LOS BUKIS, “Y AHORA TE VAS”

23rd April, 1988

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We're still on the earlier legs of our journey, early enough for me to still be obsessed with marking firsts. And this is two big ones: the first real regional (pronounced rayhee-oh-NAL) song, which I'll get into later, and our first encounter with a man who will be a more-or-less constant companion throughout the next two decades: Marco Antonio Solís.

Solís, with his cousin Joel, founded Los Bukis in the early 70s in Michoacán, one of Mexico's southwestern states. From their first single ("Falso Amor," 1975) they became one of the most popular bands in the country, with strong followings in the United States and Puerto Rico. Their name means "the kids" in the Yaqui language of northern Mexico, and that identification with the indigenous underclass (however superficial) pointed to the sort of panamericanismo to which most Latin Pop stars would at least pay lip service in the years to come.

But Los Bukis were no trad outfit, singing old songs in old styles and busking for tourist dollars. (It's worth noting here that the questions of authenticity and keeping-it-realism which exercise so many commentators in the American and Anglo pop spheres have very little to do with how Third World pop stars actually make use of their own native pop forms. Solidarity with the poor is better expressed financially than through canons of taste.) Their regionalismo was a glossy, uptown take on the country-fried rancheras and corridos, with plush up-to-date instrumentation and a versatile, tempered instrument in Solís' lead vocals. Like a Mexican version of the countrypolitan movement of the 1960s, Los Bukis gave their listeners a thoroughly Mexican, thoroughly modern music that worked just as well in the bustling urban centers as in the open spaces of the countryside: an aspirational music for the emerging middle class on both sides of the border.

"Y Ahora Te Vas" ("and now you leave") was written by Solís, who wrote nearly all the group's material (his going solo several years down the road, spoiler alert, was less an escandalo de pop than a foreordained conclusion; no one flocked to Los Bukis concerts to see the other guys), and is a solid if unpretentious regional song. My comparison of the genre with country music in the American market is both illuminating and misleading; like country, regional relies on specific images to tell universal stories, but unlike country it's not really relegated to a specialized market (at least in Mexico, and since we're telling the story of Latin Pop in the U.S., there's going to be a lot of overlap with the story of Mexican pop).

It's a breakup song, the kind that George Jones did so well — "and now you're leaving, knowing I couldn't find/The motive in your soul, the love I feel for you/To whom will you give everything you never gave to me/Who will cry for you, as I do, some day" — the faithless beloved throwing over our creamy-voiced hero, but he'd take her back in a heartbeat nevertheless. The instrumentation is dominated by cheap synthesizers, but in 1988 that still coded as uptown, classy, and American in regional music. The occasional interpolation of regionalismo into our story has its own story of change, cool, and identity which doesn't always correspond with the shifts in the larger Latin Pop scene. But more about that when we come to it.

JUAN GABRIEL, “DEBO HACERLO”

16th April, 1988

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There are three reasons this installment of our journey is running a bit late. First, I'm having a hard time concentrating enough to write anything at all, as readers of my other blogs might have noticed. Second, I recently went through the spreadsheet I've compiled of all the Hot Latin #1s to date and I think got a little intimidated at just how many there are left to cover. I should catch up to the present in a couple of years, but damn. A couple of years. I never make plans more than two weeks in advance. And third, tackling this song in particular has seemed more and more foolhardy the more I've listened to it.

Let's begin with the dry, three-minutes-on-Wikipedia basics: recorded two years earlier, this was Juan Gabriel's last original song for six years thanks to a dispute with his label and publishers. (Shades of another major pop star of the 1980s going into the 1990s.) It is an uptempo dance song with elements of freestyle, mariachi, merengue, and house. And it is nearly ten minutes long.

We've had uptempo songs before: the Franco/Emmanuel double-header, Luis Miguel's Dusty Springfield cover, and of course Los Lobos. But this is the first Dance Song in the modern meaning of the phrase, with electronic rhythms and the sort of bloated running time that would raise suspicions of this being the twelve-inch version if there had ever been a seven-inch. But no; this is it, the song as it appeared on Gabriel's "farewell" compilation of the same name, and as far as I can tell the song as it was played on the radio in late 1987 and early 1988.

And it's the kind of song worthy of that running time. Not only does it have a hot beat that practically demands dancing (I broke into a white-boy boogie almost reflexively the first time I heard it), but Gabriel's performance, pushing himself to the very edge of his range, almost in tears, is a hell of a swan song. He pitches the opening just an emotional notch below opera, with as many dramatic flourishes as he can muster, and when the beat drops he simply rides it. It's a tropical beat, equal parts Havana and Miami (which for thirty years have practically been the same thing) the punchy horn charts which accompany it practically the only concession to the Mexican mariachi on which he made his name in the 70s and early 80s. Aside, that is, from his own near-frenzied performance.

(Mariachi, of course, practically requires being sung with a sob in one's voice. Or more strictly speaking, norteño does. This isn't the moment to get into the distinction, but there is one.)

Structurally, this song is a complete mess, following Gabriel's own circuitous route through whatever sections he apparently felt like singing at the time. There's no particular chorus, although everything gets repeated more than once; there are about five different main hooks, and though it's compulsively danceable throughout it changes tempo so many times and so abruptly that I'd imagine it would be a DJ's nightmare. (If you're feeling brave, though, I dare you to throw it on at a busy club night and see what happens.)

But ultimately, I don't have a whole lot of reference points for this kind of thing. The best I can do is gesture vaguely in the direction of Miami Sound Machine, the only outfit I know of that was making anything like this in the 1980s (we'll be meeting their most famous alumnus before long), and not even they were as garish and cheap-sounding as this can be.

Because while I don't have a lot of reference points in professionally recorded music, I'm intimately familiar with some of the sounds in this song: they were produced by the same cheap not-even-Casio keyboards that I fooled around with as a kid in the 80s: those telltale tinny "bass" notes and the upward flourishes on some "harpsichord" setting or other irresistibly recall the embarrassment I felt when I tried to show off to a more worldly-wise friend and he mocked those sounds. I rarely played with the keyboard again. (Come to think of it, that was probably the first instance of snob-oriented criticism making my revise my musical opinions. It would not be the last.) So I have instant and deeply-set aversions to some of these sounds; but the propulsiveness , rhythmic density, and luxuriant emotionalism of this song overwhelms everything else.

Even the lyric is something of a mess; he needs a love, he's tired of being alone, but he's also rejecting a lover — and finding one, all to the same thumping beat and righteous salsa horn charts. If nothing else, it's a tremendously camp performance (though by Anglo standards what piece of Latin culture isn't?), the kind of florid, flamboyant spectacle that not only invites but practically compels comparisons with Prince or Michael Jackson. The electro-soul, the rhythmic chokes and sighs . . . I can't help wondering what kind of collaborations might have taken place had Gabriel not chosen to walk away at just this moment.

It was only at the top of the chart for a week. You could hardly expect more from a nine-and-a-half-minute camp techno-tropical suite.

ANA GABRIEL, “AY AMOR”

23rd January, 1988

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Fifteen songs in, this song is only our third to feature a female vocalist. I don't know what your understanding of pop is, but mine is more or less predicated the female voice. Which is among the reasons that taking this travelogue has been both educational and challenging for me: I've had to patiently work out the differences between hearty male singers that I would otherwise instinctively dismiss as "all the same." But Ana Gabriel cannot possibly be mistaken for Daniela Romo or Rocío Dúrcal, and it's not only the timbre of her voice that sets her apart.

The immediate comparison I want to make with this song is to "Total Eclipse Of The Heart." There are obvious points of reference: the big, crashing production, the rock-operatic melody, and Gabriel's own raspy but perfectly controlled voice; but where Jim Steinman and Bonnie Tyler stretched out, luxuriating in an operatic running time (nearly seven minutes!) and setting several themes against each other, Gabriel remains a pop traditionalist, singing a spare three-minute-plus song as simplified and direct as the title (which translates to "oh love").

She wrote it herself; she sang it in the 1987 OTI Festival (the Latin Pop version of the Eurovision contest, which ran from 1972-2000) and won the chance to represent Mexico in the finals — it didn't win, but the song was a major hit in both Mexico and the U.S., tying with Daniela Romo's "De Mí Enamórate" for the longest time spent at the top of the Hot Latin chart yet (fourteen weeks) and not incidentally launching her as a major pop star in the Latin American market. (She remains the Mexican cantadora [female singer] with the highest ever international sales.)

And it's the sort of song which inspires that kind of response: not only does it sound big — we've had that before, from Romo and Julio Iglesias — it sounds unmistakably modern. The much-bemoaned-by-me thinness and plasticness of 80s Latin Pop is nowhere to be found here; this isn't just a ballad, it's a power ballad, and Gabriel sings it like a rock star. It made her one; and as Wikipedia puts it, she became a success in three separate fields: Rock En Español, Latin Pop, and Ranchera. She will appear in at least two of these guises again (and again) throughout this tale; but rarely sounding better (I'm going to guess) than she does here.

That scratchy, impassioned vocal style, in 1988 falling decidedly out of favor in Anglophone pop circles (Bonnie Tyler, Kim Carnes, and the 80s Tina Turner were about its last exponents in female pop, unless you count Marianne Faithfull's cult) would have a sizable impact on Latin Pop over the next decade; rock was not yet uncontroversial in many traditional communities, and while the most flamboyant inheritor of Ana Gabriel's technique will not be a part of our history (as of early 2010, anyway; you never know), this is an early loosening of the metaphorical tie.

The lyrics are more or less standard stuff; Gabriel was not yet one of the great poets of Latin Pop. (Will she ever be? Stay tuned.) The dramatic heft of the production isn't quite matched by a chorus that runs "Oh, love/I don't know what it is about your look/That day after day conquers me more and more." (Though it, uh, sounds better in Spanish.) But I do admire one line in the second verse: "Y busco entre mil cosas una que me hable de tí" ("and I search through a thousand things for one that speaks to me of you"), which is such a perfect encapsulation of a universal but very specific emotion that I have high hopes for Ana Gabriel's many return engagements on this stage.

JOSÉ JOSÉ, “SOY ASÍ”

16th January, 1988

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The last time we saw José José in this space I compared him to Frank Sinatra for his exquisite phrasing and almost jazzy cadences. Well, those have fallen by the wayside now: this is not a gentle, reflective flamenco song, but a roaring ballad of self-justification, a "My Way" for the late 80s.

Though to be fair this is a far more nuanced and even classically structured work than "My Way." In fact it has more in common with the great self-justifications of George Jones in the 1970s as he spiraled into abuse both drug and domestic. Both country music and Latin pop draw on deep wells of tradition that is mostly invisible to the ordinary pop audience — this is what gives both genres a uniform sound to the uneducated ear — and they also play to their dedicated audiences' knowledge of and investment in the singer's personal lives. Just as "He Stopped Loving Her Today" was that much more powerful to a listener who'd been following the Jones-Wynnette soap opera for over a decade, so "Soy Así" gains in emotion and relevance under the knowledge that it was written and sung at a low point in Jose Jose's career, when his wife was leaving him, his manager (and brother-in-law) had abandoned him, and he was drifting into alcoholism and despair, his life an unending circuit of "aviones, camiones, encerrado en un cuarto de hotel" ("planes, trucks, locked in hotel rooms"), as he later put it to the music press.

In that light, the forthright stomp and aggressive rise of this ballad, with its military tempo and big crescendos, is less pompous than angry. Wikipedia translates "Soy Así" as "The Way I Am," but it literally means "I am this way." (Shades of Popeye as well as Old Blue Eyes.) The chorus, with its blustery bangs, goes "I am this way/This way I was born and this way I will die/With all my faults I know it's true/I never deceived you, I never lied to you, I never denied it/I am this way/And I know very well that I will never change/And I accept my fate just as it is/I never deceived you, I never lied to you, I never denied it." In fact the chorus repeats only twice, and it's over, which is one up on "My Way."

We will be meeting José José once more (so far!) in this travelogue, so I won't finish up his life story just yet. But here's a hint: as Frank Sinatra knew well, hit songs rarely do much for personal demons.

JOSÉ LUIS RODRÍGUEZ, “Y TÚ TAMBIÉN LLORARÁS”

28th November, 1987

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Probably the easiest way to become convinced of Julio Iglesias' supremacy in the art of romantic Latin ballad singing is to listen to the imitators that come nowhere close. Which isn't to say that this sweeping entry in the romantic-ballad sweepstaks of late 1987 is terrible; it's just not up to the contemporary standard of Iglesias, which as the past several entries have shown is frankly pretty damn high.

Rodríguez is the first of our company to hail from South America: born in Venezuela, where his relatively poor family was involved in dangerous political activities during the 1950s, he moved around a lot and went without formal schooling, teaching himself music and stagecraft. With hit songs and commercials, he became a local star in the 1970s, and eager for more, moved to Puerto Rico, one of the hotbeds of Spanish-language pop-culture production. He was cast in two immensely successful telenovelas (Cristina Bazán and El ídolo), the latter of which gave him the nickname "El Puma," and began to have enough hit records that he was invited to participate in the Latin Pop version of "We Are The World" in 1985, "Cantaré, Cantarás." Other participants familiar to the readership of this blog include Braulio, Emmanuel, Julio Iglesias, and José José; the full list is here.

"Cantaré, Cantarás" was written by Albert Hammond — the "It Never Rains In Southern California" guy (and father of a Stroke) — who mostly spent the 80s working in Latin Pop, where his talent for big, heartstring-tugging ballads was more widely appreciated than in the Anglophone pop world at the time. (A Gibraltarian, he's fluent in both Spanish and English.) He and José Luis Rodríguez must have gotten along, because two years later he wrote and produced the album Señor Corazón for him, from which "Y Tú También Llorarás" ("and you too will weep") was drawn, becoming Rodríguez' biggest ballad hit of the late 80s.

Hammond's lyrics aren't a patch on Manuel Alejandro's poetic, refractory stuff for Iglesias, but they have their own emotional appeal: the big swooping chorus goes "And you too will weep/For what could not be/Was a torrent of love/That we threw away/You will return to feeling/Like a teenager again/Anxious to arrive/In time for our rendezvous," which turns in the final chorus to "You will never arrive/In time for our rendezvous/It's too late."

It's worth noting that the mid-80s production with which we started out this trip has mostly fallen by the wayside: although the keyboards here are extremely plastic, they have a sonic depth and sustain that's a world away from the tinny production on "La Guirnalda." The balladic 90s (which is when I first became aware of contemporary pop) are within hailing view from this height. Of course, we still have two more years to go before we get there. What's 1988 got for us?

JULIO IGLESIAS, “QUE NO SE ROMPA LA NOCHE”

14th November, 1987

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What, again? He was just here! Indeed — and more recently than the strict chronology of this blog might indicate; he and Luis Miguel traded off the top spot a couple of times throughout the late summer and early fall of 1987. A fitting symbolism, in fact: this song would be (as of this writing) Julio Iglesias' last solo visit to the top of the Hot Latin chart, and few people would dominate that spot more completely in the years to come than — but that's getting ahead of ourselves.

Here and now, this second single from Un Hombre Solo did exactly what it was supposed to do and made a worthy follow-up to "Lo Mejor De Tu Vida." Also written and produced by Manuel Alejandro, also sounding like the proverbial million bucks — listen for the harp glissandi and be surprised: it's so closely miked it sounds like a particularly silvery guitar.

But in classic singles-release fashion, the second is the same as the first, But With A Twist! The twist here being the bolero rhythm, which provides a poignant counterpoint to Iglesias' lovestruck crooning: this is a late-night, last-dance kind of song, only just uptempo enough to qualify as more rhythmic than "Lo Mejor De Tu Vida," and so much in love with the classic Spanish romanticism on display that the song very nearly forgets to be contemporary. Luckily some airy keyboard flourishes accenting the rhythm are on hand to remind us of the date on the sleeve.

The lyrics are typically (for Alejandro) evocative, using the concise allusiveness of poetry to build up the scenario without wasting our time on unnecessary details like setting, narrative or identity. And those lyrics, translated in full:

LOS LOBOS, “LA BAMBA”

19th September, 1987

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This record, on this list, is a first in a number of ways. In fact let's try to catalogue them all:

It's the first time an act from the United States has topped the Billboard Hot Latin Chart. This might be surprising, considering that the Billboard Hot Latin Chart is after all compiled by counting sales and airplay statistics within the United States; surely locals would do better than otherwise. But the competing demographics, loyalties, and audiences measured (probably pretty poorly and incompletely) by the Hot Latin Chart makes that suggestion a massive oversimplification of a reality that I'm in no position to describe in any detail. I'll confine myself to the observation that after this it is not unusual, though I'm not sure it ever becomes unremarkable, for estadounidense-born acts to top the chart.

It's the first time a rock & roll record has topped the Billboard Hot Latin Chart. There may be some cavilling at this: Luis Miguel, Emmanuel, and Franco have all had hits that derive (some of them fairly loosely) from rock music. I can only claim popular usage: it's the first guitar-driven uptempo song with a strong backbeat and audible connections to the music of the 1950s. This is only an important point in the sense that anyone following this blog hoping for much more guitar-oriented rock music will not be very much in luck. Enjoy it while you got it, in other words.

It's the first time a Hot Latin #1 has also (not quite simultaneously) topped the Billboard Hot 100. In fact, it dropped off the top spot of the national pop chart the week before it ascended to #1 on the Latin chart; which suggests several possibilities, most of which are probably true: that records on the Latin chart, which is driven far more by airplay than by sales, tend to take longer to get up a head of steam; that the movie-driven success of the single (see below) in the wider arena was a factor in driving the record up the Latin chart; and that the dreamy Luis Miguel was hard to beat. (This last is reinforced by the fact that the record that replaced "La Bamba" at the top of the chart was also the record that preceded it.) But not only the US pop chart, but at least seven (according to Wikipedia) other international pop charts featured "La Bamba" at the top spot throughout the latter half of 1987. What's notable is that they were all European or Anglophone countries; perhaps Latin America had little use for rock & roll nostalgia in 1987. (Fun fact: as of this writing the Wikipedia Español page for "La Bamba" doesn't mention Los Lobos at all.)

It's the first time a Hot Latin #1 has been released as a commercial single. This is undoubtedly closely related to the above paragraph: the single was for the broader pop market (it was released by the venerable L.A. punk 'n' roots record label Slash, Los Lobos' home at the time), and it would remain rare for Hot Latin #1s to be available as singles until the 2000s. I note this only for the record; even in 1987, we are no longer living in a singles world.

It's the first time a Hot Latin #1 has come in off the back of a movie. It will not be the last. The movie in question, a biopic of Ritchie Valens starring Lou Diamond Phillips, is a blank to me. I haven't seen it and probably never will; I generally dislike biopics and am unreasonably irritated by the movies' colonization of pop. Unreasonably because I love this song and I wouldn't get to talk about it (I will eventually I swear) if a movie hadn't given it the publicity that sent it to #1, irritated because too often conversation about music ends with how it's been used in movies or TV. (I of course reserve the right to talk about music only through the lens of cinema or television if that's how I came to it.)

And it's the first time I knew the record before listening to it for this project. In fact I knew the record before I knew Valens' original; in those heady premillenial days of Napster the first mislabeled mp3 I downloaded was a 96kbps version of this, attributed to "Richie Valen." (Well, either that or "I Melt With You" by "the Cure.") Out of vestigial resentment at the error, I've never listened very much to Los Lobos' version of the song, and it is still my third-favorite, after Ritchie's original and Lila Downs' magnificently haunted 2004 recording.

But Los Lobos have long been one of my go-to bands when I don't know what else to listen to; their musicianship and attention to detail is always welcome, and their ability to blend as many different traditions as possible into one heady rock & roll stew is frequently inspiring. Typically, I like their early work best, from How Will The Wolf Survive? to Kiko — in recent years they've become something of a token Latino band for classic-rock boomers like my dad (like Los Lonely Boys, except not so goddamn jammy), and they've nearly always been more popular with white rocker-types than with the broader Latino audience. But then I am a white rocker-type.

Their "La Bamba" doesn't treat Valens' original as a sacrosanct document (and rightly so, or it never would have been a hit), fleshing out its sound with their ornate full-band orchestration. Instead of Valens' one, they have three guitars dueling for rhythm, ornamentation, and solo space, and Louie Pérez' drum line, shuffling just a little behind the beat, is sexier and funkier than Earl Palmer's straight-up R&B snap in 1958. In fact Los Lobos play up the folklórico roots of the song by adding in elements of traditional Latin music: flamenco flourishes, banda accordion, and into a charanga breakdown in the outro. David Hidalgo's sweet croon of a voice isn't as punchy as Valens' raver (but Valens could also be sweet when he tried, viz. "Donna").

Hmm? The lyrics? "To dance the bamba, you need a little grace." "For me, for you, go man go." "For you I will live, for you I will live." "I'm not a sailor, I'm a captain." Shouldn't you have learned this stuff in second grade?

LUIS MIGUEL, “AHORA TE PEUDES MARCHAR”

22nd August, 1987

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Get used to that name; we'll be seeing it regularly from here on out. In fact Luis Miguel makes an excellent case study in the evolution (maturation? commercialization?) of Latin Pop: his career mirrors the trajectory of the time period we are covering. Of course Latin Pop has existed for decades before this, but it tended towards parochialism and regionalism: the gooey embrace of transglobal pop stardom is something new, and Miguel is one of its key players.

We meet him for the first time here, at the age of seventeen. He has been in show business for most of his life, scoring his first hit record when he was eleven. (Shades of another child star turned leading light of the global pop overground.) He has just fired his father as his manager and signed on with Spanish pop empresario Juan Carlos Calderón. A standard hitmaking formula is brought to bear, with excellent results: a number-one song, which will give way twice to Julio Iglesias and once to — but that'd be telling. It's a bumptious dance song, funky in that mid-80s cheap keyboard bass way, with a sax solo that dates it as surely and minutely as counting tree rings. And you know the song.

You probably don't know it as "Ahora Te Puedes Marchar," because the original English title of the song was not "Now You Can Leave." It was "I Only Want To Be With You," and it was first released by Dusty Springfield in November 1963, her first single after leaving folk group The Springfields, and the third British-Invasion hit in the US. Ivor Raymonde's billowy Swinging London production is swapped out for a sub-Huey Lewis go-go, and Mike Hawker's giddy lyrics about new love are refashioned into a don't-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out anthem (directed at Miguel's money-mismanaging father?), but the giddiness remains. Miguel sounds downright gleeful to be singing this song, to be on his own, to be making modern dance music out of classic pop.

Most of the album from which "Ahora Te Puedes Marchar" was drawn is taken up with modernized covers of pop songs from the sixties and seventies — "Reach Out," "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me," "Only You," "All By Myself" — and given a glossy 80s sheen. It's very much, even designedly, a disposable teen-pop record; Miguel is only seventeen, and his pouty lips on the album cover don't invite us to expect much more. But you can hear a bit into the future: he has a fine, strong cock's crow of a voice, he's good with rhythm, and he's interested in raiding the closet of history to enhance his own throbbing good looks.

He will come to be called the Frank Sinatra of Latin music; but as of right now, Michael Jackson is the far better comparison. If Jackson had been born in Puerto Rico ten years later than he was, this — triumphalist, a little cutting, and interestingly sexually ambiguous in terms of who his forebears are — might well be the record he'd have made in 1987.