1.4.19

PAULINA RUBIO, “NI UNA SOLA PALABRA”

30th September, 2006

Wiki | Video

I compared Paulina Rubio's last entry here, "Dame Otro Tequila", to "Since U Been Gone," a song it preceded by several months. The debt that "Ni Una Sola Palabra," two years later, owes to "Since U Been Gone" is notable, although more in the space which Kelly Clarkson and Max Martin's adaptation of indie-rock aesthetics to chart pop opened for female pop artists using rock sounds to do well commercially than in anything inherent to Rubio, whose appearances here have frequently used rock sounds.

But if "Since U Been Gone" was a pop-auteur's adaptation of the Yeah Yeah Yeah's "Maps," "Ni Una Sola Palabra" (not a single word) is no adaptation, but a union of indie-rock and chart-pop sensibilities. It was written by Xabi San Martín of Spanish band La Oreja de Van Gogh, who weren't indie at all in the cloistered Spanish scene (where they were as central to pop as Mecano in the 1980s) but certainly would be in an American context, and it would require a more overtly pop personality like Rubio's to take their sound from local sensation to transatlantic phenomenon.

The result is the best song we've heard from her yet, and one of her most enduring classics regardless of chart placement: with a chugging power-pop guitar line, an exquisite candyfloss melody, and Rubio's throaty vocals playing with the stuttering descant on "amanece-eh-eh-er," it's become something of a Latin pop radio standard in the years since, the Paulina Rubio song that can hold its head up alongside the Julieta Venegases and Natalia Lafourcades who were even then assuming critically-claimed auteur status in Mexican pop. (We will hear from at least one of them down the line.)

The fact that the song never shifts into a key change, forcing Rubio to strain at the upper level of her range in order to approximate a Clarkson-like banshee wail, is probably why it never reached higher than #98 on the Hot 100; bellowing as an approximation of emotion is littered all over postmillennial Anglophone pop, to the degree that something like this which merely circles around its own tight groove may sound unfinished or undercooked to ears conditioned to expect a build-and-release.

But I think that's a failure to appreciate genre. This song doesn't need catharsis, it's not an emotional break-up song, but a wry song about being emotionally ghosted; puzzlement, rather than pain, is its keynote. The campy video, in which Rubio poses as a superhero over the Los Angeles nightscape, gives the game away: at its core, despite the whining synth and spaghetti-western flourishes, this is a pop-punk song.

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