12th September, 2009
If "Loba" made me excited about the Hot Latin charts, "Manos al Aire" (hands in the air) made me intrigued. If the charts were this wide open for being crashed, what else might not appear? It's one of the most unusual crossovers we've seen throughout this travelogue: a Canadian singer of Portuguese descent had a Latin #1 without an equivalent English-language version. Wikipedia says, incorrectly, that she "was the first North American act to have an originally written Spanish song reach #1," and despite the error (even if you don't count Mexico as North America, Selena was Texan born and bred), it's a notable achievement for someone who only learned Spanish as an adult to have a hit with a Spanish-language song.
A lot of that is due to her co-writer, Afro-Cuban singer and instrumentalist Alex Cuba, who grew up in the Havana area but emigrated to British Columbia as an adult and was a regular winner of Juno awards for "world music" in the 2000s. But Furtado was smart enough to refuse to translate the song to English, because the poetic idioms of Spanish and English are different enough that a lovely Spanish-language song about surrendering to love could sound bathetic or self-loathing in English.
The plastic sound of the song, all crisp electronic drums, repetitive palm-muted acoustic guitar chords, and soaring ersatz string sections, was extremely in vogue in the late 2000s, and in its moment sounded a bit like Anglophone pop crashing Hispanophone pop, productively. Furtado's previous record, Loose, had been a smash on the strength of the Timbaland collaborations "Promiscuous" and "Maneater," which were so rhythmically slippery that her limited voice could just be another texture within the soundscape, but it had also contained Spanish-language collaborations with Calle Ocho and Juanes (again). neither of which troubled the Hot Latin chart; for her 2009 Mi Plan, an all-Spanish-language album (and her first after going independent), she gathered collaborators like Cuba, Lester Mendez, and Julieta Venegas to try to solidify her presence in the Latin market.
It worked, insofar as "Manos al Aire" was #1 for four weeks in the fall of 2009, the album went platinum within a month of release, and Furtado won a Latin Grammy for her pains. But her attempts to return to the English-language market in 2012 and 2017 were met with a stony reception, and she has made no further gestures in Spanish since. Perhaps she's wisely sitting out the streaming era, which as one of the surprise winners of the CD era, she can presumably afford to do.
Twelve years later, "Manos al Aire" no longer sounds as revelatory or heart-gripping as it did back when it was my only companion hurtling through the freeway around Piestewa Peak on my way to work. It sounds thin and clipped, all sharp angles and unconvincing sentiment. A surrender to its joys would be a surrender to nostalgia, and I'm wary enough of the people I used to be that I'm suspicious of that. I still love that it happened; three years later, it could not. And I want to squeeze every last drop out of my affection for these years while I can.
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