for friend.

The song that this comes from Cerdo is one of our favourites from Molotov with a cruisy disco type beat. Nice to groove to even though it talks about things that aren’t too appetising.

I hope you like the post. Maybe you have some corrections for us here. Some of the words were deciphered rather than translated as there are not often translations for some localised slang words.

We’ll leave you with another of our favourite Molotov songs

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