ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “NO LLORES POR MÍ”

5th October, 1996

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It's the fall of 1996, and the inevitability of Enrique Iglesias' fourth number one in the space of a year is matched only by the tidal swell and crash of the music behind his youthfully strained voice. He's now matched Selena and Jon Secada for highest amount of number ones off of one album — like Secada, it's his debut; unlike either Secada or Selena, he will go on having number ones for decades.

"No Llores Por Mí" means "don't cry for me," and while I'm not certain the Evita reference is intentional (the Madonna movie version was not yet in theaters, and the song had been written some time earlier), this recording shares Lloyd-Weber's fondness for big obvious dramatics — that power-ballad guitar solo! — and fatal lack of any actual dynamics; it's just the same chord sequence in the same tempo, pounded over and over again.

Iglesias is almost a cipher on the song, attempting Luis Miguel-style intimacy and power but achieving neither, larding on extra grit in order make up for his thin, kind of whiny voice. I say this as an Enrique Iglesias fan; but he did not spring forth fully-formed, only gradually working his way into the louche caricature of Latin sexiness he's inhabited for the last decade. It'll be a while before we get there.

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “QUE PENA ME DAS”

27th July, 1996

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Marco Antonio Solís' triumphant return to the top spot as a solo act, having finally shaken off even the name of Los Bukis, is ironically (or perhaps not so ironically, given the trend of number-one songs in the mid-90s) much less pop and much more traditional Mexican regional, with a twelve-string bajo sexto as the lead instrument whenever Solís isn't singing, and a rhythmic bed that makes room for the lazy scrape of the Afro-Latin güiro and the urgent thunk of a cowbell in addition to the drumpad fills he's always been singing over.

The song itself is a plaintive lament — "Que Pena Me Das" translates literally as "What Trouble You Give Me" (though "pena" is a flexible term that can mean anything from lasting grief to momentary annoyance) — about a woman who has gone chasing after money and left her lover disconsolate. It's pretty, but extremely traditional, and Solís continues his march through the charts as the most successful inconsequential artist we've spent a good deal of this travelogue running into occasionally.

This song, in fact, marks the end of the first decade of the Hot Latin chart, as it remained at the top of the chart through much of September, the one-year anniversary of Rocío Dúrcal's "La Guirnalda," the song at the top when Billboard first published the chart. If we'd heard none of the intervening songs, it would be tempting to imagine that not much had changed in a decade, but much has and there's much more to come.

But I wanted to mark this anniversary by first, thanking everyone for reading so far with me (thanks! you're the best!), and then asking for feedback. What works about this blog? What doesn't? Should I post video? Would it be helpful, or maybe more conducive to triggering conversation, if I gave these songs a mark out of ten, as Tom does on Popular and Sally does on No Hard Chords? I'd love to hear what anyone besides me thinks about any of these songs in particular, or about the blog in general, whether you leave comments here, at my Tumblr, or via e-mail. Especially if you know more about the subject than I do — which isn't hard at all, I'm winging every one of these posts.

Regardless, it's been a lot of fun to trawl through the past ten years. But I make no secret that I'm really looking forward to the next fourteen and counting. Latin Pop, not unlike its Anglophone counterpart, has only gotten better as the millennium turns. How so? Keep reading.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “POR AMARTE”

1st June, 1996

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Another few weeks, another Enrique Iglesias #1. This is the third single off his debut album, and in a lot of ways it sounds like it. It's more middling and less dynamic than either the assured "Si Tú Te Vas" or the expansive, oddball "Experiencia Religiosa". It's very much a rock ballad — the bluesy guitar licks sound right out of mid-period Clapton or even the late-70s Rolling Stones — but Iglesias doesn't quite know what to do with it, failing to create a coherent performance out of the disparate elements and falling back on his particular brand of underfed overemoting.

The title means "To Love You," and it's another song of devoted love, but this time the images are all extremely hackneyed (chorus: "To love you I would steal the stars from the sky as a gift to you/To love you I would cross the oceans just to hold you close/To love you I would bring together rain and fire/To love you I would give my life just to kiss you"), and while there's always a built-in audience for such songs — inexperienced teenagers will always need something to listen to while crushing on the unattainable — this particular brand of devotion is pretty laughable to anyone with adult concerns.

The only bright spot is in the production dynamics; even after all these years, it's still a pleasure to fall for the trick where all the instruments cut out briefly, then rush back in on a soaring chord. Iglesias even manages a wordless improvisation that's not too embarrassing; right now it seems like he's hitting number one out of sheer nepotistic inertia, but it's tiny hints like this that encourage me to think of what he'll be capable of in the years to come.

CRISTIAN CASTRO, “AMARTE A TÍ”

25th May, 1996

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Perhaps the easiest way to point out what Olga Tañon and Marco Antonio Solís were doing "wrong" in the last entry (scare quotes because it's not actually wrong, just not to my taste and less of a forward advance than I was hoping for) is to compare it with this. This is also a ballad and therefore, by my reckoning, has a strike against it from the outset. But the production isn't the mushed-together goop that is Solís' signature sound — it's vibrant, detailed, even lush, even if little of the actual instrumentation is any different. Except there's an oboe carrying the lead melody! There are never enough oboes in pop music.

Where "¡Basta Ya!" sounded like a holdover from the poorly-funded 80s, "Amarte a Tí" sounds like the most modern and up-to-date version of romantic Latin Pop available, with a pulsating rhythm, sparkling accents, and gorgeously treated female vocals on the chorus which would be a fine addition to any indie pop song today. (The credits I've been able to find don't specify, but it's either Gabriela Anders, Dámaris Carbaugh, Doris Eugenio, or Lori-Ann Velez doing the dream-pop bit.) I've been using the tag "pop idol" for Cristian Castro's appearances here, but on the evidence of this and "Amor", it may be time to graduate him to "pop royalty" — the attention to detail here is worthy of a Luis Miguel or Julio Iglesias.

It is, for once in a way, an uncomplicated love song: "amarte a tí" means "loving you," and if the lyrics are somewhat more formal and metaphorical than those of the Minnie Riperton song (Spanish love poetry rears its head again), the sentiment's the same: "Amarte a tí es soñar despierto/Los ojos abiertos/Amarte a tí es de verdad/El corazón entregar/Lleno de paz" ("Loving you is dreaming awake/Eyes wide open/Loving you is truly/Finding [my] heart/Full of peace"). I am at the kind of place in my life where a song like this will have a particular resonance for me, even outside of its musical sensuousness; uncomplicated joy in mutual love exactly matches my needs right now.

OLGA TAÑÓN, “¡BASTA YA!”

18th May, 1996

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Of course, no sooner is there a new normal — with regional Mexican and border styles suddenly making up a huge proportion of the top of the Latin chart, displacing the old school of blowsy ballads punctuated by sassy dance numbers — than the professionals and the pop lifers start moving in to take it over.

Olga Tañon is a new name in these parts, but a minimum of research uncovers a very familiar name. Marco Antonio Solís, the long-haired, blandly sentimental leader of Los Bukis and latterly a solo artist, wrote and produced the album Nuevos Senderos in a transparent bid to fill the void which the death of young miss Quintanilla-Pérez had left in the affections of Latin Pop listeners all over the hemisphere. Tañon had been singing for years -- in fact her career pretty closely parallels that of Selena's, with Puerto Rico standing in for Tejas, and merengue for tejano.

Still, this is supposed to be a tejano song (you can hear, very faintly, a cumbia rhythm in the verses), and even though it was (briefly) successful, it's no replacement for Selena. Solís drowns everything in his signature bland soup of cascading keyboard riffs and too-patient drum fills, and Tañon's voice is neither as charged nor as flexible as Selena's; the overall effect is that of a script being dutifully followed. Which doesn't mean there aren't pleasures to be had in the song, just that they are minor and without the urgency that the lyrics provide — "¡Basta Ya!" means "Enough Already!", but both the chiming melody and Tañon's too-elegant phrasing give it the sound of a treacly lament instead of the desperate, long-awaited standing-up-for-herself that you get from a straightforward reading of the lyrics.

This isn't Olga Tañon's last appearance in our travelogue, but I'm hoping for something a little more lively in our next encounter.