JERRY RIVERA, "ESE"

30th January, 1999

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I've had occasion to lament before that I wasn't listening to Latin radio at the time, which means I'm working at a disadvantage in regard to ambient information and cultural awareness. There are two versions of "Ese" on Puerto Rican singer Jerry Rivera's 1998 album De Otra Manera, one which remains a ballad throughout and one which switches to uptempo salsa about a minute in. Sony released a music video for the ballad version, so that's the one I've linked to and will be talking about, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if airplay being counted for both across radio formats was a factor in driving the song to number one. (The salsa version is here, for comparison.)

Jerry Rivera was an enormous deal in salsa before he reached #1 here. He had been a youthful prodigy in the late 80s, and his 1992 album Cuenta Conmigo broke sales records and remains the highest-selling salsa album of all time. The success of "Ese" on the heels of such a blockbuster might be attributed to what Chris Molanphy calls the AC/DC Rule, if Rivera hadn't released six albums in between. The real difference, from what I can see, is that the top of the Hot Latin chart has been newly open to salsa since Marc Anthony stormed it in 1997. And, of course, the ballad version of "Ese" is by no stretch pure, uncut salsa.

The only reminder of any Cuban/Borinquen influence is in the slow-paced congas and timbales that underlay the glossy synths, nylon-stringed guitar, and Rivera's smooth singing: otherwise, it's simply a romantic ballad that could belong to any Western musical tradition. Even so, the chorus switches to an ordinary drumkit to pound out the rhythm rather than keep up the tropical accents. The result is a big, maudlin love song: the title, roughly translated as "that guy," is invoked over and over again to describe the the big passionate, mercurial, and hopelessly devoted lover of the song's "you." And then, in the very last line of the song, TWIST! "Ese soy yo" — that guy is me. Shock, swoon, clinch, fadeout.

The problem, of course, is that it is practically on the fadeout. The natural peaks of the song, the big swells at the ends of verses and choruses, are romantic declaration enough; no one who's listened to pop before needs to have the lover's identity uncovered, so it's inevitably an anticlimax. Rivera delivers it as slickly as he can, which is considerably, but I can't help feeling as though he'd rather be singing something with more bite and snap; something more, well, salsa. At press time, we're only going to hear from him once more; we'll see in a couple of years whether he — and we — get to pick it up.

JUAN LUIS GUERRA Y 440, "MI PC"

26 December, 1998

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The waning years of the 1990s were, from the perspective of more than a decade later, a minor Gilded Age, a global utopia of brand names and Internet startups. The great struggles of the twentieth century were over, Western capitalism and American hegemony had won, the final eradication of time and distance was at hand via the Web, and there was nothing left to do but set yourself up in a McMansion, keep raking in the money, and spend it on whatever the lords of Madison Avenue and TRL demanded.

It was a time begging to be satirized ― for God's sake, it was a time when a totally earnest commencement address over trip-hoppy washes could become a massive international pop hit ― and while novelists, comedians, television producers, filmmakers, and suck.com gave of their best, pop music rather lagged behind. Of course pop, at least in the United States, is much more likely to set the tone for an era rather than provide a principled opposition, and the occasional "Barbie Girl" aside, very little in any U.S. chart critiqued rather than egged on the brave new era of Internet commerce, upscale mall culture, and bubbling markets ― or at least, not in the Anglophone charts.

The last time we saw Juan Luis Guerra was much earlier in the 90s, with a song protesting (in an ironic, covert, and danceable manner) American imperialism. He's kept up with the times, though, and here delivers a rollicking merengue which poses as a love song in order to satirize online relationships, mass media, aspirational branding, and global celebrity. The title "Mi PC" should need no translation to even the most ignorant of Spanish, but to make it clear, the first verse goes: "Girl, I want to tell you that I have in my computer/A gigabyte of your kisses and a floppy of your personality/Girl, I want to tell you that only you interest me/And the mouse that moves your mouth reformats my head/Girl, I want to tell you that in my PC I only have/A monitor with your eyes and a CD-ROM of your body."

So far so William Gibson ― indeed so far so creepy otaku ― but the chorus is where Guerra takes aim at the world beyond the desktop, by listing all the things his character doesn't want (at least compared to his virtual love). These include: a limousine, a Hugo Boss vest, Cindy Crawford in Berlin, a palace with pagodas, Burger King, a drawing by Miró, a trip to Paris, an airplane ride, Holyfield's ear, a Ferrari convertible, Pizza Hut, a NASA shuttle, and Shaquille O'Neal tennis shoes. The venerable folk/pop practice of defining reality by means of lists gets turned on its head by Guerra formulating his items in the negative, and he plays with cadence and repetition to further disrupt the accumulated meaning of all these signifiers of fame, wealth, and Westernization.

The form he chooses for the song is very much a straight-ahead merengue, though one that's characteristically fast-paced and even frantic, with whirlwind interjections from the brass and a carnivalesque breakdown to punctuate the song's funhouse take on modern society. Which of course means that many of the people who would most enjoy its satire will never take it seriously; the vast majority of pop-culture consmers in the U.S. have long since consigned merengue, like salsa, mambo, and other trad Latin dance forms, to the bin of pure utilitarianism, good only for dancing to or for indicating exoticization. But Juan Luis  Guerra is no Third World postcolonial outsider: he's making his critique from within the heart of the Western pop system. Not only did this song hit #1, but its parent album (almost routinely) went gold and received two Grammys; he had been a Latin superstar for over a decade, living partly in the US and touring worldwide. In another ten years, as Dominican bachata becomes a more integral thread in the Latin pop fabric, he'll even be an elder statesman. But that's looking too far ahead. We'll get there in time.

CHAYANNE, "DEJARÍA TODO"

12th December, 1998

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It's been six years since Puerto Rican pop star Chayanne has bobbed to the surface on these top-of-the-chart waters; although he's been working steadily in the meantime and been relatively successful at it, this still marks something of a comeback for him. Written by Estéfano, a prolific songwriter and producer from Colombia whose previous success stories had  included Jon Secada's debut album and Gloria Estefan's Mi Tierra, "Dejaría Todo" continues Chayanne's success with midtempo ballads. This time, thanks to Marcello Azevedo's nylon-stringed guitar, it has what you might call a stereotypically Latin flavor, a vaguely bolero sway, though not so pronounced that the barreling power-ballad chorus gets tripped up in any kind of polyrhythmic syncopation.

It's a "she's leaving me, my world is ending" song — more or less literally — and if the emotional hyperbole of the lyrics doesn't quite match up with the bland, adult-contemporary longeurs of the production, that's nothing new. Chayanne's voice isn't powerful, but it's pretty and well-suited to the aching romanticisms he's called upon to emote. (Enrique Iglesias, for example, would make an unlistenable fist of what Chayanne relaxes into.) It goes on for too long, as the chorus repeats and repeats, but it remains listenable throughout, Estéfano's production magic keeping each instrumental injection just this side of stultifying. The choral effect on the last several iterations of the chorus is both gilding this particular lily and getting to be a bit tiresome on this travelogue — how many faux-gospel choruses does that make within the past year? — but I'm surprised to discover that I have some affection for Chayanne.

Which is good, because he'll be back.