SELENA, “BIDI BIDI BOM BOM”

22nd October, 1994

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Tom Ewing’s Popular column at Freaky Trigger — on which this blog is unashamedly based — has a graphic at the top which changes out every so often, using a picture of the biggest pop star(s) of the era that Tom’s covering to orient the readership in the historical moment. If this blog had a similar graphic, Selena would be the unquestioned icon of this age. Not only was she the biggest Latin Pop star of her era — big deal, lots of people have been for lots of respective eras — but she was one of the biggest stars of her era period, doing for Latin Pop roughly what Taylor Swift (at the moment of writing) has been doing for country-pop. Namely, revitalizing it for a lot of people and confirming a lot of other people’s biases against it; a pop star’s probably not doing her job if a significant amount of people don’t hate her.

If “Amor Prohibido” was her all-conquering single, the first triumph in her own voice and style which made her queen over a vast territory of pop, “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom” represents a consolidation of power — she’s not just a lament-singer, she can do uptempo dance music too. Not too uptempo — the cumbia rhythm and skanking guitars suggest a lazy beachfront jam rather than a hot dancefloor stomp — but funky and playful where she’s previously been anthemic, even melodramatic. The secret theme of Nineties Music, cross-genre mélange, is given superb form here: Selena combines cumbia tejano, coastal reggae, beach funk, florid r&b vocalizing, and a crisply, bluesy guitar solo into a perfectly-balanced solution that contemporary “eclectic” magpies like Beck or that dude from Soul Coughing might envy.

The title phrase “bidi bidi bom bom” isn’t dictionary Spanish, but onomatopoeia for the giddy beating of a heart. (A rough translation might be “thumpa thumpa dum dum.”) The lyrics, insofar as they matter beyond the gorgeous swell of Selena’s ex tempora vocalizing, are all about how her heart races when someone walks by or speaks in her hearing. The verses are so magnificently generalized, so completely abandoned to anyone’s use, that not even a gender is attributed to the person who’s to blame for this arrhythmia, just a third-person tense. It’s an intentionally slight song, and Selena delivers a complementary performance. You couldn't describe it as slight, not with that lungpower, but it has the impermanence of real joy — even as you try to latch onto it, it flutters away.

LUIS MIGUEL, “EL DÍA QUE ME QUIERAS”

17th September, 1994

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Before you do anything else, you're going to want to click here. That's a link to the original version of this song, recorded in 1935 by tango pioneer, pop singer, and first Latin superstar of the twentieth century, Carlos Gardel. To get the full effect you may wish to read along with the lyrics, which I've translated (very roughly) at the bottom of this post.

Are you back? Okay.

Gardel's song, a self-consciously pastoral fantasia, a movie song (it was written by Gardel and lyricist Alfredo Le Pera for the Argentinean movie of the same name, starring Gardel), and a ballad very much in the international Thirties tradition of sumptuous sentiment married to coolly unemotional performances (compare to Bing Crosby or Dick Powell), is one of the great songs in the Latin Pop tradition, the definitive ballad of the Golden Age of Tango (ca. 1915-1955), the sudden flowering of modernism in Latin American popular culture comparable to the mixture of jazz and Art Deco in America. The tango rhythm here is almost subterranean due to the ballad tempo; only the entrance of the bandoneón in the last few choruses ties it to the traditional tango sound.

By covering this song, and by releasing it as the initial single off his new album Segundo Romance (Second Romance), Luis Miguel is explicitly placing himself as the successor to Gardel's fusion of modernism, sentiment, and iconicity -- Gardel died in a plane crash not long after recording this song, cementing his legendary status. Imagine Michael Jackson topping the charts with an Astaire cover (say "They Can't Take That Away from Me") in 1989, and you might get something of the interplay of reverence, ambition, and sheer inertial popularity at work here.

As the title of the album indicates, this is Miguel's second time laying claim to the tradition of classic Latin Pop (you may recall that the first Romance, a more strictly bolero album, produced "Inolvidable" and "No Sé Tú"), but it was far and away his most successful -- in fact it holds the record for highest-selling Latin album by a male singer of the 1990s. This probably has less to do with his fidelity to tradition than to his own magnetic self; his version of "El Día Que Me Quieras" isn't particularly faithful to Gardel's original in either chord voicing or phrasing (though he does keep the bandoneón, the instrument that sounds like a higher, thinner accordion). He converts it, essentially, into a Luis Miguel song of the 1990s, and if (like me) you have a hopeless passion for the thin crackle and low-frequency orchestras of old 78s, the blown-up keyboards and polished, glistening soup of a production is wince-inducing in comparison to the original.

But the polish and temper of Miguel's own voice cannot be denied; and if he is a worthy successor to Gardel, it is in the impeccability of his phrasing. He too paints on a sweepingly sentimental canvas, but his brushes are dry, and the song, which could easily be a wreck of overemoting in other throats, is instead a monumental sculpture, a nostalgia-free tribute to the Art Deco era in modern materials and to a modern scale. Of course, nothing ages so quickly as modernity.

Those lyrics:

RICARDO MONTANER, “QUISIERA”

3rd September, 1994

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In the middle of the most exciting year Latin Pop has had since the chart started (and more wonders to come, or at least I'll think so), it's helpful to be reminded that some things are constant. This will be our last encounter with Ricardo Montaner (barring unexpected comebacks, of course), and he goes out as he came in, with a blustery, rather pompous ballad that gestures towards the dramaturgy of rock but ends only by overstaying its welcome.

"Quisiera" means, roughly, "I would wish" or "I could wish" (the imperfect subjunctive mood isn't available in modern English), and what he wishes is to hide the person addressed away in oblivion ("esconderte en olvido," i.e. to forget her); it's another self-dramatizing portrait of a love affair gone badly, and he claims to suffer from "delirio y mezclade hastío" (madness blended with boredom), for which the only cure is to consign her to the deep past, for centuries and centuries (no really! that's the chorus!) — that, it turns out, is what he would wish.

Well, I can only wish him well in his attempt to forget. His own appearances here have been pretty difficult to remember, so we're even; and besides, we're hurtling forward into fascinating territory, and we don't need undercooked power ballads dragging us down.

JUAN GABRIEL, “PERO QUE NECESIDAD”

27th August, 1994

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He's back!

You might be forgiven for not immediately jumping to your feet with excitement, but instead wrinkling the brow and murmuring "who now?" After all, it's been more than six years since Juan Gabriel last made an appearance in this travelogue, and six years is an eternity in pop years.

At least that's usually what writers say; in truth, such gaps aren't as uncommon as the breathless hype about whatever comeback kid is in the news would have you believe. Anyone who's had a substantial pop career (that is, one spanning longer than a decade) has had fallow periods, especially as they get older and take longer breaks between albums, spend time with their families, and tour. The difference is that Juan Gabriel's fallow period was not (entirely) of his own choice; embroiled in a contractual dispute with BMG over publishing rights, he refused to write or record any new material until he got ownership of his songs. In 1994 a new contract was drawn up, and in 2000 all rights reverted to Gabriel. A happy ending, then; but while Gabriel's career will continue to flourish to the extent that he's slated for several more appearances as we journey into the future, he is no longer the force of nature he was in the 80s, having been leapfrogged by a generation of stars who were teenagers the last time he was in this position.

His 1988 swan song "Debo Hacerlo," was, if you remember, a profoundly strange song, sounding homemade and beat-boxy while still twisting uncomfortably through several different Latin strains, from flamenco to merengue. "Pero Que Necesidad," in contrast, is a comfortable pop song, with the rolling cadences of an old soul or gospel track. He uses some distancing vocal processing (rather like John Lennon in the 70s, in fact), and his sense of rhythm and structure is still highly idiosyncratic, but this is the second song in a row to earn a comparison to Billy Joel's "River of Dreams." Unlike John Secada, though, Gabriel is better than Joel; building on what could have been a schlocky foundation until the meter stretches out in florid designs.

It may go on too long, a few too many choruses perhaps than is strictly necessary to convey the idea of the song; I can practically hear Anglophone listeners muttering that they got it already. But after six years I don't suppose his fans begrudged him a victory lap or three; and like the gospel music he's referencing, the music swells continually, celebratorily, and we lose track of time. In gospel, this functions as foretaste of eternity; similarly, ecstatic modern dance music can have a related effect of abandon and self-forgetfulness. "Pero Que Necesidad" plods in a little too earthbound a fashion for that, I think, but the intent is there.

It's in writerly structure, not musical rush, that Gabriel approaches abandon: the chorus, two orderly lines followed by a babble of syllables spilling out in an upward swoop, is a masterstroke matching form to content. "Pero que necesidad/para que tanto problema," he sings ("but what need/for what big problem") — he's speaking in romantic generalities, but anyone who had paid attention would know exactly what big problem he's dismissing — "no hay como la libertad de ser, de estar, de ir, de amar, de hacer, de hablar, de andar así sin penas" ("there's nothing like the freedom to be, to exist, to go, to love, to make, to talk, to walk this way without pain").

He's exulting, and properly so; but the second half of the chorus extends the exultation generously to his audience: "Pero que necesidad/para que tanto problema/mientras yo le quiero ver feliz, cantar, bailar, reir, soñar, sentir, volar, ellos le frenan." ("But what need/for what big problem/in the meantime I want to see you happy, singing, dancing, laughing, dreaming, feeling, flying, they will fade away.") It's a song of triumph, even though the verses couch it in a romantic lament, explaining that he wants the best for his nameless auditor (who is even referred to in the third person, the sentiments so abstract) (or in the formal second person, which is even more unusual for a love song). But it's not the verses that stick in the head.

JON SECADA, “SI TE VAS”

13th August, 1994

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Two years ago, he burst onto this list like a breath of fresh, modernizing air, his soulful voice pirouetting with the sheer joy of self; now, he slogs his way through a dispirited power ballad, leaning on crutches that have long since gone out of favor, a shell of his former self.

It's worth noting, of course, that neither of those things are entirely true: "Otro Día Más Sin Verte" wasn't nearly as revolutionary as it seemed at the time, particularly now that world has Selena in it, and "Si Te Vas" is neither his low-point nor the end of the road for him, though it is the end of our association with him. Like many former and to-be-former number-one stars, he's dug a comfortable niche for himself as an overtanned, permagrinning fixture on the Latin nostalgia circuit, releasing an album every so often — the most recent is Clásicos/Classics, a trip through American-Latin standards that begins with "Oye Como Va" and ends with "La Bamba" — without bothering a chart that is increasingly focused on what the kids are listening to these days.

So perhaps the inevitable comparison here is to Billy Joel's "River Of Dreams," a similarly bland, soulless song that makes similar use of the gospel-choir crutch, which similarly marked the end of a career as a pop hitmaker, and which similarly exposed melodic and vocal weaknesses that were not previously so noticeable. Secada's voice actually sounds patchy here, like he might be sick or like he's laying down a demo vocal which they'll nail on the second pass. (Or, if it were several years later, which the producer forgot to pitch-correct before the track went to master.) The track starts promisingly, with a twinkly piano line that recalls house music, but any interesting production ideas are soon thrown out the window so that Secada can emote (poorly) all over the place.

"Si Te Vas" means "if you go," and it's as standard a lament/vow of love as the title promises. Unfortunately for him, Secada hasn't learned another trick; he's still pushing his once-fascinating combination of vaguely funky beats, soul-style singing, and dreary romanticism, and he's being left behind.

SELENA, “AMOR PROHIBIDO”

11th June, 1994

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There are at least five takes on this song battling each other to get out of me, so let's see how well I can juggle.

First let's talk about Selena. We already have, a bit, but those were only voices crying in the wilderness make straight the paths. Here she is herself, incarnate, not mediated by other voices, other scripts, other genres. (Of course, since she wasn't actually divine — more's the pity — this too is mediated, particularly by her producer and older brother A. B. Quintanilla III and frequent colaborator Pete Astudillo. But more about that below.) But this is not only Selena having greatness thrust upon her, this is the achievement of greatness by a woman who has worked very hard for many years and has made a breakthrough that is as much artistic, personal and cultural as it is commercial. She's sung rings around the Barrio Boyzz already, but that was as though to prove she could, matching a genre and a sense of place that isn't hers. Because although at age twenty-three she has lived anywhere in the Spanish-speaking US that she could perform, from quinceañeras and state fairs to nightclubs and dancehalls to video shoots and awards banquets, she is a Texas girl at heart, with all the many meanings that phrase can have.

There were Texans long before there was a Texas, and she has roots that go back farther than Sam Houston or even Cabeza de Vaca. Her beauty is not just the high-contrast drama of the chola (though there's that too), but the imperious impassivity of the indigena, and she has always been royalty. And the music she makes is Texan: planted square on the ground, grounded in traditional identities even as it races forward into technofuturism, and bigger and better than anything else around. The word is tejano, which means Texan and was there first, and the rhythm is cumbia, and it's been the rhythm of poor latinoamericanos since at least the 1950s, when it first spread from the coasts of Colombia, where it was invented by Africans, Europeans, and Indians working together even though only one of the races was not bought and sold and killed like property.

And this is where it gets personal, because I, who am not descended from slaves whether African or American, first heard the cumbia rhythm as the celebratory music of poor Latin Americans when I lived in Guatemala, not a boy but not yet a man, and I took against it from the first. I am ashamed to write these words, ashamed of the repulsion my virgin white mind felt — still feels on occasion, when I don't trample it down and snarl through gritted teeth to listen, dammit — because I experienced poverty in those days as an Other, a brown and crippled and foul-smelling horror which I would do anything to get away from. With its stiff, poky gait, cumbia became a visceral representation of my colonial disgust with native life and culture. This is me calling myself racist. And this is me reminding myself that the previous sentence doesn't get me, or anyone, off the hook.

It wasn't until investigating Argentinean music earlier this year (for entirely unrelated reasons) that I learned to hear cumbia as the tropical rhythm it is — not a million miles from one-drop reggae, in fact — instead of as the undifferentiated, droning, dull party music of poor Mayans in the Sierra Madre highlands I originally took it for. And even then, it took a modern indie-pop version before the penny dropped.

The Texan version of cumbia, which has been running strong since the 1970s, owes a little more to Mexican norteña and American country, and it might help unfamiliar ears to think of Selena as the Mexican-American equivalent of Faith Hill or Shania Twain, riding a retrofurbished boot-scootin' boogie to gleaming modernist pop ends. And the cumbia rhythm makes "Amor Prohibido" that rare encounter in this travelogue, a midtempo song, neither baile nor balada, but pop, with a funky drive to the beat that makes it nearly impossible not to sway along even if it's not fast enough for athletic dancing. Traditional cumbia dance, with its short, intricate steps, does in fact require boots to scoot; it was originally a working-class courtship ritual.

Finally (and speaking of ritual!), the lyric deserves examination. The title translates as "Forbidden Love," and if the phrase doesn't have quite the same charge in Spanish as it does in English, where connotations of closeted homosexuality have accreted over the years, it's still a rich pop vein to mine. Selena, perhaps appropriately for her big, splashy introduction to the wider Latin Pop world, takes a Romeo And Juliet tack. The chorus runs:

Amor prohibido, murmuran por los calles

Porque somos de distintas sociedades

Amor prohibido, nos dice todo el mundo

El dinero no importa en tí y en mí

Ni en el corazón

Oh oh, baby

Which, before I provide the translation, I should point out is the Spanish of someone for whom Spanish is not their first language: this is a very basic lyric in both vocabulary and ideas, and perhaps all the more successful for it. (Not everyone who listens to Latin Pop in the US is as comfortable with Spanish as their parents or grandparents were. And not everyone who speaks Spanish is educated in it.) Translated, it runs:

Forbidden love, they whisper in the streets

Because we are from different societies

Forbidden love, says the whole world to us

Money doesn't matter to you or to me

Or to the heart

Oh oh, baby

This entire travelogue has taken place in the shadow of another, much larger pop scene just beyond the borders of this one. We have encountered it here and there — Los Lobos, Jon Secada, and Gloria Estefan all crossed the border regularly — but for the most part Latin Pop has been a shadowy, underrepresented underclass, and the Anglophone Pop which sits by it on the radio is bigger, louder, more violent, and in its wholesale domination of the discourse, as colonial and even oppressive as anyone who wanted to make the two pop scenes a metaphor for the two (for which read multiple) societies could wish.

If I used blasphemously Christological language about Selena earlier, it's precisely because she was uniquely positioned, for a brief period, to bridge that gap. For many people, in fact, she did; and one reason that I've spent so much (so much!) time talking about her is that she's still one of the Names that even people who don't know anything about Latin Pop know. We'll have plenty more opportunities to talk about what exactly was lost; "Amor Prohibido" by no means sums up her contribution to Latin Pop — fuck that, to Pop, punto y final. But it's a fantastic best foot forward, a progressive anthem of racial and cultural (and sexual, if you want it to be) unity taking its cues from traditional sounds that might even play as hokey to some ears. She would fly yet higher; but I'm not sure that she ever burned brighter.

PIMPINELA, “CON UN NUDO EN LA GARGANTA”

14th May, 1994

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I've been crowing in the past few entries about the modernization, newfound sophistication, and even hipness of Latin Pop in 1994; and right on cue, here come Pimpinela to serve up some good old-fashioned corn.

Pimpinela were (are, even) that most deeply unfashionable of showbiz staples, a brother-sister act. Lucía and Joaquín Galán were from Buenos Aires, had longstanding showbiz connections — Luis Aguilé, a popular singer and composer in the 1950s, got them their start in the early 80s — and sang in an old-fashioned romantic style, the way brother-sister acts always do. Here, with the mandolin-like washes of melody over a one-two saunter, they're recalling classic ranchera styles, but their voices are purest pop — especially Lucía's high, thin dream-pop tone, which I'd like to hear more of in a less restrictive environment.

The song itself is a traditional-sounding (the songwriting credits include both Galáns, so it's not that traditional) lament for lost love: the title translates as "with a lump in my throat," and Lucía sings of how she regrets having said goodbye, while Joaquín swears he never meant to hurt her. It's so traditional, in fact, that this is (as far as I can remember) the first appearance of an accordion — or an accordion-like instrument; the production's so vague and dreamlike, it's hard to tell — in this travelogue. Anyone who's been near a building site in the Southwest knows that the accordion is perhaps the most traditional ranchera instrument there is; it may say something about the powerful gravitational pull of 1980s synthetics that it's taken this long to hear it here.

LA MAFIA, “VIDA”

7th May, 1994

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A rising tide lifts all boats. The last time we heard from La Mafia, the Texan romántica group, they were still in an 80s hangover, with thin production and warbly synths that didn't even rise to the gloss of Los Bukis. But the game's been raised: Jon Secada and Gloria Estefan are making pop as burnished and high-definition as anyone anywhere, and there's less excuse for Latin Pop to languish in a ghetto of underproduction and out-of-date sounds just because its audience is poorer (on average) than the wider pop audience. It's the 90s — everyone's getting richer.

As a song, this isn't much: the central conceit, that he's singing to Life itself as if it were a woman (or to a woman as though she were Life itself; it's pleasantly ambiguous), is a standard of romantic poetry, and everyone from Shakespeare to Tumblr kids have had a run at it. Melodically, it's a little restrictive, plodding along in the same key without much variation, and Oscar De La Rosa, the vocalist, could either be commended for his restraint or (more likely) just called boring; the very brief moment towards the end when he goes off-script and starts singing with a bit of soul is what a lifetime of Anglophone pop listening was leading me to expect at every moment.

But it's the the production, classy without being stiff or standoffish, that makes the song for me. I love the sound of a piano — real piano, not synthesized approximations — and its appearance as the lead instrument here disposed me favorably towards the song anyway. Then the gorgeous Spanish guitar solo shows up, and I'm hooked. Even the backing strings are used tastefully, decorative rather than overwhelming, with a real sense of narrative flow which the song and the singer lack. If we must have ballads, I much prefer this style — intimate, tasteful, even restrained — to the emotionally extravagant bombast, whether orchestral or synthesized, which has so far been usual here.

BARRIO BOYZZ & SELENA, "DONDEQUIERA QUE ESTÉS"

26th March, 1994

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World, she's arrived. Prepare to be changed.

We've encountered Selena before, but while she was notable, the song wasn't: a perfunctory saunter through a traditional romántico duet that almost anyone we've seen in these pages to date could have done just as well, to just as little effect. And she's back duetting with another flash-in-the-pan; for the second time, she's just about the only reason to pay attention to her partners' second (of two) appearances at the top.

But Barrio Boyzz, while they may not graze our notice again, have this much over Álvaro Torres: they sound like Now. The snapping new jack swing beat, the house piano, and the alternately lush and silky harmonies are all precisely where urban candyfloss pop was at in 1994, and Selena has outgrown her Ana Gabriel imitation, instead channeling an r&b diva that not only keeps up with but far outpaces the Boyzz. Their name was on the hit — she was officially a guest on their album, which was named for the song — but nobody buys Barrio Boyzz compilations for the song: by all reckonings, it's her first major hit, the place where Srta. Quintanilla-Pérez, quinceañera performer, talent-show winner, and jobbing local-circuit singer, became Selena, global pop star.

The song (as opposed to the production) is still not quite worthy of her talents. The translated title would be "Wherever You Are," and the chorus continues, just as tritely in Spanish as it comes out in English: "remember, I will be there at your side ... I think of you and feel for you ... I will always be your first love." But she has a sharper sense of rhythm than her duet partners and is in full command of her impressive vocal faculties, and once the dovey lyrics die down and she can just play with the beat, she scats circles around all of them. Not even Mariah was showboating like this; Mary J. Blige is about the only English-language equivalent, and she hadn't yet come fully into her own either.

But enjoy the breezy New York funk while it lasts; when she returns, it will be as a full-throated Texan, and the world will be, ever so briefly, hers.