Another year, another Los Bukis chart-topper. Like the countrypolitan acts of the 70s and 80s I keep comparing them to, they're dependable, comfortable, reassuring. You always know what you're going to get.
Or maybe they can surprise you sometimes. Los Bukis sound here for the first time like the regional band I keep tagging them as; not just in the chord structures and the romantic sentiments, but instrumentally too: the classically-derived norteño guitar solos are both a signifier of Serious Intent and a soothing relief after a rather numbing procession of gloopy keyboard ballads. I know I've been grumbling about ballads a lot here, to the point where even I'm sick of the very word, but I love the dazzling variety of Latin music so much that it's really frustrating to hear so much of it represented by this travelogue as sounding the same.
But as to the Serious Intent: the opening of the video, with its heartwarming cascade of Mexican humanity, will do better than anything else to explain what writer-singer Marco Antonio Solís and company were getting at (and Solís' hair, at its early-90s finest, has to be seen to be believed). It's a love song — an obsessive, can't-get-you-out-of-my-head love song, but a love song — but Solís' spoken intro, the kind of inclusive stage patter that's second nature to any professional entertainer, encourages all of his listeners to hear themselves in the song, so that it's as much an ode to the band's fans as to a woman. Los Bukis were undoubtedly the biggest romántico band in Latin Pop by this point; that this is (spoiler alert) their last appearance here under the band name is as much testament to the irresistible logic of pop hubris as it it is to the various machinations which we'll catch up on the next time we come to Marco Antonio Solís.
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