LUIS MIGUEL, “LA INCONDICIONAL”

27th May, 1989

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This project has really been testing my patience with the Big Ballad, the single song form which I have to work harder to appreciate and, appreciation won, have less desire to revisit, than any other. I'm hardly alone: the single most widely-hated song of the last twenty years (at least among respondents with pretensions to youth and cool) is "My Heart Will Go On," and I'm willing to bet a fair few of you who clicked play on the song above had to resist the impulse to turn it off at the mere sound of that glassy electric piano. (Or maybe you didn't resist.)

The first listen through, it took all my attention just to find things to like in the recording; and those watery flecks of guitar in the chorus, punctuating the beat like a slow-motion skank, helped. On the second and third listen I began paying attention to the lyrics: there's some worrying gender politics at work there (though I think the worry is in the response to the song rather than in the song itself, which like all good pop presents an unbroken fictional narrative), which I'll get to in a bit. This most recent go-round (watching the high-production and largely perplexing video) (maybe if I'd ever seen Top Gun it might make more sense), I focused on Miguel's voice.

He's certainly got one. This is the kind of Big Ballad which would be intolerable with a weaker set of lungs behind it (Michael Jackson, for example, couldn't pull off its plodding directness — he'd need a lot more key changes and skittering rhythm), and while Miguel isn't exactly operating in the bel canto tradition there's a long and proud lineage of belters in Latin Pop to which he is undeniable heir. It was in fact his Today I Am A Man moment, the song with which he graduated from the teen-pop where we last saw him to the big leagues represented (in the 1980s at least) by Juan Gabriel, Julio Iglesias, and José José. As if to mark the moment definitively as an irrevocable step, he cut his hair. The windblown mane on the cover of the album was what fans were expecting, his signature look for the past ten years; but the slick power-coif in the video was what they got.

If he was to sing with the big boys, he also had to share their complexities: no more puppy love songs or simplistic kiss-offs, but oddly tortured dramas in which he acknowledges having preyed on an angelically faithful woman without expressing regret beyond a shrug: "No sé por qué." (I don't know why.) She was always the same, unconditional in her love, making no demands of him, and his response? "No existe un lazo entre tu y yo/No hubo promesas ni juramentos/Nada de nada." (There is no bond between you and I/There were no promises or vows/Nothing at all.) All delivered, of course, with a passion just short of tears, which rescues the cold-hearted son-of-a-bitch lyric and places it in a familiar context: the trifling man who realizes too late, etc.

But I wonder about the response to the song. It was a massive hit, firmly establishing Miguel among the all-time greats of Latin Pop — the decade to come will more than anyone's be his, as far as this travelogue is concerned — and Wikipedia's brief list of covers far outpaces any other song we've seen here save "La Bamba." It's become something of a standard, in effect, but unlike similar Big Ballads in Anglophone pop around the same time (say, by Richard Marx or Bryan Adams), it's not much of a love song, unless you consider praising a woman for faithfulness despite her man's being a dick romantic. Was it heard as a love song? There's no doubt that Latin American gender norms don't quite match up to the egalitarian utopia that Anglophone pop (yes, even hip-hop, in its way) tends to assume. Just something to keep in mind as we hurtle towards the present.

JOSÉ JOSÉ, “COMO TÚ”

18th March, 1989

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As someone without strong memories of 80s pop culture — I was twelve by the time they were over, but I had spent most of that time in Narnia or the 1950s of Beverly Cleary and Franklin W. Dixon — there isn't a lot that makes me automatically think of those years, as opposed to the later years when I first encountered most of the usual 80s signifiers. (The early 2000s were my personal golden age of synth-pop.) So when this song came on and I was immediately back to lying on my side in a pastel apartment that belonged to a friend of my mother's, playing her radio very quietly as I flipped through stations for the first time ever, searching for I didn't know what but feeling the scary thrill of doing something unpredictable and secretive, I was startled. Perhaps because my main memory of that first experiment with that forbidden world, secular pop, was disappointed surprise that it didn't sound very different from the Christian pop I knew. (I couldn't possibly hazard a guess as to what I heard then; extracts from the Top Gun soundtrack? Whitney, Debbie, Chaka? The "terrible suddenness" of Rick?) I don't know what I had expected, but it wasn't the same pastel-colored vaguely electronic splashiness I knew from Michael W. Smith and First Call and Teri DeSario; when, two years later in Guatemala, I first heard Megadeth, I knew that that was the terror and ecstasy I had feared.

Personal history aside, this still sounds very close to the Platonic ideal of 1980s music, at least in that familiar narrative in which the 1980s was a nadir for music, only rescued by the grunge revolution of 1992. The electronic timekeeping, neither quite throb nor chug, the drumpad rhythm, the saxophone from which all memory of r&b sweat and lust has been leached away (and which thereby anticipates the Kenny G-ridden 90s). I don't intend to suggest that this is in any way a bad thing, though some will no doubt see it as such — in fact, anything which can stand in so completely for an abstract idea (here, "hairsprayed commercial music of the 80s") is admirable.

In tracking José José's previous appearances in this journey, I've compared him (with slight justification) to Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. But the oblique, reserved way he delivers this song, in a tender, exaggerated croon over a bed of bustling electronics, reminds me of no one so much as Bryan Ferry. Not that I'm claiming this as the Latin response to "More Than This," or anything so foolish; rather, both Ferry and José were inspired by vocalists of the pre-soul era, and the electronic, high-gloss production which Roxy Music did so much to make the standard sound of adult pop reached a particular kind of cheesy apogee here.

The lyrics are a fairly standard, if admirably economical, narrative of how Love Changes Everything (call it the "I'm A Believer" template). He watched life go by, he couldn't disguise his sadness, hurt or loneliness, at time he lost hope of someday sharing his life with . . . (wait for it) . . . someone like you! "Como Tú" means "like you" (the comparative like, not the verb), which doesn't quite count as a complete phrase in English the way it does in Spanish — there have been at least four other hit songs since 1989 with the same title. Chorus: [someone] like you, he dreamed of someone like you, who would immediately change his dreams and his luck, and you arrived. Well done, the idealized you!

This is exactly the kind of fluff its expiration-dated production would suggest, the romantic nonsense on which pop careers have always been built, and which goes down so easily it hardly leaves a trace on the tongue. Hating it would be as disproportionate as loving it: it's just there, the soundtrack to a pointless reverie without which life would be slightly duller.

YURI, “HOMBRES AL BORDE DE UN ATAQUE DE CELOS”

18th February, 1989

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The phrase "cultural tourism" has been bouncing around in my head lately, and I thought it was worth taking a moment to explore it, especially as it relates to this song. As a thirtysomething white American of indeterminate but definitely European ancestry, I'm not exactly the ideal person to be examining this music. I speak Spanish, and I've lived in Central America, but all my critical instincts are still very much in line with normative Eurocentric American culture. So anyone who wanted to accuse this project of cultural tourism would have a strong case, my only defense being that it's a worthwhile project and no one else seems to be taking it on.

But cultural tourism, and the attendant appropriation necessarily involved, is far from being the exclusive province of us hetero white males. Case in point: this song, and its parent album Isla Del Sol. A hasty or inattentive Anglophone listener might just categorize it as self-evidently Latin, i.e. What Those Spanish-Speaking People Do, but Mexico is not Bermuda or Trinidad, and though Yuri was born in the Caribbean port of Veracruz, she was very much a product of mainstream Mexican culture by this point in her career. The video makes the tourism explicit: Yuri is the only Hispanic (meaning Spanish ancestry) person in it. Everyone else is Afro-Caribbean — with her shock of platinum hair, she stands out as quite literally a tourist in an underdeveloped island neighborhood — and the underlying rhythms are calypso and soca, rather than the harder-hitting Cuban salsa which has formed the basis of most tropical dance music in the Latin charts so far.

In fact, a case could be made for racist imagery in the video, though the image of an attractive blonde woman being chased by a crowd of clearly horny black men doesn't have quite the same dog-whistle connotations that it would in the US. Nevertheless the narrative — overtly sexualized white woman arrives in sleepy, dingy West Indies and causes chaos with her good looks — is pretty awfully regressive. But that's the video; we're here to talk about the song.

If anyone had the strongest claim to being called the Latin Madonna in the late 80s, it was Yuri. And not just for the blonde mane, the upbeat dance music, the winking sexuality — then every pop starlet ever would be Madonna. The sexuality in this song would be better called brazen, especially by the conservative standards of Latin pop culture: rather than being ashamed of or scandalized by her effect on men, she revels in it: her first words are a list of what makes her hot to trot. High heels, miniskirt, plunging neckline, sunglasses, tight belt, loose hair — it's pretty much a catalogue of What To Wear If You Want To Be Called A Whore (or worse) in 1989 Mexico. Which is why locating the song in the Caribbean makes a kind of sense; in Latin America as everywhere else, foreign places are decadent and depraved, and the normal rules don't apply there.

And of course the title is a reference to the sexual playfulness of Pedro Almodóvar's Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women On the Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown), which in Yuri's hands becomes "Men On The Verge Of An Outbreak Of Jealousy" — because, of course, they all want her. It's all done with a light touch, of course, as befits a cod-soca dance number; in a comic bit of outrageousness straight out of Zuleika Dobson, she even claims that they're lining up to commit suicide.

This is the second uptempo dance song from Yuri that we've had, and if it's not quite as great as "Qué Te Pasa," that's a lot to live up to; it's certainly my second favorite Yuri song so far, which puts it well ahead of the pack.

ROCÍO DÚRCAL, “COMO TU MUJER”

10th December, 1988

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We began with her, and we end 1988 with her; and unforeseen revivals aside, we will not meet her again.

It's tempting to call this the passing of the old guard in Latin Pop — or an old guard anyway — but as any honest pop follower knows, there are no clean breaks. Dúrcal, who began her career in as a girl singer in 1950s Spain, may be the earliest-born singer to top the Hot Latin chart (I haven't crunched the numbers yet), but she doesn't sound particularly old here, just authoritative.

That relative agelessness is due in part to the production, massive and tender by turns (while being very much of its moment), with those great trombone farts punctuating the hook; but it's also due to the direct, even stark simplicity of the song. This is nothing like the vague postcard-prettiness of the song with which she ushered in this project: instead of romance-novel guff, this is a showcase for adult passions, with real regret, rejection, and hungry longing despite it all. And where "La Guirnalda" was written and produced by Juan Gabriel, who gave her a pretty frame in which to pose, "Como Tu Mujer" was written and produced by Marco Antonio Solís, who pulls out stops he had left firmly in place with Los Bukis.

The lyrics are a monologue, a woman confronting her cheating lover. She still loves him — the first thing she says is that she's given him her life and more besides — but he's laughing, playing with her trust in him, and in a moment of breathtaking otherworldliness for ears used to the norms of Anglophone pop, she insists that she has to leave in order to prevent God from punishing him. Religion isn't a common enough theme in pop for there to normally be a noticeable gap between the way (ex-)Protestant English speakers and (ex?-)Catholic Spanish speakers approach it, but when it does make its presence known it's a very different beast.

The title, "Como Tu Mujer," translates as "As Your Woman," and comes from the final line of the chorus*:

Es lo mejor, me vuelva libre si tú vas a ser

El hombre aquel que siempre quise ver,

Aunque a tu lado no me puedo ver

Como tu mujer

Which I translate as:

It's better this way, I'll be free again if you will be

That man that I always used to see,

Though I can't see myself at your side

As your woman

I'm not sure anything this indebted to traditional gender norms (playboy man, suffering woman) can be called feminist, but the way it takes a principled stand for what's right is certainly better than, say, "Stand By Your Man."

*I say chorus, but like a lot of the songs we've seen, the structure isn't the standard ABABCB of Anglophone pop, but more like ABCDBCD. Which is a perfectly legitimate structure, of course — I just have to guard against thinking "oh I've heard this bit already" and remain caught up in the emotion of the singer.

ROBERTO CARLOS, “SI EL AMOR SE VA”

19th November, 1988

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Although you can't tell just by looking (or listening), this is the first Hot Latin #1 by a pop star who usually sings in another language. (Los Lobos don't count because they were never pop stars, just a rock & roll band with a lucky hit.) Roberto Carlos is Brazilian, and his long, hit-filled career has mostly been in Portuguese, with occasional side trips to the Spanish-language market, as though just to prove he could. He's the kind of silky-voiced ballad singer that is much more successful in Romance languages than in English, with this song in particular sounding as much like French chanson as Latin romántica.

("Romántica," I should point out, is the catch-all marketing term for much of the music we've been seeing and will continue to see on this journey: modern Latin ballads, generally with only a hint of any originating local or national tradition. For example, mariachi singers can also sing romántica, but they don't sound very mariachi when doing it.)

"Si El Amor Se Va" translates as "When Love Goes Away," and the lyric is more or less a high romantic list of all the terrible consequences of love’s disappearance — "faltan los detalles/Y en las mismas calles/Nada es igual" (the details fade, and in the same streets, nothing is the same). And then the key changes, and he sings "Pero cuando está" ("but when it's here"), followed another list of the happy changes when love returns. "Vuelve la confianza/Nace la esperanza/Todo es especial" (trust returns, hope is born, everything is special). It's very much the sort of thing that could have been sung a hundred years ago in the streets of Madrid, or Lisbon, or Paris, or Rio de Janeiro at that, and the production takes the hint and sounds very like what hymns recorded in the 80s sounded like.

Or country songs — there's something very period George Jones about the way the stark opening, just Carlos' voice over cheap synth chords, builds and builds as new elements are introduced, ending with a lighters-up singalong choir. Which may be a reminder that neither country nor Latin pop are as far from hymnody as many Anglophone pop fans would like.

ANGELA CARRASCO, “BOCA ROSA”

22nd October, 1988

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Tracing the contours of the #1 Hot Latin songs throughout the year, I'm starting to see a pattern emerge: the summer and early fall contain upbeat songs, songs for dancing, for public display, and even when they're talking about lost love they do it with a smile. But as the nights grow longer and the air colder — even in Miami and Los Angeles, where a significant portion of the Hot Latin audience resides — the songs grow more reflective, more poetic, more in line with the long tradition of Spanish love poetry and song. And the singers grow older, more traditional too.

The Dominican-born Angela Carrasco's boom years were the 1970s, and here she assumes the confidence of a pop survivor, taking a witchy, gothic synth cathedral of an intro (it sounds a bit like a slightly cheaper take on the Siouxise of five years previous) and singing instead in a Diana Ross purr over a light synth tango rhythm.

That hint of tango — the Argentinean dance-music-turned-art-song that is global Latin culture's strongest riposte to American jazz — serves to locate this song in a specific tradition going back much further than anything we've come across yet. It comes on like a less-ironical "Love For Sale" from the opening line: "Vendo una boca rosa, ¿quién me la puede pagar?" (I sell a pink mouth; who can buy it?). We are in the eternal twilit, noir-shot underworld of tango song peopled by romantic pimps, sarcastic prostitutes and "hombres necios" (foolish men) who fall into the "trampas hechas de labios" (traps made of lips) among whom only Cole Porter and Kurt Weill, of all the major songwriters in the American tradition, would walk easily.

But of course it is still 1988, and it is still the top reaches of the Hot Latin chart, and so there is a nagging synth hook that owes more to mariachi horn lines than to tango bandoneones, and if a disco remix is more easily imaginable than a faithful tango reading, that may be due more to Carrasco's kittenish mock-sultry performance than to the structure of the written song. Except via self-conscious revivalism, tango can only be glimpsed through the distorting lens of modern pop, which (as with the way swing informed 80s R&B) is how it should be.

MARISELA, “YA NO”

1st October, 1988

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This may be an appropriate moment for noting, in an offhand sort of way, the ways in which history both remembers and forgets. Marisela is precisely the kind of low-level star that gets forgotten by history (or did before the age of the Internet and obsessive documentation of everything). She may have been called "the Latin Madonna," but any blonde female singer in the 80s was; she may have hit the top of the Hot Latin chart, but it was only for a week (and there was no return engagement); and she certainly had a voice, but her lack of attendant personality (at least any discernible from this distance) consigned her to the dustbin of one-hit wonders whose Wikipedia pages are silently scolded about citing references and sources.

Not counting "La Bamba" (because why would we?) this is the second hit song based on an English-language original from the first generation of rock & roll; but unlike what Luis Miguel did with "I Only Want To Be With You," "Ya No" is a fairly direct translation of Barbara George's 1962 R&B hit "I Know (You Don't Want Me No More)." Which makes sense: Marisela first sang the song in English for the soundtrack to the forgettable 1988 those-sensual-Latins movie Salsa: The Motion Picture. It was her first real breakthrough into the larger pop market after about four years of bubbling-under popularity in Mexico (she was born in the U.S., but Mexico was her primary market). Said bubbling-under came thanks to a romantic involvement with Marco Antonio Solís, who gave her songs he wasn't using and gave her extra column inches when he threw her over for another pretty, vaguely talented starlet who needed his promotional help. However, "I Know" would equally be her last breakthrough to the larger pop market; she would slip back into regional obscurity, cultivate a devoted if minor fanbase, and record sporadically with diminishing returns over the next two decades.

Her "I Know" is what you would expect: heavy on 80s synthesized production, some massive timbale hits in order to tie it into the salsa of the movie, but otherwise a standard, gospelly take on the song, with a choir of backup singers high in the mix. "Ya No," however, is a slightly odder beast. It was produced by Enrique Elizondo, who seems to have taken the bouncy hook and the crashing timbales and fed them into a sequencer with New Order and Madonna presets, creating a much more exciting rhythm track that introduces, occasionally punctuates, and plays out the song. Unfortunately whenever Marisela sings it's the same old vaguely r&b-ish shuffle (the choir makes an appearance too, mixed mercifully down), so Elizondo's clubbification is only partly successful, but those bursts of electronic percussion are something to look forward to.

FRANCO, “MARÍA”

3rd September, 1988

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Wikipedia has this to say about this song:

"María" is a song written by Marcelo Molina and performed by Cuban singer Franco. It was released in 1988 as a single from Franco's album Definitivo and became his second number-one single in the Billboard Top Latin Songs chart, after "Toda La Vida" in 1986.

Now you know as much about it as I do, or from what I can tell, as much as anyone anywhere on the Internet does. I spent more time tracking down and manipulating the jpeg of the album cover than I will writing about the song — generally I try to like music, or at least work out how to like it, but this song has defeated me.

If there's an Anglophone equivalent, it's Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," except this could never have anything as interesting as Rickrolling happen to it, because Franco doesn't even have Astley's dorky charm: he's a toothy smile and an anonymous voice, and the fact that this is his second appearance in this story is the kind of thing that makes me wonder whether it's worth telling.

I don't even need to translate the lyrics: he's just met a girl named María, how does he solve a problem like María, oh María love to love oh his María; there are only so many changes that can be rung on the name. The song is too thin and insubstantial, especially compared to the monster that preceded it, for me to want to even put any effort into learning how it came to spend most of September at #1, then make a return engagement after the next entry fizzled out. How does a song that can't possibly be anyone's favorite song do that?

Rick Astley is fundamentally mysterious to me too.

YURI, “QUÉ TE PASA”

14th May, 1988

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If Juan Gabriel gave us our first taste of modern dance music — oddly elongated and strangely unecstatic as it was — Yuri plunges us right into the cross-currents of post-disco baile: this isn't some paranoid, agonized personal statement set to robot rhythms, but a massive splash of fun which topped the Hot Latin chart throughout the summer of 1988, a giddy call to dance and selfhood which deserves to be rated along with the best of Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, the Bangles, and Donna Lewis as a creamy pinnacle of 1980s pop, with day-glo instrumentation and cocaine-funky rhythms, orgasmic whoops and sexy salsa breakdowns.

This was Yuri's peak as a pop star; we'll meet her again, but this was the culmination of about a decade's worth of hard work, success, and more success after that, invisible to the exclusivity of a #1 list that didn't start until 1986. She had her first hit in 1979, and was one of Mexico's biggest pop stars in the decade that followed; in fact I knew her name and the curves of her cleavage (if not her music) well as a thirteen-year-old in Guatemala in 1991 looking through newspapers that were way sexier than the ones back home. (Hers may be the earliest name I ever knew to appear in these charts, unless Amy Grant or Barbra Streisand turns up.)

Like Madonna, her self-presentation was more important than her vocal ability; unlike contemporaries like Ana Gabriel or Daniela Romo, she didn't have the kind of voice that could make you thrill regardless of the song. But she could play up her sexuality (she posed in Playboy in 1986), and her dance moves, and she could work with canny producers and get great songs and be nearly the first "manufactured" pop star to appear on this chart.

"Manufactured" is in quotes here because I don't subscribe to the criticism implicit in the word (and neither should you); "self-made" might be a better adjective. What I mean is that she successfully engineered a pop career without coming out of a more "authentic" tradition first, whether regional, tropical or folklórico (the three traditions in Latin music which are most often set against pop; in American music the closest historical analogues would be country, r&b, and folk). Everything about Yuri, from her hair color to her musicianship, was artificial; which only means she was a late-twentieth-century pop star.

But simple-minded party songs, however giddily danceable and well presented by a sexy singer, are a dime a dozen; "Qué Te Pasa"'s historic run at the top of the chart (the longest stay at forteen weeks, a record unbroken for the rest of the millennium) needs more explanation. Which, if you understand the lyrics, it has; they are very nearly existential in their insistence on the Party as source of meaning. "El amor y desamor/Son plumas en el viento" ("love and lack of love are feathers in the wind") is a shockingly wise, practically Brelesque lyric in a giddy pop song, and the imagery of leaving behind depressive solitude for communal ecstasy could be tailor-made for 2000s indie vs. poptimist fights. "Qué te pasa" translates as "what's up with you?" and could easily be interpreted as "what's wrong with you?" or "what's your deal?" as the verses urge the listener to stop moping, get out on the balcony, and dance.

But the middle eight proves that the song isn't just about bullying the shy and depressive into uncomfortable partying: "Stop looking already/For that five-legged cat*/It doesn't make any sense/In the depths just like me/With your soul in pieces/Begin again/Always from zero."

It's a call to arms (or to feet!) that more of us could always use. Thin production or not, this has become one of my favorite pop songs in the few weeks I've been listening to it, and while I'm still a little surprised that I'm taking Yuri (Yuri! The one with the breasts!) seriously, this is exactly what I was hoping to find when I began this project.

*A Hispanic idiom meaning something so rare as to be unobtainable.