13.9.11

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “TRAPECISTA”

7th December, 1996


And with our final number one of 1996, Enrique Iglesias makes not only Hot Latin chart history but Billboard chart history — the fifth number-one song released from single album, a feat matched on the Hot 100 only by Michael Jackson in the 1980s and Katy Perry in the 2010s. (I don't know enough about the other charts to make a definitive claim, but a quick look through data I don't have to pay for suggests it hasn't often, if ever, been equaled elsewhere.)

Unfortunately, it sounds like a fifth single. A slow slog of an album track, a ballad with a single arresting image — the "trapecista," or trapeze artist, of the title — and Enrique's thin voice, quavering with unearned passion, at its most bathetic. The production is typically shiny without being particularly classy — the immaculacy of Luis Miguel's early-90s run, not to mention Iglesias Sr.'s work, is beyond Enrique at this point — but it's nothing to the classlessness of the lyric, a tough-love anthem refusing to comfort a woman who's been burned by love.

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