Maybe it's the date. Thirteen years in the past is long enough to seem embarrassing by its failure to be current, but not so deep in the past to have achieved the varnish of widespread cultural nostalgia. (Of course, i'm in my forties; if you're younger it may seem an eon ago.) It doesn't help that Maná doesn't sound particularly 2006 here, and is closer to the radio-friendly alt-rock of 1996, which sounds particularly ungainly in a chart quickly being reorganized according to the pulse of reggaetón.
The song itself is perfectly serviceable; with a different arrangement, it could have been a ranchera classic, the age-old whine of a man unwilling to share his lover's lips with another, but who can't bring himself to leave her over the infidelity either. If it is infidelity (one irony of hairy rock dudes bellowing this song is that rock was supposed to have relieved us of our sexual hangups back in the seventies. Lennon being a jealous guy was meant as a regretful confession, not a cri d'amour propre); but it's hard to imagine such rigid cultural fetishists as Maná being even aware of polyamory.
The very nineties drumming, which has heard of breakbeats (or, to put it another way, Afro-Latin rhythms) while the rest of the song plods along in a hairy yarl, sounds particularly wan and insignificant compared to the authority and insistence of the dembow riddim, and if the chiming guitars and sub-Bono vocalizing are even more anonymous, it's hardly a point in their favor.
Maná will return, and I may feel differently about them when they do, but it's worth noting that 2006 was so unsettled a time in the US charts, as physical sales tanked, digital sales had not yet fully replaced them, and streaming was still in utero, that this song remains the highest Maná has ever charted on the Hot 100. Why this utterly anodyne moan, which offers so little novelty to the non-Hispanophone, should represent them, other than to confirm the stereotype of rock en español being wholly derivative and failing to transcend its Anglophone models, is a puzzle. But it's not our puzzle.
Onward.
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