3.5.10

ROBERTO CARLOS, “ABRE LAS VENTANAS AL AMOR”

31st March, 1990


The last time we had Roberto Carlos over I compared the song to a hymn; this time around I'm reminded of the Christian music of the 70s and 80s with which I grew up. Not that people like Amy Grant were really using melodies this cloyingly circular, but the lightweight production and the singalong, grade-school pep-rally nature of the chorus sends me right back to childhood, when friendly bearded men with guitars at church were my only standard of live music performance.

There's very little else to say; the title translates as "open your windows to love," and it's exactly the kind of feel-good, hippy-dippy singalong that suggests, with the only real musical interest coming in the stiffness of the 2/4 beat, a plod which makes me think of polka and the roots of ranchera, which anyway is preferable to thinking about the song. Roberto Carlos was well past his prime here, easily scoring with some new-age nonsense that sounds like it could be from anywhere and anywhen, while the hungry kids of 1990 were busy inventing Latin pop identity for the next two decades. We'll catch up with some of them soon enough.

1 comment:

  1. Apaixonante, o nosso Roberto Carlos Braga, cantor rei de musica romântica.

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