LUIS MIGUEL, “NO SÉ TÚ”

18th April, 1992

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If Los Bukis coming round every year with another chart-topper was comfortably predictable by this point, Luis Miguel scoring two chart-toppers in quick succession from his newest album is just as certain. It's becoming clear that the broad outline of Latin Pop history differs in significant ways from both the received and the actual histories of Anglophone pop; in the early 90s, Latin artists were still an-album-a-year entertainment machines, where much of the English-speaking world had already converted to the modern every-few-years release schedule, giving people plenty of time to soak up, get sick of, and maybe forget the last album before renewing the assault. Neither model is necessarily better than the other, but the compression of the first can make artistic growth seem almost instantaneous.

So I said about Luis Miguel's last album that it was the moment when he became not just a pop star, but an institution; but this one, Romance, was the biggest-selling album of his career, and, if Wikipedia is to be trusted, the biggest-selling Spanish-language album of all time. This song sounds it, expansively expensive, the first ballad since Julio Iglesias to bring in classical orchestration -- very few top-selling songs in the last hundred years have had oboe solos -- and a lush sense of space to Miguel's already beautifully sensitive singing. The song itself is just as splendidly ornate a love song; not perhaps as poetic as Iglesias' latter-day triumphs, but in the simplicity of its language and directness of its sentiment, a classic of the genre nevertheless.

And I do mean classic. Googling the lyrics inadvertently reveals that a lot of people have wanted to know what it means in English; and this sweet story on a cooking blog suggests a pop-cultural power I in my ignorance had been unaware of. The title means, literally, "I don't know you," but the saber/conocer distinction* makes that reading impossible; really, it's short for "no sé (que piensas) tú," or "I don't know what you think." The translation given at the link, "I don't know about you, but I etc." is exact even to its informality. Miguel is (once again) relating an obsessive, extravagant love, one which he's not sure is requited; he can't sleep, he's always going back over the night she "created with her kisses." That touch of vulnerability (but without self-pity) is a masterful summary of Miguel's vocal persona: he doesn't go in for the florid emotionality of a lot of Latin Pop singers of his generation and earlier, he's controlled and even, in his adulthood, a little reserved; which makes any vulnerable emotion that much more meaningful when it arrives.

*See also connaître/savoir, wissen/kennen, etc. A lot of languages make a distinction between knowing knowledge and knowing people.

LOS BUKIS, “MI MAYOR NECESIDAD”

21st March, 1992

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Another year, another Los Bukis chart-topper. Like the countrypolitan acts of the 70s and 80s I keep comparing them to, they're dependable, comfortable, reassuring. You always know what you're going to get.

Or maybe they can surprise you sometimes. Los Bukis sound here for the first time like the regional band I keep tagging them as; not just in the chord structures and the romantic sentiments, but instrumentally too: the classically-derived norteño guitar solos are both a signifier of Serious Intent and a soothing relief after a rather numbing procession of gloopy keyboard ballads. I know I've been grumbling about ballads a lot here, to the point where even I'm sick of the very word, but I love the dazzling variety of Latin music so much that it's really frustrating to hear so much of it represented by this travelogue as sounding the same.

But as to the Serious Intent: the opening of the video, with its heartwarming cascade of Mexican humanity, will do better than anything else to explain what writer-singer Marco Antonio Solís and company were getting at (and Solís' hair, at its early-90s finest, has to be seen to be believed). It's a love song — an obsessive, can't-get-you-out-of-my-head love song, but a love song — but Solís' spoken intro, the kind of inclusive stage patter that's second nature to any professional entertainer, encourages all of his listeners to hear themselves in the song, so that it's as much an ode to the band's fans as to a woman. Los Bukis were undoubtedly the biggest romántico band in Latin Pop by this point; that this is (spoiler alert) their last appearance here under the band name is as much testament to the irresistible logic of pop hubris as it it is to the various machinations which we'll catch up on the next time we come to Marco Antonio Solís.

ÁLVARO TORRES, “NADA SE COMPARA CONTIGO”

7th March, 1992

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My direct experience with Latin America, Mexican enclaves within the US aside, has been limited to Central America (specifically Guatemala). The small, mountainous countries which string along from the sturdy bump of the Yucatán to the great bulb of South America are collectively the poorest, most politically fragile, and least likely to produce pop stars of the Spanish-speaking world, so it's always with some glad triumph that I note when a Central American reaches the august spaces chronicled here. The only previous Central American occupant of the top slot has been the Honduran Banda Blanca, with my favorite song so far; how will Salvadoran Álvaro Torres (who started his career in Guatemala) compare?

Well, it's not my second favorite. It starts promisingly, with some Serious Power Ballad Guitar, but while it's actually quite a sweet love song, his voice is thin and weak, and after the master class in ballad singing we've been having from Luis Miguel and Rocío Dúrcal, he sounds particularly out of his depth.

But like I said, it's a sweet love song. The title translates as "nothing compares to you," and while it certainly doesn't hold a candle to the Prince (or rather the Sinéad O'Connor) song of the same name, it's the kind of ballad that I can easily understand catching on in early spring, as high school students — Latino ones maybe especially — begin looking for a killer slow dance for the prom.

ROBERTO CARLOS & ROCÍO DÚRCAL, “SI PIENSAS, SI QUIERES”

29th February, 1992

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I haven't been doing this long enough to really experience the sensation of two titans of the field returning for a joint victory lap, but of course Latin Pop didn't begin in 1986 — the Billboard Latin chart did. Roberto Carlos and Rocío Dúrcal both had much more storied careers than the glimpses we've had, giant unknown (to us) icebergs of careers much greater and deeper than the few measly juts above the waterline we know. But since I haven't (yet) considered it a part of my duty to immerse myself in the full discographies of the artists who attain to the number one spot, all we have to go on is what's broken through that surface.

In comparison to Roberto Carlos' two previous entries, "Si El Amor Se Va" and "Abre Las Ventanas Al Amor," this is a significant improvement (especially on the latter). Where those sounded rather like dusty, plastic-instrumented hymns, this is a living ballad, with a rhythm less stately and more oceanic. It reminds me most, in fact, of Rocío Dúrcal's first appearance (and our inaugural entry), "La Guirnalda," which rode a similar seaside-mariachi rhythm to lovely effect. And while it doesn't rise to the level of her last solo entry, "Como Tu Mujer," which managed to combine mariachi and stateliness to thrilling effect, this is a solid duet, a pair of beautiful performances with an effective if somewhat conventional production.

"Si piensas, si quieres" means "if you think ... if you want," the opening phrases of arguments made by each singer. The occasion of the duet is a possible reunion of separated lovers; each of them is cautious about the idea for different reasons, she because he's broken her heart before, and he because he doesn't want to be tied down. Conventional again; but she's forthright about him having to change his ways, and he weasels around about being a bohemian dreamer in love with life. (Direct translation!) When the song is over, the reunion remains theoretical, conditional, everything hinging on those looming, unbridgeable Ifs.

LUIS MIGUEL, “INOLVIDABLE”

25th January, 1992

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The more Luis Miguel I hear, the more I appreciate the technical purity of his singing, the immaculate phrasing and, as he grows older, the sense of powerful emotions in reserve, which he shares with the mature Sinatra. In some ways it feels as if he's been building to this moment, the gorgeous young man who first appeared in these pages as a teen hunk singing a retrofitted 60s pop song growing into the suavely elegant man who rides a light-jazzy rhythm effortlessly and croons as sweetly as Bryan Ferry, as assuredly as Tony Bennett.

I'm told (by the usual source) that this was his biggest-selling album, the final transition into adulthood and traditional pop. That tradition is bolero, the eighteenth-century Spanish slow dance that was the first popular song form in Cuba and Mexico. I had to listen to a few more traditional bolero songs myself before I could hear the bolero rhythm under the funk-guitar flecks, but even if the instrumentation is as plastic and 1992 as possible — between the glossy keys, the rubbery guitar, and the tweeting soprano sax, it's like a crystallized memory of the first smooth jazz station I ever listened to — Miguel's precise, restrained performance rescues it from easy-listening purgatory and places it in the canon of liquid-smooth pop that all my references so far have conjured up.

While most latter-day reminiscence has focused on youth movements like alt-rock and electronic dance, at the time there was some reason to believe that traditional pop was a signal way forward as the nineties gathered steam: Tony Bennett was hip again, Harry Connick, Jr. was on the rise, and Natalie Cole had her biggest, if least defensible, hit duetting with her late father. While this isn't that "Unforgettable" (which is what "inolvidable" means), it's at least as easy to slip into its dreamy tug.

INTERMEDIO.

Having reached the end of 1991, I wrote elsewhere about the Latin Pop song that defined the year for me as a thirteen-year-old in Guatemala. It only made #19 in the Hot Latin chart, however, so it's not here.

CAMILO SESTO, “AMOR MÍO, ¿QUÉ ME HAS HECHO?”

23rd November, 1991

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It's been a while — the last time was 1988 — since we've seen a singer from Spain, or heard that distinctive Castilian accent (listen for the "th" sound). Whether this is pure chance or whether the Latin Pop chart is becoming more distinctively American as it moves lumberingly towards the present, there's definitely a way in which this sounds like winds that haven't blown through these songs in some time, not so much a breath of fresh air as a reminder of Old World sumptuousness which the more mongrel, anxious, and vibrant cultures of the New cannot usually afford.

Camilo Sesto was apparently a regular hitmaker in the 70s and 80s, though you couldn't prove it by this blog — and you most likely won't have another chance. This is more or less a swan song, at least as far as the up-and-down travails of pop, rather than the steady renumeration of the nostalgia circuit, goes. It's a classic Latin Pop song, with a big, sweeping melody and a big, sweeping performance to match. Love is again a cruel mistress ("My love, what have you done to me?" goes the chorus), and if Sesto is as ready to complain of her cruelties as anyone else, at least his mellifluous voice and the accompaniment of an equally mellifluous saxophone aren't bad company on the way.

RUDY LA SCALA, “POR QUÉ SERÁ”

9th November, 1991

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As 1991 winds into its final innings — one of the shorter Latin Pop years so far, thanks to the massive "Todo, Todo, Todo" and two Ana Gabriel songs — Rudy La Scala returns for a second at-bat in as many years. I'm not sure if I've changed or he has, but I find this much outing much more enticing than the last; his overemotional quaver and androgynous voice read less like baffling stylization and more like a function of the overdramatized passions of what turn out, on inspection, to be standard Latin Pop lyrics about "amores prohibidos" (forbidden loves; remember that phrase) and generalized longing.

The title translates as "why must it be," and La Scala's litany of foreordained dooms and inevitable anguishes visited upon those unlucky enough to fall into amores prohibidos is nearly as hyperbolic as his overwrought vocal style. I'll no doubt expand on the theme in later entries, but for now remember that "forbidden love" didn't (and doesn't?) necessarily have the "love that dare not speak its name" connotations of LGBT convention for a Latin audience; for an overwhelmingly conservative Catholic culture, any non-marital amor is prohibido. Which might be why it's so much sung about.

VIKKI CARR & ANA GABRIEL, “COSAS DEL AMOR”

31st August, 1991

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Over the past forty years, Vikki Carr has had two almost entirely separate careers singing popular music. By which I don't mean that she had one, then she had another: she's maintained both of them side-by-side, and fans of one often know nothing of the other. Fans of traditional pop, especially the brassy 60s variety, know her as the pair of iron lungs behind "It Must Be Him," a 1967 ballad that grandly ignored all pop change since about 1953. She's maintained one foot in the trad-pop and easy listening tradition ever since, collaborating with jazz musicians, playing cabarets, and even dabbling in pop-country the way so many easy-listeners did in the 70s. But she was born Florencia Bisenta de Casillas Martinez Cardona in El Paso, Texas, and beginning in 1971 with "Que Sea Él" (the Spanish-language version of "It Must Be Him"), she maintained a Latin Pop career on the side. In the 1980s, her smooth vocals and penchant for ornate arrangements became hugely successful among the Spanish-language market, and she's cultivated that side of her career so well that she's one of the Dueñas Grandes of Latin Pop.

Here she duets with Ana Gabriel (and much as we may adore Vikki Carr, let's not kid ourselves that it was anything but Ana Gabriel's magnificent hot streak that kept this at #1 for two months) on a song where she plays the wiser older woman to Gabriel's passionately distraught young blood. Just in terms of construction, it's a solid duet, each woman getting a chance to shine, with call-and-response sections that highlight the textural differences between their voices and give the song tremendous forward momentum.

But with all that, it's still a ballad, a tremendously soppy one, and horrific in terms of its sexual politics (Carr more or less advises Gabriel to strip herself of personality in order to be whatever the man she's afraid of losing wants her to be). Love, as seemingly always in Latin Pop, is presented as tragedy, an arbitrary grand passion that will inevitably betray and leave desolate. It's just easier for me to take when it's a man complaining about it.