GLORIA ESTEFAN, “MI BUEN AMOR”

12th March, 1994

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The second number one in a row to begin with lush, cinematic strings; but where Ana Gabriel's strings are opulent but generic, evoking the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema without straying from her melodic template, Gloria Estefan is going for something more specific, letting the chords arrange themselves into contrapuntal patterns like something half-classical, and recording them closely, intimately. It's the difference between shared nostalgia, Ana inviting a stadium to get caught up in her voluptuous passion, and personal nostalgia, Gloria dreaming aloud in a café, or rather in a highly polished and superbly set-dressed simulacra of one.

Four years from now, English-speaking audiences will fall in brief but highly lucrative love with traditional Cuban music because Ry Cooder told them to. Mi Tierra barely registered with that audience; but it's not spoiling anything to note that the rootsy, rock-approved Buena Vista Social Club will not be making an appearance in these pages. They were taken up by NPR, Rolling Stone, and the rest of the rockcrit establishment because their music sounded raw, authentic, and effortless; but the Latin Pop audience preferred what pop audiences always have: romantic music, aspirational music, constructed music. Glamour is an essential element of pop, and the photo-negative glamour of gritty poverty is generally only attractive to people who aren't in danger of slipping into it.

"Mi Buen Amor" ("my true love") is about as romantic as it gets: the swoony strings, the careful guitar and bass figures, even the Afro-Cuban percussion striking at a dreamy pace, while Gloria at her most coolly glamorous sings a carefully-constructed son about deathless and unforgettable love. This is her farewell bow from the Mi Tierra album (at least as far as this travelogue is concerned), and it's a lovely tableau, frozen in sepia-toned pre-revolutionary time, by which to remember her.

At least until she returns, in other clothes.

ANA GABRIEL, “LUNA”

19th February, 1994

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The strings come in all cinematic and lush, overwhelming in their voluptuous sensuality, and we are certainly no longer in the 1980s, or even in the early 90s. We have arrived at a high-water mark for certain iterations of popular culture, a period towards which people who were there at the time look back with increasing nostalgia, unrecoverable, a golden age of corporation-sponsored pop musc. The CD has definitively replaced the LP and the cassette, and the industry is reeling in the surplus that high markups, overextended running times, and the more-or-less constant discovery of previously untapped markets are providing. For established stars like Ana Gabriel, nothing is out of reach, no sound too expensive, the keyboard-and-plastic guitar of her first number one (which sounded glossy and burnished even then) now a distant memory.

And so she dives into memory and tradition, as so many of her peers did in the 90s, recovering old forms; the largest untapped market being, as always, the past. It was the decade of the reissue, and all music got its story told and retold through official corporate channels, unless there were artists with enough clout and certainty to tell history their way, to override the cults of authenticity and white-guy taste to bring up ghosts that didn't fit neatly into the Rolling Stone or Rough Guide versions of history. "Luna" is old-fashioned Mexican or even Spanish pop, a monologue addressed to the moon about the lover far away who is is, presumably, also staring at the same celestial object. It's a conceit as ancient as Homer (and for kids of my generation perhaps best remembered as the conceit behind the duet in An American Tail), and if the music isn't quite as ancient it's still venerable, from the Verdian strings to the "Spanish Harlem" guitar line keeping the beat.

Gabriel herself even seems muted with the weight of history; her signature Anglo-rock-derived rasp turns into an Italianate sob, and although the song is beautifully structured, a gesture towards classicism that ends up being a classic in its own right, she sort of gets lost in it. Which is one of the dangers of messing around with history; it takes a very strong voice not to drown in those tides.

YURI, “DETRÁS DE MI VENTANA”

29th January, 1994

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The album cover above is a riot of color; and indeed, her two previous number-one singles were riotous and colorful, two of the best dance songs to have been featured in this travelogue, in which dance songs are almost always good. But this is no dance song. If the comparisons I made then with Madonna hold good, those earlier hits were comparable to "Holiday" or "Material Girl" — and this is closer to something off Erotica or Bedtime Stories, a serious examination of sexual relations between adults, in which the moral force of feminism and the narrative force of pop are joined in a work of surprisingly complete power.

But before we dive into the song, a word on its composer. Ricardo Arjona isn't a name most English-language pop fans know — and even here, we won't meet him as a performer for several years yet — but he'd been gathering fame in Latin American circles since 1989, when his first regional-hit album, Jesus, Verbo No Sustantivo (a pun on the religious and grammatical meanings of the word verbo) was released. He was a star in Guatemala, where he was born, where he was a local basketball star, where he taught secondary school for a time, and like regional stars everywhere — especially those with songwriting talent — he was essentially on a farm team to the pop establishment. This was his first song to gain wide exposure throughout the Spanish-speaking world, and both as a piece of songwriting and as a cultural event, he could hardly have made a better shot.

Yuri sings in character as a woman, as a wife, tired of a loveless, sexually unfulfilling, and oppressive marriage: each verse begins with the words "ya me cansé" ("now I'm tired," in the sense of "sick and tired") and lists her grievances: he doesn't look at her, doesn't touch her, she feels the walls closing in, she only knows she's a woman because she does the dishes — and that's just the opening line. The whole thing is a magisterial portrait of Betty Friedan-esque rage at patriarchal oppression and (even more damning) at conjugal impotence, both figurative and literal. The final words of the chorus, "contigo pero sola" ("with you but alone") are a brilliant condensation of the emotions of a (traditional) woman trapped in a (traditional) marriage. Latin Pop is about nothing if not tradition, but neither Arjona nor (at least at this stage in her career) Yuri was interested in shoring up the traditions. Like Ana Gabriel, whose signature rasp Yuri occasionally approximates here, they smuggle genuinely countercultural content into what could be understood, if you weren't paying attention, as a standard romantic lament.

It's a powerful performance, and the production, crisp and billowy, with plenty of space and pulsing crescendos, matches it. The thin plasticity of the 80s, where we began, is far in the rearview now. We've reached 1994, and the future's never been brighter.

BARRIO BOYZZ, "CERCA DE TÍ"

18th December, 1993

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The potted biographies you can find online make them out to be a late-breaking Latino response to the New Kids On The Block, who were of course a later-wave white response to New Edition. All of which means that the Barrio Boyzz came along fairly early in the life cycle of the modern boy band — they far predated the Backstreet Boys, but not Take That — but in the life cycle of Latin Pop's response to American urban pop (at least insofar as it's tracked by these number ones, a woefully incomplete story if there ever was one), they take John Secada's new jack swing beat and inject smooth r&b harmonies. Result: a Latino version of Boyz II Men, even down to the ersatz classicism.

It's still a ballad, but the well-known melody (it's a cover of Bread's "Make It With You," not that you needed to be told) gives it a classic gauzy-pop feel, the punchy beat gives it some urgency, and these guys — all bilingual (the better to maximize profits) Puerto Ricans from New York — can sing, which is an improvement on NKOTB. Their ethnic and geographical origins are worth noting, by the way: this is the first time that New York, the US city with the largest Hispanic population, has entered our story. There's a reason for that: Nuyoricans tend to be more assimilated, so they don't often drive the Spanish-language market the way Californian, Texan, or Floridian Latinos do. (Plus, of course, they're a much smaller percentage of the New York population than they are elsewhere; there's just more of everybody in New York.) And it didn't last; aside from one rather important duet, they won't make another appearance here, and they never did crack the English-language market at all.

"Cerca De Tí" means "close to you," and you can guess the rest of the lyric's sentiments from there, even if you didn't know the original. The point isn't the romanticism of the words, but the romanticism of the sound, and secondarily of the hunky, sweet-faced boys on album covers and in video clips. The boy band as we know it may have originally been a Puerto Rican invention — Menudo, with their rotating lineup and assumed disposability, are often considered the template for the modern form — but against the accelerated vocal-group competition of the early 90s, Barrio Boyzz were ultimately just too anonymous to overcome a lack of material that stood up even to this glossy 70s retread.

LOS FANTASMAS DEL CARIBE, “POR UNA LÁGRIMA”

11th December, 1993

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Their second number-one hit off their first album, and if they show no sign of diminishing returns their combination of cumbia rhythms, synth keys and fey vocals was never all that astonishing in the first place. If anything, this melody is even more nursery-rhyme than that of their first entry, and the Casio presets even more goofy.

But their combination of tropical ritmos and electronic playfulness makes me think, unexpectedly, of the most futuristic Latin music I know today, the electro-cumbia propagated by the ZZK club and record label out of Buenos Aires, where sound sculptors from all over the world like Frikstailers and El Trip Selector fuse the urgent stasis of cumbia with up-to-the-minute glitch, microhouse, and acid electro, creating avant-garde dance music that still pulses with authentic heat. Los Fantasmas aren't trying todo anything so ambitious, of course; they're party music for parties without any low end, and they use electronic keyboards and drumpads more because, hey, it's 1993 than on any strict aesthetic grounds. But the joy in bringing out novel sounds and setting them against the old rhythm is the same.

The song is, if not a traditional one, then one that sounds traditional: "Por Una Lágrima" means "with one tear," and the singer is accusing his girl of crying false tears to cover up her unfaithfulness to him, a lover's complaint as ancient as love poetry itself. It doesn't at all match the bouncy music, but in a way that's a relief; we've had enough self-pitying ballads lately. Self-pitying dance music is much better.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “CON LOS AÑOS QUE ME QUEDAN”

13th November, 1993

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So "Mi Tierra" was an uptempo dance song. More in line with traditional American pop practices than with Latin ones, La Gloria's second single off the album is a ballad — or at least it's taken at a slow tempo, which isn't quite the same thing. It's still unmistakably tropical, with a back-and-forth beat that seems to fall halfway between Cuban son and Dominican bachata, with gorgeous guitar filigrees by legendary Mexican guitarist Chamin Correa that draw together two continents' worth of guitar tradition, bossa nova and tejano and trova and blues and flamenco and milonga all blinking out of the spaces between the notes.

Her performance is almost as supple and fully as tender. No virtuoso in terms of technique, for most of her career she's been notable as a vocalist mostly for her enthusiasm and brio rather than the elegant carefulness of her phrasing. But here she tackles a song whose melody is structured like traditional pop, the sort of song a jazz singer would take up, and draws the emotion out of it by sheer force of personality. I've taken to reading along with the lyrics while listening to the song, and I was tearing up by the second chorus, both the sentiment and her performance were so pitch-perfect. That shouldn't be a surprise; nothing gets to me like nostalgia.

And this is a very nostalgic record; arranged by the great Cuban jazz bassist Cachao, it uses great swaths of Hollywood strings like Max Steiner, arranging emotions in cubist friezes while Estefan's plaintive voice runs through a lyric not all that far away from the Luis Miguel entry it replaced at the top of the chart. "Con Los Años Que Me Quedan" means "with the years I have left," and the phrase is the first half of a vow, the second half of which is "demostraré cuánto te quiero" ("I will prove how much I love you"). The impulse to exaggerated displays and promises of affection is a familiar one to us from previous ballads, but the implicit acknowledgement of mortality is a new note, which is to say, of course, a very old note. Very little of this travelogue has ever concerned itself with looking backwards; as is proper to all pop, Latin Pop is concerned with the present and the future, and it takes someone of Estefan's stature and confidence to make what is essentially a 1950s torch song set in a Havana café still resonate with enough people long enough to take up residency at the top of the Latin chart for several weeks.

She wrote it with her husband, as she has most of her hits since 1984, and as with "Si Voy A Perderte," it's an entirely different song in the English-language version, which is less intimate in its emotions and more of a conventional "someday-we'll-be-together" study in deferred romance. Same melody, same backing track, different songs — this sort of two-for-the-price-of-one song will become increasingly common the closer we get to the present, as the Latin market increases in clout and visibility in the US, and as more Latin stars try to cross over in the other direction. Gloria Estefan, who's been playing both markets off each other since 1977, just had a head start on everyone else.

LUIS MIGUEL, “HASTA QUE ME OLVIDES”

23rd October, 1993

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It would be easier to find something to say about Luis Miguel's eighth glisteningly-produced, immaculately-sung hit in four years if he changed his game up more often. As it is, the differences between "Hasta Que Me Olvides" and his previous entry, "Ayer," is primarily a matter of the production. "Ayer" was near-symphonic in its lush production; here Miguel waxes merely opulent.

"Hasta Que Me Olvides" means "until you forget me," and the verses are a catalogue of all the things he will do to stave off that inevitable day — promises of fidelity, of obsession, of self-immolation, all in high-flown language that would be a little inaccessible if his voice didn't make the emotions clear. In fact some of the lines have such complex syntax that I'm not quite sure what they're saying, and translation software can only take you so far.

But the song is less an excuse for poetry (it's always just another love song in the end) than it is for Miguel to exercise his gift for timing and phrasing; and the way he pauses and then crashes, with a rush of melisma, on the penultimate "hasta que me olvides" in every chorus is a masterclass in pop ballad singing, keeping the emotional atmosphere fraught without overwhelming the listener with technique or pushing too far into insincerity.

JOSÉ Y DURVAL, “GUADALUPE”

16th October, 1993

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I was starting to panic about the lack of information about José y Durval on the Internet, when a stray Youtube comment pointed me to the fact that they were originally called Chitãozinho e Xororó, and that's where their Wikipedia page is. To sum up: they're a Brazilian sertanejo duo (sertanejo is more or less Brazilian country-pop, the traditional rural form of caipira given a modern pop gloss) who used their given names when they recorded for the Spanish-language market because Spanish speakers are just as bad as English speakers when it comes to pronouncing foreign names.

"Guadalupe" was the theme song to a hugely successful American telenovela of the same name, and it's on that basis (and presumably no other) that the song was a hit: it stayed at the top for a week, then vanished. Produced in Miami, the telenovela's high-drama operatics about organized crime, bastard children, insanity, and true love (at least as far as I can make out; I haven't seen it) has precious little to do with the old-fashioned regional ballad that José y Durval sing about the title character. As something stirring to play over the credits, it's only adequate; our last telenovela theme was far more dramatic and involving, but then Juan Gabriel wrote it, and he hasn't been seen in these parts for many years.