Bilbo's Laptop

LUIS MIGUEL, “POR DEBAJO DE LA MESA”

2012-01-31T00:32:00.002-07:00

6th September, 1997

Romances was Luis Miguel's third album of classic boleros and love songs from the rich history of twentieth-century Latin music. As Rod Stewart would find a decade later, it was almost impossible not to keep indulging his audience's nostalgic streak; the records sold too well.

Even the fact that "Por Debajo de la Mesa" (underneath the table) isn't a classic, but a new song written by Miguel's long-time producer for the Romance series (Armando Manzanero, himself a classic song composer of the 60s, 70s and 80s) speaks to the exhaustion that's begun to set in, not only with the series, but with Miguel's own pop career. Only twenty-seven at the time of release, he's already accomplished more than he could have dreamed; and the kids are coming up from behind. Miguel's standard of four hits a year has been slipping for a while, and will only slip away in the years to come. You can build quite a nice career on nostalgia, as thousands of aging entertainers have found; but at least in the modern world, you can't be a pop star too.

"Por Debajo de la Mesa" is a love song — underneath the table he caresses her knee, and then spends the rest of the song wondering what will happen next. Will she accept his advances, will she awaken the fire in his blood? He can't live without her, etc. It's a professional song, professionally arranged, but while Miguel sings it with all the tenderness at his command, he can't make it into a timeless work of beauty. It's filler — gorgeous filler, but filler. And the kids are coming up from behind.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “MIENTE”

2011-11-14T06:43:00.001-07:00

16th August, 1997

And then, finally, eight singles in to his all-conquering chart run -- all eight of which have hit the top spot, a Latin Pop record and a pretty unassailable accomplishment no matter what chart you're looking at -- Enrique Iglesias found his sound. Not that he's singing any differently: the choked whine he employs here is, if anything, even more choked and whinier than on his debut. But the production for once matches him, equal parts bouncy and dramatic, forward motion with an emotional content built into the chord structure. Freed from the necessity of being the most interesting thing about the song, he can to some degree disappear into its rhythmic thrust, and if he still sounds a little ridiculous, it's the forgiving ridiculousness of camp rather than that of trying, and failing, to be tenderly sincere.

The winding-up-and-twisting down electric piano line against a rather limp breakbeat is one of the key sounds of mid-90s kitsch, electronic music gesturing towards classical, or earlier, forms (cf. Enigma, Miranda Sex Garden, that one Sarah Brightman record): if the melody's not actually from a moody Bach fugue, it means to sound like it. (The attack and sustain on the piano even drift toward the sound of a harpsichord.) The textural rock guitar and sonic drift layering out the record gives it a punch that rescues it from limp New Age mood-setting; and then, of course, there's Iglesias singing the actual song.

"Miente" means "lie" (both the noun and -- the sense in which the lyric uses it -- the imperative verb form). He's begging her to lie, to say that she loves him, because he can't live without her. It's appropriately hyperbolic stuff, dramatic to match the dramatic mood of the music, and though he delivers it with his usual conviction, the rhythmic pulse of the song protects him from lugubriousness. It's the best song we've heard from him yet, but it's still not among his best songs; we've got a few years before he begins to regularly turn out material on this level.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “NO PRETENDO”

2011-10-24T22:41:00.004-07:00

2nd August, 1997

Probably the most telling indication of my taste-slash-white-boy-assumptions-about-"real"-Latin-music is the reaction I'm having to this run of songs compared to the run that immediately preceded it. Enrique Iglesias and Marco Antonio Solís, much as I've liked individual songs of theirs, are wearying in romántico ballad after romántico ballad slicked up with mid-90s adult-contemporary pop production. The ranchero classicism of Juan Gabriel/Rocío Dúrcal and the countryfied corridos of Los Tigres del Norte, leaning as they did on traditional Mexican sounds, the Latin American version of "roots" music like the blues, country and gospel, were much more agreeable to my classicist's ears. Which may be indication of an "authenticity"-driven double standard applied to Latin music — after all, in Anglophone music of the period, I like the Cardigans way more than, say, Keb' Mo' — or maybe it's just a numbers game. If it were one or two Enriques to every six or seven Tigres, I might be feeling the exact opposite.

I bring all this up because this is the third Latin-traditionalist song in a row that I'm really loving; though the traditionalism here isn't Mexican but Cuban, even Spanish (the flowing flamenco-like guitar lines), and I think I even hear Peruvian huayño (cf. "El Condor Pasa") in the shuffling rhythm. But I'm no expert, as the musicologists falling over themselves laughing at my disorderly tags can attest. And faithful traditionalism would surely be pointless without Estefan's effortless melodicism and Kike Santander's classic songwriting.

"No Pretendo" can be translated several different ways, from the obvious "I don't pretend" to "I'm not trying" to "I don't mean" — either way, the phrase ends most frequently with "ser tu dueña" (be your lady, in the aristocratic as well as the lover sense) and "hacerte mío" (make you mine), and the repeated disclaimers have the effect of enforcing humility: after saying at great length what she doesn't mean to be, when she says what she does want to be it's "el mano que se llene de quebranto, ser un poco el remanso donde muere el desengaño" (the hand filled with broken dreams, a bit of an oasis where disappointments die).

This is practically Victorian — the "ministering angel thou" version of womanhood, rejecting any stronger moral or emotional hold on her man — but the complexity and the sheer poetry of the full lyric make it go down easier, as does Estefan's eternally warm voice, pitched at just the right level of desperation to make the sentiment believable. And listen to the guitars: they're letting us know it's tragic, all right.

LOS TIGRES DEL NORTE, “EL MOJADO ACAUDALADO”

2011-10-10T19:27:00.000-07:00

19th July, 1997

The last time we heard from Los Tigres, they were taking on corruption and systemic failure in the Mexican government. Their return engagement to the top of the chart, in contrast, sees the most fearless conjunto in norteño engaging directly with the immigrant experience. "El Mojado Acaudalado" means "The Prosperous Wetback" (the slur is comparable, maybe, to the way country music has reclaimed "redneck"), and the lyrics are as plain and direct as any we've seen:

Me estés esperando Mexico lindo
Por eso mismo me voy a ir
Soy el mojado acaudalado
Pero en mi tierra quiero morir

(Beautiful Mexico, you're waiting for me
That's just where I'm heading to
I'm the prosperous wetback
But I want to die in my own country)

The crisp stomp backing up this bone-dry recitative is beautiful in its spareness, a repeated descending bassline as close as we get to any instrumental flourishes. The fact that the song opens with the chorus sung by a child is perfectly appropriate: it's simple enough for a child (or an uneducated laborer) to sing, as plain as a hymn, as straightforward as a nursery rhyme. Comparisons with country music, especially Johnny Cash's bone-dry rattle or Hank Williams' brusque eloquence, are inevitable; and in the roundup of American placenames to which the narrator is saying goodbye, it echoes the grand old country tradition of a travelin' song. But it also positions him as much American as Mexican -- W. E. B. DuBois' notion of "double consciousness" is as applicable to the immigrant laborer as to the black American.

For the nth time, I'm not rating these out of ten. I suspect, though, that if I was, this would be ~~one~~ a ten.

JUAN GABRIEL & ROCÍO DÚRCAL, “EL DESTINO”

2011-10-03T18:35:00.000-07:00

14th June, 1997

The title of their album, one of the best-selling of the year (it went gold in Mexico, but double platinum in the United States — which should tell you something about the Latin-music market ~~in the 1990s~~), was Juntos Otra Vez (together again), and even I, who know very little about either Dúrcal or Gabriel, can't help but feel sentimental about their reunion. The beginning of this journey may have been entirely arbitrary, but it began with her singing a song written by him, and this final pairing, just before she developed the lung cancer that would eventually kill her, is very much a fitting swan song, sweeping, majestic, and sumptuously reveling in the fine details of their voices, both separately and together.

Juntos Otra Vez was written and performed as a stage show — performed in a sumptuous opera house in Jalisco, the heart of the nineteenth-century son ranchera movement that Gabriel is evoking with his compositions and orchestrations — and released both as a studio album and a live video. You can see the video of "El Destino" here; its artificial staging and odd light show feel very 90s, but the music is timeless, echoing both nineteenth-century Mexican romanticism and Gabriel's old orchestrations from the 80s (those puffs of trumpets are very like the synthesized horns decorating "La Guirnalda").

The song is equally timeless, a love song — "¿me quieres?" (do you love me), she begins, and he echoes "te quiero" (I love you) — built on an epic scale, meant to soundtrack an epic romance. True to Gabriel's form, however, it's surprisingly bloodless — there's no carnality to the lyrics, no passion (though you could say that he and Dúrcal provide all that's necessary). "Soy tu amigo y tambien tu hermano" (I am your friend and also your brother), he sings at one point, as though brotherly friendship is the stuff of epic romance.

All of which perhaps makes the point that it's a true portrait of the relationship between Juan Gabriel and Rocío Dúrcal. They clearly held each other in great regard and affection — and indeed neither of them was ever as great separately as they were together — but it was a platonic, professional love. Platonic love, however, doesn't pay the pop radio bills. This song was only number one for a week, a tribute to the affection in which both singers were held by the wide Latin audience; but it also marks the end of an era. Newer, younger voices are coming up from behind.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “SOLO EN TÍ”

2011-09-29T21:06:00.000-07:00

3 May, 1997

Two covers in a row! The original of this one may be slightly more familiar to my English-language readers than Vicente Fernández; it is, of course, Yazoo's "Only You." (Enrique also covered the original and released it at the same time to English-language markets; but his time as an Anglophone hitmaker was not yet.)

As a cover of "Only You," it's only okay; the cheap-sounding keyboard presets are no match for the synthetic worlds of 1982, and Enrique, no matter how hard he emotes, will never be Alison Moyet. The melody, however, is a timeless one, and the Spanish lyrics, if not as subtle as the original (which is pretty universally true of translated songs no matter which direction they're going), are a fairly faithful rendition of the sentiment.

So as an Enrique Iglesias song, at least by the standard set in his early years, it's a qualified success. The limited range of the melody, typical of the synthpop pioneers who were generally better at programming than singing, prevents Enrique from indulging his habit of turning everything into sefl-serving melodrama; there's just not enough there to oversing.

LOS TEMERARIOS, “YA ME VOY PARA SIEMPRE”

2011-09-26T17:32:00.001-07:00

26th April, 1997

The first song to break the Iglesias/Solís streak is also the third live norteño song in three years, and the ninth time I've had occasion to break out the "cover" tag. The cover here is of Vicente Fernández' late-70s hit "Ya Me Voy Para Siempre" (you can, and should, see him lipsync to it in the 1980 movie Picardia Mexicana II here), and Los Temerarios, who were a romántico band, not a norteño one, make only a decent fist of it, studio instrumentation filling in the weak spots in their live act.

The Fernández original is a grimly comic song of lost love: "Si sigue este dolor, no le sorprenda que mi hogar sea una cantina," runs the repeated bridge. ("If this pain continues, don't be surprised that my home is a tavern.") Which fit perfectly with Fernández' working-class hero image — in the movie, he ends the song by vowing future loyalty only to the comic proletariat of the supporting cast — but among the moneyed classiness of the mid-90s Latin chart (or that portion of it we're hearing) is something of a shock.

Gustavo Ángel, the singing Ángel brother of Los Temerarios (their name means "the reckless ones") goes for a more dramatic reading than Fernández' classically balanced blue-collar mariachi version (the difference is maybe not dissimilar to Alan Jackson covering George Jones), and he gets off a fantastic grito and shout out to the Temerarios' home state of Zacatecas, but the bulk of the energy here comes from the crowd singing lustily along with the "porque el amor de mi vida solito me dejó" refrain. ("Because the love of my life left me all alone.") Still, I can't be mad at anything that breaks up the pop-establishment ballad monotony.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “ENAMORADO POR PRIMERA VEZ”

2011-09-19T23:28:00.000-07:00

1st February, 1997

The thing to always keep in mind is that I'm ever only discussing a tiny portion of what was in the Hot Latin chart at any given time. So what is recorded, in this blog, as an unbroken string of romantico ballad after romantico ballad, Enrique and Marco Antonio following each other like night after day, was only a small part of a dynamic and ever-shifting Latin Pop scene which included hot dance jams, innovative rock en español acts, keeping-the-faith traditionalists in Mexican regional styles, and flashy novelty pop hits as well. By early 1997, Los Del Rio's "Macarena" has, alas, come and gone, reaching only #12 on the Latin chart even as it hit #1 on the Hot 100; it was always more of a tourist jingle than an organic Latin hit.

Instead we have the sixth Enrique Iglesias number one in fifteen months; Enrique Iglesias, his self-titled debut, has stuck around for so long that it's nearly in danger of running into the follow-up. Vivir, the Gorgeous One's second album, was (of course) hotly anticipated, and "Enamorado Por Primera Vez" ("In love for the first time") went straight in at #1, only the second song in Latin chart history to do so. It's a step up in terms of production, if not in vocal quality or songwriting: though a ballad — a power ballad, even! — it's very much a rock song according to its instrumentation. Soft rock, sure (the Bryan Adams of 1991 would surely raise an eyebrow in recognition), but the the guitars shred and the drums clump like very little we've had on the chart before.

This is a point where I'd love to hear from anyone who was in the Enrique demographic at the time: for someone who is (arguably) the most iconic and commercially powerful Latin Pop star of the past several decades, he's inspired relatively little fan-oriented chatter, and I can't really reconstruct, from my Anglo male 21st-century citadel, what his appeal was; or at least what drove the (commercial) response to him in a way it didn't, really, for anyone else. Lots of guys are pretty, after all. Did the famous name cross the generation gap and make his success a foregone conclusion no matter what he did? Were there extracurricular appearances I'm not privy to which made him more of a heartthrob than just a guy smoldering in a video clip? Am I just not hearing the music properly?

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “ASÍ COMO TE CONOCÍ”

2011-09-16T00:36:00.001-07:00

11th January, 1997

We're deep into that odd stretch of the Hot Latin chart where the top spot alternates between Marco Antonio Solís and Enrique Iglesias with no intermission, and if you're getting sick of it I can't blame you. But skipping irritatedly over Solís' third number one in a row over the same album would be a mistake: it's the best yet.

No doubt I've mostly come to this conclusion because I'm a sucker for Farfisa organs, and the opening riff and later solo are different enough from the usual romántico instrumentation that it caught my ear; but I also appreciate the old-fashioned bolero rhythm and construction, the tasty nylon-stringed guitar playing (sounding like current pop-bachata a decade early), and Solís' carefully-constructed, grown-up lyric. "Así Como Te Conocí" means, roughly, "The way I came to know you," and he draws a portrait that manages to be both clear-eyed and romantic about the end of a relationship. Though he falters into romántico conventionality ("sé que solo fui tu pasatiempo" / "I know I was only your pasttime"), it's mostly as assured a lyric as you might expect from the most acclaimed Latin songwriter of the 90s.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “TRAPECISTA”

2011-09-12T23:24:00.003-07:00

7th December, 1996

And with our final number one of 1996, Enrique Iglesias makes not only Hot Latin chart history but Billboard chart history — the fifth number-one song released from single album, a feat matched on the Hot 100 only by Michael Jackson in the 1980s and Katy Perry in the 2010s. (I don't know enough about the other charts to make a definitive claim, but a quick look through data I don't have to pay for suggests it hasn't often, if ever, been equaled elsewhere.)

Unfortunately, it sounds like a fifth single. A slow slog of an album track, a ballad with a single arresting image — the "trapecista," or trapeze artist, of the title — and Enrique's thin voice, quavering with unearned passion, at its most bathetic. The production is typically shiny without being particularly classy — the immaculacy of Luis Miguel's early-90s run, not to mention Iglesias Sr.'s work, is beyond Enrique at this point — but it's nothing to the classlessness of the lyric, a tough-love anthem refusing to comfort a woman who's been burned by love.

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “RECUERDOS, TRISTEZA Y SOLEDAD”

2011-08-31T22:18:00.009-07:00

12th October, 1996

I don't speak Spanish very well; I went through intensive instruction as a boy in Guatemala, but didn't often use it in daily life, and in the fifteen years since I moved back to the U.S., have almost never spoken it. So when I'm listening to Latin music, there's often a sense in which I feel like I'm not getting the whole story. Not just because Hispanophone songs, like songs in any language, are full of references to other texts — literature, pop culture, standard sayings — that just knowing the dictionary definition of the words won't necessarily make clear to you, but because I feel like I have a hard time judging tone. Literal, or even vaguely approximate, English translations of Latin pop lyrics are often in a heightened poetic manner, with the kind of all-out floridity that hasn't been popular in English for over a century.

Even the name of this song doesn't quite work in English: it translates as "Memories, Sadness, and Loneliness," which — though it would be perfectly acceptable, even ideal, as a subject for an American country, r&b, folk, or pop-punk song — is a little over-the-top as a title. Of course, that over-the-top-ness is a feature of Latin popular culture, not a bug (think of telenovela ~~over~~acting, or even just the tired stereotype of the Latin lover) — what rings as overheated melodrama in one culture is standard dramatic tension in another; you just have to know the context.

The music here is not much different from what he was doing with Los Bukis, but even through its cheap-sounding synthesizers there's a deliberate anxiousness. (It's in waltz time, but the tempo's too fast to waltz to; which is very odd for a ballad.) The lyrics have Solís describing, in what I've come to expect as the standard imagistic fashion of romántico, the slow dissolution of a relationship. But it was the chorus that really caught my ear: "Fuimos cayendo poco a poco/en la rutina cruel/al ritmo crudo/de este mundo de papel." Which in English, runs "We were falling little by little/into the cruel routine/to the crude rhythm/of this paper world." A paper world! What an unusual image!

And then of course I looked it up, and "en un mundo de papel" is a standard Spanish phrase to describe living in a fantasy ("building castles in Spain" would be an equivalent, if more old-fashioned, English phrase). Well, I tried to think of something nice to say. But it's hard for me to find Marco Antonio Solís anything but boring.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “NO LLORES POR MÍ”

2011-02-14T04:54:00.006-07:00

5th October, 1996

It's the fall of 1996, and the inevitability of Enrique Iglesias' fourth number one in the space of a year is matched only by the tidal swell and crash of the music behind his youthfully strained voice. He's now matched Selena and Jon Secada for highest amount of number ones off of one album — like Secada, it's his debut; unlike either Secada or Selena, he will go on having number ones for decades.

"No Llores Por Mí" means "don't cry for me," and while I'm not certain the Evita reference is intentional (the Madonna movie version was not yet in theaters, and the song had been written some time earlier), this recording shares Lloyd-Weber's fondness for big obvious dramatics — that power-ballad guitar solo! — and fatal lack of any actual dynamics; it's just the same chord sequence in the same tempo, pounded over and over again.

Iglesias is almost a cipher on the song, attempting Luis Miguel-style intimacy and power but achieving neither, larding on extra grit in order make up for his thin, kind of whiny voice. I say this as an Enrique Iglesias fan; but he did not spring forth fully-formed, only gradually working his way into the louche caricature of Latin sexiness he's inhabited for the last decade. It'll be a while before we get there.

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “QUE PENA ME DAS”

2011-02-10T21:40:00.000-07:00

27th July, 1996

Marco Antonio Solís' triumphant return to the top spot as a solo act, having finally shaken off even the name of Los Bukis, is ironically (or perhaps not so ironically, given the trend of number-one songs in the mid-90s) much less pop and much more traditional Mexican regional, with a twelve-string bajo sexto as the lead instrument whenever Solís isn't singing, and a rhythmic bed that makes room for the lazy scrape of the Afro-Latin güiro and the urgent thunk of a cowbell in addition to the drumpad fills he's always been singing over.

The song itself is a plaintive lament — "Que Pena Me Das" translates literally as "What Trouble You Give Me" (though "pena" is a flexible term that can mean anything from lasting grief to momentary annoyance) — about a woman who has gone chasing after money and left her lover disconsolate. It's pretty, but extremely traditional, and Solís continues his march through the charts as the most successful inconsequential artist we've spent a good deal of this travelogue running into occasionally.

This song, in fact, marks the end of the first decade of the Hot Latin chart, as it remained at the top of the chart through much of September, the one-year anniversary of Rocío Dúrcal's "La Guirnalda," the song at the top when Billboard first published the chart. If we'd heard none of the intervening songs, it would be tempting to imagine that not much had changed in a decade, but much has and there's much more to come.

But I wanted to mark this anniversary by first, thanking everyone for reading so far with me (thanks! you're the best!), and then asking for feedback. What works about this blog? What doesn't? Should I post video? Would it be helpful, or maybe more conducive to triggering conversation, if I gave these songs a mark out of ten, as Tom does on Popular and Sally does on No Hard Chords? I'd love to hear what anyone besides me thinks about any of these songs in particular, or about the blog in general, whether you leave comments here, at my Tumblr, or via e-mail. Especially if you know more about the subject than I do — which isn't hard at all, I'm winging every one of these posts.

Regardless, it's been a lot of fun to trawl through the past ten years. But I make no secret that I'm really looking forward to the next fourteen and counting. Latin Pop, not unlike its Anglophone counterpart, has only gotten better as the millennium turns. How so? Keep reading.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “POR AMARTE”

2011-02-07T00:50:00.009-07:00

1st June, 1996

Another few weeks, another Enrique Iglesias #1. This is the third single off his debut album, and in a lot of ways it sounds like it. It's more middling and less dynamic than either the assured "Si Tú Te Vas" or the expansive, oddball "Experiencia Religiosa". It's very much a rock ballad — the bluesy guitar licks sound right out of mid-period Clapton or even the late-70s Rolling Stones — but Iglesias doesn't quite know what to do with it, failing to create a coherent performance out of the disparate elements and falling back on his particular brand of underfed overemoting.

The title means "To Love You," and it's another song of devoted love, but this time the images are all extremely hackneyed (chorus: "To love you I would steal the stars from the sky as a gift to you/To love you I would cross the oceans just to hold you close/To love you I would bring together rain and fire/To love you I would give my life just to kiss you"), and while there's always a built-in audience for such songs — inexperienced teenagers will always need something to listen to while crushing on the unattainable — this particular brand of devotion is pretty laughable to anyone with adult concerns.

The only bright spot is in the production dynamics; even after all these years, it's still a pleasure to fall for the trick where all the instruments cut out briefly, then rush back in on a soaring chord. Iglesias even manages a wordless improvisation that's not too embarrassing; right now it seems like he's hitting number one out of sheer nepotistic inertia, but it's tiny hints like this that encourage me to think of what he'll be capable of in the years to come.

CRISTIAN CASTRO, “AMARTE A TÍ”

2011-02-03T13:27:00.007-07:00

25th May, 1996

Perhaps the easiest way to point out what Olga Tañon and Marco Antonio Solís were doing "wrong" in the last entry (scare quotes because it's not actually wrong, just not to my taste and less of a forward advance than I was hoping for) is to compare it with this. This is also a ballad and therefore, by my reckoning, has a strike against it from the outset. But the production isn't the mushed-together goop that is Solís' signature sound — it's vibrant, detailed, even lush, even if little of the actual instrumentation is any different. Except there's an oboe carrying the lead melody! There are never enough oboes in pop music.

Where "¡Basta Ya!" sounded like a holdover from the poorly-funded 80s, "Amarte a Tí" sounds like the most modern and up-to-date version of romantic Latin Pop available, with a pulsating rhythm, sparkling accents, and gorgeously treated female vocals on the chorus which would be a fine addition to any indie pop song today. (The credits I've been able to find don't specify, but it's either Gabriela Anders, Dámaris Carbaugh, Doris Eugenio, or Lori-Ann Velez doing the dream-pop bit.) I've been using the tag "pop idol" for Cristian Castro's appearances here, but on the evidence of this and "Amor", it may be time to graduate him to "pop royalty" — the attention to detail here is worthy of a Luis Miguel or Julio Iglesias.

It is, for once in a way, an uncomplicated love song: "amarte a tí" means "loving you," and if the lyrics are somewhat more formal and metaphorical than those of the Minnie Riperton song (Spanish love poetry rears its head again), the sentiment's the same: "Amarte a tí es soñar despierto/Los ojos abiertos/Amarte a tí es de verdad/El corazón entregar/Lleno de paz" ("Loving you is dreaming awake/Eyes wide open/Loving you is truly/Finding [my] heart/Full of peace"). I am at the kind of place in my life where a song like this will have a particular resonance for me, even outside of its musical sensuousness; uncomplicated joy in mutual love exactly matches my needs right now.

OLGA TAÑÓN, “¡BASTA YA!”

2011-01-31T00:32:00.001-07:00

18th May, 1996

Of course, no sooner is there a new normal — with regional Mexican and border styles suddenly making up a huge proportion of the top of the Latin chart, displacing the old school of blowsy ballads punctuated by sassy dance numbers — than the professionals and the pop lifers start moving in to take it over.

Olga Tañon is a new name in these parts, but a minimum of research uncovers a very familiar name. Marco Antonio Solís, the long-haired, blandly sentimental leader of Los Bukis and latterly a solo artist, wrote and produced the album Nuevos Senderos in a transparent bid to fill the void which the death of young miss Quintanilla-Pérez had left in the affections of Latin Pop listeners all over the hemisphere. Tañon had been singing for years -- in fact her career pretty closely parallels that of Selena's, with Puerto Rico standing in for Tejas, and merengue for tejano.

Still, this is supposed to be a tejano song (you can hear, very faintly, a cumbia rhythm in the verses), and even though it was (briefly) successful, it's no replacement for Selena. Solís drowns everything in his signature bland soup of cascading keyboard riffs and too-patient drum fills, and Tañon's voice is neither as charged nor as flexible as Selena's; the overall effect is that of a script being dutifully followed. Which doesn't mean there aren't pleasures to be had in the song, just that they are minor and without the urgency that the lyrics provide — "¡Basta Ya!" means "Enough Already!", but both the chiming melody and Tañon's too-elegant phrasing give it the sound of a treacly lament instead of the desperate, long-awaited standing-up-for-herself that you get from a straightforward reading of the lyrics.

This isn't Olga Tañon's last appearance in our travelogue, but I'm hoping for something a little more lively in our next encounter.

LOS TIGRES DEL NORTE, “EL CIRCO”

2011-01-27T00:18:00.000-07:00

11th May, 1996

However easy it seems to look back at the decades and identify patterns, make generalizations, and persuade yourself that music is its own through-line, there are always going to be pieces of the puzzle that go missing if all you hear, if all you know, is the music.

So while I've been making a pretty glib case for the increasing recurrence of Mexican norteño music (and American tejano music) at the top of the Hot Latin chart being entirely due to Selena's star power, it's just as much due to demographic shifts — in the wake of NAFTA, cross-border immigration exploded as multinationals opened cheap factories across Mexico, decimating local economies and sending millions looking for a better life in the factories and fields of the United States. But this too is glib (though no less pertinent); focusing on the new immigrants obscures the Spanish speakers who have been here for generations. Border life for Mexican-Americans means being concerned with the politics, the culture, and the wars of two nations, and Los Tigres del Norte, a norteño band from the Mexican state of Sinaloa, are the Clash, the Bob Marley, or the Public Enemy of the region, truth-tellers and gadflies of power who couch their commentary in witty, effervescent music. (The fact that they do most of this truth-telling from San Jose, California doesn't hurt.)

The tool they use for this commentary is the corrido (lit. "ballad"), a standard form in Latin music that can be analogized to the twelve-bar blues in its standardization, its antiquity, and its flexibility and adaptability to any tempo, instrumentation, or topic. Los Tigres' primary lead instrument is the norteño accordion, and their stiff polka-derived tempos may sound corny if you're not hearing with the proper ears (as I didn't for many years), but once you accept these as features instead of bugs, there's a whole world of little runs between verses, ironic chord changes, and most of all, the deliciously biting, sarcastic lyrics.

Los Tigres del Norte (that's "The Tigers of the North" in English) came to fame in the mid-70s with a series of narcocorridos, or ballads about drug trafficking — in humanistic, literary songs, with a cinematic gift for narrative and character — and have remained at the very top of the norteño heap since; but on "El Circo," which hit the top of the Hot Latin chart for a week in the spring of 1996, they turn their gimlet eye on the world of Mexican politics.

Even if you know Spanish, this might not be immediately apparent; after all, as leader Jorge Hernández sings the first verse, it's a song about two brothers who own a circus. (The full text of the song — my translation — is behind the jump.) But anyone who'd been paying attention to Mexican politics from the late 80s to that very week knew exactly who the brothers Carlos and Raúl were supposed to be: ex-president of Mexico Carlos Salinas and his strongarm brother Raúl, then in jail for conspiring in political assassination and under suspicion of money laundering. (It was Carlos Salinas who negotiated the NAFTA agreement with the Clinton administration; under his right-wing presidency, Mexico plunged into debt and suffered economic collapse.) The political enemies of the Salinas brothers tended to meet mysterious but fatal ends; in this regard, both the Tigres' recording of this song and the airplay that pushed it to #1 on the (American) chart can be seen as acts of political defiance.
Between them, Carlos and Raúl
Were masters of a circus.
Carlos was the lion tamer,
He was the handsome brother,
Raúl the coordinator
With a hunger to make himself rich

They became so influential
That they began to knock off
[Competing] circuses from all over,
Until they began to fail,
Staying too long in the plazas
And being out of work.

The circus in the Gulf
Was the first to fall
And the circuses of Chihuahua —
It was Carlos who shut them down,
Leaving only the one in Sinaloa
Facing the lion tamer.

Raúl made himself a millionaire
They say it was through being a magician:
The money disappeared
From the hands of his brother.
Today they say it's in the banks
Of Switzerland and everywhere else.

Carlos disappeared
And brought the circus down,
Learning the Sinaloan way.
After that plane crash
Was how Raúl and Carlos
Left their work behind.

Raúl found himself in jail,
Now the magic has left him.
Carlos out on the tightrope,
But now the people are bored,
Until another circus comes
And the same swindle starts again.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “EXPERIENCIA RELIGIOSA”

2011-01-24T19:09:00.000-07:00

21st April, 1996

Yes, again already. Get used to it. For the next fifteen years (and counting), nearly every single he releases will go #1. Not all of them, of course, are created equal.

Which makes it sound like I think this one is bad. I don't, quite: there are some quite good things about it, but it's a mismatch of singer, style and song. Iglesias is still singing like a rock singer here, belting grittily in a thin, static register, the audio equivalent of those Rob Liefeld comic books where everyone scowls grimly so much that it looks like they're constipated. He has not yet learned what his voice can do — and, more to the point, what it can't. If he were the singer he thinks he is, if he were Julio Iglesias or Luis Miguel or even Cristian Castro, he'd be able to overcome the repetitive up-and-down-the-scale of the song's melody (if the song's melody were plotted on a graph, it'd be as regular as a heartbeat, but not as warm), but as it is he doesn't even emote, he just groans.

Which is too bad; because the song, outside of the grinding melodic mechanics, is actually pretty good. I won't be so condescending as to translate the title (obvious Latinates are obvious), but the first line of the chorus makes the crucial distinction "casi" ("almost") -- settle down, priests and mothers, he's not saying sex is a religious experience, just that it's like one. Except that, three lines later, he says it straight: "es un experiencia religiosa" ("it is a" etc). But pay no attention to the flip-flopping semantics: the real highlight of the chorus is the sly rhyme "besar la boca tuya merece un aleluya" ("kissing your mouth deserves a hallelujah" — it's, sigh, better in Spanish), the kind of wordplay that died out in English-language pop with Ira Gershwin.

The requisite gospel choir comes in the for the last couple of choruses, which only further underscores how far this is from anything actually religious — Latin Pop audiences are so overwhelmingly Catholic that the gospel choir, a trope imported from American soul and rock music, is a signifier of generalized, and international, ambition rather than anything bone-deep to the culture. The hair-metal guitar solo that wails just after gives it away: this is (not very good) international pop, not particularly Latin in any way. (Enter Boyzone's 1997 cover "Mystical Experience," a pretty direct translation and even less bearable.)

Enrique will find his voice eventually, and material that's worthy of it. But it'll be a rocky road for a while. Buckle up.

CRISTIAN CASTRO, “AMOR”

2011-01-20T07:36:00.000-07:00

3rd February, 1996

When last we saw Cristian Castro, he was peddling a soft-rock version (complete with "tasteful" guitar and sax licks) of Luis Miguel's slick romántico. In the six years since then, however, Latin Pop has changed; what came as a moderately novel modernization then would be an unbearable throwback now. So luckily he too has advanced with the times; instead of Richard Marx in 1990, he's now upgraded to the Gin Blossoms in 1993.

This song is pure jangle-pop of the kind that was the most commercially appealing face of college rock in the late 80s and early 90s, R.E.M. and Gin Blossoms and Wildflowers-era Tom Petty and even echoes of the Lemonheads in Castro's smooth assurance, his mellifluous vocal just about the only thing connecting the song to Latin Pop traditions. If there's even a hint of the Rembrandts' terminally uncool "I'll Be There For You" (which I knew as a radio pop song before I knew it as the theme song to Friends), that's because it was one logical conclusion of the sound: this is surely as much trend-hopping as it is a deeply-felt love for the style, but that's fine. What matters is how convincing the song is.

And it's a feather-light construction, a song of hopeless love (I don't need to translate the title this time, do I?) delivered at such an easy, shuffling remove that, as with the Everly Brothers' proto-jangly "Bye Bye Love," you can't believe he's actually all that broken up about it. The guitars are not just for texture, either: this is straight-up mid-tempo rock, and if the unbelievably pretty Castro is still more pop star than rock & roller that doesn't mean the music is insincere. Rather, this is a hint of things to come. Just as rock is fading from prominence in Anglophone pop, it's experiencing a bullish renaissance in the Latin world. This is far from the last time I will use the Rock En Español tag.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “MÁS ALLÁ”

2011-01-17T04:25:00.000-07:00

6th January, 1996

After a magnificent hot streak, Estefan finally deals herself a bum hand. This is, of course, up to interpretation; clearly enough people liked it to send the song to #1; but it's her worst song, qua song, that we've yet encountered in this travelogue.

The production remains as polished and detailed as ever, with gorgeous flamenco guitar runs and swaying Afro-Cuban percussion; but the melody refers to no Latin tradition, instead rising and falling in the safe, predictable, even cozy patterns of inspirational pabulum. It does not surprise me to learn, when I check Wikipedia, that she sang this for the Pope. I and my immediate circle have been present for people singing things to the Pope on a number of different occasions, and this fits right in, banal Chicken Soup for the Soul-level platitudes married to a melody strenuously wiped free of all secular interest. You can't dance to it, you can't fall in love to it, you can't weep to it, you can't get pumped to it, you can't even — and this is where it fails as an inspirational song as well as a pop song — feel any great interest in changing the world to it.

The song is about stasis: the title, "Más Allá" means "Beyond," and is a metonymy for heaven; and all the sweetly-sung little Christian sacrifices in the verses are promised their eternal reward in the stubbornly not-soaring chorus. It's a vision of heaven as a gated community, "más allá del rencor, de las lágrimas y el dolor" ("beyond rancor, beyond tears and pain"), without any hint that rancor, tears and pain are not the disease we need to escape, but its symptoms; injustice, as even the Pope has acknowledged from time to time, needs to be confronted and beat back. As an anthem for such effort, however, this kind of thing is too heavenly minded to be any earthly good.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “SI TÚ TE VAS”

2011-01-14T10:06:00.006-07:00

2nd December, 1995

And so we close out 1995, perhaps the most tumultuous year at the top of the Latin chart yet, with the arrival of a new voice bearing an old name. The people's princess is gone, the youth, invitation, and opportunity she represented having dissipated in the San Antonio night. Instead, we have another form of royalty.

He dropped out of college — the University of Miami, he was no scholar — to record this album, having secretly borrowed money from his nanny to record demos which he sent out under a fake name, because he didn't want the old man's prestige influencing the decisions. Of course, once the marketing people found out. . . .

Julio Iglesias was one of the greatest singers of the twentieth century, an interpreter of great sensitivity and a richness unusual in pop. His son inherited little of his burnished vocal quality; Enrique's voice is instead rather thin and pinched, if perhaps more nimble, better suited to a less stately pop era. But he has similar control and, which is what matters in pop, a similar ability to orchestrate emotions; listen, here, to how he clips his voice on the very edge of rock grittiness on the chord change.

But there will be plenty more opportunities to discuss Enrique Iglesias in the years to come; he currently holds the record for the most number ones on the Hot Latin chart, and is unlikely to be unseated any time soon. To the song. At first hearing, it's what I've been mentally cataloging as Another Fucking Ballad; but wait. It's actually been a while since we've had a straight-up ballad in this travelogue, and despite the tempo this isn't particularly Adult Contemporary. The hard drum sound, entirely devoid of syncopated rhythm; the guitar and organ which, though muted and in the background, pull hard in the direction of classic rock; Iglesias' own half-croon, half-groan. This is almost not Latin Pop at all, at least not in any of the traditional senses we've come to identify, neither regional nor tropical nor even, really, romántico. This is just pop that happens to be in Spanish, and could easily be otherwise.

Which make sense for a U of M dropout, who's lived in Florida since he was ten; his heritage is Spanish, but his instincts are all American — or international, same thing, thanks cultural imperialism. Even if he speaks with a Spanish accent (and you can hear the Spaniard when he sings "corathón" in the first line), he's been an international jet-setter all his life, identified with no tradition except that of wealth and privilege, provided with no cultural shorthand except that of universal human emotion. He perhaps oversells it here; he's young, and the song needs an injection of meaning; the premise ("Si Tú Te Vas" means "If You Leave") is some of the most well-covered ground in pop, and the lyrics don't distinguish themselves. Not for the first time, a good story, great personal attractiveness, and a strong publicity blitz have conspired to launch a new pop sensation.

But just how sensational he turns out to be will, of course, be a recurring theme in these pages for some time to come.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “ABRIENDO PUERTAS”

2011-01-10T09:58:00.007-07:00

21st October, 1995

This song begins what, scanning the horizon, looks like becoming a semi-annual tradition: another Gloria Estefan album, another Gloria Estefan number-one single. After having thoroughly ingratiated herself to the Latin Pop audience with Mi Tierra (the album that produced three chart-topping songs), she'll never again go without that audience's appreciation for her work — at least as of press time. And she repays that appreciation with some of the most joyful and glorious music we've yet encountered in this travelogue.

"Abriendo Puertas," as even a Sesame Street-level Spanish education should tell you, means "opening doors," and the light, scattered-tempo vallenato rhythm of the song reiterates the dance-yrself-free message of the lyrics, which on the chorus run something like "And we're opening doors, and we're closing wounds/Because in the new year we're going to live life/And we're opening doors, and we're closing wounds/Step by step down the path we're going to find our way." It's the sort of pleasingly universalist message that could, frankly, be a hit at any time, but in the fall of 1995 it perhaps inevitably recalled the great grief of that year (at least as far as US Latin Pop fans were concerned), and its call to get up and dance anyway, to tear down barriers and dismiss failure as a lie, sounds both thrilling and, well, healing.

That vallenato rhythm is worth remarking on: it's a close cousin of the cumbia rhythm that Selena exposed us to, with similar origins in the mixed-race cauldron of coastal Colombia, and the guitar/accordion combination (unrelated to the similar combination in Mexican norteño) is one of the genre's trademarks. Perhaps unusually for the highly-vertically-integrated Estefans, the song was written and arranged by Colombian songwriter/producer Kike Santander, who will be a name to remember in the years to come, as the late 90s fade into the 00s.

Still, Gloria and producer husband Enrique, ever the ambassadorial multiculturalists, make a point of letting the opening guitar sound not only tropical but African — a hint, perhaps, of Congolese rumba echoing back to her own native Cuban rhythms? — and mix the rest with salsa horn charts, funky urban bass, Afro-Cuban percussion, and a call-and-response chorus that could have grown out of any of the above, but which in this travelogue is a Gloria Estefan hallmark. They don't call themselves the Miami Sound Machine anymore — they're bigger than Miami, and far more eclectic than any Sound Machine — but she's had the same band her whole career, and they've kept up with her every swerve and wild goose chases. If she sounds now content — like she could just make variations on this record for the rest of her career and not miss a thing — she has perhaps earned it. How many other openers to fifteenth albums sound so irrepressibly joyful?

LUIS MIGUEL, “SI NOS DEJAN”

2011-01-06T09:51:00.003-07:00

30th September, 1995

Let this be a lesson never to assume. You listen to and write about Latin Pop over the course of several years and start thinking you know what the parameters are. But 1994 and especially 1995 have messed with my assumptions so much that WHAT IS HAPPENING seems to be the only appropriate response. Not only have we seen a decisive shift in genre, away from bland romántico ballads towards distinctively flavored regional music whether uptempo or down, but this is the second live cut in a year to make the top of the chart.

Yes, of course it's Luis Miguel at the height of his powers, and nearly anything he recorded was bound to end up here. But this isn't the Luis Miguel we've become familiar, even overfamiliar with in the past eight years. He's looser than he's been in ages — since he was a teen idol, in fact — and deviates from his usual velvet-lunged passionata by letting the band behind him, massive string section and all, play with tempo, even vamp a little. It's a mariachi orchestra, but the song is pure pop in its harmonics and structure, and if it's still a controlled looseness, closer to Sinatra Swings! than to the near-punk of La Mafia's live cut, he doesn't let the side down, acquitting himself handily outside the clinical, glossy perfection of his studio cuts.

"Si Nos Dejan" means "if they let us" (or "if they leave us," but not in this context), and it's either a silly trifle of a love song in which the Always Unspecified They are all that's standing in the way of true love, ultimate happiness, a new dawn, and all the rest, or it's a really powerful, political song about the inescapability of power dynamics and how the system crushes personal happiness with ruthless thoroughness. I think it's the former, but multiple readings is what happens when you don't specify.

SELENA, “TÚ, SÓLO TÚ”

2011-01-03T18:13:00.000-07:00

22nd July, 1995

That's all there is; there isn't any more.

This is our farewell to Selena, just over a year since we first properly said hello to her. We're gliding inevitably on to the horizon, and she must remain behind. If this hurts more than any other voice which has gradually faded from these pages — we've seen the last of Ana Gabriel, of Yuri, of Jon Secada, to name just three who have given us pleasure over the years — it's because Selena held more than just the promise of future musical success in her voice, in her beauty, in her ambition. She could have been so much more. She could have beaten back the inequalities of race and language, bridged the gap between Hot Latin Tracks and the Hot 100, belonged not just to a single region, not just to a single language, but to the world.

And in a way, she did, at least briefly. Her death made her more famous than her life to date had done; and Dreaming Of You, the somewhat motley collection of tracks she had been working on in various studios at the time of her death, rushed out to assuage the grief, was her biggest-selling album ever. "Tú, Sólo Tú" was the second single from that record; the first, and the one song you probably know by her, "I Could Fall In Love," was the biggest Latin song to hit the Hot 100 since "La Bamba" back in 1987. It peaked at #8 there, and became something of a generational classic, especially in the urban US. It also raced up the Hot Latin chart, of course, reaching #2; only the simultaneous #1 of "Tú, Sólo Tú" kept it from being included in this travelogue.

But "I Could Fall In Love" was an R&B ballad, perfect for teary memorializing; "Tú, Sólo Tú" is a mariachi waltz, so perfect a companion piece to "El Palo" that this period of our travelogue is starting to look less like a generational shift in listening patterns and more like black magic. But it's not just a soundalike throwback; "Tú, Sólo Tú" is a genuine classic, written by the great ranchera composer Felipe Valdés Leal for the 1949 film Perdida, where it was sung by La Torcacita (Matilde Sánchez), and would be covered by virtually every ranchera singer ever, perhaps most notably Pedro Infante and Linda Ronstadt. Selena's performance of it is respectful without being reverential; she digs into the emotion of the lament in her own way, rather than trying to resurrect a bygone vocal style, and towards the end begins to sound a bit like Ana Gabriel in the hoarseness of her moans.

Which brings us more or less full circle; she first came to our notice doing something like an Ana Gabriel imitation. But where the music there was thin and tentative, a bad memory of the underproduced 80s, she — and Latin Pop as a whole — had reached the place where she could glory in sumptuous history without being held back by it. There's a kind of confidence here, confidence in the power of the song and of the classic mariachi instrumentation to retain their full meaning almost fifty years after the fact; like Dylan forcing rock to look back at folk in order to flower in a million different directions, she's almost with her dying breath helping Latin Pop hurtle into the future by taking stock of its past.

And if she's not quite going to be the bridge we had hoped — too young, too soon, never forget — that doesn't mean there won't be one. But that's getting ahead of ourselves.

JUAN GABRIEL, “EL PALO”

2010-12-30T14:34:00.007-07:00

15th July, 1995

Strictly from the evidence of this travelogue, Juan Gabriel is a man of moods. He was introduced to us very early on as a singer of synth-pop mariachi; he said goodbye with an extended dance mix; he said hello again with a gospelly march; and now he's doubling down on the mariachi — or rather, on ranchera (mariachi is a specific form that generally includes charro costumes), digging into the 1940s and 50s and 60s heyday of classic Mexican music.

In a sense this is a culmination of all the backward-looking pop we've been seeing over the course of the past few years, from Gloria Estefan's exploration of Cuban traditionalism and Luis Miguel's homages to the greats of Latin music to exercises by Selena and Los Bukis in modernized classicism. Even though Juan Gabriel's visits to the top spot tend to be brief these days (this was only there for a week), he's still something of a key figure in Latin Pop, and his embrace of traditional ranchera music on El México Que Nos Se Fue ("the Mexico that left us," or rather, "that got away from us") is another confirmation that the mood of Latin Pop (as measured by US airplay, anyway) has changed considerably from where it was ten, or even five, years ago.

"El Palo" is a Gabriel original, but it sounds entirely traditional (except perhaps in the rapid-fire syllable-spitting at the end, which owes more to American funk and soul than the strict rhythm and ornate instrumentation suggest). A "palo" is a stick, and the repeated phrase which gives the song its title, "palo dado, ni Dios lo quita" is a variation on a Spanish-language proverb which means, roughly, "what's done is done" (lit. "stick given, neither does God remove it"). It's a scales-from-the-eyes end-of-relationship song, and if it's performed in a rather breathless rush as the guitars and guitarróns and vihuelas and harps propel us forward, while the glossy, feathery strings swirl above and around and the horns break in like spotlights to show the track, it's still an old pop theme, and an old romantic-poetry theme before that.

But if the instrumentation, the lyric, and the melodymaking are all traditional ranchera, Juan Gabriel's voice is not. He doesn't have the burnished tones of a Vicente Fernández or a Pedro Infante: his voice is high and thin and cracked (a bit like David Bowie's, in fact), and the sobbing wrench in his voice doesn't sound stylized in the traditional method of ranchera, but real. He's still unpredictable, even when writing and singing what might be the most predictable form of music there is. The signature sounds, harmonic structures, and cries (the grito mexicano, again!) of classic Mexican music are as immediately recognizable as any traditional music anywhere; the flexibility of the form is less noted by outside listeners, but Juan Gabriel makes it sound immediate even while sounding old.

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS & LOS BUKIS, “UNA MUJER COMO TÚ”

2010-12-27T16:11:00.008-07:00

3rd June, 1995

Los Bukis are back! It's been a while since we've heard from them, and in the meantime they've undergone a name change. Marco Antonio Solís, who was always the frontman, songwriter, face, and leader of the band, is billed up front now; the next time we see him, he'll have left behind the Bukis brand entirely.

But if the band was ever more than a collection of guys who played behind Solís, this is a great note for them to go out on. Listening back to their appearances in this travelogue, they've been more consistent than I think I gave them credit for at the time; back to back, their songs form a sort of interlocking pattern of trad-inflected Mexican pop, moving from the synth-heavy production of the 80s to the rhythm-centric production of the 90s. Of course, there were solid rhythms on their earlier songs, and there are synths here. Maybe the real difference is that the trad is just a little more inflected than previously.

The song is a bolero, and Solís gives it the rich, full vocal that bolero tradition demands — and I'm pleasantly surprised. This is the first time I've been impressed by his singing; not that he's Luis Miguel all of a sudden, but especially on the middle eight, where he has to make a difficult leap alone, he acquits himself so well that you can see exactly why he felt that the band wasn't necessary any more. Still, the sensitive arrangement and tasteful guitar and percussion figures enhance the pleasure, and if this isn't quite in the Gloria Estefan range of superbly evocative traditionalism, it's dreamy enough to do.

SELENA, “FOTOS Y RECUERDOS”

2010-12-23T08:06:00.009-07:00

15th April, 1995

And like that, she's gone.

On March 31st, after an argument with a former employee and president of her fan club, Selena turned to leave the Days Inn room where they had agreed to meet and was shot deep in the right shoulder. She died of blood loss just over an hour later in a Corpus Christi hospital.

The immense and immediate public grief that followed was the occasion of most Anglophone music fans' first hearing of her. Tom Brokaw called her "the Madonna of Mexico" on the evening news, but he was wrong. She was the Madonna of America — of that portion of America which, just as free and proud and God-fearing as any other, has worked harder, lived on less, and built more (at least west of the Mississippi). Mexico? Please. Selena was from Texas.

(Which isn't to say she wasn't proud of her Mexican heritage, same as anyone can be of their Irish or Italian or whatever. Just noting acts of erasure where I see them.)

And by now hopefully you'll have clicked play and wondered why I haven't yet mentioned the song. It's a great song even if you don't know Spanish, and you recognized that guitar line right away. But although it was her first number one after her death, it was the fourth single from Amor Prohibido, and so even if the imagery was kind of apt (see below), there was always going to be a feeling of exhaustion to whatever song took this place.

But the fact that it's a rewrite of perhaps the most buoyant, sparkling song of ache and loss ever written (even if Chrissy Hynde's new-wave Kinksisms have little in common with Selena's skanking cumbia) very nearly lifts it above mere fourth-single roteness and into something grander, more eloquent: a self-eulogy. The Spanish lyric, written by Ricky Vela, takes its lead from the opening line of the original — "I found a picture of you" — and sticks to the image. Selena sings "tengo fotos y recuerdos" ("I [only] have photos and memories") over the title melody, and while her background singers gamely imitate the "ooh ahh" chants which Hynde had borrowed from Sam Cooke, the chain-gang metaphor is lost in translation. Still, the rising "oh-oh-a-oh-ohhh" and the descending, patient guitar figures of the original remain, and in any language it's a beautiful song.

We will see Selena from this deck only once more; we barely got to know her, and already she's slipping out of sight. It would probably be too much to say she changed everything. But she changed enough; the rest of this travelogue will be that much better for all the ways she pushed Latin Pop forward.

LA MAFIA, “TOMA MI AMOR”

2010-12-20T17:53:00.009-07:00

8th April, 1995

When the Hot Latin chart goes norteño, it goes norteño all the way. Forget the politesse of Bronco's string arrangement, or La Mafia's own concessions to electronic modernism — this is the raw stuff, accordion and rhythm section and a singer gritando puro campesino. It's a rare example of a live hit, always unusual outside of 70s AOR, and the fact that it was only on the top of the chart for a week detracts nothing from the fact that hey, it was at the top of the chart at all.

But it's not just the crowd noise that makes this the rawest, most rock & roll record we've encountered yet in our journey. The stiff polka-descended rhythms might not sound very raucous, but the accordion positively shreds, and the gritos aren't a million miles away from Joe Strummer's Peter Pan crows on "London Calling," or from cowboy whoops presaging heavy sales at the saloon and a gunfight in the morning. Sure, people who aren't used to norteño might mutter "Chicken Dance" to themselves, and the lyrics are very nearly simple enough to be a playground chant, but there's a magnificent energy to the song, an organic looseness that suggests that maybe more Latin Pop should have been released to radio from concert recordings.

"Toma Mi Amor" means "take my love," but the verb "tomar" ("take") is also used to mean "drink" — and La Mafia doesn't hesitate to let the suggestiveness bubble up to the surface. It's a bar-band singalong from South Texas, where bar bands are just as likely to be brown as white, and their crowds are composed of shitkickers, hard-working alcoholics, and horndogs either way.

BRONCO, “QUE NO ME OLVIDE”

2010-12-16T18:09:00.002-07:00

11th February, 1995

It’s been building up steam for a while now. The tejano pop of Álvaro Torres and La Mafia broke the ground; the unashamedly rustic cumbia rhythms of Selena laid the foundation; and even Luis Miguel’s revisiting the style in his immaculately polished manner helped to get people used to the idea. But Bronco is the first actual norteño outfit, unmediated through the gloss and synths of contemporary pop, to hit the top of the Latin chart since it began. In Anglophone pop terms, it’s like a country-blues singer suddenly hitting the top of the charts in 1995 — and not being a one-off either, but making the top spot safe for roots acts ever after.

But norteño is pop in a way that blues and even traditional country are not (at least not anymore). Partly this has to do with the shifting demographics of the Latin Pop audience in the 1990s; where from the beginning of the chart in 1986 it had been driven by urban, middle-class Cuban-Americans and Puerto Ricans in the East and North and Mexican-Americans who had long lived in the American West, beginning in the mid-90s the boom in immigration of poor Mexicans and Central and South Americans to the U.S. pushed Latin Pop towards including more diverse voices: poor people’s music, in fact.

(The reason for this mid-90s boom in immigration? Conservative pundits pretend to be baffled and blame the inherent criminality of brown skin, but I’ll drop a hint: it begins with N and ends with AFTA.)

Those horns, descanting brightly in muted chords, are the first sign: this is traditional Mexican music. José Guadalupe Esparza's high, emotional vocal style is another —— and then the whoop, half laugh, half sob, entirely artificial, the grito mexicano that more than any other sound defines norteño as something particular and vulgar and sets on edge the teeth of listeners for whom the music codes as poverty, as ignorance, as hickface, as hidebound fakery set to a grossly inelegant march (exactly the reaction I had as a child to the honky tonk whine of country, incidentally), for whom norteño is the music of abuelos, of campesinos, of the patria they want nothing to do with. It is firmly itself, not Americanized, not assimilated, not conducive to being remixed or anglicized. There have still been no norteño hits in English (unless "Ring of Fire" counts), almost alone among global pop musics, because once the blues barrier was broken back in the 20s another sound of Otherized Poverty, with which all Americans are familiar second-hand but never first, had to rise to take its place.

But this is still pop-norteño, those lush strings particularly taking the place of what would, a year earlier, be synthesizers. And I'm not entirely convinced they're not; but it's the mid-90s and gestures towards "authenticity" of any stripe are appreciated more than the sonic novelty and futurism that peaked once in the 80s but will peak higher still in years to come.

The song? It's a traditional-sounding lament (though written by Esparza) — "Please Don't Forget Me" would be a rough translation of the title's sentiment, and the rest can be extrapolated from it. It's the fact of the song, more than the song itself, that excites me. So much more is to come.

LA MAFIA, “ME DUELE ESTAR SOLO”

2010-12-13T13:24:00.000-07:00

21st January, 1995

La Mafia's previous appearances in these pages have been piano ballads, tasteful — of their kind — and even excessively polite, as though they had put on their good suits in order to enter the charts and were reluctant to turn around for fear something might break. But something happened between then and now; even though their previous single was off the same album, it's highly unlikely this one would have made it to the top if it weren't for the gravitational force exerted by the high-mass formation of a new star.

Tejano, the specifically Texan homebrew of cumbia, norteño, and American r&b and pop, was the new sound of Latin radio, and the way La Mafia presses hard on cumbia's Caribbean beat, skanking hard at reggae tempos, may be the funkiest sound we've had to date. As well as one of the tackiest — speaking as someone who grew up in the late 80s and early 90s, there are class and taste implications in the cheap keyboard sounds and drum-machine presets La Mafia use here that still trigger hot floods of embarrassment deep in my subconscious. But I'm learning to own it, to even rejoice in it (the unlikely reappearance of similar off-brand synth textures on the radio in 2011 is some help here), and the groove bounces enough to forgive anything.

Or maybe I'm just overidentifying with the lyrics. "Me Duele Estar Solo" means "it hurts to be alone," and the fact that the self-pitying lyrics are sung with such a smooth, carefree delivery over a very sunny bounce only appeals even more to someone who prefers to wrap unflattering self-pity in a breezy irony that dares anyone else to feel sorry for me. (I didn't say I succeed.) If it's a little hard to imagine raising a maudlin glass to the chorus, that's only because bopping to the rhythm might spill the beer.

SELENA, “NO ME QUEDA MÁS”

2010-12-09T16:50:00.000-07:00

17th December, 1994

We close out 1994 appropriately, with the woman who owned 1994 top-to-bottom. It's her fourth number one of the year, and on first listen it's her least modern. It sounds like it could have been recorded in the sixties or even earlier, all tight-strummed guitars and a mini-orchestra pumping film-cue trills in on every bar. The lush r&b of "Dondequiera Que Estés," the skanking cumbia of "Amor Prohibido" and "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom" are nowhere to be found here; Ana Gabriel, or even Rocío Dúrcal, could just as easily have recorded this.

Which is partly the point. Latin music is just as much invested in understanding itself as existing in continuity with grand old traditions as country music is; understandably so, given the socially conservative makeup of both core audiences. Selena is very much a way into the future, but she knows that her novelty exists on sufferance: without explicit nods, explicit ties to the past, she remains on unstable ground, as easily dropped as any other novelty. And of course she loves the grand old traditions herself; listen to how enthusiastically she rips into the traditional sobbing ranchera style of singing. Juicy melodramatics no know expiration date.

But the song only sounds old; it was written by Ricky Vela, who was in love with Selena's sister Suzette, after she married, and it's not in the old florid poetic style of traditional bolero ranchero. The vivid images of traditional romántico are left behind as the lyrics deal only in direct emotions; this is a song about how loss of love shatters a person's conception of self, and Vela baldly states it. The opening lines, "no me queda más/que perderme en un abismo de tristeza y lágrimas" translate to "I have nothing left/but to lost myself in an abyss of sadness and tears." It's mopey stuff, for sure; but Selena's vibrant performance, and the refusal of the music to get maudlin, rescues it. Which isn't to say that the song isn't better-written than Selena's previous number ones (not that great writing is everything) — Vela's Spanish is much less basic than A. B. Quintanilla's.

Selena has conquered her world. Dance, ballads, funk, traditional music; she can do it all. Naturally, her sights are set higher still; there's a whole other market out there still to conquer. 1995, and all it will bring, waits right around the corner. No spoilers.

LUIS MIGUEL, “LA MEDIA VUELTA”

2010-12-06T16:41:00.004-07:00

26th November, 1994

Again, before listening to Luis Miguel's version, I highly recommend that you hear the original, recorded by its composer José Alfredo Jiménez in 1963. Jiménez was one of the great ranchera composers and performers in the 50s and 60s, a self-taught songwriter of proletariat origins who contributed immensely to the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, producing a body of work that few songwriters anywhere have equaled in scope and quality.

This particular song takes a bolero form (the punctuated guitar rhythm is what gives it away), making it even dreamier and more classically-minded than usual for ranchera, and ranchera is usually one of the more dreamy and traditional Latin genres. Luis Miguel plays up the classicism, holding the power of his voice mostly in check throughout. As I've had occasion to point out again and again, he's a singer of consummate skill: here, the quality of power held in reserve mirrors the lyric.

"La Media Vuelta" translates literally as "The Half-Turn," and it's a term borrowed from the art of bullfighting; the media vuelta is a method of sticking the bull that requires perfect agility and timing — like a dance, which is the other use of the stock phrase. The singer of "La Media Vuelta" is renouncing his love for her own good; all the power in the relationship lies on his side, as he admits when he says "yo soy tu dueño" (a tricky phrase which translates as "I am your lord and master," but connotes something like "you're so in love with me that you'll do whatever I say"). The sentiments are horrific from a feminist point of view — dude's just dictating to her regardless of her own wishes, can't they sit down and talk this out? — but as a representation of a certain floridly Romantic scenario (it's all a bit Mr. Rochester), it's an effective character portrait. He's aware of the damage he's doing, but power is its own reward.

LOS REHENES, “NI EL PRIMERO NI EL ÚLTIMO”

2010-12-02T16:26:00.004-07:00

19th November, 1994

Already Selena has begun changing the landscape of Latin Pop. Los Rehenes, a zacatecano band (from the central Mexican state of Zacatecas) which had had some local popularity on an independent label, suddenly zooms to the top of the charts not because they're anything special, necessarily — lots of local regional dance-and-corrido bands could have done as well — but because they're working the cumbia beat with modern electronic flourishes: those drum-machine fills are almost identical to the ones on "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom."

Which isn't entirely fair to Javier and Roberto Torres and their bandmates. Their sound, both classic and modern, was what the moment demanded as Selena opened up an appetite for tejano and related music in the U.S. Latin market, and they could write. "Ni El Primero, Ni El Último" means "neither the first nor the last," and the shrugging fatalism and class-consciousness of the lyric — he's not the first to strike out in love, he's not alone in being despised for his poverty, he doesn't offer the sun and the moon because they're not his to give — is charming and refreshing after the steady diet of extravagant emotionalism which the past eight years of baladas románticas have fed us, punctuated occasionally by silly dance songs.

This is in fact the closest we have come yet to the Mexican version of what country music has traditionally been in the United States: the place where showmanship meets heartbreak, where lower-class solidarity meets pop tunefulness, and wry grins and cowboy hats go hand in hand. It's not quite puro regional, it's slickly produced and major-label poppy, with that pumped-out keyboard hook and those juddering post-industrial fills, but we can see regional from here. We'll see more of it.

SELENA, “BIDI BIDI BOM BOM”

2010-11-29T15:58:00.001-07:00

22nd October, 1994

Tom Ewing’s Popular column at Freaky Trigger — on which this blog is unashamedly based — has a graphic at the top which changes out every so often, using a picture of the biggest pop star(s) of the era that Tom’s covering to orient the readership in the historical moment. If this blog had a similar graphic, Selena would be the unquestioned icon of this age. Not only was she the biggest Latin Pop star of her era — big deal, lots of people have been for lots of respective eras — but she was one of the biggest stars of her era period, doing for Latin Pop roughly what Taylor Swift (at the moment of writing) has been doing for country-pop. Namely, revitalizing it for a lot of people and confirming a lot of other people’s biases against it; a pop star’s probably not doing her job if a significant amount of people don’t hate her.

If “Amor Prohibido” was her all-conquering single, the first triumph in her own voice and style which made her queen over a vast territory of pop, “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom” represents a consolidation of power — she’s not just a lament-singer, she can do uptempo dance music too. Not too uptempo — the cumbia rhythm and skanking guitars suggest a lazy beachfront jam rather than a hot dancefloor stomp — but funky and playful where she’s previously been anthemic, even melodramatic. The secret theme of Nineties Music, cross-genre mélange, is given superb form here: Selena combines cumbia tejano, coastal reggae, beach funk, florid r&b vocalizing, and a crisply, bluesy guitar solo into a perfectly-balanced solution that contemporary “eclectic” magpies like Beck or that dude from Soul Coughing might envy.

The title phrase “bidi bidi bom bom” isn’t dictionary Spanish, but onomatopoeia for the giddy beating of a heart. (A rough translation might be “thumpa thumpa dum dum.”) The lyrics, insofar as they matter beyond the gorgeous swell of Selena’s ex tempora vocalizing, are all about how her heart races when someone walks by or speaks in her hearing. The verses are so magnificently generalized, so completely abandoned to anyone’s use, that not even a gender is attributed to the person who’s to blame for this arrhythmia, just a third-person tense. It’s an intentionally slight song, and Selena delivers a complementary performance. You couldn't describe it as slight, not with that lungpower, but it has the impermanence of real joy — even as you try to latch onto it, it flutters away.

LUIS MIGUEL, “EL DÍA QUE ME QUIERAS”

2010-11-25T10:51:00.005-07:00

17th September, 1994

Before you do anything else, you're going to want to click here. That's a link to the original version of this song, recorded in 1935 by tango pioneer, pop singer, and first Latin superstar of the twentieth century, Carlos Gardel. To get the full effect you may wish to read along with the lyrics, which I've translated (very roughly) at the bottom of this post.

Are you back? Okay.

Gardel's song, a self-consciously pastoral fantasia, a movie song (it was written by Gardel and lyricist Alfredo Le Pera for the Argentinean movie of the same name, starring Gardel), and a ballad very much in the international Thirties tradition of sumptuous sentiment married to coolly unemotional performances (compare to Bing Crosby or Dick Powell), is one of the great songs in the Latin Pop tradition, the definitive ballad of the Golden Age of Tango (ca. 1915-1955), the sudden flowering of modernism in Latin American popular culture comparable to the mixture of jazz and Art Deco in America. The tango rhythm here is almost subterranean due to the ballad tempo; only the entrance of the bandoneón in the last few choruses ties it to the traditional tango sound.

By covering this song, and by releasing it as the initial single off his new album Segundo Romance (Second Romance), Luis Miguel is explicitly placing himself as the successor to Gardel's fusion of modernism, sentiment, and iconicity -- Gardel died in a plane crash not long after recording this song, cementing his legendary status. Imagine Michael Jackson topping the charts with an Astaire cover (say "They Can't Take That Away from Me") in 1989, and you might get something of the interplay of reverence, ambition, and sheer inertial popularity at work here.

As the title of the album indicates, this is Miguel's second time laying claim to the tradition of classic Latin Pop (you may recall that the first Romance, a more strictly bolero album, produced "Inolvidable" and "No Sé Tú"), but it was far and away his most successful -- in fact it holds the record for highest-selling Latin album by a male singer of the 1990s. This probably has less to do with his fidelity to tradition than to his own magnetic self; his version of "El Día Que Me Quieras" isn't particularly faithful to Gardel's original in either chord voicing or phrasing (though he does keep the bandoneón, the instrument that sounds like a higher, thinner accordion). He converts it, essentially, into a Luis Miguel song of the 1990s, and if (like me) you have a hopeless passion for the thin crackle and low-frequency orchestras of old 78s, the blown-up keyboards and polished, glistening soup of a production is wince-inducing in comparison to the original.

But the polish and temper of Miguel's own voice cannot be denied; and if he is a worthy successor to Gardel, it is in the impeccability of his phrasing. He too paints on a sweepingly sentimental canvas, but his brushes are dry, and the song, which could easily be a wreck of overemoting in other throats, is instead a monumental sculpture, a nostalgia-free tribute to the Art Deco era in modern materials and to a modern scale. Of course, nothing ages so quickly as modernity.

Those lyrics:

It caresses my dreams,

the soft murmur of your breath.

How life laughs

if your black eyes want to watch me.

And if mine is the comfort?

of your light laughter like a song,

it calms my troubles,

all, all is forgotten.

The day you love me

The adorning rose

will dress for a party

in its best color.

And on the wind the bells

will say that you're mine now,

and laughing the fountains

will tell of your love.

The night you love me

from the blue sky

the jealous stars

watch us go by.

And a mysterious ray of light

will nest in your hair,

a strange firefly you will see

that you are my consolation.

The day you love me

nothing will be other than harmonious.

Clear will be the aurora

and happy the wellspring.

The breeze will quietly carry

rumors of melody.

And the fountains will give us

their crystal song.

The day you love me,

the songbird will sweeten its instrument.

Life will bloom,

pain will exist no ore.

The night you love me

from the blue sky

the jealous stars

watch us go by.

And a mysterious ray of light

will nest in your hair,

a strange firefly you will see

that you are my consolation.

RICARDO MONTANER, “QUISIERA”

2010-11-22T18:09:00.000-07:00

3rd September, 1994

In the middle of the most exciting year Latin Pop has had since the chart started (and more wonders to come, or at least I'll think so), it's helpful to be reminded that some things are constant. This will be our last encounter with Ricardo Montaner (barring unexpected comebacks, of course), and he goes out as he came in, with a blustery, rather pompous ballad that gestures towards the dramaturgy of rock but ends only by overstaying its welcome.

"Quisiera" means, roughly, "I would wish" or "I could wish" (the imperfect subjunctive mood isn't available in modern English), and what he wishes is to hide the person addressed away in oblivion ("esconderte en olvido," i.e. to forget her); it's another self-dramatizing portrait of a love affair gone badly, and he claims to suffer from "delirio y mezclade hastío" (madness blended with boredom), for which the only cure is to consign her to the deep past, for centuries and centuries (no really! that's the chorus!) — that, it turns out, is what he would wish.

Well, I can only wish him well in his attempt to forget. His own appearances here have been pretty difficult to remember, so we're even; and besides, we're hurtling forward into fascinating territory, and we don't need undercooked power ballads dragging us down.

JUAN GABRIEL, “PERO, QUE NECESIDAD”

2010-11-18T22:41:00.000-07:00

27th August, 1994

He's back!

You might be forgiven for not immediately jumping to your feet with excitement, but instead wrinkling the brow and murmuring "who now?" After all, it's been more than six years since Juan Gabriel last made an appearance in this travelogue, and six years is an eternity in pop years.

At least that's usually what writers say; in truth, such gaps aren't as uncommon as the breathless hype about whatever comeback kid is in the news would have you believe. Anyone who's had a substantial pop career (that is, one spanning longer than a decade) has had fallow periods, especially as they get older and take longer breaks between albums, spend time with their families, ad tour. The difference is that Juan Gabriel's fallow period was not (entirely) of his own choice; embroiled in a contractual dispute with BMG over publishing rights, he refused to write or record any new material until he got ownership of his songs. In 1994 a new contract was drawn up, and in 2000 all rights reverted to Gabriel. A happy ending, then; but while Gabriel's career will continue to flourish to the extent that he's slated for several more appearances as we journey into the future, he is no longer the force of nature he was in the 80s, having been leapfrogged by a generation of stars who were teenagers the last time he was in this position.

His 1988 swan song "Debo Hacerlo," was, if you remember, a profoundly strange song, sounding homemade and beat-boxy while still twisting uncomfortably through several different Latin strains, from flamenco to merengue. "Pero Que Necesidad," in contrast, is a comfortable pop song, with the rolling cadences of an old soul or gospel track. He uses some distancing vocal processing (rather like John Lennon in the 70s, in fact), and his sense of rhythm and structure is still highly idiosyncratic, but this is the second song in a row to earn a comparison to Billy Joel's "River of Dreams." Unlike John Secada, though, Gabriel is better than Joel; building on what could have been a schlocky foundation until the meter stretches out in florid designs.

It may go on too long, a few too many choruses perhaps than is strictly necessary to convey the idea of the song; I can practically hear Anglophone listeners muttering that they got it already. But after six years I don't suppose his fans begrudged him a victory lap or three; and like the gospel music he's referencing, the music swells continually, celebratorily, and we lose track of time. In gospel, this functions as foretaste of eternity; similarly, ecstatic modern dance music can have a related effect of abandon and self-forgetfulness. "Pero Que Necesidad" plods in a little too earthbound a fashion for that, I think, but the intent is there.

It's in writerly structure, not musical rush, that Gabriel approaches abandon: the chorus, two orderly lines followed by a babble of syllables spilling out in an upward swoop, is a masterstroke matching form to content. "Pero que necesidad/para que tanto problema," he sings ("but what need/for what big problem") — he's speaking in romantic generalities, but anyone who had paid attention would know exactly what big problem he's dismissing — "no hay como la libertad de ser, de estar, de ir, de amar, de hacer, de hablar, de andar así sin penas" ("there's nothing like the freedom to be, to exist, to go, to love, to make, to talk, to walk this way without pain").

He's exulting, and properly so; but the second half of the chorus extends the exultation generously to his audience: "Pero que necesidad/para que tanto problema/mientras yo le quiero ver feliz, cantar, bailar, reir, soñar, sentir, volar, ellos le frenan." ("But what need/for what big problem/in the meantime I want to see you happy, singing, dancing, laughing, dreaming, feeling, flying, they will fade away.") It's a song of triumph, even though the verses couch it in a romantic lament, explaining that he wants the best for his nameless auditor (who is even referred to in the third person the sentiments so abstract) (or in the formal second person, which is even more unusual for a love song). But it's not the verses that stick in the head.

JON SECADA, “SI TE VAS”

2010-11-15T20:57:00.005-07:00

13th August, 1994

Two years ago, he burst onto this list like a breath of fresh, modernizing air, his soulful voice pirouetting with the sheer joy of self; now, he slogs his way through a dispirited power ballad, leaning on crutches that have long since gone out of favor, a shell of his former self.

It's worth noting, of course, that neither of those things are entirely true: "Otro Día Más Sin Verte" wasn't nearly as revolutionary as it seemed at the time, particularly now that world has Selena in it, and "Si Te Vas" is neither his low-point nor the end of the road for him, though it is the end of our association with him. Like many former and to-be-former number-one stars, he's dug a comfortable niche for himself as an overtanned, permagrinning fixture on the Latin nostalgia circuit, releasing an album every so often — the most recent is Clásicos/Classics, a trip through American-Latin standards that begins with "Oye Como Va" and ends with "La Bamba" — without bothering a chart that is increasingly focused on what the kids are listening to these days.

So perhaps the inevitable comparison here is to Billy Joel's "River Of Dreams," a similarly bland, soulless song that makes similar use of the gospel-choir crutch, which similarly marked the end of a career as a pop hitmaker, and which similarly exposed melodic and vocal weaknesses that were not previously so noticeable. Secada's voice actually sounds patchy here, like he might be sick or like he's laying down a demo vocal which they'll nail on the second pass. (Or, if it were several years later, which the producer forgot to pitch-correct before the track went to master.) The track starts promisingly, with a twinkly piano line that recalls house music, but any interesting production ideas are soon thrown out the window so that Secada can emote (poorly) all over the place.

"Si Te Vas" means "if you go," and it's as standard a lament/vow of love as the title promises. Unfortunately for him, Secada hasn't learned another trick; he's still pushing his once-fascinating combination of vaguely funky beats, soul-style singing, and dreary romanticism, and he's being left behind.

SELENA, “AMOR PROHIBIDO”

2010-11-11T20:26:00.010-07:00

11th June, 1994

There are at least five takes on this song battling each other to get out of me, so let's see how well I can juggle.

First let's talk about Selena. We already have, a bit, but those were only voices crying in the wilderness make straight the paths. Here she is herself, incarnate, not mediated by other voices, other scripts, other genres. (Of course, since she wasn't actually divine — more's the pity — this too is mediated, particularly by her producer and older brother A. B. Quintanilla III and frequent colaborator Pete Astudillo. But more about that below.) But this is not only Selena having greatness thrust upon her, this is the achievement of greatness by a woman who has worked very hard for many years and has made a breakthrough that is as much artistic, personal and cultural as it is commercial. She's sung rings around the Barrio Boyzz already, but that was as though to prove she could, matching a genre and a sense of place that isn't hers. Because although at age twenty-three she has lived anywhere in the Spanish-speaking US that she could perform, from quinceañeras and state fairs to nightclubs and dancehalls to video shoots and awards banquets, she is a Texas girl at heart, with all the many meanings that phrase can have.

There were Texans long before there was a Texas, and she has roots that go back farther than Sam Houston or even Cabeza de Vaca. Her beauty is not just the high-contrast drama of the chola (though there's that too), but the imperious impassivity of the indigena, and she has always been royalty. And the music she makes is Texan: planted square on the ground, grounded in traditional identities even as it races forward into technofuturism, and bigger and better than anything else around. The word is tejano, which means Texan and was there first, and the rhythm is cumbia, and it's been the rhythm of poor latinoamericanos since at least the 1950s, when it first spread from the coasts of Colombia, where it was invented by Africans, Europeans, and Indians working together even though only one of the races was not bought and sold and killed like property.

And this is where it gets personal, because I, who am not descended from slaves whether African or American, first heard the cumbia rhythm as the celebratory music of poor Latin Americans when I lived in Guatemala, not a boy but not yet a man, and I took against it from the first. I am ashamed to write these words, ashamed of the repulsion my virgin white mind felt — still feels on occasion, when I don't trample it down and snarl through gritted teeth to listen, dammit — because I experienced poverty in those days as an Other, a brown and crippled and foul-smelling horror which I would do anything to get away from. With its stiff, poky gait, cumbia became a visceral representation of my colonial disgust with native life and culture. This is me calling myself racist. And this is me reminding myself that the previous sentence doesn't get me, or anyone, off the hook.

It wasn't until investigating Argentinean music earlier this year (for entirely unrelated reasons) that I learned to hear cumbia as the tropical rhythm it is — not a million miles from one-drop reggae, in fact — instead of as the undifferentiated, droning, dull party music of poor Mayans in the Sierra Madre highlands I originally took it for. And even then, it took a modern indie-pop version before the penny dropped.

The Texan version of cumbia, which has been running strong since the 1970s, owes a little more to Mexican norteña and American country, and it might help unfamiliar ears to think of Selena as the Mexican-American equivalent of Faith Hill or Shania Twain, riding a retrofurbished boot-scootin' boogie to gleaming modernist pop ends. And the cumbia rhythm makes "Amor Prohibido" that rare encounter in this travelogue, a midtempo song, neither baile nor balada, but pop, with a funky drive to the beat that makes it nearly impossible not to sway along even if it's not fast enough for athletic dancing. Traditional cumbia dance, with its short, intricate steps, does in fact require boots to scoot; it was originally a working-class courtship ritual.

Finally (and speaking of ritual!), the lyric deserves examination. The title translates as "Forbidden Love," and if the phrase doesn't have quite the same charge in Spanish as it does in English, where connotations of closeted homosexuality have accreted over the years, it's still a rich pop vein to mine. Selena, perhaps appropriately for her big, splashy introduction to the wider Latin Pop world, takes a Romeo And Juliet tack. The chorus runs:

Amor prohibido, murmuran por los calles

Porque somos de distintas sociedades

Amor prohibido, nos dice todo el mundo

El dinero no importa en tí y en mí

Ni en el corazón

Oh oh, baby

Which, before I provide the translation, I should point out is the Spanish of someone for whom Spanish is not their first language: this is a very basic lyric in both vocabulary and ideas, and perhaps all the more successful for it. (Not everyone who listens to Latin Pop in the US is as comfortable with Spanish as their parents or grandparents were. And not everyone who speaks Spanish is educated in it.) Translated, it runs:

Forbidden love, they whisper in the streets

Because we are from different societies

Forbidden love, says the whole world to us

Money doesn't matter to you or to me

Or to the heart

Oh oh, baby

This entire travelogue has taken place in the shadow of another, much larger pop scene just beyond the borders of this one. We have encountered it here and there — Los Lobos, Jon Secada, and Gloria Estefan all crossed the border regularly — but for the most part Latin Pop has been a shadowy, underrepresented underclass, and the Anglophone Pop which sits by it on the radio is bigger, louder, more violent, and in its wholesale domination of the discourse, as colonial and even oppressive as anyone who wanted to make the two pop scenes a metaphor for the two (for which read multiple) societies could wish.

If I used blasphemously Christological language about Selena earlier, it's precisely because she was uniquely positioned, for a brief period, to bridge that gap. For many people, in fact, she did; and one reason that I've spent so much (so much!) time talking about her is that she's still one of the Names that even people who don't know anything about Latin Pop know. We'll have plenty more opportunities to talk about what exactly was lost; "Amor Prohibido" by no means sums up her contribution to Latin Pop — fuck that, to Pop, punto y final. But it's a fantastic best foot forward, a progressive anthem of racial and cultural (and sexual, if you want it to be) unity taking its cues from traditional sounds that might even play as hokey to some ears. She would fly yet higher; but I'm not sure that she ever burned brighter.

PIMPINELA, “CON UN NUDO EN LA GARGANTA”

2010-11-08T21:12:00.009-07:00

14th May, 1994

I've been crowing in the past few entries about the modernization, newfound sophistication, and even hipness of Latin Pop in 1994; and right on cue, here come Pimpinela to serve up some good old-fashioned corn.

Pimpinela were (are, even) that most deeply unfashionable of showbiz staples, a brother-sister act. Lucía and Joaquín Galán were from Buenos Aires, had longstanding showbiz connections — Luis Aguilé, a popular singer and composer in the 1950s, got them their start in the early 80s — and sang in an old-fashioned romantic style, the way brother-sister acts always do. Here, with the mandolin-like washes of melody over a one-two saunter, they're recalling classic ranchera styles, but their voices are purest pop — especially Lucía's high, thin dream-pop tone, which I'd like to hear more of in a less restrictive environment.

The song itself is a traditional-sounding (the songwriting credits include both Galáns, so it's not that traditional) lament for lost love: the title translates as "with a lump in my throat," and Lucía sings of how she regrets having said goodbye, while Joaquín swears he never meant to hurt her. It's so traditional, in fact, that this is (as far as I can remember) the first appearance of an accordion — or an accordion-like instrument; the production's so vague and dreamlike, it's hard to tell — in this travelogue. Anyone who's been near a building site in the Southwest knows that the accordion is perhaps the most traditional ranchera instrument there is; it may say something about the powerful gravitational pull of 1980s synthetics that it's taken this long to hear it here.

LA MAFIA, “VIDA”

2010-11-04T17:54:00.008-07:00

7th May, 1994

A rising tide lifts all boats. The last time we heard from La Mafia, the Texan romántico group, they were still in an 80s hangover, with thin production and warbly synths that didn't even rise to the gloss of Los Bukis. But the game's been raised: Jon Secada and Gloria Estefan are making pop as burnished and high-definition as anyone anywhere, and there's less excuse for Latin Pop to languish in a ghetto of underproduction and out-of-date sounds just because its audience is poorer (on average) than the wider pop audience. It's the 90s — everyone's getting richer.

As a song, this isn't much: the central conceit, that he's singing to Life itself as if it were a woman (or to a woman as though she were Life itself; it's pleasantly ambiguous), is a standard of romantic poetry, and everyone from Shakespeare to Tumblr kids have had a run at it. Melodically, it's a little restrictive, plodding along in the same key without much variation, and Oscar De La Rosa, the vocalist, could either be commended for his restraint or (more likely) just called boring; the very brief moment towards the end when he goes off-script and starts singing with a bit of soul is what a lifetime of Anglophone pop listening was leading me to expect at every moment.

But it's the the production, classy without being stiff or standoffish, that makes the song for me. I love the sound of a piano — real piano, not synthesized approximations — and its appearance as the lead instrument here disposed me favorably towards the song anyway. Then the gorgeous Spanish guitar solo shows up, and I'm hooked. Even the backing strings are used tastefully, decorative rather than overwhelming, with a real sense of narrative flow which the song and the singer lack. If we must have ballads, I much prefer this style — intimate, tasteful, even restrained — to the emotionally extravagant bombast, whether orchestral or synthesized, which has so far been usual here.

BARRIO BOYZZ & SELENA, "DONDEQUIERA QUE ESTÉS"

2010-11-01T18:26:00.010-07:00

26th March, 1994

World, she's arrived. Prepare to be changed.

We've encountered Selena before, but while she was notable, the song wasn't: a perfunctory saunter through a traditional romántico duet that almost anyone we've seen in these pages to date could have done just as well, to just as little effect. And she's back duetting with another flash-in-the-pan; for the second time, she's just about the only reason to pay attention to her partners' second (of two) appearances at the top.

But Barrio Boyzz, while they may not graze our notice again, have this much over Álvaro Torres: they sound like Now. The snapping new jack swing beat, the house piano, and the alternately lush and silky harmonies are all precisely where urban candyfloss pop was at in 1994, and Selena has outgrown her Ana Gabriel imitation, instead channeling an r&b diva that not only keeps up with but far outpaces the Boyzz. Their name was on the hit — she was officially a guest on their album, which was named for the song — but nobody buys Barrio Boyzz compilations for the song: by all reckonings, it's her first major hit, the place where Srta. Quintanilla-Pérez, quinceañera performer, talent-show winner, and jobbing local-circuit singer, became Selena, global pop star.

The song (as opposed to the production) is still not quite worthy of her talents. The translated title would be "Wherever You Are," and the chorus continues, just as tritely in Spanish as it comes out in English: "remember, I will be there at your side ... I think of you and feel for you ... I will always be your first love." But she has a sharper sense of rhythm than her duet partners and is in full command of her impressive vocal faculties, and once the dovey lyrics die down and she can just play with the beat, she scats circles around all of them. Not even Mariah was showboating like this; Mary J. Blige is about the only English-language equivalent, and she hadn't yet come fully into her own either.

But enjoy the breezy New York funk while it lasts; when she returns, it will be as a full-throated Texan, and the world will be, ever so briefly, hers.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “MI BUEN AMOR”

2010-10-28T08:00:00.003-07:00

12th March, 1994

The second number one in a row to begin with lush, cinematic strings; but where Ana Gabriel's strings are opulent but generic, evoking the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema without straying from her melodic template, Gloria Estefan is going for something more specific, letting the chords arrange themselves into contrapuntal patterns like something half-classical, and recording them closely, intimately. It's the difference between shared nostalgia, Ana inviting a stadium to get caught up in her voluptuous passion, and personal nostalgia, Gloria dreaming aloud in a café, or rather in a highly polished and superbly set-dressed simulacra of one.

Four years from now, English-speaking audiences will fall in brief but highly lucrative love with traditional Cuban music because Ry Cooder told them to. Mi Tierra barely registered with that audience; but it's not spoiling anything to note that the rootsy, rock-approved Buena Vista Social Club will not be making an appearance in these pages. They were taken up by NPR, Rolling Stone, and the rest of the rockcrit establishment because their music sounded raw, authentic, and effortless; but the Latin Pop audience preferred what pop audiences always have: romantic music, aspirational music, constructed music. Glamour is an essential element of pop, and the photo-negative glamour of gritty poverty is generally only attractive to people who aren't in danger of slipping into it.

"Mi Buen Amor" ("my true love") is about as romantic as it gets: the swoony strings, the careful guitar and bass figures, even the Afro-Cuban percussion striking at a dreamy pace, while Gloria at her most coolly glamorous sings a carefully-constructed son about deathless and unforgettable love. This is her farewell bow from the Mi Tierra album (at least as far as this travelogue is concerned), and it's a lovely tableau, frozen in sepia-toned pre-revolutionary time, by which to remember her.

At least until she returns, in other clothes.

ANA GABRIEL, “LUNA”

2010-10-25T08:22:00.010-07:00

19th February, 1994

The strings come in all cinematic and lush, overwhelming in their voluptuous sensuality, and we are certainly no longer in the 1980s, or even in the early 90s. We have arrived at a high-water mark for certain iterations of popular culture, a period towards which people who were there at the time look back with increasing nostalgia, unrecoverable, a golden age of corporation-sponsored pop musc. The CD has definitively replaced the LP and the cassette, and the industry is reeling in the surplus that high markups, overextended running times, and the more-or-less constant discovery of previously untapped markets are providing. For established stars like Ana Gabriel, nothing is out of reach, no sound too expensive, the keyboard-and-plastic guitar of her first number one (which sounded glossy and burnished even then) now a distant memory.

And so she dives into memory and tradition, as so many of her peers did in the 90s, recovering old forms; the largest untapped market being, as always, the past. It was the decade of the reissue, and all music got its story told and retold through official corporate channels, unless there were artists with enough clout and certainty to tell history their way, to override the cults of authenticity and white-guy taste to bring up ghosts that didn't fit neatly into the Rolling Stone or Rough Guide versions of history. "Luna" is old-fashioned Mexican or even Spanish pop, a monologue addressed to the moon about the lover far away who is is, presumably, also staring at the same celestial object. It's a conceit as ancient as Homer (and for kids of my generation perhaps best remembered as the conceit behind the duet in An American Tail), and if the music isn't quite as ancient it's still venerable, from the Verdian strings to the "Spanish Harlem" guitar line keeping the beat.

Gabriel herself even seems muted with the weight of history; her signature Anglo-rock-derived rasp turns into an Italianate sob, and although the song is beautifully structured, a gesture towards classicism that ends up being a classic in its own right, she sort of gets lost in it. Which is one of the dangers of messing around with history; it takes a very strong voice not to drown in those tides.

YURI, “DETRÁS DE MI VENTANA”

2010-10-21T20:40:00.006-07:00

29th January, 1994

The album cover above is a riot of color; and indeed, her two previous number-one singles were riotous and colorful, two of the best dance songs to have been featured in this travelogue, in which dance songs are almost always good. But this is no dance song. If the comparisons I made then with Madonna hold good, those earlier hits were comparable to "Holiday" or "Material Girl" — and this is closer to something off Erotica or Bedtime Stories, a serious examination of sexual relations between adults, in which the moral force of feminism and the narrative force of pop are joined in a work of surprisingly complete power.

But before we dive into the song, a word on its composer. Ricard Arjona isn't a name most English-language pop fans know — and even here, we won't meet him as a performer for several years yet — but he'd been gathering fame in Latin American circles since 1989, when his first regional-hit album, Jesus, Verbo No Sustantivo (a pun on the religious and grammatical meanings of the word verbo) was released. He was a star in Guatemala, where he was born, where he was a local basketball star, where he taught secondary school for a time, and like regional stars everywhere — especially those with songwriting talent — he was essentially on a farm team to the pop establishment. This was his first song to gain wide exposure throughout the Spanish-speaking world, and both as a piece of songwriting and as a cultural event, he could hardly have made a better shot.

Yuri sings in character as a woman, as a wife, tired of a loveless, sexually unfulfilling, and oppressive marriage: each verse begins with the words "ya me cansé" ("now I'm tired," in the sense of "sick and tired") and lists her grievances: he doesn't look at her, doesn't touch her, she feels the walls closing in, she only knows she's a woman because she does the dishes — and that's just the opening line. The whole thing is a magisterial portrait of Betty Friedan-esque rage at patriarchal oppression and (even more damning) at conjugal impotence, both figurative and literal. The final words of the chorus, "contigo pero sola" ("with you but alone") are a brilliant condensation of the emotions of a (traditional) woman trapped in a (traditional) marriage. Latin Pop is about nothing if not tradition, but neither Arjona nor (at least at this stage in her career) Yuri was interested in shoring up the traditions. Like Ana Gabriel, whose signature rasp Yuri occasionally approximates here, they smuggle genuinely countercultural content into what could be understood, if you weren't paying attention, as a standard romantic lament.

It's a powerful performance, and the production, crisp and billowy, with plenty of space and pulsing crescendos, matches it. The thin plasticity of the 80s, where we began, is far in the rearview now. We've reached 1994, and the future's never been brighter.

BARRIO BOYZZ, "CERCA DE TÍ"

2010-10-18T11:40:00.000-07:00

18th December, 1993

The potted biographies you can find online make them out to be a late-breaking Latino response to the New Kids On The Block, who were of course a later-wave white response to New Edition. All of which means that the Barrio Boyzz came along fairly early in the life cycle of the modern boy band — they far predated the Backstreet Boys, but not Take That — but in the life cycle of Latin Pop's response to American urban pop (at least insofar as it's tracked by these number ones, a woefully incomplete story if there ever was one), they take John Secada's new jack swing beat and inject smooth r&b harmonies. Result: a Latino version of Boyz II Men, even down to the ersatz classicism.

It's still a ballad, but the well-known melody (it's a cover of Bread's "Make It With You," not that you needed to be told) gives it a classic gauzy-pop feel, the punchy beat gives it some urgency, and these guys — all bilingual (the better to maximize profits) Puerto Ricans from New York — can sing, which is an improvement on NKOTB. Their ethnic and geographical origins are worth noting, by the way: this is the first time that New York, the US city with the largest Hispanic population, has entered our story. There's a reason for that: Nuyoricans tend to be more assimilated, so they don't often drive the Spanish-language market the way Californian, Texan, or Floridian Latinos do. (Plus, of course, they're a much smaller percentage of the New York population than they are elsewhere; there's just more of everybody in New York.) And it didn't last; aside from one rather important duet, they won't make another appearance here, and they never did crack the English-language market at all.

"Cerca De Tí" means "close to you," and you can guess the rest of the lyric's sentiments from there, even if you didn't know the original. The point isn't the romanticism of the words, but the romanticism of the sound, and secondarily of the hunky, sweet-faced boys on album covers and in video clips. The boy band as we know it may have originally been a Puerto Rican invention — Menudo, with their rotating lineup and assumed disposability, are often considered the template for the modern form — but against the accelerated vocal-group competition of the early 90s, Barrio Boyzz were ultimately just too anonymous to overcome a lack of material that stood up even to this glossy 70s retread.

LOS FANTASMAS DEL CARIBE, “POR UNA LÁGRIMA”

2010-10-14T21:31:00.000-07:00

11th December, 1993

Their second number-one hit off their first album, and if they show no sign of diminishing returns their combination of cumbia rhythms, synth keys and fey vocals was never all that astonishing in the first place. If anything, this melody is even more nursery-rhyme than that of their first entry, and the Casio presets even more goofy.

But their combination of tropical ritmos and electronic playfulness makes me think, unexpectedly, of the most futuristic Latin music I know today, the electro-cumbia propagated by the ZZK club and record label out of Buenos Aires, where sound sculptors from all over the world like Frikstailers and El Trip Selector fuse the urgent stasis of cumbia with up-to-the-minute glitch, microhouse, and acid electro, creating avant-garde dance music that still pulses with authentic heat. Los Fantasmas aren't trying todo anything so ambitious, of course; they're party music for parties without any low end, and they use electronic keyboards and drumpads more because, hey, it's 1993 than on any strict aesthetic grounds. But the joy in bringing out novel sounds and setting them against the old rhythm is the same.

The song is, if not a traditional one, then one that sounds traditional: "Por Una Lágrima" means "with one tear," and the singer is accusing his girl of crying false tears to cover up her unfaithfulness to him, a lover's complaint as ancient as love poetry itself. It doesn't at all match the bouncy music, but in a way that's a relief; we've had enough self-pitying ballads lately. Self-pitying dance music is much better.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “CON LOS AÑOS QUE ME QUEDAN”

2010-10-11T17:20:00.000-07:00

13th November, 1993

So "Mi Tierra" was an uptempo dance song. More in line with traditional American pop practices than with Latin ones, La Gloria's second single off the album is a ballad — or at least it's taken at a slow tempo, which isn't quite the same thing. It's still unmistakably tropical, with a back-and-forth beat that seems to fall halfway between Cuban son and Dominican bachata, with gorgeous guitar filigrees by legendary Mexican guitarist Chamin Correa that draw together two continents' worth of guitar tradition, bossa nova and tejano and trova and blues and flamenco and milonga all blinking out of the spaces between the notes.

Her performance is almost as supple and fully as tender. No virtuoso in terms of technique, for most of her career she's been notable as a vocalist mostly for her enthusiasm and brio rather than the elegant carefulness of her phrasing. But here she tackles a song whose melody is structured like traditional pop, the sort of song a jazz singer would take up, and draws the emotion out of it by sheer force of personality. I've taken to reading along with the lyrics while listening to the song, and I was tearing up by the second chorus, both the sentiment and her performance were so pitch-perfect. That shouldn't be a surprise; nothing gets to me like nostalgia.

And this is a very nostalgic record; arranged by the great Cuban jazz bassist Cachao, it uses great swaths of Hollywood strings like Max Steiner, arranging emotions in cubist friezes while Estefan's plaintive voice runs through a lyric not all that far away from the Luis Miguel entry it replaced at the top of the chart. "Con Los Años Que Me Quedan" means "with the years I have left," and the phrase is the first half of a vow, the second half of which is "demostraré cuánto te quiero" ("I will prove how much I love you"). The impulse to exaggerated displays and promises of affection is a familiar one to us from previous ballads, but the implicit acknowledgement of mortality is a new note, which is to say, of course, a very old note. Very little of this travelogue has ever concerned itself with looking backwards; as is proper to all pop, Latin Pop is concerned with the present and the future, and it takes someone of Estefan's stature and confidence to make what is essentially a 1950s torch song set in a Havana café still resonate with enough people long enough to take up residency at the top of the Latin chart for several weeks.

She wrote it with her husband, as she has most of her hits since 1984, and as with "Si Voy A Perderte," it's an entirely different song in the English-language version, which is less intimate in its emotions and more of a conventional "someday-we'll-be-together" study in deferred romance. Same melody, same backing track, different songs — this sort of two-for-the-price-of-one song will become increasingly common the closer we get to the present, as the Latin market increases in clout and visibility in the US, and as more Latin stars try to cross over in the other direction. Gloria Estefan, who's been playing both markets off each other since 1977, just had a head start on everyone else.

LUIS MIGUEL, “HASTA QUE ME OLVIDES”

2010-10-07T14:09:00.006-07:00

23rd October, 1993

It would be easier to find something to say about Luis Miguel's eighth glisteningly-produced, immaculately-sung hit in four years if he changed his game up more often. As it is, the differences between "Hasta Que Me Olvides" and his previous entry, "Ayer," is primarily a matter of the production. "Ayer" was near-symphonic in its lush production; here Miguel waxes merely opulent.

"Hasta Que Me Olvides" means "until you forget me," and the verses are a catalogue of all the things he will do to stave off that inevitable day — promises of fidelity, of obsession, of self-immolation, all in high-flown language that would be a little inaccessible if his voice didn't make the emotions clear. In fact some of the lines have such complex syntax that I'm not quite sure what they're saying, and translation software can only take you so far.

But the song is less an excuse for poetry (it's always just another love song in the end) than it is for Miguel to exercise his gift for timing and phrasing; and the way he pauses and then crashes, with a rush of melisma, on the penultimate "hasta que me olvides" in every chorus is a masterclass in pop ballad singing, keeping the emotional atmosphere fraught without overwhelming the listener with technique or pushing too far into insincerity.

JOSÉ Y DURVAL, “GUADALUPE”

2010-10-04T19:21:00.006-07:00

16th October, 1993

I was starting to panic about the lack of information about José y Durval on the Internet, when a stray Youtube comment pointed me to the fact that they were originally called Chitãozinho e Xororó, and that's where their Wikipedia page is. To sum up: they're a Brazilian sertanejo duo (sertanejo is more or less Brazilian country-pop, the traditional rural form of caipira given a modern pop gloss) who used their given names when they recorded for the Spanish-language market because Spanish speakers are just as bad as English speakers when it comes to pronouncing foreign names.

"Guadalupe" was the theme song to a hugely successful American telenovela of the same name, and it's on that basis (and presumably no other) that the song was a hit: it stayed at the top for a week, then vanished. Produced in Miami, the telenovela's high-drama operatics about organized crime, bastard children, insanity, and true love (at least as far as I can make out; I haven't seen it) has precious little to do with the old-fashioned regional ballad that José y Durval sing about the title character. As something stirring to play over the credits, it's only adequate; our last telenovela theme was far more dramatic and involving, but then Juan Gabriel wrote it, and he hasn't been seen in these parts for many years.

CRISTIAN CASTRO, “NUNCA VOY A OLVIDARTE”

2010-09-30T21:48:00.002-07:00

18th September, 1993

And another young varón thinks he has a shot at the Luis Miguel throne. You get the impression he's studied Miguel closely: not just the histrionic vocals, but the bolero rhythms, the expansive production, and even the record sleeves, where he stares off into the distance with smoldering sexuality in his eyes, shout that this is a teen idol who wants to be taken seriously as a romantic pop star.

He comes of good show-business stock, this young Castro: his mother was a noted singer and actress, and his father was a comedian and actor, one of the Valdés clan who popularized pachuco comedy with Tin-Tan in the 1940s and 50s. A child actor in the eighties, he released his first album when he was eighteen. A year later, he released Un Segundo En El Tiempo, from which this song was the first single.

It's a strong song, originally performed by the norteño outfit Grupo Bronco in their pop-friendly Mexican-country style. Castro adds such modern (i.e. "rock") signifiers as an alto sax and turns it from a two-step into a power ballad, emoting his guts all over the place. Luis Miguel has nothing to worry about; the kid has none of his sense of restraint or timing, and oversings it rather badly. The music holds up its end, and he doesn't manage to embarrass himself too much — it was after all a significant hit, and will become one of his signature songs — but in terms of 90s Latin pop idols, he along with everyone else, dwells very much in one man's shadow.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “MI TIERRA”

2010-09-27T22:32:00.007-07:00

7th August, 1993

Unlikely as it sounds, this is only Gloria Estefan's second appearance in these chronicles. She was far and away the most popular Latin act in the Anglophone market, having racked up a string of hits comparable to Madonna's or Janet Jackson's, at least for consistency if not longevity. I was barely paying attention at the time, and even I remember "Mi Tierra" as a sort of back-to-her-roots move after the campy strut of "Go Away."

But the Latin market was more astringent, demanding songs in Spanish, and Mi Tierra, at long last, complied. Her first all-Spanish-language album, it was less sleek and modern than much of the music she had been making, with or without the Sound Machine. Not that she had ever been particularly cutting-edge or critically acclaimed, rock purists recoiling from her dance-pop diva roots and diva fans skeptical of her sometimes corny sense of humor and often-weak material. Mi Tierra was that particularly rockist move, the back-to-roots record, and let her diva tear into some meaty emotions with mature sensibilities and precise control, and she was rewarded for it in Grammies, sales, and the loving embrace of Latin Pop radio. For the rest of the 90s, Gloria Estefan will be a much more recurrent figure here — just as she begins to fade from sight in English-language pop.

The first single off the album, "Mi Tierra" ("my land") is practically a textbook in Cuban dance styles, beginning with a folk-African drumbeat and shimmying into a guajira, a son, a rumba, and finally, when the horns come in, puro salsa. The lyrics are perhaps the best set of lyrics we've seen to date on this journey, an impressionistic, fragmented, and emotionally charged immigrant's monologue. Estefan herself was born in Cuba but her family escaped to the US when Castro took power; she has not returned. The song is as much an exile's song as an immigrant's, full of longing for the beloved homeland and musical reverie, but as she works her way up to the climax of the song (just before the horns come in), she grows more and more passionate: "sufro eso dolor que hay en su alma, aunque estoy lejos yo lo siento, y ¿un día regreso?" ("I suffer that pain born in [my country's] heart, though I am far away I feel it, and will I return one day?") The question hangs in the air for the briefest of seconds, before the answer is pounded out in three sharp hits: "Yo no sé." ("I don't know.")

Even the music dies away with the anguish of the unresolved, impossible-to-resolve question, before rushing back in harder and fiercer than ever, the horns blare in reckless joy, and even soothing disco strings flutter in. But the flutes still shriek unquietly, and the drums as frantic as ever: the call-and-response returns, as she cries out that she will remember, she will bear witness, her blood runs hot, she carries her tierra within her, and the voices ring back in response "mi tierra ... mi tierra ... mi tierra" in nasal unison after the fashion of traditional Latin American backing singers. The music rises again, the horns implacable, the disquiet overwhelming, and ends on the highest pitch of emotion possible, leaving the listener exhilarated but (if they have understood the words) emotionally drained.

It's a hell of a song, and I hear more in it every time I return to it. It was even a minor hit on various English-language charts, including in the UK and Australia; and I have to wonder why it's not talked about more. Is the Spanish language too daunting? The Cubanismo too specific? Estefan herself too easily dismissed as a pop lightweight? (I've done it myself, based mostly on the fact that everyone I knew who liked her in the 90s were women in their forties.) Consider this a call for Gloria Estefan Reappraisal Month. Or at the very least, point me to the places I've missed where people have given her her due.

LUIS MIGUEL, “AYER”

2010-09-23T23:02:00.000-07:00

17th July, 1993

Jon Secadas may come and Jon Secadas may go, but Luis Miguel is forever. At least that's how it feels now that we are well into the 1990s, as Miguel continues his streak of two hit songs off every album every year, like the hitmaking romance machine he is.

"Ayer" remains true to the Luis Miguel ethic: big, polished, finely crafted, orchestral — very orchestral. Where before Miguel has used classical instrumentation as a sort of filigree on his pop songs, here he attempts a pop-operatic fusion. You could say it was in the air; Guns N' Roses' ridiculously orchestral "November Rain" had been a worldwide smash, and Whitney Houston and Céline Dion were having major hits with studio orchestration that was recorded with the clear, even prissy fidelity of classical recordings rather than the compressed vamping traditional with strings and horns in pop. But far more than at attempt at currency, the hugeness and grandeur of the orchestration is driving home a more timeless point: Miguel is the King of Latin Pop, the most ambitious, accomplished, and able-to-afford-a-symphony-orchestra belter around. Jon Secada may well sound cheap by comparison; as who would not?

"Ayer" ("yesterday") is a song that may not quite live up to the tempestuous orchestration (though Miguel's voice, even more controlled and versatile an instrument than it has been to date, has no problem). Today he dreamed of her, they came together in a whirlwind of passion, oh but it's only a dream. In truth she is lost forever, they tore themselves with love, promises were exchanged, but ... there is a lacuna. He doesn't say how or why it ended, only acknowledges that now, woken from the dream, he realizes that he loved her, and it hurts. Of course it's all said much better — if he doesn't stint on the orchestration he doesn't draw the purse strings tight on the lyrics either. But ultimately it's kind of a weak story for the storming orchestration, and I can't help feeling that he's making too much of it. Maybe if you hadn't taken her for granted in the first place.

JON SECADA, “SENTIR”

2010-09-20T08:00:00.005-07:00

3rd July, 1993

Four singles off the debut album, four songs at the number one spot. Nobody else has had a hit rate like this in Latin Pop, at least not since the chart began; and nobody with comparable success disappeared as quickly. This isn't quite the end of Secada's reign — as with all earthquakes, there were followup tremors for some time afterwards — but it's the beginning of the end. What began sounding like a revolution turns out to be something of a dead end.

At least immediately. Secada did not lead the charge on Cuban-American r&b singers invading the Latin chart, but there are few recurrent figures on the chart today who don't owe at least something to his example. But we'll get to that when we get to them; in the meantime, "Sentir" is an impassioned ode to self-involvement, Secada emoting all about his emotions ("sentir" means "to feel," and boy does he ever) and how their intensity and urgency are all that matter. The you of the lyric (presumably a woman, though he could just as easily be singing into a mirror) exists only as an object of sentiment, the most important thing in the world because his feelings declare it so.

Of course plenty of love songs could be criticized on such grounds; the real grounds for dismissal is that this song retreads ground he's mined plenty of times already. Fourth singles have to introduce us to a new aspect of the performer, or they're just going to be watered-down retreads of what caught our attention in the first place, and "Sentir" only spent two weeks at the top before the chart, and the audience, moved on. Unless Secada could pull off another "Otro Día Más Sin Verte"/"Just Another Day Without You" hat trick, his days too were numbered.

LOS FANTASMAS DEL CARIBE, “MUCHACHA TRISTE”

2010-09-16T22:39:00.003-07:00

12th June, 1993

Los Fantasmas Del Caribe, or The Ghosts Of The Caribbean, were a Venezuelan tropical outfit whose very first single was an unexpected dance hit throughout the Spanish-speaking world. This is that single.

"Muchacha Triste" means "sad girl," but the music doesn't dwell on her sadness. It's got a light synth-reggae beat — plus our first glimpse of a genre that will only grow in importance as we continue, cumbia (the chk-chka-chh triplets in the rhythm), and nothing can sound sad at that bouncy tempo. Anyway, the lyrics focus much more on the singer's swoony love for the muchacha triste, who is repeatedly encouraged to come give him a kiss, than on anything about her.

I'd call it an an evanescent, summery anthem if it didn't feel even too lightweight to be called an anthem. Despite being Venezuelan and therefore creditably Caribbean, it sounds almost British to me. The high, childish vocal melody reminds me of Scottish twee-pop, and the cod-reggae synthesizers with no discernable low end bring to mind Culture Club. But it contains the notes just on the edge of souring which marks working-class Latin pop, and if the voices are fey the funk is real. They dressed like pirates for a reason: George Clinton and Adam Ant must be acknowledged.

LA MAFIA, “ME ESTOY ENAMORANDO”

2010-09-13T16:21:00.007-07:00

10th April, 1993

Not since Los Lobos have we seen this particular configuration in this particular spot: La Mafia are, rarely for the #1 Hot Latin spot, a band; and even more rarely, they're U.S. citizens. Texans, born and raised, from the city of Houston, and if they sing in Spanish and play a particularly safe and sanitized version of the plaintive border pop music called tejano, that's perhaps less because they're aiming for global Latin pop dominance and more because regional pop in the 90s tended towards the safe and sanitized. This was the decade that begat alt-country, however unnecessarily; while adherents could hear the pain and glory in John Michael Montgomery, others heard only the slow, waxy merging of all romantic pop into one homogenous ball of keyboard-heavy gloop.

Tejano will also have its crowd-pleasing alternative forms in the years ahead; but for now, this spare, almost minimalist rendition of a soulful countryish melody, with its hushed vocals and bluegrassy harmonies on the chorus, is a great low-key introduction to one version of the genre. The song is a ballad, and a soppily conventional one at that ("me estoy enamorando" just means "I'm falling in love," and the rest of the lyrics don't get much deeper), but the stark backing and crisp drums add unexpected heft to the naked melody until it sounds almost profound, like a folk or gospel song without the specificity of either.

RICARDO MONTANER, “PIEL ADENTRO”

2010-09-09T13:50:00.004-07:00

13th March, 1993

Ricardo Montaner continues his string of polished ballads that are far more erotic than they sound to an Anglophone. "Piel Adentro" means "skin inside" or "skin within" and a Google search turns up, besides this song, sex-and-dating sites.

But for all that, it's still as crashingly romantic as the music sounds. He's looking back on the sex as a metonymy for the relationship, and it apparently wasn't a good one — love turned to dust, he goes sleepwalking through it, the usual surprisingly specific images which are a feature of Latin Pop the way they very much aren't of Anglophone pop of the same breed and vintage.

Montaner has carved out a space for himself as a purveyor of primo ballads here in the early 90s; could he possibly challenge Luis Miguel, unquestionably the reigning champion of Latin ballads since the late 80s, for his throne? On this evidence, probably not; his voice deals capably with the big dramatic chord changes, but it doesn't do more than that. He doesn't have Miguel's gift for nuance or phrasing, and as the song crashes its way to a finish, he starts to sound winded, like a sprinter forced to run a steeplechase.

JON SECADA, “CREE EN NUESTRO AMOR”

2010-09-06T16:06:00.004-07:00

27th February, 1993

This is Jon Secada's third single, and third appearance at the top of this chart; a skeptic might be forgiven for thinking that Latin Pop was so devoid of new ideas or talent that a single shirtless Cuban-American singing adult-contemporary fluff with a vaguely urban beat represents a tidal wave of the New and the Now, and a general dissatisfaction with what the rest of the Latin universe was offering up.

There are two responses to make to this: first, an acknowledgement that Jon Secada's charms are beginning to pale. We've seen him run through his paces, and there are no surprises here, unless you count the shift from muted, ballady piano chords to snapping not-quite-new-jack-swing beats which does for an intro here. Even the melody is familiar, and Secada's bag of tricks — oh, look, he's going into falsetto on the third chorus — is starting to sound like a cheap copy of himself. If "Otro Día Más Sin Verte" was a breath of fresh air, this is that same air after having been recycled a couple dozen times through the system, a photocopy of a photocopy that retains the outline but loses the distinctiveness and clarity of the original.

The other response is, of course, that the number one spot is a very narrow, and in a lot of ways unrepresentative, stripe on any chart. At this point in history, reggaetón was being popularized by El General, rock en Español was being popularized Stateside by Maná and Café Tacuba, and cumbia was beginning to make waves outside of South America and rural Mexico. Not to mention the first hits of a new generation of pop stars — Mexican, Puerto Rican, Colombian, estadounidense — who won't crest up to the number one spot for several more years, and who will profoundly transform Latin Pop into something modern and sleek and danceable, and change Anglophone pop too, in the process. That Jon Secada happened, during these weeks, to sell the most records, is no indication of the earth-and-sea-shaking shifts under way elsewhere on the charts.

But even Secada, in his way, was transformative: before him, it was a relative rarity to find an American — that is, a United States of American — at the top spot on the main US Latin chart. It will not be a rarity from here on out. Latin Pop is growing more American, and America is growing more Latin. This is a change which will not slow down in the years to come.

JUAN LUIS GUERRA Y 440, “EL COSTO DE LA VIDA”

2010-09-02T11:55:00.007-07:00

20th February, 1993

Now this is what I'm talking about!

Within the first few notes, "El Costo De La Vida" shimmered its way into my favorite of the songs I've listened to for this project. It's something we haven't heard before, something we haven't even come close to hearing before; even the few trópical tracks we've had before weren't this light-footed and funky, big muscular salsa or jacking dancehall instead of goosey, jiving merengue with bachata guitars and afro-pop percussion.

Or rather afro-pop guitars and bachata percussion. If it's not easy to draw a clear distinction between the dance music of the Dominican Republic and the dance music of Western Africa, there's a reason for that; not only is the music of the Caribbean more African than European or native (a mixed heritage to which Guerra refers when he sings "una raza encendida, negra, blanca y taína" — "a race on fire, black, white and Taíno"), but twentieth-century African pop has long drawn inspiration from the music of the Caribbean.

But then this isn't a song produced by anonymous, collective Caribbean, or even Dominicans — Juan Luis Guerra (both with and without his muso band 440) is one of the major figures of modern Latin Pop, and it's only the vagaries of US airplay that has kept us from considering him before now. Most of Latin America was introduced to him in 1989, when "Ojalá Que Llueva Café" ("if only it rained coffee") became the biggest Dominican hit to date, and introduced his hyperliterate, danceable fusion of merengue, bachata and highlife to an international audience which ate it up. If there's a comparable figure in Anglophone pop, it would be as if Billy Bragg had had George Michael's career — only he never went away. (Not to upset a certain bunny, but stay tuned for lots more Guerra over the years.)

"El Costo De La Vida" means "the cost of living," and as usual with the phrase there's an implicit "high" in there. Both an unrelentingly funky dance track, with the call-and-response and punctuating horns typical of tropical music, and a sharp-tongued analysis of the political and economic woes of the early 90s (although, he noted with despair, very little about it would need to be updated to reflect 2010), it was if Wikipedia can be trusted a source of controversy, as certain [citation needed] listeners heard anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism in its litany of ills (accurately! see below) and certain [citation needed] countries actually banned it from airplay, afraid of pissing off the US. That it reached number one here anyway (if only for a week) is a testament to its innate danceability rather than to the radicalism of the Spanish-speaking population in America.

That radicalism: "Democracy cannot grow if corruption plays chess." "Unemployment also bit me/No one cares, because you see/We don't speak English/Or Mitsubishi/Or Chevrolet." "We are a perforation in between sky and sea/Five hundred years later a race on fire/Black, white and Taíno/But who discovered who?" All of it punctuated with chirrups and "ya ves" ("now you see") because, after all, this is a dance song. But it's also a political song, and a literary political song at that.

Not only is this now my favorite song I've heard so far in this project, the more I listen to it and study the lyrics and shimmy to its intoxicating rhythm, it's fast becoming one of my favorite songs ever. One of the key tracks of the 90s, of world music history, of pop music generally. This is me grabbing you by the lapels and shaking you: listen to this song.

RICARDO MONTANER, “CASTILLO AZUL”

2010-08-30T09:31:00.006-07:00

19th December, 1992

Ricardo Montaner made his first appearance in this travelogue with a power ballad of the Michael Bolton stripe; if this song's glassy, glossy keys and muscial-theater lift recalls instead Peabo Bryson & Regina Belle, that's surely not unintentional. Montaner sang the Peabo part in the Spanish-language version of Aladdin's "A Whole New World," "Un Mundo Ideal" with duet partner Michelle.

But this song sounds more like something out of (or inspired by) 1991's Beauty And The Beast. "Castillo Azul" literally means "blue castle," and the lyrics could be sung by a not-for-kids version of the Beast (or perhaps that other fairy-tale icon, Bluebeard) showing his new bride around the place. Not-for-kids because he goes adult very quickly; halfway through the first verse they're stripping off their clothes and by the lead-in to the chorus he's singing wistfully of "el momento pleno de hacernos sexo, a orillas del mesón." ("The fullness of the time we had sex in every corner of the place.") The imagery, in fact, is gorgeous, even intoxicating; a full translation would be a beautiful sample of erotic poetry, and is beyond my powers.

But of course little of that transcendent rush is conveyed in the music: formally, this is another bland, vacantly crescendoing ballad with almost no compensations for someone who doesn't understand the language. (Almost: the orgasmic rise and subtle funk guitar on the brief middle eight have their low-key pleasures.) And so we close out 1992 on a faintly disappointing note; so far it's the year I've liked the best as a whole — largely if not entirely thanks to Jon Secada — but there's more and better still awaiting us in the future.

DANIELA ROMO, “PARA QUE TE QUEDES CONMIGO”

2010-08-26T13:43:00.005-07:00

12th December, 1992

Daniela Romo has appeared twice before in this tale (and if my spreadsheet is accurate she won't appear again), the first time as a powerfully-lunged singer of that most tricky of ballad forms, the telenovela theme song, and the second as a breezy dancey salsa diva. It might be too reductive to claim that last part of the trilogy finds a middle ground between the two — it's definitely more of an uptempo swing than a dramatic recitative — but while there's undoubtedly an island groove to the song, its tempo is more stately than hip-shaking. Even the ska rhythm under the chorus is taken at a pace too slow to skank to.

I like it a lot, not only because any uptempo track is better than another goddamn ballad (although I've even been liking the ballads lately too), but because it's the kind of thing I was expecting to hear a lot more of when I initially began this project. My exposure to Latin Pop, like a lot of clueless white Americans', has been limited mostly to party situations, when of course uptempo dance songs are pretty much necessary, and so the swooning (and often cheesy) romanticism of the slower, for-individual-listening songs has represented both a surprise and a kind of frustration. Though of course a glance at the contemporary Hot 100 chart shows just as many drippy adult-contempo ballads in the top spot there — which makes me wonder if the relatively high-energy state of postmillennial pop is the real outlier.

Anyway, none of this has much to do with Daniela Romo, whose strong voice and penchant for slightly gaudy melodicism has been one of the most enjoyable things about this journey so far. "Para Que Te Quedes Conmigo" is a slightly old-fashioned song about all the things she will do to get her lover to stay with her, and can be read as either super-romantic or kind of comic, depending on your preference (me, I'm sticking with comedy every time). But the lyrics don't matter as much as the punchy horns and the way her voice punches through just as clearly over a flat-footed rock beat that breaks into a lazy island half-step on the chorus.

JON SECADA, “ÁNGEL”

2010-08-23T11:48:00.008-07:00

31st October, 1992

I couldn't say with any certainty whether there's a thin line between love and hate — none of my relationships have ever risen to that extreme pitch of emotion — but surely everyone who listens to music is aware of the thin line between enjoyment and disgust.

When I was young, I listened to this song freely, even carelessly, glorying in it as I gloried in all new gifts which rained down from heaven in those magical early teens, when all of experience seemed to be opening to me, flower after flower, petal after petal. All the music on the radio was new, bewitching, even in some sense illicit and all the more alluring for it. This was no different from any other — an opportunity to learn, to work out what this music was for, who it was for, how it worked. Like "November Rain" or "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You" or "I Will Always Love You," it was a dramatic ballad with dynamics that demanded fight-or-die scenarios, aligned with the basic grammar of action movies in which the hero got the girl because he was tougher, more loyal, more willing to sacrifice himself than the other guy.

But I soon learned to disdain the simplicities of these ballads for more problematic, ironized, and abstracted narratives. Alternative rock was an important, if confused social signifier at my high school — it would be many years before I learned that 4 Non Blondes' "What's Up" and the Spin Doctors' "Two Princes" were not widely considered part of rock's avant-garde in 1993 — and ballads, with their dramatic sweep and brimming emotional heft, were for girls and old people. Boys listened for the most unpleasant noise they could find and latched onto it.

But I maintained my omnivorous radio diet, though as it were in secret. The tapes I made off the radio had Bon Jovi cheek by jowl with Ace Of Base and Madonna and the Eagles and this very odd, impossibly shiny song which it would take me until the Internet to learn was Boston's "More Than A Feeling" (Guatemalan English-language radio was let us say unpredictable). Jon Secada's "Angel" (not "Ángel"; we'll get into the difference) was on one of these tapes, a serendipitous play several years after its first flush of success, and I internalized it alongside R.E.M., Take That, Toad The Wet Sprocket, and Yaki-Da as I mowed the half-acre backyard lawn wearing cheap Walkman headphones.

My memories of how I felt about it are as jumbled and confused as most memories of those hormonal times are. I remember singing along, trying to hit the high notes at the climax -- I remember shuddering in disgust and changing the station, fast-forwarding the tape, making up a narrative in my head about Jon Secada being totally creepy because he sang these slow romantic ballads, like couldn't girls tell he was only trying to get into their pants? I remember that it played one afternoon when I hung laundry in the backyard while the twenty-something woman who worked as a maid in the house watched, and later when I went up to write on the computer she followed me and tried to kiss me. Maybe I stopped liking it after that. Or maybe it was a different song that was playing then and my memory's confused.

Today it sounds so utterly familiar, so deeply ingrained in me, that I can't possibly hear it outside of all that loose, jumbled history. Except I knew the English-language version; the Spanish-language version isn't different in sentiment (again the translation is nearly exact), but the rhythms of its lines are different enough that my attempts to sing along in my head are constantly thrown off. But the dynamics — the gently funky rhythm underlying it all, a dreamy r&b memory of salsa, the gorgeous sweep into electric intensity, and the final release of Secada's screaming falsetto — are the same.

It's not the kind of song I would generally ever think to call a favorite, or representative of its era, or even necessarily particularly good; but when it came to an end I hit play again. Not because I had to write about it, but because I wanted to hear it again. That hardly ever happens.

CHAYANNE, “EL CENTRO DE MI CORAZÓN”

2010-08-19T08:00:00.006-07:00

17th October, 1992

We've heard dispatches from Chayanne twice before, but this is the first time in which, for my money, he sounds like the globe-straddling pop star his single name and my vague awareness of modern Latin Pop over the last few decades would suggest. (Meaning his Greatest Hits are always in the Latin section of the local Wal-Mart or wherever.) (And in case you were wondering, his name is pronounced Shy Ann, though the last syllable varies considerably depending on where the DJ is from.)

The production is sharp and dynamic, as glossy and spirited as a Foreigner power ballad from 1982 — which, lest you misunderstand me, is not a complaint. We are well into the 90s by now, as the crisp, live-sounding drums attest, and the use of electric guitar, as a sort of emphasizer to symphonic bombast, begins to see a way out of the rock/not-rock dichotomy which has sort of hung over my understanding of non-dance Latin Pop over the course of this exercise.

Chayanne himself is almost the least interesting thing about the song, his thin voice just another instrument to convey the build and crash of the melody, a delivery system for lyrics about how dizzying love is. Although if his voice carried more authority — if he was Luis Miguel, in other words — it might be more difficult to take the bit where he suggests that she's planned it all out, and he's only the passive recipient of her seductive embraces. Chayanne, however, sounds just weak-minded enough for it all to sound plausible, and not even necessarily a bad thing. Some guys need to be pulled into love.

ANA GABRIEL, “EVIDENCIAS”

2010-08-16T17:27:00.009-07:00

8th August, 1992

After the first few seconds of this song washed over me, I started writing this entry in my head. "Of course, just because Jon Secada felt like a level-up doesn't mean that the lands and seas have changed. Pop never develops in a straight line, and it's neither retrograde nor particularly surprising that the next song after the most modern-sounding one we've had to date sounds like it could have been recorded in 1985."

And if you've listened further than the first couple of verses, you should be laughing at that, because it's not the straightforward lovesick ballad it starts out being. Which doesn't mean it's ever entirely surprising — except during the middle eight, where we suddenly break into a funky tropical rhythm and some bluesy guitar licks — but once Gabriel gets revved up the song is a march, not a ballad, too uptempo even to be a power ballad. In the general shape of its chord structure, it recalls the AM pop of the 70s, and Gabriel's distinctive voice over that inevitably draws comparison to what Janis Joplin might have recorded in 1977 or 78, had she lived and gone on to work with Lindsey Buckingham or Richard Carpenter.

But of course this is 1992, and if the alternative explosion is felt at all at these highest reaches of Latin Pop, it is in the freedom to extend and play with song structure rather more than has been done before. The lyric is still highly traditional — she opens by saying "If I say I don't want to love you any more/It's because I love you" — but Ana Gabriel, no stranger to bucking pop convention, will throw royal fanfares, boogie-woogie piano, rumba timbales, and blues-rock power chords into her souped-up triumphal march of admitting defeat, and given her commercial track record, nobody will tell her differently.

JON SECADA, “OTRO DÍA MÁS SIN VERTE”

2010-08-12T01:45:00.007-07:00

4th July, 1992

The beat drops, a beat coiled and springy like new jack swing, cool and dusty like trip-hop, and we have arrived. This is Modern Music (mk. 1992), as up-to-the-minute and of-its-time as music ever is, and we have entered a new phase in our journey, almost audibly leveling up (as they say in gaming) into a world where the rules of combat and cheat codes are slightly different even if the basic contour maps remain the same.

And another entry in my increasingly-specific list of firsts is born: this song marks the first time I knew and liked a song on this list at the time, and listened to the radio specifically for it, and knew the words and sometimes sang along if I was sure no one was around to hear. I lived in Guatemala, but it was the English-language version I knew best; though I knew "Otro Día Más" well enough to run the two side-by-side in my head and compare the translation. Secada's bilingual songs, by the way, were as precisely accurate in translation as I've ever seen; unlike Gloria Estefan, he stayed on-message regardless of language.

And here also is where I run up against one of the first barriers of memory and experience between myself and my possible? potential? anyone-out-there? readers. Because I know "Just Another Day (Without You)"/"Otro Día Más Sin Verte" as one of the big, all-encompassing, signature hits of the early 1990s; maybe not quite in the league of "Everything I Do (I Do It For You)" or "Losing My Religion," but also not far behind. But I have no idea whether English-language listeners, whether they were there for the early 90s or not, have similar associations with the song. Was Secada confined to the Latin Pop ghetto, or did he cross over? Was he stuck in adult-contemporary purgatory, or did people dance when they heard him? There's only so much that Wikipedia can tell you.

I don't know. But in the context of this list, this travelogue as I've been calling it with rueful hyperbole, it's a sea change. Secada most definitely does not sound like Luis Miguel or Julio Iglesias or Juan Gabriel, the three biggest male stars we've had up to this point — he sounds not Spanish or Mexican, but American, which is to say black. (Well, he sounds Cuban, which is what his parents were; but if you know your ethnographic history, that's just another way of saying black.) The laid-back club beat, the soulful, extemporaneous voice which rides it comfortably, the way he sings in the back of his throat like an r&b singer instead of clear and from his chest like a ballad crooner — after the last sixty entries, it's like hearing Sam Cooke when all your life you've known nothing but Perry Como.

I don't want to oversell this; it's obviously still a very conventional adult-contemporary ballad, perhaps not all that different from what Michael Bolton and Bryan Adams and Rod Stewart were peddling around the same time, but the springy beat and the Cuban floridity of expression hold it in good stead. I can't possibly be objective about it, and I don't want to be; it's one of the signature songs of my youth, and even if I haven't heard it for fifteen years I still know its every detail with the intimacy of early love.

PANDORA, “DESDE EL DÍA QUE TE FUISTE”

2010-08-09T13:40:00.008-07:00

27th June, 1992

Even the opening synth chord is familiar, and as the first voice takes up the stately melody we all know exactly where this is headed. They do nothing surprising with it, unless those Big Guitars on the chorus count.

But on the other hand — hey, there was a Spanish-language cover of "Without You" that hit the top of the Latin Pop chart in 1992! And it's pretty good! Not as good as the Harry Nilsson version, of course, or the Badfinger original, but better than the Mariah Carey version which would define overwrought balladry for a generation two years later. Then again, it was never the best of Nilsson's or Badfinger's songs either, says the man who's still grumpy about all those ballads in a row in 1990 and 1991. (The Spanish-language lyrics are only slightly changed from the English original to fit scansion; the sentiment of death being preferably to romantic loss is very much the same.)

Pandora marks our first encounter with that evergreen pop configuration, the girl group, which will never be entirely as common in Latin Pop as it is in Anglophone pop, particularly r&b. But the early 90s was a fertile moment in girl groups, if overshadowed by the Spice Girls and Destiny's Childs of the late 90s: En Vogue, SWV, Jade, and the early TLC had made the airwaves safe for harmonies that ranged from sweet to powerful. Pandora was mostly the later, a full-frontal attack of harmony on the chorus that makes me think of Wilson Phillips (speaking of girl groups) and the gospel group First Call. A quick glance at the list suggests that neither girl groups nor boy bands will have much part in the story this particular chart journey will tell; if Latin Pop is one of the more conservative pop genres, it may be because the traditional focus on a single singer is one of its traditional strengths.

JOSÉ LUIS RODRÍGUEZ & JULIO IGLESIAS, “TORERO”

2010-08-05T09:46:00.005-07:00

13th June, 1992

Here in the summer of 1992, the charts have at long last entered something of a groove, with song after song that interest and enthuse me, whether I actually like them or not. The opening bars to "Torero" are the kind of thing that will always put a smile on my face, flamenco flourishes over bolero rhythms, and José Luis Rodríguez being pushed by proximity to living legend Julio Iglesias to deliver a performance infused with the kind of graceful, assured masculinity that I'd bottle and spray on myself before going out if 'twere possible.

Masculinity, particularly the myths of masculinity which are very likely all there is to say about it, is very much the subject of this song, and it's worth spending some time thinking about the myths and figures of Latin masculinity in particular. It's no accident that the most extremely, even parodically, masculine figure at large in pop culture today, the guy in the Dos Equis commercials, speaks with a faint Spanish accent; even beyond the "Latin lover" stereotype (which can as easily encompass the gigolo as the bandito), there's a sort of subconscious sense in which Anglo-Americans believe that Latin men, with their machismo and fiery passions and earthy romanticism — I told you we would trade in myths — are naturally better at being men than Anglos, who are left to console themselves only with superior follicle density.

A torero, of course, is a bullfighter, the most masculine of professions according to that most masculinity-obsessed writer, Ernest Hemingway. Rodríguez and Iglesias use the image of the torero as a symbol of masculinity, one that's in danger of being lost and has to be reinforced. But since it's a pop song, sentiment comes first: like a bullfighter, a man must measure the distance to her heart, be brave and unguarded when he goes to steal a kiss, beware of the danger from her black eyes . . . . The metaphor is intrinsically sexist, of course — women aren't animals in need of tricking and taming — but it's a comfortably familiar one, and they sing it so well, that it's easy (at least for male-gendered me) for the space of the song to believe the myths and aspire to the tender, lordly masculinity their magical thinking creates.

ÁLVARO TORRES & SELENA, “BUENOS AMIGOS”

2010-08-02T11:42:00.005-07:00

6th June, 1992

As I keep saying, I'm learning to hear this stuff as I go along, which means that most of my writeups are more and more inadequate the further away from them I get. I'm bound to miss small, subtle social and cultural cues; but there are big obvious ones that drift past me unnoticed as well. The obvious word missing from the blocks of text when we last had Álvaro Torres before the board (only three hits ago, for crying out loud) was tejano.

Torres was born in El Salvador, and began his career in Guatemala, but by the time he was reaching the top of the Hot Latin charts he was based in the US, participating in Southern Florida's omnivorous Latin Pop machine. He'd had some success duetting with Mexican pop stars like Marisela and Tatiana, so while recording the album that would become his biggest-selling hit, he was paired with another young up-and-coming girl singer out of Texas, who had been doing the local pop circuit since she was thirteen, and was poised to be a breakout star in the Latin Pop community. How big a star, of course, and how quickly snuffed out, no one as yet had any idea.

She sounds, on this first encounter with the uppermost reaches of this chart — her home chart, as it were, the pinnacle of which she will claim a half-dozen more times before all is done — like a young woman who very much wants to be Ana Gabriel. Like Gabriel, she sounds instinctively at home with the woozy ranchera rhythm, with the triumphantly goofy (or goofily triumphant) synth-horn fanfare that introduces and punctuates the duet, with expressing emotion while holding back a steely unreachable self (shades also of Luis Miguel). And like Ana Gabriel, she comfortably and without showboating blows her duet partner out of the water. This is to be Álvaro Torres' last appearance in our travelogue; it's perhaps not his fault that he's so unmemorable in it.

LUIS MIGUEL, “NO SÉ TÚ”

2010-07-29T13:26:00.004-07:00

18th April, 1992

If Los Bukis coming round every year with another chart-topper was comfortably predictable by this point, Luis Miguel scoring two chart-toppers in quick succession from his newest album is just as certain. It's becoming clear that the broad outline of Latin Pop history differs in significant ways from both the received and the actual histories of Anglophone pop; in the early 90s, Latin artists were still an-album-a-year entertainment machines, where much of the English-speaking world had already converted to the modern every-few-years release schedule, giving people plenty of time to soak up, get sick of, and maybe forget the last album before renewing the assault. Neither model is necessarily better than the other, but the compression of the first can make artistic growth seem almost instantaneous.

So I said about Luis Miguel's last album that it was the moment when he became not just a pop star, but an institution; but this one, Romance, was the biggest-selling album of his career, and, if Wikipedia is to be trusted, the biggest-selling Spanish-language album of all time. This song sounds it, expansively expensive, the first ballad since Julio Iglesias to bring in classical orchestration -- very few top-selling songs in the last hundred years have had oboe solos -- and a lush sense of space to Miguel's already beautifully sensitive singing. The song itself is just as splendidly ornate a love song; not perhaps as poetic as Iglesias' latter-day triumphs, but in the simplicity of its language and directness of its sentiment, a classic of the genre nevertheless.

And I do mean classic. Googling the lyrics inadvertently reveals that a lot of people have wanted to know what it means in English; and this sweet story on a cooking blog suggests a pop-cultural power I in my ignorance had been unaware of. The title means, literally, "I don't know you," but the saber/conocer distinction* makes that reading impossible; really, it's short for "no sé (que piensas) tú," or "I don't know what you think." The translation given at the link, "I don't know about you, but I etc." is exact even to its informality. Miguel is (once again) relating an obsessive, extravagant love, one which he's not sure is requited; he can't sleep, he's always going back over the night she "created with her kisses." That touch of vulnerability (but without self-pity) is a masterful summary of Miguel's vocal persona: he doesn't go in for the florid emotionality of a lot of Latin Pop singers of his generation and earlier, he's controlled and even, in his adulthood, a little reserved; which makes any vulnerable emotion that much more meaningful when it arrives.

*See also connaître/savoir, wissen/kennen, etc. A lot of languages make a distinction between knowing knowledge and knowing people.

LOS BUKIS, “MI MAYOR NECESIDAD”

2010-07-26T08:00:00.002-07:00

21st March, 1992

Another year, another Los Bukis chart-topper. Like the countrypolitan acts of the 70s and 80s I keep comparing them to, they're dependable, comfortable, reassuring. You always know what you're going to get.

Or maybe they can surprise you sometimes. Los Bukis sound here for the first time like the regional band I keep tagging them as; not just in the chord structures and the romantic sentiments, but instrumentally too: the classically-derived norteño guitar solos are both a signifier of Serious Intent and a soothing relief after a rather numbing procession of gloopy keyboard ballads. I know I've been grumbling about ballads a lot here, to the point where even I'm sick of the very word, but I love the dazzling variety of Latin music so much that it's really frustrating to hear so much of it represented by this travelogue as sounding the same.

But as to the Serious Intent: the opening of the video, with its heartwarming cascade of Mexican humanity, will do better than anything else to explain what writer-singer Marco Antonio Solís and company were getting at (and Solís' hair, at its early-90s finest, has to be seen to be believed). It's a love song — an obsessive, can't-get-you-out-of-my-head love song, but a love song — but Solís' spoken intro, the kind of inclusive stage patter that's second nature to any professional entertainer, encourages all of his listeners to hear themselves in the song, so that it's as much an ode to the band's fans as to a woman. Los Bukis were undoubtedly the biggest romántico band in Latin Pop by this point; that this is (spoiler alert) their last appearance here under the band name is as much testament to the irresistible logic of pop hubris as it it is to the various machinations which we'll catch up on the next time we come to Marco Antonio Solís.

ÁLVARO TORRES, “NADA SE COMPARA CONTIGO”

2010-07-22T13:06:00.003-07:00

7th March, 1992

My direct experience with Latin America, Mexican enclaves within the US aside, has been limited to Central America (specifically Guatemala). The small, mountainous countries which string along from the sturdy bump of the Yucatán to the great bulb of South America are collectively the poorest, most politically fragile, and least likely to produce pop stars of the Spanish-speaking world, so it's always with some glad triumph that I note when a Central American reaches the august spaces chronicled here. The only previous Central American occupant of the top slot has been the Honduran Banda Blanca, with my favorite song so far; how will Salvadoran Álvaro Torres (who started his career in Guatemala) compare?

Well, it's not my second favorite. It starts promisingly, with some Serious Power Ballad Guitar, but while it's actually quite a sweet love song, his voice is thin and weak, and after the master class in ballad singing we've been having from Luis Miguel and Rocío Dúrcal, he sounds particularly out of his depth.

But like I said, it's a sweet love song. The title translates as "nothing compares to you," and while it certainly doesn't hold a candle to the Prince (or rather the Sinéad O'Connor) song of the same name, it's the kind of ballad that I can easily understand catching on in early spring, as high school students — Latino ones maybe especially — begin looking for a killer slow dance for the prom.

ROBERTO CARLOS & ROCÍO DÚRCAL, “SI PIENSAS, SI QUIERES”

2010-07-19T08:02:00.002-07:00

29th February, 1992

I haven't been doing this long enough to really experience the sensation of two titans of the field returning for a joint victory lap, but of course Latin Pop didn't begin in 1986 — the Billboard Latin chart did. Roberto Carlos and Rocío Dúrcal both had much more storied careers than the glimpses we've had, giant unknown (to us) icebergs of careers much greater and deeper than the few measly juts above the waterline we know. But since I haven't (yet) considered it a part of my duty to immerse myself in the full discographies of the artists who attain to the number one spot, all we have to go on is what's broken through that surface.

In comparison to Roberto Carlos' two previous entries, "Si El Amor Se Va" and "Abre Las Ventanas Al Amor," this is a significant improvement (especially on the latter). Where those sounded rather like dusty, plastic-instrumented hymns, this is a living ballad, with a rhythm less stately and more oceanic. It reminds me most, in fact, of Rocío Dúrcal's first appearance (and our inaugural entry), "La Guirnalda," which rode a similar seaside-mariachi rhythm to lovely effect. And while it doesn't rise to the level of her last solo entry, "Como Tu Mujer," which managed to combine mariachi and stateliness to thrilling effect, this is a solid duet, a pair of beautiful performances with an effective if somewhat conventional production.

"Si piensas, si quieres" means "if you think ... if you want," the opening phrases of arguments made by each singer. The occasion of the duet is a possible reunion of separated lovers; each of them is cautious about the idea for different reasons, she because he's broken her heart before, and he because he doesn't want to be tied down. Conventional again; but she's forthright about him having to change his ways, and he weasels around about being a bohemian dreamer in love with life. (Direct translation!) When the song is over, the reunion remains theoretical, conditional, everything hinging on those looming, unbridgeable Ifs.

LUIS MIGUEL, “INOLVIDABLE”

2010-07-15T15:27:00.006-07:00

25th January, 1992

The more Luis Miguel I hear, the more I appreciate the technical purity of his singing, the immaculate phrasing and, as he grows older, the sense of powerful emotions in reserve, which he shares with the mature Sinatra. In some ways it feels as if he's been building to this moment, the gorgeous young man who first appeared in these pages as a teen hunk singing a retrofitted 60s pop song growing into the suavely elegant man who rides a light-jazzy rhythm effortlessly and croons as sweetly as Bryan Ferry, as assuredly as Tony Bennett.

I'm told (by the usual source) that this was his biggest-selling album, the final transition into adulthood and traditional pop. That tradition is bolero, the eighteenth-century Spanish slow dance that was the first popular song form in Cuba and Mexico. I had to listen to a few more traditional bolero songs myself before I could hear the bolero rhythm under the funk-guitar flecks, but even if the instrumentation is as plastic and 1992 as possible — between the glossy keys, the rubbery guitar, and the tweeting soprano sax, it's like a crystallized memory of the first smooth jazz station I ever listened to — Miguel's precise, restrained performance rescues it from easy-listening purgatory and places it in the canon of liquid-smooth pop that all my references so far have conjured up.

While most latter-day reminiscence has focused on youth movements like alt-rock and electronic dance, at the time there was some reason to believe that traditional pop was a signal way forward as the nineties gathered steam: Tony Bennett was hip again, Harry Connick, Jr. was on the rise, and Natalie Cole had her biggest, if least defensible, hit duetting with her late father. While this isn't that "Unforgettable" (which is what "inolvidable" means), it's at least as easy to slip into its dreamy tug.

INTERMEDIO.

2010-07-12T20:34:00.000-07:00

Having reached the end of 1991, I wrote elsewhere about the Latin Pop song that defined the year for me as a thirteen-year-old in Guatemala. It only made #19 in the Hot Latin chart, however, so it's not here.

CAMILO SESTO, “AMOR MÍO, ¿QUÉ ME HAS HECHO?”

2010-07-08T08:00:00.002-07:00

23rd November, 1991

It's been a while — the last time was 1988 — since we've seen a singer from Spain, or heard that distinctive Castilian accent (listen for the "th" sound). Whether this is pure chance or whether the Latin Pop chart is becoming more distinctively American as it moves lumberingly towards the present, there's definitely a way in which this sounds like winds that haven't blown through these songs in some time, not so much a breath of fresh air as a reminder of Old World sumptuousness which the more mongrel, anxious, and vibrant cultures of the New cannot usually afford.

Camilo Sesto was apparently a regular hitmaker in the 70s and 80s, though you couldn't prove it by this blog — and you most likely won't have another chance. This is more or less a swan song, at least as far as the up-and-down travails of pop, rather than the steady renumeration of the nostalgia circuit, goes. It's a classic Latin Pop song, with a big, sweeping melody and a big, sweeping performance to match. Love is again a cruel mistress ("My love, what have you done to me?" goes the chorus), and if Sesto is as ready to complain of her cruelties as anyone else, at least his mellifluous voice and the accompaniment of an equally mellifluous saxophone aren't bad company on the way.

RUDY LA SCALA, “POR QUÉ SERÁ”

2010-07-05T08:00:00.002-07:00

9th November, 1991

As 1991 winds into its final innings — one of the shorter Latin Pop years so far, thanks to the massive "Todo, Todo, Todo" and two Ana Gabriel songs — Rudy La Scala returns for a second at-bat in as many years. I'm not sure if I've changed or he has, but I find this much outing much more enticing than the last; his overemotional quaver and androgynous voice read less like baffling stylization and more like a function of the overdramatized passions of what turn out, on inspection, to be standard Latin Pop lyrics about "amores prohibidos" (forbidden loves; remember that phrase) and generalized longing.

The title translates as "why must it be," and La Scala's litany of foreordained dooms and inevitable anguishes visited upon those unlucky enough to fall into amores prohibidos is nearly as hyperbolic as his overwrought vocal style. I'll no doubt expand on the theme in later entries, but for now remember that "forbidden love" didn't (and doesn't?) necessarily have the "love that dare not speak its name" connotations of LGBT convention for a Latin audience; for an overwhelmingly conservative Catholic culture, any non-marital amor is prohibido. Which might be why it's so much sung about.

VIKKI CARR & ANA GABRIEL, “COSAS DEL AMOR”

2010-07-01T08:00:00.003-07:00

31st August, 1991

Over the past forty years, Vikki Carr has had two almost entirely separate careers singing popular music. By which I don't mean that she had one, then she had another: she's maintained both of them side-by-side, and fans of one often know nothing of the other. Fans of traditional pop, especially the brassy 60s variety, know her as the pair of iron lungs behind "It Must Be Him," a 1967 ballad that grandly ignored all pop change since about 1953. She's maintained one foot in the trad-pop and easy listening tradition ever since, collaborating with jazz musicians, playing cabarets, and even dabbling in pop-country the way so many easy-listeners did in the 70s. But she was born Florencia Bisenta de Casillas Martinez Cardona in El Paso, Texas, and beginning in 1971 with "Que Sea Él" (the Spanish-language version of "It Must Be Him"), she maintained a Latin Pop career on the side. In the 1980s, her smooth vocals and penchant for ornate arrangements became hugely successful among the Spanish-language market, and she's cultivated that side of her career so well that she's one of the Dueñas Grandes of Latin Pop.

Here she duets with Ana Gabriel (and much as we may adore Vikki Carr, let's not kid ourselves that it was anything but Ana Gabriel's magnificent hot streak that kept this at #1 for two months) on a song where she plays the wiser older woman to Gabriel's passionately distraught young blood. Just in terms of construction, it's a solid duet, each woman getting a chance to shine, with call-and-response sections that highlight the textural differences between their voices and give the song tremendous forward momentum.

But with all that, it's still a ballad, a tremendously soppy one, and horrific in terms of its sexual politics (Carr more or less advises Gabriel to strip herself of personality in order to be whatever the man she's afraid of losing wants her to be). Love, as seemingly always in Latin Pop, is presented as tragedy, an arbitrary grand passion that will inevitably betray and leave desolate. It's just easier for me to take when it's a man complaining about it.

DANIELA ROMO, “TODO, TODO, TODO”

2010-06-28T22:30:00.003-07:00

22nd May, 1991

As you've probably gathered by now, I'm not necessarily the most knowledgeable person about the various forms, genres, and cultures of Latin music. There's a lot about it I simply don't understand, and even more I think I understand but consistently get wrong. And yet I think I must be making some headway, at least as far as my listening instincts go, because my first thought when the opening notes of this song began to play was:

God damn am I glad to hear some salsa up in this bitch.

When Daniela Romo last caught our eye, she was singing a Big Ballad that served as the theme to a telenovela she was starring in, a majestic, even slightly Gothic piece of sonic architecture. But now she's gone tropical with an effervescent, funky dance song that entered the lists as the soundtrack to summer, and was — it didn't leave the top of the chart until August. And for good reason; we haven't met very many dance songs on this travelogue (at least compared to ballads), but this is easily the most easily danceable yet, hitting the rumba beat hard and making even unfunky white me jig in my chair on the pasodoble.

But Romo hasn't fully left behind her Gothic-novela self. The song is a kiss-off to a man who doesn't treat her right; the "todo, todo" (everything, everything) of the chorus is what she will forget about him. But the celebratory mood of the music makes a lyric, and even a performance, that could be played as full-blooded ranchera-level melodrama, even more of a kiss-off; he's not even worth getting upset over, and she's inviting the whole world to the goodbye party. It's a fabulous recording, even slightly adventuresome with some phased vocals in the breakdown, and has left me with one of the biggest smiles on my face that any song so far has done.

LOS BUKIS, “MI DESEO”

2010-06-24T08:00:00.002-07:00

11th May, 1991

Their third album in a row, and their third number one hit in a row — Los Bukis have, in the short space of time that the Hot Latin chart has been in existence, become an institution. And more and more my categorization of them as a "regional" band is slipping away from accuracy; Wikipedia calls them a "romantic" band, and I'm sure it knows better.

But I've drawn the comparison before between regional Mexican music and country music, and this is a fantastic country song, the sort of thing that George Jones in his imperial phase (1969-1982, give or take) would have loved to get his teeth into, a double-reverse narrative that is also nothing but a list of wishes. Marco Antonio Solís, the band's songwriter, singer, and prime mover, spends two verses coming on like Tom T. Hall in "I Love," as he wishes ("Mi Deseo" means "my wish") for universal peace, happiness, and the realization of each individual person's complete good. Then, as the drumpads hit and the chord changes up to the bridge, he sings — well, here's my translation:

But for you, I wish that nobody would be with you
And that sadness envelops you and drags you into bitterness
That everything will be cold, that you weep, that you never feel safe
That when you look at your bed, you see your tomb

Which that right there, oh snap, but he's not finished. The final verse continues:

I wish that you never hear truthful words where you walk
That the whole world turn its face from you, that no one understand you
And although it seems as though you're listening to your worst enemy,
My wish is that soon, you'd return to me

Aw, he's only saying these things because he misses her! How sweet! But nevertheless creepy! And your ultimate judgment of the song depends on how comfortable you are with unreliable narrators.

There's a Tex-Mex drag to the music, a sob in Solís' voice, and the kind of stately build to the melody that recalls old-time hymnody, all of which scream "country" to me, but of course the instrumentation is as synthetic and untraditional as the 80s could wish. Like I say, I'd love to hear George Jones (or maybe Raul Malo) sink his teeth into it. It's the kind of song that could, with the right treatment, become a modern pop-noir classic.

FRANCO DE VITA, “NO BASTA”

2010-06-21T08:00:00.005-07:00

30th March, 1991

This is our first real encounter with a phenomenon that will be with us for years to come, the middle-class attempt at a Serious Rock Statement. A quick overview of Latin American culture, unforgivably simplified, is probably in order here.

Most of the Latin Pop we've encountered so far has been descended from two traditions, which is really one tradition: folk music and show business. (The American equivalents would be blues/country/r&b and Tin Pan Alley/Broadway/Hollywood, respectively.) This is complicated by the fact that the Latin Pop industry encompasses two continents, several dozen countries, and innumerable local cultures; but the general principle, that Latin Pop is traditionally a vehicle for poor, working-class, and marginalized people to achieve wealth and fame and adoration even if only briefly, holds. (This is also true in American pop, from Jersey punk Sinatra and Tennessee hick Presley to blue-collar Madonna and white-trash Britney — pop is dominated by people who have a story of transcending their origins to tell.) In contrast, rock has been the music of middle-class respectability since at the latest 1967, and even more so in Latin America, where only the well-off have the resources to really get into American and European music. Despite what some will tell you, rock has never really been a international lingua franca, remaining a symbol of aspirational, and even elitist, cosmopolitanism while dance music and, more recently, hip-hop have been more solidly identified with the masses of any nation.

Which is probably several conclusions too many to draw from the fact that Franco De Vita sounds like he wants to be Billy Joel, up to and including the use of an American-style gospel choir for his Serious Statement Ballad. I call it a Serious Statement Ballad because it is; even if I didn't understand the words, the video would make it plain that this is hectoring pop in a "Cat's In The Cradle" mold. The title and two-word refrain translates as "it's not enough,"and the list of things which aren't enough — bringing them into the world out of obligation, taking them to school, buying them what they want you to buy them, blushing and running when they ask about sex, punishing them for being out late — adds up to a public service announcement to Talk To Your Children About Drugs And Bullying. It's all very middle class once more, and even if Latin culture was particularly in need of De Vita's message (Latin fathers are traditionally authoritarian and unapproachable, like all traditional fathers) the wussy piano-rock makes it clear exactly what strata of society it's being pitched to.

Someone like Ana Gabriel could have sung this song with a big synth-mariachi backing and been far more successful both politically and aesthetically; for Franco De Vita, it was his big moment in the spotlight, the highlight of an earnest singer-songwriter career, and the moment in the concert when all the lighters come out.

BANDA BLANCA, “SOPA DE CARACOL”

2010-06-17T08:00:00.006-07:00

16th March, 1991

Ahh, at last. Entries like this one make me regret my decision to not copy Popular in all things and refrain from giving scores; if ever there was a first 10-out-of-10 begging to be given out, this was it.

Of course there's personal history here, as there should always be with a 10.

In the summer of 1990, when I was twelve, my family moved from Arizona to Guatemala so that my parents could be missionaries in the most heavily missionized country in the Western Hemisphere. Apart from several months at language school, where I learned Spanish largely by immersion, I never really identified with, participated in, or even felt comfortable with the local culture. Part of this is because I was a shy, introverted kid and would have felt just as out of place anywhere, but part of it is because I went to an English-language school, surrounded by other missionary kids, listened to the English-language stations on the radio, and spent my teens living what I now recognize as an extremely privileged, even colonialist lifestyle, in which the only regular contact I made with Guatemalans was as servicepeople. That old colonialist's line, "lovely country, pity about the people," would have disgusted me if I'd heard it spoken aloud, but I almost never conducted myself in any way that would have contradicted it.

So when I say that this song is the first song in this travelogue so far that I knew at the time, I don't want to be misunderstood. I didn't hear it as pop, the way I heard "I Love Your Smile" and "Mr. Wendal" and "Runaway Train" on the radio, hoping and waiting around for them to come on, knowing who it was sang them, having an opinion about their relative merit as compared to everything else on the radio — I heard it as background noise, as the kind of thing that would be played on outdoor speakers during Sundays in the parque central, or at the occasional saint's-day fiesta to which we ventured, excited and a little nervously, and possibly as one of the videos which washed over me in undistinguished mass on the fuzzy local music-video channel while I waited for the English-language hour to come on.

Nevertheless, that horn line, that rhythm, those Garifuna shouts — "iupe! iupe!" — and most of all, that stutter-and-release of a refrain, chanted irregularly throughout the song, are so deeply embedded in the back of my mind that it functions in much the same way as pop music does for those lucky enough to have grown up with it (before my parents were missionaries, they were very strict about what we listened to), as an invisible presence clouding and coloring an entire portion of your life, something you never consciously sought out but nevertheless know intimately, like family or home.

That refrain — "si tú quieres bailar... sopa de caracol! jey!" (tr. "if you want to dance... conch soup! hey!") — is if possible even more meaningless than the rest of the "lyrics," which mostly aren't in Spanish but in the Garifuna language of the Caribbean coast of Central America. It's a rare example of a Central American hit that, however briefly or novelty-like, stormed the rest of Latin American pop for a season. But while I don't suppose it left much of a trace on the Billboard Hot Latin chart, where it reigned at the top for only two weeks, it was more or less a standard in Guatemala for years, a hip-moving guaranteed dancefloor-filler that I clearly remember hearing in 1996, as we were preparing to move back to the States, and being surprised by how familiar it was since I never listened to Spanish-language music.

My six years in Guatemala were spent almost entirely inland, so I don't know much about Garifuna culture beyond what I gather from Wikipedia, but I will state for the record that this is not salsa or merengue, despite the similarity of a tropical rhythm with horns, but punta, the Central-American coastal dance music which moves in tighter circles and sounds (to my not-very-educated ear) more like the chant-like indigenous folk music I was as likely to hear as Latin pop coming from stereos and sound systems in the tourist town of Antigua. Banda Blanca were from Honduras, and their silly ode to a standard Honduran national dish (I was taught that "caracol" meant snail, but apparently it can refer to any mollusk) was the breakthrough punta hit of the 1990s. Like most such, it was of course seen by devotees of the form as a childish bastardization for degraded mass tastes; which is of course the most pop thing of all about it.

Listening to it today, I'm not exactly whisked back to my early youth — it was only in the air, it never reached me emotionally then — but I am moved to dance, to whoop along, and to reflect guiltily on how many opportunities for knowledge, understanding, joy, and human connection I missed by being a self-involved, self-important American teenager. There are only a few other big Spanish-language hits I remember noticing from those years, but a glance at the list says they won't be troubling us. I'll probably manage to talk about them anyway, whether here or elsewhere; in self-involvement and self-importance, at least, I haven't changed.

MYRIAM HERNÁNDEZ, “TE PARECES TANTO A ÉL”

2010-06-14T08:00:00.003-07:00

16th February, 1991

In some ways this feels like a throwback, but I'm not sure whether that's because it really is or if it's just fallen out that we've had a run of more "modern"-sounding ballads. And anyway, this only recalls the far-flung, dimly-remembered era of 1988, when traditionally-structured songs about the inevitable doom of romance and the necessity of grasping at fleeting moments of happiness before it all turns to shit were all the rage. (I may be misremembering. I'm not reading the archives to check.)

It's a somewhat more lively ballad than the kinds we've been having recently, but that only means it has a strong, synth-pulse rhythm; the sound of the record is still very much a soup of glossy keyboards and distant gated drums. The lyrics are all that really catch at the attention; even Hernández' voice is a little weak for the kind of agonized stateliness required here.

The title translates to "you look so much like him," and indeed it's a song that compares the current lover to an old lover, one who made life a living hell until she had to leave. But she knows that the same pattern will repeat again here; not only does he look like him, he acts, moves and loves like him, and she's just waiting for the day when "llegue a suceder lo que sospecho" ("what I suspect will happen happens"). Apparently she has a type, would be the cynical reading of the song; but of course in the heightened, stormy telenovela romanticism of traditional Latin pop, this is all the inscrutable working of an unkind destiny, a Cathy and Heathcliff and Heathcliff in adult-contemporary drag. Myriam, unfortunately, is no Kate Bush; and so the song slides slickly away from attention and memory and fails to provoke any responding passion.

ANA GABRIEL, “ES DEMASIADO TARDE”

2010-06-10T08:00:00.007-07:00

8th December, 1990

Those who have followed the low-level mystery of format release in this travelogue may be intrigued to learn that although this song reached the top of the Hot Latin chart in December 1990 and stayed there through February of 1991, I can find no release of the song dating back earlier than 1992, on a greatest-hits compilation called Personalidad. Whether this is because the Internet in its infinite wisdom has overlooked recording the existence of any Latin single release before about 1994, or because the makers of tracklistings of Rapishare downloads (which gentlemen and scholars are the only people anywhere who bother giving discographical details on artists that the rest of the Internet is too bougie, white and indie-rock to give a fuck about) got something wrong somewhere, I can't say.

But Ana Gabriel, though one of the more frequent visitors to the top spot here, is also one of the most welcome presences whenever she appears. I've complained passive-aggressively about the domination of 1990 by ballads, and while this is undeniably a ballad — it even starts with those same glistening, watery keyboards that every goddamn song since "Volaré" has started with — it has stronger roots than most of this stuff. You see, it's a ranchera song.

I note from a quick perusal of my tags that I haven't had occasion to talk about ranchera before, so I'll do it now. The easiest shorthand is to call ranchera "Mexican country music," and while it does serve some of the same functions and even grew out of some of the same cultural conditions (the word itself means "from the ranch," i.e. cowboy music), its roots are as much in showbiz as in the fields and hills of Mexican labor. The first ranchera stars were singing actors like Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete (cf. Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and the "western" half of country-and-western), and cowboy hats are just as required and just as affected in ranchera as they are in Nashville.

This being the overproduced early 90s, of course, the signifiers of Golden Age ranchera — the moaning horns, the keening accordion, the weeping vocals — aren't present, but the strict timekeeping of the guitar and the melodic form is puro jalisquero. And Ana's singing, pitched halfway between her usual tuff brio and the sob of tradition, would be campy if it didn't also feel so honest. "It's too late" is the English translation of the title, but even if I didn't understand Spanish, that sense of ravishing, inevitable loss hangs over her performance, giving it a shiver of real sorrow that the ballads we've been hearing have all been missing, however well-sung.

LOURDES ROBLES, “ABRÁZAME FUERTE”

2010-06-07T08:00:00.001-07:00

1st December, 1990

Lourdes Robles is a Puerto Rican singer who stumbled around the Latin Pop market for a while in the 80s and early 90s, managed a few decent-sized hits, and is today so far removed from the spotlight that she doesn't even have an (English) Wikipedia page. (And the Spanish one is three sentences long.) "Abrázame Fuerte" ("hug me hard") looks set to be our only encounter with her, and I could wish it was under better circumstances; at the close of a long string of similar-sounding ballads, her gospelly sway does too little to distinguish itself and seems destined to melt into the mass.

The first listen through, I thought that perhaps I could get some mileage out of claiming that the production is slightly more atmospheric than what we've been seeing lately, but subsequent run-throughs have unconvinced me that that's the case. Her voice maybe plays off the production more, rather than powering through on its own force while the production churns away as strict accompaniment, but that's the kind of claim that's too general and could be made by well-intentioned ears about anyone else too.

So there it is: yet another ballad, this one rising to a sort of dramatic, choral crescendo, but not giving me the kind of urgency or oddness I look for in pop. Perhaps I should have put off writing this until I was in a better mood; but honest reactions in the moment are all I've ever been able to successfully write.

LUIS MIGUEL, “ENTRÉGATE”

2010-06-03T09:37:00.005-07:00

23rd November, 1990

Can you tell I'm running out of things to say about professionally produced, floridly sung, and hyperbolically written ballads? Luis Miguel remains "pop royalty," as I put it in the tags, the King of his era and demesne of Pop so utterly and completely that I'm tempted to borrow a phrase from Tom Ewing (or rather from Neil Tennant) and call this his "imperial phase." His voice, immaculate and creamily expressive, is the focus here, and he sweeps us from a tender, quiet beginning to the standard banners-waving, fist-pumping Big Chorus with such ease that we scarcely notice the seam.

The lyrics are hyperbolic not only in the sense that they would be ridiculous as a rational statement, but also in the sense that spoken rather than sung they would be creepy and domineering: that Big Chorus goes "Surrender yourself/I don't feel you yet/Let your body/Get used to my heat/Surrender yourself/My prisoner/Passion does not wait/And I can't love you more than this." Which may be a relief from song after song about untouchable cruel woman who makes the man weep, but as a portrait of a healthy relationship (consensual s&m excluded) it's hardly better.

Of course, pop songs about healthy relationships are even more rare than romantic comedies where people do sane things -- the drama is in the hyperbole, and a diet of bombastic Latin Pop is as likely to make me feel that Anglo pop norms are anodyne and wussy as that Latin Pop is overheated and misogynist.

CHAYANNE, “COMPLETAMENTE ENAMORADOS”

2010-05-31T08:00:00.001-07:00

20th October, 1990

If you were wondering where the faintly chugging guitar in the intro to "Peligroso Amor" went, don't worry: it went here. Sure, the first sound we hear is the delicate tinkling of plastic ballas keyboards, but this ends up being more like the sort of gently rhythmic ballad that was popular in the 80s; probably the most obvious example of the form is "Every Breath You Take," but I always think of it as the "Missing You" template. (Uh, by which I mean John Waite, not Puff Daddy.)

Chayanne's matured as a vocalist from his last time round; he's even taken on some Waitean cod-soulfulness; and, more importantly, learned to sing from somewhere besides his head. Last time, of course, he was lamenting a love who would not love him back; this time he's celebrating mutual love. The title translates as "Completely In Love," but since the adjectival phrase is plural, means more precisely "[two people] completely in love."

This also marks the smuggled return of Italy into our pop narrative; the song was originally written by a brace of Italians including the legendary Eros Ramazzotti, who is as much a Latin Pop star as an Italian one, and who we will only meet in such glancing ways throughout this travelogue (so far). And once that scrap of information falls into place, the production choice sounds perfectly reasonable: of course this is an Italian ballad converted into Spanish. How could it ever have sounded like anything else?

MYRIAM HERNÁNDEZ, “PELIGROSO AMOR”

2010-05-27T08:00:00.004-07:00

6th October, 1990

I almost began writing "an unexpected reward of this undertaking is," but that's sloppy, thoughtless copymaking. The truth is it was entirely expected — in fact it was half the reason I began it in the first place. So:

A long-foreseen reward of this undertaking is the chance to familiarize myself with acts I never would have come across in the ordinary run of things. Even if I'd wanted to educate myself on the history of Latin Pop, Myriam Hernández is not one of the names that stands out in bold relief; apart from her brief early-90s moment in the wider Latin Pop spotlight, her success (though steady) has been mostly confined to South America*.

But though I inwardly groaned at the telltale keys of yet another ballad (even the flickers of guitar in the intro betrayed me), her voice made me sit up and take notice; I played it again, almost instinctively. It's not the kind of voice that would stop traffic, necessarily; and maybe only someone with my peculiar set of tastes could find it fascinating, but while she has the requisite operettic lungpower for a Latin Pop diva, and goes full-throttle on the chorus, her approach to the verses is more delicate and even kind of unusual. The texture of her voice in the quieter moments reminds me more of jazz or folk singers (the liquid clarity of Joan Baez, perhaps?) than of the strong-lunged diva who belts out her litany of amors.

And then I got home and looked up the record cover in order to create this post, and phew! It's a good thing I'm past the age of falling in love with a song and a photograph. Ahem.

*At least, that's the impression I get from her Wikipedia pages. As always, please correct me in the comments.

JOSÉ JOSÉ, “AMNESIA”

2010-05-24T08:00:00.005-07:00

29th September, 1990

One major downside of the way I've chosen to conduct this blog is that I spend so little time with these songs before trying to write about them that I can't possibly do them justice. Even if I'd listened to this song twenty times before setting finger to keyboard, I wouldn't be recreating the conditions under which it became a hit. The life of a pop song in its natural environment — heard in many different places under many different emotional conditions over the space of weeks and months, at the center of a whole complex of previously-received information about the artist, the pop hype cycles of the moment, and the songs which surround it on the radio, in the club, and in one's personal music collection — is so radically different from the clinical, concentrated burst under which "criticism" necessarily takes place that the latter exercise may well start to seem pointless.

Especially when I have so little to say about the actual song that I start talking about the mechanics of criticism.

José José has appeared on this travelogue three times already, each time to somewhat lesser effect. That I've ended up considering this his slightest appearance yet has less to do with the virtues of the actual song than with the fact that it's yet another midtempo adult-contemporary ballad with those gleaming, contentless keyboards and an alto sax sprinkling boredom dust over top of it. I know, in a theoretical sense, that the Latin Pop chart wasn't entirely composed of these songs, but since I'm only listening to the number ones it's starting to give me me a highly lopsided view of the period.

His voice is as polished and attractive an instrument as ever; the song is the second in a row about the romance of oblivion (though José Feliciano can't forget, and José José can't remember); and if this post feels a bit like marking time until we get to the next song whatever it is, that's because it is.

JOSÉ FELICIANO, “¿POR QUÉ TE TENGO QUE OLVIDAR?”

2010-05-20T22:51:00.000-07:00

15th September, 1990

If you're an American, you know at least one José Feliciano song by heart, even if you hate it. His appearance here — sadly, his only appearance here (to date, anyway; believe it or not, there's an upcoming single I have hopes for) — is a welcome reminder that the success of Latin Pop in America has roots going back well before Billboard thought to assign it its own chart. I still think his version of "Light My Fire" is the definitive one, and his version of airy, flamenco-tinged Latin pop is one of the sounds of 60s and 70s AM pop that is easiest to lose myself dreamily in.

Of course, this isn't that; it's another ponderous early-90s ballad, with rubato keyboards and big gated drums, but you can hear a beautiful-if-slight song underneath it all, with Feliciano's trademark acoustic guitar adding a tasteful, witty running commentary throughout. I've seen the title given as both "¿Por Qué Te Tengo Que Olvidar?" and "Porque Te Tengo Que Olvidar" (reading from left to right, "why do I have to forget you?" and "because I have to forget you"), but the grammar's less important than the broken-hearted sentiment. Feliciano sounds his age here, a pop survivor who retains his professionally cheerful demeanor, and it's rather a relief from the series of overemoting blowhards (I like Luis Miguel, but really) that we've had recently.

Still, it's hard to get past that one-size-fits-all overproduction. Feliciano's at his best when there's more space to the arrangement; here he comes dangerously close to sounding like just another faded pop star trading on past glories for a valedictory lap.

LUIS MIGUEL, “TENGO TODO EXCEPTO A TÍ”

2010-05-17T08:00:00.001-07:00

21st July, 1990

There's a subtle shift that happens when a hugely successful pop star becomes more than just a pop star, and it's not always identifiable in a particular song. With Madonna, for example, it happened over the course of the Like A Virgin album; with Michael Jackson, it was obviously Thriller; and with Britney Spears there was no shift, she was always top-of-the-world from the first single. I'm not even particularly confident that this particular song marks Luis Miguel's shift (it could well be the 20 Años album, which broke sales records for Latin Pop from the first week of its release, but which I haven't heard in full) — but his music has definitely moved up a tax bracket since last we saw him.

But it's not just the production, as expensively glossy, spacious, and upscale as we've heard to date (at least this side of Julio Iglesias) — Miguel's singing has lost its teen-pop floridity, the anxious emotionalism of "Fría Como El Viento"or "La Incondicional," and he sounds now like a man supremely confident in his powers, able to work in delicate shades of timbre and phrasing without sacrificing the full-blast power of his gifted lungs.

That top-of-the-world atmosphere is perfect for this song, the kind of song a William Randolph Hearst might sing while pursuing his Marion Davies. The title means "I have everything but you," and while he isn't so gauche as to detail the extent of his holdings, Miguel's performance is that of a powerful, wealthy man missing only the one thing that won't be his for the asking. The alto sax coming in at the end was a signifier of opulent classiness as the 80s turned into the 90s, but it was also, at least for those whose palates considered themselves more refined, a signifier of the bourgeois failure of taste — anyone who remembers the 90s as they actually were (rather than as they were played on TV) hears Kenny G, and winces.

RUDY LA SCALA, “EL CARIÑO ES COMO UNA FLOR”

2010-05-13T14:46:00.004-07:00

23rd June, 1990

One of the things about Latin Pop that doesn't strike the new listener as particularly reasonable on first delve is how many Italians there are all up in there. Italian isn't Spanish, as I learned the hard way inside a Roman electronics shop in 2000, and the influence of Italian culture in the Western hemisphere has mostly been limited, in the pop understanding of things, to the Eastern seaboard of the United States. But when you think about it from the point of view of an ambitious Italian pop star, it makes more sense; unless you're on the opera circuit, there's only so far you can go singing exclusively in Italian. The Spanish-language market is secondary only to the English-language market in terms of global reach, and it's the rare Italian pop act that doesn't try cutting amore down to amor at least once.

Not all of which totally applies to Rudy La Scala; he was born in Italy (and spent time in a progressive rock act there), but he's spent the bulk of his career operating out of Venezuela, where he worked on telenovelas, acted as svengali/producer for a number of up-and-coming pop stars (including Maria Conchita Alonso's Donna Summer period), and had a string of Latin-Pop hits on his own starting in 1990.

Starting here, in fact; which is as unlikely a pop hit as I've hard in some time. La Scala's unsteady, overwrought voice louder than anything else in the mix, lyrics which are lugubrious even by the standards of Latin Pop ballads*, and a production which seems to be aiming for the title of Dullest In Show all combine to create a car-wreck of a single which not only do I not like, I can't even begin to organize my thoughts around how anyone would like it. The best I can do is that he undoubtedly sounds like a guy who sang in a prog-rock band in the 70s; but not even Phil Collins fell this low.

*The title translates to "affection is like a flower," than which there could be no more idiotically trite sentiment.

ANA GABRIEL, “QUIÉN COMO TÚ”

2010-05-10T08:00:00.006-07:00

5th May, 1990

It's possible that anything would have been a disappointment after "Simplemente Amigos," but while Ana Gabriel's throaty howl is still in fine form, and the production floats and soars with all the shiny bombast of early-90s rock balladry, as a song "Quién Como Tú" (tr. "who like you") is too lightweight to really live up to the emotion she invests it with.

The song addresses someone (man? woman? the sexual ambiguity that haunted "Simplemente Amigos" is still present, but that might only be because second-person pronouns aren't gendered in Spanish) who is in love with (and also sleeping with) someone else (again, possessive and objective pronouns aren't gendered), and the singer appears to feel a certain way about it all. But it's difficult to say exactly what; the only expression of emotion she makes is "I have nothing to hope for though I'm left in the air." It's unclear who she was hoping for, the lover or the beloved, and though the ambiguity neatly serves to fit just about any situation to which listeners might wish to apply it, as a standalone song it's unsatisfying.

Lyrically, anyway. As I said, the production's gloriously bombastic, with lovely plastic-sounding guitar lines giving way to big drums and strings and hair-metal backgrounds. Ana Gabriel's certainly in no danger of losing the title of queen of Mexican pop here; but the first cracks in her marble edifice are visible.

GIPSY KINGS, “VOLARÉ”

2010-05-06T08:00:00.001-07:00

21st April, 1990

Strange things were happening in the Latin chart as the first year of the 1990s got underway, at least at the top. First "Lambada," a Brazilian dance song as filtered through a French dance outfit, then this, an old Italian pop song as played by a French flamenco outfit. Where have all the Latin Americans gone?

Gipsy Kings have more in common with Los Lobos than with anyone else we've seen so far in this journey; as a Serious Muso Band with a specific ethnic identity that didn't get in the way of big-time crossover success (the tasteful-liberal kind we'd associate with NPR today), their success on the Hot Latin chart is another entry in the logbook of my suspicions that Billboard was maybe counting sales and airplay of anything in Spanish regardless of whether actual Latin stations were playing it. But enough with the meta, how's the song?

It's good, as no one will be surprised to hear: an acoustic uptempo jam that sticks fairly closely to the classic Domenico Modugno and Dean Martin versions of the song (a.k.a. "Nel blu dipinto di blu") which sat like twin huge roosting birds on the Billboard pop charts of 1958 and refused to budge. It's maybe lighter on its feet than Modugno was (Martin was always pretty light), but it's still very much the same kind of ethnic cheese: entirely enjoyable if you're not hung up on questions of identity politics, hipness, and "authenticity," somewhat less so if you are. Regardless, it's a pretty undeniable chorus, which far more than some theoretical midcentury cult of Italian masculinity was surely what gave it legs in the 50s, as well as what did the same, to somewhat lesser effect, three decades later.

ROBERTO CARLOS, “ABRE LAS VENTANAS AL AMOR”

2010-05-03T21:26:00.000-07:00

31st March, 1990

The last time we had Roberto Carlos over I compared the song to a hymn; this time around I'm reminded of the Christian music of the 70s and 80s with which I grew up. Not that people like Amy Grant were really using melodies this cloyingly circular, but the lightweight production and the singalong, grade-school pep-rally nature of the chorus sends me right back to childhood, when friendly bearded men with guitars at church were my only standard of live music performance.

There's very little else to say; the title translates as "open your windows to love," and it's exactly the kind of feel-good, hippy-dippy singalong that suggests, with the only real musical interest coming in the stiffness of the 2/4 beat, a plod which makes me think of polka and the roots of ranchera, which anyway is preferable to thinking about the song. Roberto Carlos was well past his prime here, easily scoring with some new-age nonsense that sounds like it could be from anywhere and anywhen, while the hungry kids of 1990 were busy inventing Latin pop identity for the next two decades. We'll catch up with some of them soon enough.

KAOMA, “LAMBADA”

2010-04-29T08:09:00.001-07:00

10th February, 1990

This is — and again, I'm guessing, I'm listening to these in real time, and unless I've encountered them organically haven't listened to any songs in advance — about as close to rave culture as this journey will ever take us. Happily, it's also just about as close to rave culture as I'm comfortable getting, for reasons which have as much to do with geography and history as education and taste.

The 4/4 beat (almost) straight through, that backbone of remixes and DJ sets, ties it to the mainstreaming of the dance underground that was then going on all around the world — it could easily fit on a mix with Snap!, C + C Music Factory, and Technotronic. But it's the sped-up tango bandoneón, the modified cumbia rhythm, and the timbale fills that make it the great crossover Latin Dance song of its era, and the first of several such dance crazes to appear on our journey. It's also the first time I was ever vaguely aware of a song that would appear on this list. I don't mean that I ever actually heard it (as far as I know) until today; but I read about the Lambada — the "forbidden dance" — in Newsweek and was both slightly scared and slightly aroused by what I read. (I was twelve; everything slightly scared and slightly aroused me.)

But unlike some of what's to follow, the Lambada doesn't seem to have had any staying power as a dance. Possibly that's because unlike, say, the Macarena (similarly the butt of jokes but still a common social dance), you can't half-ass it and have fun anyway — and if the video's any guide, one partner has to be comfortable in a thong. (Thereby full-assing it, ha ha.) But at twenty years' remove from the song — and the dance's — peak in popularity, it's hard to hear much of a punchline in the music. It sounds like what it is, South American exoticism by way of French producers, and for me, anyway, that's enough.