CHAYANNE, “COMPLETAMENTE ENAMORADOS”

20th October, 1990

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If you were wondering where the faintly chugging guitar in the intro to "Peligroso Amor" went, don't worry: it went here. Sure, the first sound we hear is the delicate tinkling of plastic ballad keyboards, but this ends up being more like the sort of gently rhythmic ballad that was popular in the 80s; probably the most obvious example of the form is "Every Breath You Take," but I always think of it as the "Missing You" template. (Uh, by which I mean John Waite, not Puff Daddy.)

Chayanne's matured as a vocalist from his last time round; he's even taken on some Waitean cod-soulfulness; and, more importantly, learned to sing from somewhere besides his head. Last time, of course, he was lamenting a love who would not love him back; this time he's celebrating mutual love. The title translates as "Completely In Love," but since the adjectival phrase is plural, means more precisely "[two people] completely in love."

This also marks the smuggled return of Italy into our pop narrative; the song was originally written by a brace of Italians including the legendary Eros Ramazzotti, who is as much a Latin Pop star as an Italian one, and who we will only meet in such glancing ways throughout this travelogue (so far). And once that scrap of information falls into place, the production choice sounds perfectly reasonable: of course this is an Italian ballad converted into Spanish. How could it ever have sounded like anything else?

MYRIAM HERNÁNDEZ, “PELIGROSO AMOR”

6th October, 1990

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I almost began writing "an unexpected reward of this undertaking is," but that's sloppy, thoughtless copymaking. The truth is it was entirely expected — in fact it was half the reason I began it in the first place. So:

A long-foreseen reward of this undertaking is the chance to familiarize myself with acts I never would have come across in the ordinary run of things. Even if I'd wanted to educate myself on the history of Latin Pop, Myriam Hernández is not one of the names that stands out in bold relief; apart from her brief early-90s moment in the wider Latin Pop spotlight, her success (though steady) has been mostly confined to South America*.

But though I inwardly groaned at the telltale keys of yet another ballad (even the flickers of guitar in the intro betrayed me), her voice made me sit up and take notice; I played it again, almost instinctively. It's not the kind of voice that would stop traffic, necessarily; and maybe only someone with my peculiar set of tastes could find it fascinating, but while she has the requisite operettic lungpower for a Latin Pop diva, and goes full-throttle on the chorus, her approach to the verses is more delicate and even kind of unusual. The texture of her voice in the quieter moments reminds me more of jazz or folk singers (the liquid clarity of Joan Baez, perhaps?) than of the strong-lunged diva who belts out her litany of amors.

And then I got home and looked up the record cover in order to create this post, and phew! It's a good thing I'm past the age of falling in love with a song and a photograph. Ahem.

*At least, that's the impression I get from her Wikipedia pages. As always, please correct me in the comments.

JOSÉ JOSÉ, “AMNESIA”

29th September, 1990

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One major downside of the way I've chosen to conduct this blog is that I spend so little time with these songs before trying to write about them that I can't possibly do them justice. Even if I'd listened to this song twenty times before setting finger to keyboard, I wouldn't be recreating the conditions under which it became a hit. The life of a pop song in its natural environment — heard in many different places under many different emotional conditions over the space of weeks and months, at the center of a whole complex of previously-received information about the artist, the pop hype cycles of the moment, and the songs which surround it on the radio, in the club, and in one's personal music collection — is so radically different from the clinical, concentrated burst under which "criticism" necessarily takes place that the latter exercise may well start to seem pointless.

Especially when I have so little to say about the actual song that I start talking about the mechanics of criticism.

José José has appeared on this travelogue three times already, each time to somewhat lesser effect. That I've ended up considering this his slightest appearance yet has less to do with the virtues of the actual song than with the fact that it's yet another midtempo adult-contemporary ballad with those gleaming, contentless keyboards and an alto sax sprinkling boredom dust over top of it. I know, in a theoretical sense, that the Latin Pop chart wasn't entirely composed of these songs, but since I'm only listening to the number ones it's starting to give me me a highly lopsided view of the period.

His voice is as polished and attractive an instrument as ever; the song is the second in a row about the romance of oblivion (though José Feliciano can't forget, and José José can't remember); and if this post feels a bit like marking time until we get to the next song whatever it is, that's because it is.

JOSÉ FELICIANO, “¿POR QUÉ TE TENGO QUE OLVIDAR?”

15th September, 1990

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If you're an American, you know at least one José Feliciano song by heart, even if you hate it. His appearance here — sadly, his only appearance here (to date, anyway; believe it or not, there's an upcoming single I have hopes for) — is a welcome reminder that the success of Latin Pop in America has roots going back well before Billboard thought to assign it its own chart. I still think his version of "Light My Fire" is the definitive one, and his version of airy, flamenco-tinged Latin pop is one of the sounds of 60s and 70s AM pop that is easiest to lose myself dreamily in.

Of course, this isn't that; it's another ponderous early-90s ballad, with rubato keyboards and big gated drums, but you can hear a beautiful-if-slight song underneath it all, with Feliciano's trademark acoustic guitar adding a tasteful, witty running commentary throughout. I've seen the title given as both "¿Por Qué Te Tengo Que Olvidar?" and "Porque Te Tengo Que Olvidar" (reading from left to right, "why do I have to forget you?" and "because I have to forget you"), but the grammar's less important than the broken-hearted sentiment. Feliciano sounds his age here, a pop survivor who retains his professionally cheerful demeanor, and it's rather a relief from the series of overemoting blowhards (I like Luis Miguel, but really) that we've had recently.

Still, it's hard to get past that one-size-fits-all overproduction. Feliciano's at his best when there's more space to the arrangement; here he comes dangerously close to sounding like just another faded pop star trading on past glories for a valedictory lap.

LUIS MIGUEL, “TENGO TODO EXCEPTO A TÍ”

21st July, 1990

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There's a subtle shift that happens when a hugely successful pop star becomes more than just a pop star, and it's not always identifiable in a particular song. With Madonna, for example, it happened over the course of the Like A Virgin album; with Michael Jackson, it was obviously Thriller; and with Britney Spears there was no shift, she was always top-of-the-world from the first single. I'm not even particularly confident that this particular song marks Luis Miguel's shift (it could well be the 20 Años album, which broke sales records for Latin Pop from the first week of its release, but which I haven't heard in full) — but his music has definitely moved up a tax bracket since last we saw him.

But it's not just the production, as expensively glossy, spacious, and upscale as we've heard to date (at least this side of Julio Iglesias) — Miguel's singing has lost its teen-pop floridity, the anxious emotionalism of "Fría Como El Viento"or "La Incondicional," and he sounds now like a man supremely confident in his powers, able to work in delicate shades of timbre and phrasing without sacrificing the full-blast power of his gifted lungs.

That top-of-the-world atmosphere is perfect for this song, the kind of song a William Randolph Hearst might sing while pursuing his Marion Davies. The title means "I have everything but you," and while he isn't so gauche as to detail the extent of his holdings, Miguel's performance is that of a powerful, wealthy man missing only the one thing that won't be his for the asking. The alto sax coming in at the end was a signifier of opulent classiness as the 80s turned into the 90s, but it was also, at least for those whose palates considered themselves more refined, a signifier of the bourgeois failure of taste — anyone who remembers the 90s as they actually were (rather than as they were played on TV) hears Kenny G, and winces.

RUDY LA SCALA, “EL CARIÑO ES COMO UNA FLOR”

23rd June, 1990

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One of the things about Latin Pop that doesn't strike the new listener as particularly reasonable on first delve is how many Italians there are all up in there. Italian isn't Spanish, as I learned the hard way inside a Roman electronics shop in 2000, and the influence of Italian culture in the Western hemisphere has mostly been limited, in the pop understanding of things, to the Eastern seaboard of the United States. But when you think about it from the point of view of an ambitious Italian pop star, it makes more sense; unless you're on the opera circuit, there's only so far you can go singing exclusively in Italian. The Spanish-language market is secondary only to the English-language market in terms of global reach, and it's the rare Italian pop act that doesn't try cutting amore down to amor at least once.

Not all of which totally applies to Rudy La Scala; he was born in Italy (and spent time in a progressive rock act there), but he's spent the bulk of his career operating out of Venezuela, where he worked on telenovelas, acted as svengali/producer for a number of up-and-coming pop stars (including Maria Conchita Alonso's Donna Summer period), and had a string of Latin-Pop hits on his own starting in 1990.

Starting here, in fact; which is as unlikely a pop hit as I've hard in some time. La Scala's unsteady, overwrought voice louder than anything else in the mix, lyrics which are lugubrious even by the standards of Latin Pop ballads*, and a production which seems to be aiming for the title of Dullest In Show all combine to create a car-wreck of a single which not only do I not like, I can't even begin to organize my thoughts around how anyone would like it. The best I can do is that he undoubtedly sounds like a guy who sang in a prog-rock band in the 70s; but not even Phil Collins fell this low.

*The title translates to "affection is like a flower," than which there could be no more idiotically trite sentiment.

ANA GABRIEL, “QUIÉN COMO TÚ”

5th May, 1990

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It's possible that anything would have been a disappointment after "Simplemente Amigos," but while Ana Gabriel's throaty howl is still in fine form, and the production floats and soars with all the shiny bombast of early-90s rock balladry, as a song "Quién Como Tú" (tr. "who like you") is too lightweight to really live up to the emotion she invests it with.

The song addresses someone (man? woman? the sexual ambiguity that haunted "Simplemente Amigos" is still present, but that might only be because second-person pronouns aren't gendered in Spanish) who is in love with (and also sleeping with) someone else (again, possessive and objective pronouns aren't gendered), and the singer appears to feel a certain way about it all. But it's difficult to say exactly what; the only expression of emotion she makes is "I have nothing to hope for though I'm left in the air." It's unclear who she was hoping for, the lover or the beloved, and though the ambiguity neatly serves to fit just about any situation to which listeners might wish to apply it, as a standalone song it's unsatisfying.

Lyrically, anyway. As I said, the production's gloriously bombastic, with lovely plastic-sounding guitar lines giving way to big drums and strings and hair-metal backgrounds. Ana Gabriel's certainly in no danger of losing the title of queen of Mexican pop here; but the first cracks in her marble edifice are visible.

GIPSY KINGS, “VOLARÉ”

21st April, 1990

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Strange things were happening in the Latin chart as the first year of the 1990s got underway, at least at the top. First "Lambada," a Brazilian dance song as filtered through a French dance outfit, then this, an old Italian pop song as played by a French flamenco outfit. Where have all the Latin Americans gone?

Gipsy Kings have more in common with Los Lobos than with anyone else we've seen so far in this journey; as a Serious Muso Band with a specific ethnic identity that didn't get in the way of big-time crossover success (the tasteful-liberal kind we'd associate with NPR today), their success on the Hot Latin chart is another entry in the logbook of my suspicions that Billboard was maybe counting sales and airplay of anything in Spanish regardless of whether actual Latin stations were playing it. But enough with the meta, how's the song?

It's good, as no one will be surprised to hear: an acoustic uptempo jam that sticks fairly closely to the classic Domenico Modugno and Dean Martin versions of the song (a.k.a. "Nel blu dipinto di blu") which sat like twin huge roosting birds on the Billboard pop charts of 1958 and refused to budge. It's maybe lighter on its feet than Modugno was (Martin was always pretty light), but it's still very much the same kind of ethnic cheese: entirely enjoyable if you're not hung up on questions of identity politics, hipness, and "authenticity," somewhat less so if you are. Regardless, it's a pretty undeniable chorus, which far more than some theoretical midcentury cult of Italian masculinity was surely what gave it legs in the 50s, as well as what did the same, to somewhat lesser effect, three decades later.

ROBERTO CARLOS, “ABRE LAS VENTANAS AL AMOR”

31st March, 1990

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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.