The narcocorrido is the corrido narrative song with a drug trafficker or cartel figure as its subject. Instrumentation is either standard norteño (button accordion, bajo sexto, bass, drums) or full banda sinaloense brass. The genre's originality is not in the sound but in the lyric — real narcos are named, real routes and rivalries described, real deaths reported, in the same detached third-person newsreel voice that revolutionary corridos used a hundred years ago to describe Pancho Villa. Tempo runs 110–140 BPM in polka 2/4 or waltz 3/4. The recent 'corrido bélico' (war corrido) generation has intensified the violent detail.

The corrido form itself dates to the 1910–20 Mexican Revolution, when the deeds of Villa, Zapata, and other revolutionaries were set to music and passed hand to hand. The narcocorrido revives that documentary lyric mode with the drug trade as its content. Los Tigres del Norte's 1974 'Contrabando y Traición' — the story of a female smuggler Camelia — is the commercial founding moment. The defining voice, though, was Chalino Sánchez (1960–92), from Sinaloa, who sang his own material with a plain unrefined voice and the authenticity of someone visibly close to the drug world. On 16 May 1992 Sánchez was abducted after a concert in Culiacán, Sinaloa; his body was found the next morning. His killers were never identified. His death made the genre one with a founding martyr.

Narcocorrido's listening reward is the lyric tension rather than the musical form. Like traditional corrido, songs open with a specific time and place ('on a certain night in the Sonoran mountains'), name the protagonist, and report the events in third person. Los Tigres del Norte's 'Contrabando y Traición' shows the compact three-minute smuggler-story format at its cleanest. Chalino Sánchez's voice isn't technically strong, but the sense that the singer knows the world he's singing about rewrote the genre's credibility rules. Los Tucanes' 'Mis Tres Animales' demonstrates the coded-language variant of the form.

Los Tigres del Norte, 'Contrabando y Traición' (1974) — the genre's origin. Chalino Sánchez, 'Alma Enamorada' (1990), for the martyred voice near the end of his short life. Los Tucanes de Tijuana, 'Mis Tres Animales' (1995), for the controversial coded strand. Headphones, lyrics up on another screen — this is not dance music but reportage music.

'Chalino Sánchez' was born Rosalino Sánchez Félix in El Guayabo, Sinaloa. He emigrated to California in the 1970s, working manual labour by day and singing corridos at night. His grave in Whittier, Los Angeles County, is now a shrine where new corrido singers make pilgrimages and sing at the plot. The coded slang inside narcocorridos (gallo — fighting cock; chapo — short man; jefe — boss) closely tracks actual cartel-internal usage, and the US DEA at one point catalogued narcocorrido lyrics as intelligence source material. Several Mexican states now fine venues that host narcocorrido performances.