Selena Quintanilla’s Brother Lashes Out After Being Booed at Tejano Music Festival [Video]
Late singer Selena Quintanilla's brother A.B. Quintanilla was booed at the Tejano Explosion 2024 festival in San Antonio, Texas on April 27 after he scolded the crowd for not being enthusiastic enough.
"[It's] like someone put a gun to your head and forced you to be here tonight," A.B., 60, told the audience in a video taken by a concertgoer.
The leader of A.B. Quintanilla Y Los Kumbia Kings All Starz continued, "And that feels horrible as a musician to work so f--king hard over all these years to bring you hits, and you guys come here, and you can’t even f--king raise your hands to f--king clap or be happy, man, you know, and that feels sad for us and for me. I’ll take my music somewhere else."
“I traveled all the way from Las Vegas, received love all the way from over there. I come to my hometown in Texas, San Antonio, and I get no f--king love over here, man. That’s not cool. That’s not acceptable.”
As the audience began to boo, A.B. told them, "Just like you support ?the Dallas Cowboys every f--king year, you should support Tejano music, OK?"
"Y'all can boo all you want. Boo yourselves for not participating in the show," the "Fuego" musician added, telling the crowd, “When I started with Selena, we got booed a lot of times, and you know where we went? To the top. So boo all the f--k you want.”
The "Boom Boom" artist took to his Instagram account in a video on Sunday, April 28, to explain the outburst before deleting his page.
He apologized to the concertgoers and “to all the people that were there ... for my words, my actions, what I said, but at the same time I wanted to share something with you guys that’s a little bit personal, and normally I don’t like to share things that are personal when it comes to health matters. But in this situation, I feel I need to address last night."
A.B. said that three weeks prior, he had a cancer scare and underwent a biopsy. He was told by doctors he would need to go off some of his prescribed medications that "control some mental issues that I have ... I guess after Selena passed away, they came around. I became bipolar, I became OCD/ADD/PSTD, I’m on the spectrum basically, for people that understand that. I’m bipolar, basically."
"And when not taking medications, things that happen like last night at San Antonio on stage, it’s the scariest thing because your brain just goes crazy. You break basically, and I broke last night. I said things that I don’t mean, that I don’t feel in my heart. From the bottom of my heart, I’d like to apologize to everybody,” A.B. concluded.
The family's band, Selena y Los Dinos, worked their way to stardom in the Tejano genre during the 1980s. A.B. continued to work with his younger sister as her principal music producer and songwriter when she embarked on a solo career in 1989.
Selena won Best Mexican/American Album at the 1994 Grammy Awards, becoming the first recording by a female Tejano artist to do so. The "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom'" singer was selling out ?arenas as one of Latin music's brightest stars when she was shot to death by former fan club president Yolanda Saldívar on March 31,1995. ?Yolanda, 63, is currently serving a life sentence in a Gatesville, Texas, prison for Selena's murder.
Selena's life story was made into a 1997 film starring Jennifer Lopez.