I had trouble believing that this was really the first proper bachata song we've encountered in these pages -- the importance of bachata to the last ten years of Latin Pop has given it a larger place in my internal estimate of Latin pop history -- but that's what the tags say. Of course, I could easily have tagged stuff wrong; but there's no more bachata to the only other song that's used the tag, Juan Luis Guerra's "Costo de la Vida" than there is South African mbube, which is to say that it's used as one flavor among many in his postmodern, intentionally culture-clashing gumbo. La Gloria's bachata is, by contrast, not only traditional but positively reverent, which however musically luscious it is can't help feeling a little politically queasy among the pre-revolutionary Cuban pageantry of the parent album: is she really expressing nostalgia for the Trujillo dictatorship?
But of course she too is a postmodernist, intentionally culture-clashing and remixing the past to project an ideal image of today. (Everyone is, these postcolonial days.) The close-miked violin which decorates the second half of this song isn't particularly bachata (which for most of its history was a low-rent, few-frills music, despised by the Dominican elite as drunkards' laments), and structurally it owes more to Mexico-born songwriter Marco Flores' early training in romántica and pop than to bachata traditions of meter and rhythm. It's still undeniably gorgeous, a swooning love song that would work with any underlying rhythm or instrumental filigree.
Still, as a starting point for pop-bachata history (at least within the context of Hot Latin #1s) it's a pretty great foot forward. Gloria Estefan, entirely without meaning to, has now served as our introduction to two major Latin genres, vallenato and bachata, and if (say) Carlos Vives' pop-vallenato has already turned up to show us how it's "really" done, the future of bachata in this travelogue is brighter still.
i'm still here keep it goin
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