The third Hot Latin #1 in a row from Maná's 2006 album Amar Es Combatir (to love is to struggle), and it's time for me to acknowledge that whether I like it or not Maná were speaking to the broader Latin-music audience in the late 2000s in much more meaningful ways than I have been able to understand on this travelogue so far.
But I'm getting closer with this song. It helps that it's a straight-down-the-line power-pop song, with 80s guitar chugs and sparkling harmonies and anthemic choruses, and so feels closer to the derivative, romantic, essentially conservative heart of Maná than incorporating Afro-Latin rhythms or post-grunge posturing does.
I want to be skeptical here of my usual conflation of post-80s rock with conservatism; outside the Anglosphere, rock means different things, and especially on a different time scale, than what the usual histories of US and British fads claim are set in stone. But it is noteworthy that Maná is having bigger hits than ever at the moment that reggaetón is challenging the settled assumptions of the Latin-music industry: Maná are the very definition of a settled assumption, and their not exactly dominance but certainly resurgence here in the 2000s might be comparable to something like the way the rock gods of the 1960s and 1970s reentered the US charts in the late 80s as a sort of comfort food to aging Boomers weirded out by hip-hop and hair metal.
To use a word with more currency in Hispanophone theory than Anglophone, Maná have never made particularly autochthonous music: and reggaetón's refusal to embrace the Estefan-bred crossover ideal, as seen in the paltry "Latin Invasion" of 1999 and the rather less paltry career of Shakira -- reggaetón remains defiantly aimed at an urbano audience, forcing Anglophone audiences to come to it (as they actually did with "Gasolina") rather than seeking to ingratiate itself by crooning in translated English -- is an assertion of greater autochthony, and particularly a darker-skinned, poorer, and urban autochthony, than the comfortable Latin middle class, both in the US and elsewhere, is comfortable with. They're comfortable with Maná, a crossover act in everything but language; Maná makes extremely comfortable music.
It's impossible not to read all of this from the vantage point of 2019, of course, which has proved the reggaetoneros right and the ingratiating middle class wrong; as concentration camps for darker-skinned, poorer, and urban Hispanophones proliferate, as border-wide fortresses are raised to protect the wealthy and white from rising tides and the tropical poor those tides will displace, as Us and Them become ever more deeply riven by race, language, and class, Maná's ode to romantic questing, expressed in beautifully poetic literary Spanish and accompanied by totemic sounds from the past four decades of sensitive white male guitar heroics sounds more and more hollow, an aristocratic fashion for dressing in the workingman's clothes of yesteryear while the mob cries out for justice.
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