23rd January, 2010
"Tu grupo favorito, mami."
Romeo Santos wasn't wrong. While this song was at #1, Aventura sold out Madison Square Garden four nights in a row, outselling acts like Lady Gaga and Madonna in terms of total tickets sold. By any metric but Anglophone radio play, they were one of the biggest bands in the United States. Imperial periods have not been frequently represented in this blog, because nothing is more arbitrary than a well-timed #1, but it's undeniable that Aventura split up at their peak, and despite reuniting to tour several times over the past decade, have released only the occasional single and collaboration: Romeo's hugely lucrative solo career takes precedence.
"¿Le gusta mi bachata, mijita?"
I noted in Aventura's previous appearance here that their liquid, R&B-inflected version of bachata was tailor-made to give them a boy-band quality very different from the historicized, reverent incorporation of bachata we'd seen hitherto. Bachata, first termed "amargue" (bitter) was originally Dominican blues music, the music of rural or at least lower-class Black Dominicans expressing pain and loneliness, consonant with Cuban bolero and Puerto Rican plena; it was first recorded in 1962, after the death of repressive dictator Rafael Trujillo. Over the years (especially in the 70s and 80s), it gained a reputation for salaciousness (not unlike certain R&B performers in the same years), but by the historicizing 90s, the options were either to modernize, with steel rather than nylon guitar strings, and adopt merengue-style percussion, or to fossilize and become a legacy music. Aventura's role in creating a newly urban bachata for the hip-hop generation can be overstated (Monchy y Alexandra had earlier hits), but they certainly capitalized on it better than anyone else, and Lenny Santos' instrumental break here might be one of the greatest guitar solos of the twenty-first century, taut and compelling, casting a more complex light on Romeo's romantic complaints.
"So nasty!"
Those romantic complaints are, again, extremely smartly written, if you can get over the initial concept of the entire song being addressed to Cupid. (The video literalizes this in a rather meaningless way, with Cupid as an urban-fantasy archer who keeps missing her shots at Romeo's romantic targets, possibly because she wants him for herself.) Romeo, disillusioned with love because it never ends up being reciprocated, renounces it entirely:
Pues dile al amor que no toque mi puerta
Que yo no estoy en casa, que no vuelva mañana
A mi corazón ya le ha fallado en ocasiones
Me fui de vacaciones lejos de los amores
Dile al amor que no es grato en mi vida
Dale mi despedida, cuéntale las razones
("So tell love not to knock on my door,
That I'm not at home, not to come back tomorrow
It has failed my heart on many occasions
I have gone on vacation far away from loves
Tell love it's not welcome in my life
Give it my goodbye, tell it the reasons why.")
I believe I have occasionally grumbled in these pages about over-the-top, extravagant, or hyperbolic expressions of sentiment in Latin pop over the years. Which may be hypocritical, because I adore this, and freely acknowledge that it's hyperbolic to the point of absurdity. But then I've had more use for songs of romantic disappointment than songs of romantic aspiration or romantic fulfillment over the course of my life; and given how prevalent pro-love propanganda is in pop, the salutary effect of the final lines of this song are as counter-culturally thrilling as Huck Finn's "all right then, I'll go to hell" was at an earlier time in my life.
"I don't need no love in my life."
Ending the song singing in vernacular English, repeating the same line four times, with sparkling boy-band harmonies, cemented "Dile al Amor" definitively as not just my favorite Aventura song, but one of my favorite songs period, perhaps ever. It would have been simple enough not to include those final lines, or to keep them in Spanish: "No requiero (el) amor en mi vida" could fit the meter. But Romeo Santos was perfectly aware that he was outgrowing not just the Dominican market, the bachata market, and the Latin pop market, but even the Spanish-language market generally. And besides, he and all the others had grown up in the Bronx; English was as natural to them as Spanish. The juxtaposition of the poetic, elegant (even perhaps too-elegant) Spanish of the main lyrics and the straightforward, working-class, double-negative-as-emphasis English of the coda also has something to say about class in the US, about the intersections of Latine identity with class, not to mention the further intersection of Afro-Latin identity. It remains the common assumption that people who speak Spanish are (like Black people) working-class or lower in the US, and the anti-immigration furor reaching a fever pitch in the Obama years (not to mention afterward) has long been as much a class war as it is a racist desire to keep the working class white. Against which Aventura's demonstration of Spanish as the classy language and English as the basic one does precisely nothing, but the gesture at least brought me to tears more than once on those long Phoenix drives of the early 2010s.
As did the sentiment: the relief of admitting, even to yourself, that you don't need romantic love in a world that demands you perform it is sometimes overwhelming. I would not categorize myself as either asexual or aromantic, perhaps for much the same reasons that another type of guy my age refuses to disbelieve he could still compete at a pro level in his chosen sport if he applied himself, but a dispassionate survey of my behavior over time would draw its own conclusions. More time for nerdy projects like this one, anyway.
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