ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “SOLO EN TÍ”

3 May, 1997

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Two covers in a row! The original of this one may be slightly more familiar to my English-language readers than Vicente Fernández; it is, of course, Yazoo's "Only You." (Enrique also covered the original and released it at the same time to English-language markets; but his time as an Anglophone hitmaker was not yet.)

As a cover of "Only You," it's only okay; the cheap-sounding keyboard presets are no match for the synthetic worlds of 1982, and Enrique, no matter how hard he emotes, will never be Alison Moyet. The melody, however, is a timeless one, and the Spanish lyrics, if not as subtle as the original (which is pretty universally true of translated songs no matter which direction they're going), are a fairly faithful rendition of the sentiment.

So as an Enrique Iglesias song, at least by the standard set in his early years, it's a qualified success. The limited range of the melody, typical of the synthpop pioneers who were generally better at programming than singing, prevents Enrique from indulging his habit of turning everything into self-serving melodrama; there's just not enough there to oversing.

LOS TEMERARIOS, “YA ME VOY PARA SIEMPRE”

26th April, 1997

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The first song to break the Iglesias/Solís streak is also the third live norteño song in three years, and the ninth time I've had occasion to break out the "cover" tag. The cover here is of Vicente Fernández' late-70s hit "Ya Me Voy Para Siempre" (you can, and should, see him lipsync to it in the 1980 movie Picardia Mexicana II here), and Los Temerarios, who were a romántico band, not a norteño one, make only a decent fist of it, studio instrumentation filling in the weak spots in their live act.

The Fernández original is a grimly comic song of lost love: "Si sigue este dolor, no le sorprenda que mi hogar sea una cantina," runs the repeated bridge. ("If this pain continues, don't be surprised that my home is a tavern.") Which fit perfectly with Fernández' working-class hero image — in the movie, he ends the song by vowing future loyalty only to the comic proletariat of the supporting cast — but among the moneyed classiness of the mid-90s Latin chart (or that portion of it we're hearing) is something of a shock.

Gustavo Ángel, the singing Ángel brother of Los Temerarios (their name means "the reckless ones") goes for a more dramatic reading than Fernández' classically balanced blue-collar mariachi version (the difference is maybe not dissimilar to Alan Jackson covering George Jones), and he gets off a fantastic grito and shout out to the Temerarios' home state of Zacatecas, but the bulk of the energy here comes from the crowd singing lustily along with the "porque el amor de mi vida solito me dejó" refrain. ("Because the love of my life left me all alone.") Still, I can't be mad at anything that breaks up the pop-establishment ballad monotony.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “ENAMORADO POR PRIMERA VEZ”

1st February, 1997

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The thing to always keep in mind is that I'm ever only discussing a tiny portion of what was in the Hot Latin chart at any given time. So what is recorded, in this blog, as an unbroken string of romantico ballad after romantico ballad, Enrique and Marco Antonio following each other like night after day, was only a small part of a dynamic and ever-shifting Latin Pop scene which included hot dance jams, innovative rock en español acts, keeping-the-faith traditionalists in Mexican regional styles, and flashy novelty pop hits as well. By early 1997, Los Del Rio's "Macarena" has, alas, come and gone, reaching only #12 on the Latin chart even as it hit #1 on the Hot 100; it was always more of a tourist jingle than an organic Latin hit.

Instead we have the sixth Enrique Iglesias number one in fifteen months; Enrique Iglesias, his self-titled debut, has stuck around for so long that it's nearly in danger of running into the follow-up. Vivir, the Gorgeous One's second album, was (of course) hotly anticipated, and "Enamorado Por Primera Vez" ("In love for the first time") went straight in at #1, only the second song in Latin chart history to do so. It's a step up in terms of production, if not in vocal quality or songwriting: though a ballad — a power ballad, even! — it's very much a rock song according to its instrumentation. Soft rock, sure (the Bryan Adams of 1991 would surely raise an eyebrow in recognition), but the the guitars shred and the drums clump like very little we've had on the chart before.

This is a point where I'd love to hear from anyone who was in the Enrique demographic at the time: for someone who is (arguably) the most iconic and commercially powerful Latin Pop star of the past several decades, he's inspired relatively little fan-oriented chatter, and I can't really reconstruct, from my Anglo male 21st-century citadel, what his appeal was; or at least what drove the (commercial) response to him in a way it didn't, really, for anyone else. Lots of guys are pretty, after all. Did the famous name cross the generation gap and make his success a foregone conclusion no matter what he did? Were there extracurricular appearances I'm not privy to which made him more of a heartthrob than just a guy smoldering in a video clip? Am I just not hearing the music properly?

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “ASÍ COMO TE CONOCÍ”

11th January, 1997

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We're deep into that odd stretch of the Hot Latin chart where the top spot alternates between Marco Antonio Solís and Enrique Iglesias with no intermission, and if you're getting sick of it I can't blame you. But skipping irritatedly over Solís' third number one in a row over the same album would be a mistake: it's the best yet.

No doubt I've mostly come to this conclusion because I'm a sucker for Farfisa organs, and the opening riff and later solo are different enough from the usual romántico instrumentation that it caught my ear; but I also appreciate the old-fashioned bolero rhythm and construction, the tasty nylon-stringed guitar playing (sounding like current pop-bachata a decade early), and Solís' carefully-constructed, grown-up lyric. "Así Como Te Conocí" means, roughly, "The way I came to know you," and he draws a portrait that manages to be both clear-eyed and romantic about the end of a relationship. Though he falters into romántico conventionality ("sé que solo fui tu pasatiempo" / "I know I was only your pasttime"), it's mostly as assured a lyric as you might expect from the most acclaimed Latin songwriter of the 90s.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “TRAPECISTA”

7th December, 1996

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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.

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “RECUERDOS, TRISTEZA Y SOLEDAD”

12th October, 1996

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I don't speak Spanish very well; I went through intensive instruction as a boy in Guatemala, but didn't often use it in daily life, and in the fifteen years since I moved back to the U.S., have almost never spoken it. So when I'm listening to Latin music, there's often a sense in which I feel like I'm not getting the whole story. Not just because Hispanophone songs, like songs in any language, are full of references to other texts — literature, pop culture, standard sayings — that just knowing the dictionary definition of the words won't necessarily make clear to you, but because I feel like I have a hard time judging tone. Literal, or even vaguely approximate, English translations of Latin pop lyrics are often in a heightened poetic manner, with the kind of all-out floridity that hasn't been popular in English for over a century.

Even the name of this song doesn't quite work in English: it translates as "Memories, Sadness, and Loneliness," which — though it would be perfectly acceptable, even ideal, as a subject for an American country, r&b, folk, or pop-punk song — is a little over-the-top as a title. Of course, that over-the-top-ness is a feature of Latin popular culture, not a bug (think of telenovela overacting, or even just the tired stereotype of the Latin lover) — what rings as overheated melodrama in one culture is standard dramatic tension in another; you just have to know the context.

The music here is not much different from what he was doing with Los Bukis, but even through its cheap-sounding synthesizers there's a deliberate anxiousness. (It's in waltz time, but the tempo's too fast to waltz to; which is very odd for a ballad.) The lyrics have Solís describing, in what I've come to expect as the standard imagistic fashion of romántico, the slow dissolution of a relationship. But it was the chorus that really caught my ear: "Fuimos cayendo poco a poco/en la rutina cruel/al ritmo crudo/de este mundo de papel." Which in English, runs "We were falling little by little/into the cruel routine/to the crude rhythm/of this paper world." A paper world! What an unusual image!

And then of course I looked it up, and "en un mundo de papel" is a standard Spanish phrase to describe living in a fantasy ("building castles in Spain" would be an equivalent, if more old-fashioned, English phrase). Well, I tried to think of something nice to say. But it's hard for me to find Marco Antonio Solís anything but boring.