Mexican Waves: Music and Chaos in the District Federale

"There isn't any test for driving licenses," I'm told by my Mexican host as a blue ford rear-ends a police car en-route from the airport. "There was a lot of corruption when we had tests so you just pay a fee and they let you drive...although more people are dying every year in traffic accidents than drugs wars so maybe it'a not working so well..."

Nothing can prepare you for the traffic in Mexico City. It's different to every other South American capital I've visited and lived in. La Paz has its traffic zebras and colectivos; Buenos Aires is all grids, pollution and a jaywalker's nightmare. Mexico DF, as the locals call it, is something else entirely.

And it's not the baffling one-way systems that snake and intersect like overlapping moebius loops nor the constant succession of near-scrapes at every turn or lane merge. It's the ordered chaos: the pulsing open veins of this beautiful, mad city aren't a barrier but a reflection of functionality and necessity over circumstance. People get where they need to be (eventually). In a city of ten million people - a number that more than doubles when you figure in the outer parts of DF - the streets become an endless, brilliant blur of colour, graffiti, and typography; framing pocket after pocket of aphrodisiacal, sensory beauty.

I'm in Mexico here hoping to discover a little more about how the ninth biggest city in the world is taking to one of its biggest imports. The largest festival in the country is sponsored by the country's most famous cerveza and this year's Corona Capital is the centrepiece of my visit. The line-up reads like a festival junky's wet dream: Beck, Jack White, Damon Albarn, Weezer and St Vincent at one end of the spectrum; Chvrches, Haim, Tune Yards, Gus Gus, Metronomy and MØ at the other.

Over two days at the city's Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez - an expanse of sports grounds and racetrack better known for grand prixes - sixty thousand people will attend this curious hybrid of Reading-meets-Coachella. On this particular weekend they will brave earthquake, hurricane and a mud and water combo that reduces the festival site to a mini archipelago. Mexicans are, I find, the most unfazed crowds in the world. Watery disruptions push set times and force power cuts. They create vast lakes between front rows and stage barriers but the people resolutely shake it off with a positive belligerence that Brits would do well to adapt.

I had hoped for some homegrown sounds at Corona Capital but even before getting a passport stamp, I'm told "There are no Mexican bands playing I don't think," by my savvy border guard. I find that surprising, I say. Wouldn't it be a good thing to try and mix them up on the bill? "Most of the people who play music here will be going to the festival I guess,” she says curtly. “Why would they want to play?”

It’s a disappointment of sorts and something of a strange dichotomy that becomes more pronounced as I dig away at the reasons why there isn't at least a tokenistic Mexican artist amongst the line-up. The journalists I talk to are positive about the festival itself - citing a thriving music industry, with magazines like Indie Rocks catering for audience turned on by British and American sounds - but one offers an explanation: "Mexico is still learning a lot of things.We get asked by a lot of extrañeros about why there's no latin, no Mexican bands on the festivals...but you know how to bill your own artists and where they fit. We don't know yet how to fit them within a festival like this alongside our own bands."

>It's not so much of a letdown though. Beneath the somewhat violently branded festival site there’s limitless excitement this weekend - and debuts are a big deal here. It's Beck's first ever show in Mexico. More than one person recounts to me how huge it was for The Pixies to come here a few years back for theirs. As it turns out, Haim scoop up a lot of the love this time, including a Selena cover ("Como La Flor") in their inaugral Mexican outing. The highlights are all about context - as they should be.

Biffy Clyro pitch up with something to prove as relative unknowns. With an awesome power and belief in every single riff and line that the Scttish trio spit out, a dedicated mass grows throughtout the set and leave conerted. The Julie Ruin are another highlight and one redoubled by a chance backstage encounter with Kathleen Hanna that will forever make the jet lag worth it. Chvrches show why they're slowly conquering the world and Belle & Sebastian continue to be one of the greatest live bands we've seen in the last three decades.

And then there’s Sam Smith.

Over the course of my five days in Mexico City, I barely walk down a street without hearing some incarnation of the loveable cheurb-faced crooner. On the metro from Velodromo to Tacubya, he's there seeping out of an ipod on the Naughty Boy track. When I eat at a taqueria for the first time, Disclosure's "Latch" is on loop in the background while tour footage of The Clash in America plays silently on a television; a weird juxtaposition made bearable by some frankly incredible food. In total. I hear "Money on My Mind" at least twenty times during my stay. The man is ever-present and his festival set is predictably a Very Happy Moment for many people.

When the dulcet tones of Smith finally leave me, it's something of a culture shock: my final day in the country and I head on foot from the classy, expensive barrio of Polanco to the less salubrious La Merced. After stumbling blindly up a caged staircase and through a discount shopping arcade that sits suspended above a motorway, I emerge into the one of the oldest parts of the city. It's a surreal inverted-Narnia moment, pushing through stalls of fabric and following glimmers of daylight, finally setting foot on street again to the strains of a winding electro-cumbia melody from a nearby shop. Sam Smith is not to be found anywhere here.

This is the South America I know- the part of every big city below of the US border where bright colours, commerce and great food sit hand-in-hand with poverty, decay and crime. The kind of barrio where the cross-country coaches end their journey and an urban dustiness is ever-present. This could be La Paz or Santiago de Chile or Cusco or Medellin: a sense of purpose is everywhere.

"Go find the witches market,” a friend said and so I enter the vast Mercado Sonora at the center of Merced, which houses hundreds of tiny concessions around a tight indoor grid. I pass through the livestock and pet section (everything from cows to kittens) and find an endless path of two etre cubes housing potions and herbs. There are all manner of dried animals, icons and Día de Muertos paraphenalia. It's unthreatening, somewhat kitschy but at the same time utilitarian.

Among the more questionable bottle and boxes there are thing you'd see in any Holland & Barratt but I have my eye on a particular prize: sangre de grado, an amazonian tree sap akin to a liquid bandage that once healed a half-inch deep animal bite on my hand in twenty four hours. I buy a vial but the stall holder seems perplexed I haven’t come here for something more novelty. She pushes an altar box my way - three garish skeleton figures in mariachi garb inside - and some candles, which I buy to keep the peace. She beams at me as I leave, offering a blessing.

For my final meal in the country, I head out for a torta, Mexico's own spin on a sandwich. Supposedly invented by an Italian immigrant adapting a panini to whatever was available, I’m told the best is to be found at Tortas Been, a stall housed in a covered shopping passage five minutes from the Zócalo (República del Salvador 152 if you’re tempted to find it).

I’m uncompromising in my choice: I want to eat a Cuban sandwich, or at least the version of the torta cubana they serve up here. The calorific treat sees the filling assembled on the plancha; a heady mixture of meats (different cuts of pork and beef) along with cheese, peppers and a sour cream-doused soft baguette, fried with a little butter. Less than ten minutes after ordering, I'm tearing into the beautiful, fat-soaked chunk of beauty and hearing the first bars of "Latch" rising out from a passing car. It's a perfect ending.

Find out more about Corona Capital