The charting of Gloria Estefan's musical career only by her Hot Latin #1s has told a necessarily incomplete story (for a fuller but still incomplete version, my One Week One Band on her remains available), but one thing it's actually been quite good at has been tracking her shifts into exploring many different flavors of traditional Latin American music from Cuban son to Cuban/Mexican bolero to Colombian vallenato to Dominican bachata to, here, Peruvian huayno.
Best known among English-speaking audiences as the musical genre of "El Condor Pasa" thanks to the Simon & Garfunkel rewrite, and immediately recognizable for its use of Andean panpines, huayno is perhaps the most Amerindian-inflected popular music genre of the Americas, although its dotted rhythms speak to the hemisphere-wide influence of enslaved African musicians over the centuries. We've only heard it here before as one element in wide-ranging mixtures from Colombians Shakira and Carlos Vives (huayno is a pan-Andean music, and so is common to Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina), and it's not entirely uncut here, only the predominant element in what is otherwise merely a sturdy pop song.
It was simultaneously released in an English-language version as "Wrapped", which didn't make the Hot 100 at all and only scraped the upper 20s on the Adult Contemporary chart. In both languages the song seems to be a vaguely spiritual love song to a loved one, although it could as easily be directed to a parent (or even the Virgin Mary) as to a romantic partner. The video, the same for both versions, is set among the ruins of Machu Picchu, which only adds to the spiritual (and neocolonial) overtones. It isn't the last we'll see of Gloria, by a long ways, but it's not as sharp or smart as we've come to expect from her, either. Whenever she tries to get vaguely spiritual (remember "Más Allá"?) her usual excellent taste seems to fail her.
Best known among English-speaking audiences as the musical genre of "El Condor Pasa" thanks to the Simon & Garfunkel rewrite, and immediately recognizable for its use of Andean panpines, huayno is perhaps the most Amerindian-inflected popular music genre of the Americas, although its dotted rhythms speak to the hemisphere-wide influence of enslaved African musicians over the centuries. We've only heard it here before as one element in wide-ranging mixtures from Colombians Shakira and Carlos Vives (huayno is a pan-Andean music, and so is common to Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina), and it's not entirely uncut here, only the predominant element in what is otherwise merely a sturdy pop song.
It was simultaneously released in an English-language version as "Wrapped", which didn't make the Hot 100 at all and only scraped the upper 20s on the Adult Contemporary chart. In both languages the song seems to be a vaguely spiritual love song to a loved one, although it could as easily be directed to a parent (or even the Virgin Mary) as to a romantic partner. The video, the same for both versions, is set among the ruins of Machu Picchu, which only adds to the spiritual (and neocolonial) overtones. It isn't the last we'll see of Gloria, by a long ways, but it's not as sharp or smart as we've come to expect from her, either. Whenever she tries to get vaguely spiritual (remember "Más Allá"?) her usual excellent taste seems to fail her.
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