ALEJANDRO FERNÁNDEZ, “NO SÉ OLVIDAR”

14th March, 1998

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Bolero, which originated (as a romantic music, anyway; the rhythm is originally Cuban) in the low-life cantina scene of Mexico City in the 20s and 30s, grew into a lot of different permutations as it became the standard pop language of Latin America from the 40s through the 60s; bolero costero (coastal bolero), bolero habanero (Havana bolero, fused with son, rumba, or U.S. rhythm and blues), bolero ranchero. Ranchero stars like Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete — icons of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema in the 40s 50s — sang boleros too, but with a ranchero, or pop-country, flavor.

All of that (limited understanding of) history is what comes to mind on the third single from Alejandro Fernández' Me Estoy Enamorado. The rhythm is definitely a bolero, but the horns erupt into the mariachi cadenzas typical of ranchero, and the sweeping strings belong to both traditions. As a committed fan of even the most banal musical cross-breeding, I was going to like this anyway; but Fernández' performance is exceptional. Big-voiced (naturally), but with uncommon sensitivity around the edges of the floridly sustained notes on the chorus. He's not quite at Luis Miguel's level, but (at least for the moment) he's not a bad replacement.

The song itself lets him down a little. Sure, it's got the appropriate sweep and holds together well melodically (you wouldn't expect anything else from Kike Santander), but the lyrics aren't top-shelf. "No sé olvidar como  lo hiciste tú" (I don't know how to forget the way you did it) isn't eternal love — or rather heartbreak — poetry, though the following image ("tú has quedado clavado en mi pecho como si fuera ayer," you are still stuck in my chest as if it were yesterday) is at least memorable. It hardly matters, of course, with that swaying rhythm and those swirling strings and the plaintive guitar lines and those pealing horns and above all Fernández' masterful voice ... but third singles are third singles for a reason.

RICKY MARTIN, “VUELVE”

28th February, 1998

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And now, as if we were only waiting for Céline to put the capstone on the era, we are fully immersed in modern Latin Pop. Ricky Martin has been a professional singer and entertainer for more than a decade at this point, from his early days in the revolving-door Puerto Rican boy band Menudo to his increasing profile not just in Latin music but crossover dance as well, and he sounds like it, relaxed and professional, with a lively soul/rock delivery — everything Enrique Iglesias wants to be but isn't, not yet.

In fact we haven't heard anything this confident, or this indebted to Stateside R&B, in a long time; not since Selena, or even Jon Secada. Although this is R&B as filtered through Anglo-American pop/rock aesthetics, a loose soul vamp that sweeps up into a declamatory chorus, with broad key changes and plenty of room for a singer to show off, if that's the sort of thing he's inclined to do. Martin's not, for the most part, but that doesn't mean he hasn't got the tools to do it with.

The comparison that keeps urging itself to me is to George Michael, and while I don't want to make too much of it (gay dance-rock-soul men with brilliant smiles who came out later in their careers, after their hitmaking days were behind them), the ease and mastery with which Martin nagivates the funk-flecked power ballad form, swooping up into falsetto on the chorus and engaging gleefully with the gospel choir in the final third, is very Michaelian.

"Vuelve" ("return," both the noun and the imperative) was also the title of its parent album, Martin's fourth, on which he finally scaled the heights of the Latin chart. It was written by the Venezuelan Franco De Vita, who we last saw making a not-so-convincing effort at Anglo-American gospelly rock dynamics. Martin's boyband-bred sense of rhythm is one key improvement, but the big one is that "Vuelve" is not nearly so self-important a song as "No Basta" — while certainly pulling out a big gospel choir for the final chorus is a time-honored Seriousness Indicator, it's impossible to take the grinning sway of Martin's performance as seriously as the lyrics would like us to. Sure, he's begging for his lover's return — without him*, life has no meaning, even air has deserted his lungs — but Martin never sounds anything but totally confident that he* will return.



*I know it's not really kosher to make assumptions about the gender of non-gendered objects of song, especially since Martin was very much still in the closet in 1998, but I'm enough of an English traditionalist that I revolt at the prospect of "hir" or "s/he," and entirely feminine pronouns are equally problematic.

CÉLINE DION, “MY HEART WILL GO ON (LOVE THEME FROM TITANIC)”

21st February, 1998

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It's only my decades-long head start that has enabled me to get to this ahead of Tom, Sally, or Marcello; anyone who surveys popular music of the twentieth century is going to have to contend with it sooner or later. In a decade characterized by staggeringly popular songs from staggeringly popular movies — "Everything I Do (I Do It for You)," "I Will Always Love You," "Kiss from a Rose," "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing," "I Believe I Can Fly," and on and on — "My Heart Will Go On" was the most staggeringly popular of them all, just as its parent film was, and it blanketed the earth so heavily in the years following the release of Titanic that people talk about it as having been metastatic, colonizing, inescapable; a very good book was even written about how impossible it is to say anything meaningful about such totalizing work.

Well, I haven't seen the movie. Nor had I consciously heard "My Heart Will Go On" before listening to it for this travelogue. Oh, it wasn't new to me; like anyone else alive, hearing, and capable of long-term memory fifteen years ago, I knew it. But I'd never listened to it. By chance I'd managed not to tune into commercial or contemporary radio during its seasons of dominance; I'd left the television turned off; I'd not been in the kinds of public spaces that pipe in the hits of the day at unignorable decibels. But of course it had seeped in anyway — the pennywhistle opening, the broad and sturdy chord changes, like vast steps leading up to some Brutalist cathedral, and of course Céline's painfully angelic voice sweeping through the pillowy orchestration like a tracking shot through a rote crowd scene: no time to pause for any enlivening bits of business or quirks of personality, we are Setting a Mood.

So of course when I do sit down and listen, it's a bit different than I had remembered, or imagined. The popular image of Céline Dion is that of a non-stop belter, tempestuous in her evocation of tin-pan melodrama, but on the opening verse her voice is as pure and ethereal as Sarah McLachlan's — or perhaps even Sarah Brightman's — and throughout she makes unusual choices, if minor ones. Nobody quite has her phrasing, and if the later choruses get histrionic they're still individual enough to give the pleasure of watching an entirely inimitable performer; the play may be the most frightful nonsense but by God there won't be a stick of scenery left on stage when she's done.

The lyrics are the most frightful nonsense, of course; a weak-minded declaration in the power of romantic love to transcend all limitations even unto death, given the solemn reading of a sacred hymn (those great gulping thwacks of syllables are straight out of praise-and-worship) and cloaked in a fuzzy and unmeaning spirituality, its catechism of willful self-belief and sentimental denial of all hard truths is one of the most overpowering and cringeworthy strains in late-90s pop. It'd be pretty (and awfully convenient to my tastes) to think that it was confined to that decade, that 9/11 killed it off  and that the public ever after has chosen either pure escapism or raw unvarnished Truth, but nothing dies that easily.

In a way, it feels like all the 135 songs I've written about for this blog were just a preparation for this: I had to come to terms with the 90s romántico ballad before I could hear this in its proper context, faux-Irishness, overbudgeted orchestra, climactic arrangement and all. It's perhaps worth pointing out that Céline Dion, a French-Canadian (which is to say, a member of a historically impoverished ethnic minority), is actually culturally closer to the Spaniards, Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and so forth on the Hot Latin chart than to the Hollywood Irishness of the song — and the modern big-voiced ballad, whether Anglophone, Hispanophone, or otherwise, is also Latinate, descended from the Italian bel canto tradition.

So it's fitting that Céline, who belongs to the entire world, not just the Anglophone (much less just the Francophone) parts of it, would usher in another of the momentous firsts in this travelogue: the first English-language song. There will be many more.

LOS TEMERARIOS, “¿POR QUÉ TE CONOCÍ?”

7th February, 1998

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But first...

Our last encounter with Los Temerarios had them whooping it up, slightly unconvincingly, with a live cover of a classic Vicente Fernández ranchera song. This seems to be much more their preferred speed: a heavily -- and nostalgically -- orchestrated song of romantic regret. "Why did I meet you?" is one translation of the title and first line of the song ("why did I know you" -- very much including the Biblical sense -- is another), and you can guess the development of the lyrical theme from there. She belongs to another, and he (or the character played by Gustavo Ángel) is in anguish because he can't have her. The chorus then sweeps into t a declaration that he knows she truly loves him, but is afraid to tell her man that he (Ángel) is the only one who can make her dream.

I don't buy that at all, and not just because I try to be skeptical of guys who claim to know women's minds, especially when the women aren't around to speak for themselves. The very production urges us against him: his voice, so close-miked that he barely sings above a whisper, is creepily intimate, and the sugary, pan-60s nostalgia of the orchestration, calling to mind both late doo-wop and classic ranchera, sounds more like a fantasy built up in an obsessive's head than a properly sweeping setting for his tragiheroic narrative of self.

Of course all this too is in my head, unsupported by any literal reading of the text -- and maybe I'm grasping at straws to keep yet another ballad interesting. Still, the gestures towards pops past are intriguing. We'll see more of Los Temerarios in the next decade, and based on the gap between this and their previous number one, I have absolutely no idea what to expect from them.

ALEJANDRO FERNÁNDEZ & GLORIA ESTEFAN, “EN EL JARDÍN”

27th December, 1997

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Our last duet was between aging superstars Juan Gabriel and Rocío Dúrcal, who were reviving the great 19th-century tradition of the son ranchero. Alejandro Fernández is quite literally of the next generation (his father was Dúrcal's exact contemporary), and Gloria Estefan, though more than ten years his senior, still plays young in the right light; the throwback tradition preserved here is the bolero of the 40s and 50s -- and Cuban bolero rather than the more noir-y Mexican version. Fernández had relied on the Estefan machine to get hits, and they came as a package; songwriter Kike Santander, producer Emilio Estefan, and La Gloria, now on her eighth appearance in these pages. (This, incidentally, now makes her the female Latin artist with the most number ones as of 1997, beating Ana Gabriel's record of seven.)

"En El Jardín" (in the garden) is a sweet song, with lovely string-ensemble decoration, and tasteful accordion and trumpet solos punctuating the proceedings. It's a love song, of course, and for once an uncomplicated one without recriminations or self-aggrandizement: things were bad, nothing gave me lasting pleasure, everything was a disappointment... and then there was You.

The transformative power of love is a perfectly ordinary subject for song, and Santander's lyrics are only notable for keeping a pretty tight leash on the central metaphor of the "jardín de mis amores" (the garden of my love), which had withered, but flourishes now under the new regime. Fernández and Estefan sell it well, particularly Fernández, whose fine voice and an excellent command of phrasing would be a pleasure in any context, but it does drag a bit, particularly when they restate the second verse and full chorus after the trumpet solo; a smart program director would no doubt have long since faded it out.

Where Gabriel and Dúrcal were presenting (even if unwittingly) something of a swan song, Fernández is just declaring his arrival, and Estefan establishing herself as the dominant female voice in the field. They respect the conventions -- but with this song, 1997 is over, and things are going to start to change rapidly.

MARC ANTHONY, “Y HUBO ALGUIEN”

29th November, 1997

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I need you to have listened to the song before you read this. Not that there's a huge spoiler or anything, but if you just click play and start reading, you won't hear what I'm talking about until two minutes in. Honor system here.

All set? Okay. Honestly, it's as if the U.S. Latin-listening public had not only anticipated my objections to the previous song (recap: sensitive ballad cover of a funky salsa original is a change for the worse), but agreed. What starts off sounding like another ultra-sensitive ballad (but classy! that string arrangement!) eventually turns into a roaring salsa barnstormer, complete with competing horn charts, popping bass, and a lengthy dénouement in which he shouts improvisatorily over the chants of his backing orchestra. The first salsa #1, Wikipedia says, and if my tags disagree I may have misidentified merengue or simply dance music with horns; certainly it's the first #1 by a performer dedicated to the genre.

Salsa, like disco, is essentially a longform medium, structurally flexible but enslaved to the rhythm, highly orchestrated, passionately performed and danced, and an implicit expression of joy regardless of the sentiments in the actual lyrics. (Disco both partly descended from salsa and developed alongside it; but where disco went electro in the 80s salsa has stayed largely true to its big-band roots, and remains a live performer's music rather than a DJ's.)

Those lyrics are where the dramatic ballad-dance structure comes in: it's programmatic music, telling a story even though the change is in mood rather than time. "Y Hubo Alguien" means "and there was someone," and the story Marc Anthony tells is that he was left broken-hearted by the song's addressee -- but it's all right, because there was someone else, someone who took care of him, sacrificed to please him, spoke kindly to him (like a woman should a man, runs the unspoken assumption). And the music and rhythm swell up in response to this joy. The second verse downshifts into a ballad gear again, as he addresses the ex with pity -- and then the chorus whirls back up dramatically, and the long salsa workout that finishes out the song is rubbing it in her face: "I cried over you, now it's your turn to cry a while." Both the sentiment and the music are traditional (well, dating to the 70s), but details of the production (the funky slap bass) and especially Anthony's rich, flexible voice make it thoroughly modern.

For here is another brick in the edifice that is the Latin music world as we know it today: Marc Anthony's first #1, the first single off his third album, carefully dramatized and orchestrated to be a massive hit -- he is of the generation of Enrique Iglesias and Alejandro Fernández, and together they represent the tripartite coalition of Latin music within the United States: Iglesias the international playboy and pop star, Fernández the Mexican craftsman and ranchero, and Anthony the Nuyorican soulman and salsero. The album, Contra la Corriente (against the current), with its starkly miminalist cover, posits Anthony as a Real Musician, modern but also out of time, a salsa belter dressed like Paul Simon in 1969. Of the three, he intrigues the most, and I know least what to expect from him as we barrel into the future.

CRISTIAN CASTRO, “LO MEJOR DE MÍ”

22nd November, 1997

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As regular readers of this travelogue are aware, I'm fairly skeptical of ballads, demanding to be impressed by great writing, great singing, or great arranging before letting any low-bpm romanticism past my rock-reared defences. So I was already listening to this with one eyebrow raised, as it were, from the very first notes.

And?

It's not bad! Castro's found his own rather fine voice -- no longer shamelessly aping Luis Miguel, he's found his own tricks of intimacy -- and it's tastefully-arranged, with lovely acoustic guitar runs and actual piano instead of electric approximations, and a slow saunter of a bolero rhythm underpinning the whole thing. If it's not lyrically a knockout, well, it's a conventional romántico ballad. "Lo Mejor de Mí" means "the best of me," and the chorus is a complaint that he's given her his best, but it's not enough, she keeps hurting him and he doesn't deserve it.

But then I clicked over to Wikipedia to check up on any facts I needed to know, and saw that it was a cover of Rey Ruiz's 1991 original. And, well, I'm sorry, Cristian, but a danceable salsa ballad is always going to kick a self-important dirgey ballad all to hell. I know I'm something of a hypocrite here, because I love nothing more than a good wallow when I'm romantically rejected, but Ruiz's version, in which it can never get that bad as long as there's dancing and buddies you can do a call-and-response with, is infinitely more attractive to listen to.