KAOMA, “LAMBADA”

10th February, 1990

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This is — and again, I'm guessing, I'm listening to these in real time, and unless I've encountered them organically haven't listened to any songs in advance — about as close to rave culture as this journey will ever take us. Happily, it's also just about as close to rave culture as I'm comfortable getting, for reasons which have as much to do with geography and history as education and taste.

The 4/4 beat (almost) straight through, that backbone of remixes and DJ sets, ties it to the mainstreaming of the dance underground that was then going on all around the world — it could easily fit on a mix with Snap!, C + C Music Factory, and Technotronic. But it's the sped-up tango bandoneón, the modified cumbia rhythm, and the timbale fills that make it the great crossover Latin Dance song of its era, and the first of several such dance crazes to appear on our journey. It's also the first time I was ever vaguely aware of a song that would appear on this list. I don't mean that I ever actually heard it (as far as I know) until today; but I read about the Lambada — the "forbidden dance" — in Newsweek and was both slightly scared and slightly aroused by what I read. (I was twelve; everything slightly scared and slightly aroused me.)

But unlike some of what's to follow, the Lambada doesn't seem to have had any staying power as a dance. Possibly that's because unlike, say, the Macarena (similarly the butt of jokes but still a common social dance), you can't half-ass it and have fun anyway — and if the video's any guide, one partner has to be comfortable in a thong. (Thereby full-assing it, ha ha.) But at twenty years' remove from the song — and the dance's — peak in popularity, it's hard to hear much of a punchline in the music. It sounds like what it is, South American exoticism by way of French producers, and for me, anyway, that's enough.

RICARDO MONTANER, “LA CIMA DEL CIELO”

27th January, 1990

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This sounds so perfectly 1990 to me — those slow-building, gospelly melodies were very much in vogue as the fabulous 1980s prepared for the earnest 90s — that I'm almost tempted to believe that its being The First Number One Of The 1990s is somehow significant. But it's just as much another entry in my theory of ballads belonging to the winter months.

It's also the first time an Argentinean singer has appeared at the top spot so far. (Montaner was born in Argentina but raised and achieved his first success in Venezuela.) Argentina is the richest and most powerful Spanish-speaking South American country, but partly because its cultural ties are closer to Spain than to the rest of Latin America, partly because of the lengthy Peron dictatorship, and partly because of a certain amount of cultural elitism, its pop culture hasn't necessarily been very popular throughout the rest of Latin America.

Montaner began, according to himself, as a black metal singer, but it was a series of baladas románticas that made him famous. You can, if you try very hard, hear a bit of rock vocal stylings here, but it's closer to the theatrical soul stylings of the post-Hair Broadway. Nevertheless it's an assured production, only a step or so removed from the Michael Bolton, Bryan Adams, and Richard Marx songs which were blanketing the English-speaking world at the same time.

EMMANUEL, “LA CHICA DE HUMO”

30th December, 1989

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And so we say farewell to the 1980s, never to return unless something very unexpected indeed happens in the upcoming years. This song was at the top of the Billboard Latin chart as the decade turned over from 1989 to 1990, and like any user of symbol and myth, I've tried to find things about it that echo whatever significance that particular turnover on the chronological odometer might have had. All I've really been able to come up with is that this is the first song we've heard so far that would have been unimaginable without hip-hop. The jacking, stuttered beat, the synthesized horns and bass working as a digitized memory of funk, and the dreamy house piano lines all fade irresistibly from the late 80s into the early 90s. In fact it reminds me, with my early ignorance and limited exposure to pop music, of nothing so much as the first DC Talk record (the one with "Heavenbound" on it), though better-produced and more fragrantly alive.

The title translates to "The Girl Of Smoke," and the sucked-in breath which opens the song, inevitably evokes a specific source of smoke to anyone keyed into the popular culture of the last forty years — but the lyrics, unless I'm missing some subtext somewhere, aren't about pot. If anything, the central metaphor is tobacco; the girl burns, soothes, flirts, evaporates. She's smoke because he can't hold onto her; she's mercurial, even fatal, but he's addicted; when he insists that "no me va a transformar en crucigrama viviente" ("she won't change me into a living puzzle"), the boast rings hollow.

A lot of the songs we've looked at recently have been about fascinating, even mythic, women, the belles dames sans merci of medieval, Gothic, and noir narratives. Which is a perfectly satisfying story for adolescent males to tell themselves — certainly it was a useful myth in my own youthful crushes, the cruel but distant goddess who I could obsess over without having to acknowledge as actually being human — but after a while, as these portraits start piling up indistinguishably, it begins to look more like misogyny than hopeless romanticism. Taken at face value, Emmanuel's declarations are standard lover's woes; but within the context of a narrative matrix in which all women are predatory, congenitally faithless beings tempting young men to destruction, he's a little less sympathetic.

Which is fine — his vocal performance, vacant and barely there, fading exhaustedly towards the end of each line, isn't geared towards sympathy anyway. This is primarily a dance song, and the triumphal boogie of the music is at odds (though not really in such a way as to inspire alternate readings) with the paranoid misery of the lyrics. The synth sounds are cheap and obvious and splashy — very Casio, very 1989 — and it's the synthetic fanfares and the way his voice reaches up into the caress of "ahh-aaaahh" that stick in the memory, not the clipped, accusatory verses.

On a more meta note, it's taken a long time for me to get this one up not because I didn't have anything to say about it but because I've been "busy" with other things. ("Busy" = sure, I could have made the time, but this project isn't the kind of thing that brings immediate and obvious rewards.) As we head into the 90s, I'm planning on tweaking the format slightly to make it easier to get through the patches where I'm not totally enthused about the material. This means shorter writeups — blurbs, as we say at the Singles Jukebox — and hopefully more frequent postings. Of course, if there's mass outrage at the change . . . .

LOS BUKIS, “CÓMO FUÍ A ENAMORARME DE TÍ”

9th December, 1989

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There's something about Los Bukis that makes it hard for me to even want to grapple with their music. Not hard to listen to their music — it goes down easy, just like it was made to — but to pay attention to it and consider it and give it due weight and render a fair and sober judgement. This isn't even about how I don't like it. I like it fine! Or I would if I had any thoughts about it at all. Instead I spent their last appearance talking about them (not the song) and now I'm spending this one talking about me (not the song).

As has become my habit, I translated the lyrics into English in a Notepad document before opening this post, just so I could make sure I wasn't missing anything important. I wasn't — they're standard bleeding-heart lyrics about the anguish of unrequited love, with one or two nice images and a whole lot of standard lines. I bet this is a great song to blast at full volume in your room or your car when la única chica no te quiera, but without that motivating emotional hook, it only rings bombastic and faintly ridiculous to me now.

This is the third ballad in a row with an electric guitar solo, which means I'm pretty dumb, but it also means that we're definitely turning into the 90s now. I remember early-90s ballads as being chock full of pointless electric guitar solos (most egregiously on the Vanessa Williams/Brian McKnight duet "Love Is"), and at least as far as Latin Pop goes, that's looking like a trustworthy memory.

And I think that's all I have to say. Next time I'll try to talk about the actual music; I just have to post this so I can get past it and jump-start this blog again.

CHAYANNE, “FUISTE UN TROZO DE HIELO EN LA ESCARCHA”

4th November, 1989

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The second temperate ballad in a row to be interrupted by a flash of electric-guitar wizardry; is this a slow-rolling sea change, or merely something which had never before bobbed to the surface? But comparisons with the Luis Miguel song which preceded it are not likely to be very fruitful; after all, once you've noted the difference in the singing styles (Miguel: all-out passion, Chayanne: so sweet as to maybe be called simpering), the similarities in topic (both are anguished farewells to dangerously fickle women that use images of ice and treachery), and a general structural similarity (which either of them would share with ninety percent of ballads produced in the last quarter of the century), what's left to compare?

That's meant for humor. Unfortunately there is a sameness to much of the music we've been discussing over the past several months, a sameness which stands out all the more to ears that have not really been trained to pick out the nuances, and who hasn't followed the breathless press about each new estrella fabulosa. But Chayanne's going to be around a while; let's see what there is to know about him.

He's of the same generation of pop stars as Luis Miguel; when Miguel had his first #1, Chayanne was right behind him at #4. If his own summitting took a little longer, well, he had more irons in more fires. As un estrella de pop puertorriqueño, he also got jobs in the island's telenovela industry. We'll get to his crowning glory in that field -- in fact, one of the absurd crowning glories of all Latin pop culture -- in a few years' time, but for now, note that his dreamy swoon-worthiness is as much televisual as musical. Also, his birth name was Elmer.

I'd engage the song more, but the snark above pretty much nailed it. I'll just translate the title as per usual: "You Were A Piece Of Ice In The Frost." Which sets us up for a much more poetic lyric than the one we actually get, but pop has always been as much about hollow promises as about glory fulfilled; frequently more so.

LUIS MIGUEL, “FRÍA COMO EL VIENTO”

21st October, 1989

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I may just be balladed out. But it's difficult for me to hear much in this song except a lot of grimacing emoting, which the video bears out. (Luis Miguel watch: it was clearly shot before the one for "La Incondicional," as witness his uneven mop of hair, and I'm left wondering if was promoted first but took longer to get to the top, thanks to the vagaries of the airplay market.) The backing is thin and conventional, the only faint surprise being a brief electric guitar solo, which is quickly replaced by a saxophone.

That solo is hardly revolutionary or even interesting by Anglo pop standards, but the electric guitar could have decadent, imperialist-American connotations in much of Latin America up through the 80s. Rock en Español was far more upsetting in the context of its home audience in the 80s and 90s than the Anglophoners who embraced it with a patronizing "about time you caught up" air (even as rock lost unrecoverable ground in England and America) could possibly have understood. But we'll have plenty of time to explore that later; for now, just note the almost dangerous sophistication it represents in this song.

The dangerous sophistication, it is to be understood, is not on the part of Miguel himself, who is a nearly invisible presence in his own song. (At least as much as he can be, with that creamy voice emoting so hard all over the place.) The lyrics place an unknowable, untouchable woman at the center, and wind so thickly around her in metaphor and simile that seeing the anonymous model-dancer in the video is an inevitable letdown.

The title translated to English is "Cold As The Wind," and the chorus continues, "dangerous as the sea/sweet as a kiss/Don't let yourself love, because/I don't know if I have you/I don't know if you come or go/You're like an unbroken colt." (Luis Miguel expressing iffy sentiments about women watch: are those supposed to be good things or bad?)

As has been the general rule throughout this travelogue, romantic sentiments inevitably sound even more romantic (or ridiculous!) when written in Spanish, because they're expressed in idioms and images which are unfamiliar or old-fashioned in English. An English-language power ballad about a "cold," "vain, capricious, ideal" woman would be unlistenable; in Spanish, the language is only slightly more heightened than normal for pop.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “SI VOY A PERDERTE”

16th September, 1989

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Notable firsts watch: this is the first song we've encountered that simultaneously went to #1 on the Hot 100 (the main Billboard pop chart). Niggling caveats watch: "Si Voy A Perderte" isn't quite the same song as "Don't Wanna Lose You," despite having the same backing melody, the same backing track, and even the same competent-but-bland performance from Estefan. Also, "Don't Wanna Lose You" spent only a week at #1, her fifth top-ten entry since 1987, while as if to make up for her previous absence from this travelogue, she spends a solid month at the top of the Hot Latin tree.

For this is also our first encounter with the woman who most readily comes to mind if you say the words "80s Latin" to an American pop fan. We're almost done with the 80s, of course; but in a lot of ways this song sounds like the first of the 90s to me.

You see, my memory of the 90s is as much Adult Contemporary ballads as it is grunge, g-funk, or garage. (In order: quite a lot, a bit, not at all.) And only people who have never seriously listened to a ballad — instead of just hearing them and seething, or whatever — could imagine that the conventions of the form haven't changed, sometimes quite dramatically, over the years. The hushed verse/soaring chorus Estefan employs here isn't precisely a new idea, but the miles of space within the production, everything polished to a carefully tasteful sheen, is, at least in the Latin provinces. In other realms of the pop universe earlier in the decade, it was called sophisti-pop; as the 80s wheeled gracefully into the 90s, it became simply The Way Pop Gets Done.

But I started to talk about the difference between this and "Don't Wanna Lose You Now." I'm assuming you've heard "Don't Wanna Lose You Now" — in waiting rooms, if nowhere else — and it is, as I'm sure you know, a fine-to-middling example of the Dance-Pop Diva Sings A Ballad of the era. (See also: Paula Abdul, Janet Jackson, even on occasion Madonna.) The title says it all: she don't wanna lose you now, you're gonna get through somehow, she don't wanna lose you now (or ever), baby she's finally found the courage to stand her ground, etc., etc. As a vaguely empowering "we can make this work" anthem, it's fairly rote; as an sample of the Inspirational Pop of the period, it's Why Grunge Had To Happen. (That's, um, a joke. No letters, please.)

But the Spanish-language version (written, as was the "original," by Estefan herself) is something else. The differences in the title reflect the differences in the song: "Si Voy A Perderte" translates as "If I'm going to lose you," and rather than trying to rescue the relationship, she's making an ultimatum. The empowerment remains, but it's no longer vague: "If I'm going to lose you, it will be for the last time. This is forever, understand? I'd rather let you go and learn to live without you, because if I'm going to leave you, don't come back."

(Admittedly, this is a somewhat biased reading; the jut-jawed "understand?" could be a sympathetic "you understand me," and "don't come back" could also be a fatalistic "you won't come back." But it's worth noting that that sort of — or any — ambiguity is not available in the English-language version.)

This is far from our last encounter with La Gloria, and it doesn't necessarily show her off to her best advantage (I'll rep for the Miami Sound Machine any day), but it's indisputably the arrival of a major figure in Latin Pop. Nothing yet has sounded quite so clinically lovely, so (for lack of a better phrase) professional, which is no slur on the previous three years' worth of pop. This isn't the first song we've seen that was produced in the US, but it's the first that sounds like it.

It won't be the last.

ANA GABRIEL, “SIMPLEMENTE AMIGOS”

2nd September, 1989

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Well, this was unexpected.

Not the fact of Ana Gabriel's reappearance in this travelogue (I'd peeked ahead), or the fact that she was peddling another ballad — according to my theory, September is prime ballad territory — but the song's subject matter.

In these posts I've usually started out by talking about the sound of the song, then worked my way into discussing the lyrics; since Spanish isn't my first language, that's often seemed like the most natural way to approach them. But there are times when the lyrics suggest so much, and are so startlingly different from what I in my ignorance would have expected, that they insist on being dealt with first. Here, then, are the lyrics to "Simplemente Amigos" in full (my translation); I'll meet you again below:

ONLY FRIENDS

Always, like usual, from day to day the same

There's nothing to say in front of people like this

Friends, only friends and nothing more

But who knows in reality what happens between the two

If each one when night falls feigns a goodbye

How much I would give to cry to them of our love

Tell them that when the door closes we love each other uncontrollably

That we wake up embracing, hungering to go on loving each other

But I know that in reality they won't accept our love

Always, with looks we always give each other all our love

We speak without speaking, everything is silent where we walk

Friends, only friends and nothing more

But who knows in reality, what happens between we two

If each of us when night falls feigns a goodbye

How much I would give to cry to them of our love

Tell them that when the door closes we love each other uncontrollably

That we wake up embracing, hungering to keep on loving each other

But I know that in reality they won't accept our love....

No, oh no, they won't accept our love

No, oh no, they won't accept our love....

I might as well confess that I'm generally unsympathetic to the pop convention whereby every love is threatened by an unspecified They. The origin of that convention, the girl-group songs of the sixties, grew out of a specific time and place, the class-conscious (which often went musically coded as race-conscious) bourgeoisie of the American Northeast, and had specific enemies in mind: parents, school boards, The Man. Even Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach" located the resisting force in a character; but more often since the 80s pop expresses a generalized truculence aimed at anyone who would in any way sideline or doubt the Intensity of What We're Feeling. Even with a song I love very much, like Alicia Keys' "No One," I'm always left with the nagging feeling that she's being overdramatic: you ain't no Capulet, girl, hush up and live your damn life. Exactly no one is stopping you.

But I do not feel that way about this song. The reason should be obvious: even though the song is scrupulously careful not to give away any identity tags about the "we," the psychology of the closet is too obvious to go unremarked. With the benefit of hindsight, she could hardly have been more blatant if she had sung "amigas simplemente amigas." (I, uh, don't have to explain gendered nouns, do I?)

Ana Gabriel has always stated that she sang it in solidarity with her gay fans, and I see no reason to doubt her; the internet is rife with speculation — and plenty of flat-out assertions — that she's gay, but she says she loves women as people, not as lovers. It hardly matters; her gay following is large and devoted, and she doesn't have to be a lesbian to be an outspoken defender of gay rights in the Mexican media. (Her vocal style, it turns out, is only one of the things she has in common with Melissa Etheridge.)

From what I can tell, the song has long been understood as an anthem of gay identity in Latin Pop, even if people who wish to believe otherwise are able to do so; and Gabriel's assumption of it as one of her signature songs is something I did not expect to encounter so early in this travelogue. Clearly that has more to do with my own prejudices and assumptions — Latin audiences are more conservative, gay rights didn't really gather steam until the 90s in Latin culture, pop stars are normatively heterosexual — than with reality. (And the fact that the word "reality" is repeated twice, with opposite meanings, in the lyrics of "Simplemente Amigos" is no accident: in pop, reality depends a lot on who's looking.)

But I'm glad to acknowledge reality over my assumptions. Frankly, that undertow makes the song a lot better, far more intense and gripping than some half-hearted run through a memory of West Side Story.

JOSÉ LUIS RODRIGUEZ, “BAILA MI RUMBA”

14th July, 1989

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This is the second extended dance song we've seen here, and while it's not quite as epic as Juan Gabriel's "Debo Hacerlo," it's the kind of song that if you don't like the sort of thing it's doing wears out its welcome very quickly. Luckily, I like the sort of thing it's doing. A lot.

It's also our first real encounter with Cuban music. Not that most modern Latin dance doesn't have some cubano in it somewhere -- the New Yorkers who invented salsa were all Cubans in exile -- but this tale has so far mostly focused on Mexican music at the expense of the Caribbean. But this song is far from entirely Cuban -- in addition to rumba, I can hear Trinidadian soca, the "Miami Sound," and of course the juddering beats of post-New Order British dance.

Rumba is often used as a generic term in Cuban music, and in the generic sense it bears the same general relationship to Cuban music as jazz does to American music, a black-originated, dance-based music that swiftly evolved into many disparate forms. But there are also specific rhythms and sounds that are unique to rumba as a music and a dance form: in the opening to this song, the piano plays rumba while the percussion is rather busier, evoking the southern Caribbean as much as the north.

Soca is to calypso what dancehall is to ska/rocksteady/reggae: a modernized, electronic update of an island music that isn't nearly as respected, musicology-wise, as its venerable ancestors. Which only means it's a living music, not having been trapped in amber by the killjoy curatorial instincts of the Hundred Best Ever listmaking set. (Among whom I of course count myself.) The hip-shaking jollity of the percussion, in fact, reminds me of no late 80s music so much as Buster Pointdexter's Latin-kitsch-and-the-kitchen-sink cover of "Hot, Hot, Hot," originally a soca hit by Monserratian singer Arrow.

But this song wasn't recorded in the Caribbean; though it fleshes out its curves with tropical signifiers, its throbbing spine moves with the sleek, violent precision of drug-glazed, neon-decadent Miami. Emilio Estefan, Gloria's husband and the ringleader of the Miami Sound Machine, co-produced it, and it is the clearest example we have yet seen of the impact new American pop music was having on the overall Latin scene. Those stiff jackhammer beats are like nothing we have heard before; and while neither José Luis Rodriguez, a soap opera actor taking a flier on an uptempo summer jam, nor his overly-sweet backing singers really have the vocal fire to match the banging music, it's still the party-heartiest number we've heard yet, the first song on this travelogue it wouldn't be impossible to imagine working into a DJ set today, provided the crowd was either callow or knowing enough to not hear it as Pointdexterian kitsch.

The lyrics barely matter, and he sings the back half in English anyway. Twenty years later, the only arresting words are a mondegreen: the backing girls sing "ritmo ritmo" (rhythm, rhythm), but it sounds a couple of times like "Gitmo ritmo," which has a whole lot of other, entirely unintended connotations; but it made me realize where I'd heard those jacking beats before. Of course! Paul Hardcastle's "19."