LUIS MIGUEL, “POR DEBAJO DE LA MESA”

6th September, 1997




Romances was Luis Miguel's third album of classic boleros and love songs from the rich history of twentieth-century Latin music. As Rod Stewart would find a decade later, it was almost impossible not to keep indulging his audience's nostalgic streak; the records sold too well.

Even the fact that "Por Debajo de la Mesa" (underneath the table) isn't a classic, but a new song written by Miguel's long-time producer for the Romance series (Armando Manzanero, himself a classic song composer of the 60s, 70s and 80s) speaks to the exhaustion that's begun to set in, not only with the series, but with Miguel's own pop career. Only twenty-seven at the time of release, he's already accomplished more than he could have dreamed; and the kids are coming up from behind. Miguel's standard of four hits a year has been slipping for a while, and will only slip away in the years to come. You can build quite a nice career on nostalgia, as thousands of aging entertainers have found; but at least in the modern world, you can't be a pop star too.

"Por Debajo de la Mesa" is a love song — underneath the table he caresses her knee, and then spends the rest of the song wondering what will happen next. Will she accept his advances, will she awaken the fire in his blood? He can't live without her, etc. It's a professional song, professionally arranged, but while Miguel sings it with all the tenderness at his command, he can't make it into a timeless work of beauty. It's filler — gorgeous filler, but filler. And the kids are coming up from behind.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “MIENTE”

16th August, 1997

And then, finally, eight singles in to his all-conquering chart run -- all eight of which have hit the top spot, a Latin Pop record and a pretty unassailable accomplishment no matter what chart you're looking at -- Enrique Iglesias found his sound. Not that  he's singing any differently: the choked whine he employs here is, if anything, even more choked and whinier than on his debut. But the production for once matches him, equal parts bouncy and dramatic, forward motion with an emotional content built into the chord structure. Freed from the necessity of being the most interesting thing about the song, he can to some degree disappear into its rhythmic thrust, and if he still sounds a little ridiculous, it's the forgiving ridiculousness of camp rather than that of trying, and failing, to be tenderly sincere.

The winding-up-and-twisting down electric piano line against a rather limp breakbeat is one of the key sounds of mid-90s kitsch, electronic music gesturing towards classical, or earlier, forms (cf. Enigma, Miranda Sex Garden, that one Sarah Brightman record): if the melody's not actually from a moody Bach fugue, it means to sound like it. (The attack and sustain on the piano even drift toward the sound of a harpsichord.) The textural rock guitar and sonic drift layering out the record gives it a punch that rescues it from limp New Age mood-setting; and then, of course, there's Iglesias singing the actual song.

"Miente" means "lie" (both the noun and -- the sense in which the lyric uses it -- the imperative verb form). He's begging her to lie, to say that she loves him, because he can't live without her. It's appropriately hyperbolic stuff, dramatic to match the dramatic mood of the music, and though he delivers it with his usual conviction, the rhythmic pulse of the song protects him from lugubriousness. It's the best song we've heard from him yet, but it's still not among his best songs; we've got a few years before he begins to regularly turn out material on this level.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “NO PRETENDO”

2nd August, 1997

Probably the most telling indication of my taste-slash-white-boy-assumptions-about-"real"-Latin-music is the reaction I'm having to this run of songs compared to the run that immediately preceded it. Enrique Iglesias and Marco Antonio Solís, much as I've liked individual songs of theirs, are wearying in romántico ballad after romántico ballad slicked up with mid-90s adult-contemporary pop production. The ranchero classicism of Juan Gabriel/Rocío Dúrcal and the countryfied corridos of Los Tigres del Norte, leaning as they did on traditional Mexican sounds, the Latin American version of "roots" music like the blues, country and gospel, were much more agreeable to my classicist's ears. Which may be indication of an "authenticity"-driven double standard applied to Latin music — after all, in Anglophone music of the period, I like the Cardigans way more than, say, Keb' Mo' — or maybe it's just a numbers game. If it were one or two Enriques to every six or seven Tigres, I might be feeling the exact opposite.

I bring all this up because this is the third Latin-traditionalist song in a row that I'm really loving; though the traditionalism here isn't Mexican but Cuban, even Spanish (the flowing flamenco-like guitar lines), and I think I even hear Peruvian huayño (cf. "El Condor Pasa") in the shuffling rhythm. But I'm no expert, as the musicologists falling over themselves laughing at my disorderly tags can attest. And faithful traditionalism would surely be pointless without Estefan's effortless melodicism and Kike Santander's classic songwriting.

"No Pretendo" can be translated several different ways, from the obvious "I don't pretend" to "I'm not trying" to "I don't mean" — either way, the phrase ends most frequently with "ser tu dueña" (be your lady, in the aristocratic as well as the lover sense) and "hacerte mío" (make you mine), and the repeated disclaimers have the effect of enforcing humility: after saying at great length what she doesn't mean to be, when she says what she does want to be it's "el mano que se llene de quebranto, ser un poco el remanso donde muere el desengaño" (the hand filled with broken dreams, a bit of an oasis where disappointments die).

This is practically Victorian — the "ministering angel thou" version of womanhood, rejecting any stronger moral or emotional hold on her man — but the complexity and the sheer poetry of the full lyric make it go down easier, as does Estefan's eternally warm voice, pitched at just the right level of desperation to make the sentiment believable. And listen to the guitars: they're letting us know it's tragic, all right.

LOS TIGRES DEL NORTE, “EL MOJADO ACAUDALADO”

19th July, 1997

The last time we heard from Los Tigres, they were taking on corruption and systemic failure in the Mexican government. Their return engagement to the top of the chart, in contrast, sees the most fearless conjunto in norteño engaging directly with the immigrant experience. "El Mojado Acaudalado" means "The Prosperous Wetback" (the slur is comparable, maybe, to the way country music has reclaimed "redneck"), and the lyrics are as plain and direct as any we've seen:

Me estés esperando Mexico lindo
Por eso mismo me voy a ir
Soy el mojado acaudalado
Pero en mi tierra quiero morir

(Beautiful Mexico, you're waiting for me
That's just where I'm heading to
I'm the prosperous wetback
But I want to die in my own country)

The crisp stomp backing up this bone-dry recitative is beautiful in its spareness, a repeated descending bassline as close as we get to any instrumental flourishes. The fact that the song opens with the chorus sung by a child is perfectly appropriate: it's simple enough for a child (or an uneducated laborer) to sing, as plain as a hymn, as straightforward as a nursery rhyme. Comparisons with country music, especially Johnny Cash's bone-dry rattle or Hank Williams' brusque eloquence, are inevitable; and in the roundup of American placenames to which the narrator is saying goodbye, it echoes the grand old country tradition of a travelin' song. But it also positions him as much American as Mexican -- W. E. B. DuBois' notion of "double consciousness" is as applicable to the immigrant laborer as to the black American.

For the nth time, I'm not rating these out of ten. I suspect, though, that if I was, this would be one a ten.

JUAN GABRIEL & ROCÍO DÚRCAL, “EL DESTINO”

14th June, 1997

The title of their album, one of the best-selling of the year (it went gold in Mexico, but double platinum in the United States — which should tell you something about the Latin-music market in the 1990s), was Juntos Otra Vez (together again), and even I, who know very little about either Dúrcal or Gabriel, can't help but feel sentimental about their reunion. The beginning of this journey may have been entirely arbitrary, but it began with her singing a song written by him, and this final pairing, just before she developed the lung cancer that would eventually kill her, is very much a fitting swan song, sweeping, majestic, and sumptuously reveling in the fine details of their voices, both separately and together.

Juntos Otra Vez was written and performed as a stage show — performed in a sumptuous opera house in Jalisco, the heart of the nineteenth-century son ranchera movement that Gabriel is evoking with his compositions and orchestrations — and released both as a studio album and a live video. You can see the video of "El Destino" here; its artificial staging and odd light show feel very 90s, but the music is timeless, echoing both nineteenth-century Mexican romanticism and Gabriel's old orchestrations from the 80s (those puffs of trumpets are very like the synthesized horns decorating "La Guirnalda").

The song is equally timeless, a love song — "¿me quieres?" (do you love me), she begins, and he echoes "te quiero" (I love you) — built on an epic scale, meant to soundtrack an epic romance. True to Gabriel's form, however, it's surprisingly bloodless — there's no carnality to the lyrics, no passion (though you could say that he and Dúrcal provide all that's necessary). "Soy tu amigo y tambien tu hermano" (I am your friend and also your brother), he sings at one point, as though brotherly friendship is the stuff of epic romance.

All of which perhaps makes the point that it's a true portrait of the relationship between Juan Gabriel and Rocío Dúrcal. They clearly held each other in great regard and affection — and indeed neither of them was ever as great separately as they were together — but it was a platonic, professional love. Platonic love, however, doesn't pay the pop radio bills. This song was only number one for a week, a tribute to the affection in which both singers were held by the wide Latin audience; but it also marks the end of an era. Newer, younger voices are coming up from behind.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “SOLO EN TÍ”

3 May, 1997

Two covers in a row! The original of this one may be slightly more familiar to my English-language readers than Vicente Fernández; it is, of course, Yazoo's "Only You." (Enrique also covered the original and released it at the same time to English-language markets; but his time as an Anglophone hitmaker was not yet.)

As a cover of "Only You," it's only okay; the cheap-sounding keyboard presets are no match for the synthetic worlds of 1982, and Enrique, no matter how hard he emotes, will never be Alison Moyet. The melody, however, is a timeless one, and the Spanish lyrics, if not as subtle as the original (which is pretty universally true of translated songs no matter which direction they're going), are a fairly faithful rendition of the sentiment.

So as an Enrique Iglesias song, at least by the standard set in his early years, it's a qualified success. The limited range of the melody, typical of the synthpop pioneers who were generally better at programming than singing, prevents Enrique from indulging his habit of turning everything into sefl-serving melodrama; there's just not enough there to oversing.

LOS TEMERARIOS, “YA ME VOY PARA SIEMPRE”

26th April, 1997

The first song to break the Iglesias/Solís streak is also the third live norteño song in three years, and the ninth time I've had occasion to break out the "cover" tag. The cover here is of Vicente Fernández' late-70s hit "Ya Me Voy Para Siempre" (you can, and should, see him lipsync to it in the 1980 movie Picardia Mexicana II here), and Los Temerarios, who were a romántico band, not a norteño one, make only a decent fist of it, studio instrumentation filling in the weak spots in their live act.

The Fernández original is a grimly comic song of lost love: "Si sigue este dolor, no le sorprenda que mi hogar sea una cantina," runs the repeated bridge. ("If this pain continues, don't be surprised that my home is a tavern.") Which fit perfectly with Fernández' working-class hero image — in the movie, he ends the song by vowing future loyalty only to the comic proletariat of the supporting cast — but among the moneyed classiness of the mid-90s Latin chart (or that portion of it we're hearing) is something of a shock.

Gustavo Ángel, the singing Ángel brother of Los Temerarios (their name means "the reckless ones") goes for a more dramatic reading than Fernández' classically balanced blue-collar mariachi version (the difference is maybe not dissimilar to Alan Jackson covering George Jones), and he gets off a fantastic grito and shout out to the Temerarios' home state of Zacatecas, but the bulk of the energy here comes from the crowd singing lustily along with the "porque el amor de mi vida solito me dejó" refrain. ("Because the love of my life left me all alone.") Still, I can't be mad at anything that breaks up the pop-establishment ballad monotony.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “ENAMORADO POR PRIMERA VEZ”

1st February, 1997

The thing to always keep in mind is that I'm ever only discussing a tiny portion of what was in the Hot Latin chart at any given time. So what is recorded, in this blog, as an unbroken string of romantico ballad after romantico ballad, Enrique and Marco Antonio following each other like night after day, was only a small part of a dynamic and ever-shifting Latin Pop scene which included hot dance jams, innovative rock en español acts, keeping-the-faith traditionalists in Mexican regional styles, and flashy novelty pop hits as well. By early 1997, Los Del Rio's "Macarena" has, alas, come and gone, reaching only #12 on the Latin chart even as it hit #1 on the Hot 100; it was always more of a tourist jingle than an organic Latin hit.

Instead we have the sixth Enrique Iglesias number one in fifteen months; Enrique Iglesias, his self-titled debut, has stuck around for so long that it's nearly in danger of running into the follow-up. Vivir, the Gorgeous One's second album, was (of course) hotly anticipated, and "Enamorado Por Primera Vez" ("In love for the first time") went straight in at #1, only the second song in Latin chart history to do so. It's a step up in terms of production, if not in vocal quality or songwriting: though a ballad — a power ballad, even! — it's very much a rock song according to its instrumentation. Soft rock, sure (the Bryan Adams of 1991 would surely raise an eyebrow in recognition), but the the guitars shred and the drums clump like very little we've had on the chart before.

This is a point where I'd love to hear from anyone who was in the Enrique demographic at the time: for someone who is (arguably) the most iconic and commercially powerful Latin Pop star of the past several decades, he's inspired relatively little fan-oriented chatter, and I can't really reconstruct, from my Anglo male 21st-century citadel, what his appeal was; or at least what drove the (commercial) response to him in a way it didn't, really, for anyone else. Lots of guys are pretty, after all. Did the famous name cross the generation gap and make his success a foregone conclusion no matter what he did? Were there extracurricular appearances I'm not privy to which made him more of a heartthrob than just a guy smoldering in a video clip? Am I just not hearing the music properly?

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “ASÍ COMO TE CONOCÍ”

11th January, 1997

We're deep into that odd stretch of the Hot Latin chart where the top spot alternates between Marco Antonio Solís and Enrique Iglesias with no intermission, and if you're getting sick of it I can't blame you. But skipping irritatedly over Solís' third number one in a row over the same album would be a mistake: it's the best yet.

No doubt I've mostly come to this conclusion because I'm a sucker for Farfisa organs, and the opening riff and later solo are different enough from the usual romántico instrumentation that it caught my ear; but I also appreciate the old-fashioned bolero rhythm and construction, the tasty nylon-stringed guitar playing (sounding like current pop-bachata a decade early), and Solís' carefully-constructed, grown-up lyric. "Así Como Te Conocí" means, roughly, "The way I came to know you," and he draws a portrait that manages to be both clear-eyed and romantic about the end of a relationship. Though he falters into romántico conventionality ("sé que solo fui tu pasatiempo" / "I know I was only your pasttime"), it's mostly as assured a lyric as you might expect from the most acclaimed Latin songwriter of the 90s.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “TRAPECISTA”

7th December, 1996

And with our final number one of 1996, Enrique Iglesias makes not only Hot Latin chart history but Billboard chart history — the fifth number-one song released from single album, a feat matched on the Hot 100 only by Michael Jackson in the 1980s and Katy Perry in the 2010s. (I don't know enough about the other charts to make a definitive claim, but a quick look through data I don't have to pay for suggests it hasn't often, if ever, been equaled elsewhere.)

Unfortunately, it sounds like a fifth single. A slow slog of an album track, a ballad with a single arresting image — the "trapecista," or trapeze artist, of the title — and Enrique's thin voice, quavering with unearned passion, at its most bathetic. The production is typically shiny without being particularly classy — the immaculacy of Luis Miguel's early-90s run, not to mention Iglesias Sr.'s work, is beyond Enrique at this point — but it's nothing to the classlessness of the lyric, a tough-love anthem refusing to comfort a woman who's been burned by love.