It made sense, during reggaetón's first imperial period, when many observers considered it a flash in the pan, a novelty that would be finished in a season or two as the Latin youth audience moved on to the next shiny thing, that one of the hits of the era would join the dots to a flash in the pan of a previous generation. If you're not listening for it, it might be easy to miss the pitched-down flute from Bolivian folklorico group's 1981 rendition of "Llorando Se Fué" in the mix, playing a melody last heard on this blog as played by an accordion in French dance-pop group Kaoma's 1989 "Lambada".
I definitely did not do "Lambada" justice when I covered it in 2010, trying to connect it to contemporary English-language material I already knew rather than working backwards through the Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Peruvian, and Afro-Bolivian roots of the material. But this revival isn't the last time we'll encounter it in the reggaetón era, and the novelty connection I made above is once more an Anglocentric one: the real connection is that the new pan-Latin music of the 2000s is harkening back to an earlier pan-Latinism of the 1980s, giving it a a grittier, minor-key hip-hop gloss, but retaining the dance-centric fusion that an electronic age demands.
But that's just one sound in the stew of sounds cooked up by producers Luny Tunes, Tainy and Naldo for this one-week-wonder, an organic hit which was never released as a single but topped the charts anyway. The lyrics consist largely of the usual boasting: Yandel's refrain "Bailando la toqué y ella se dejó/Me aprovecho y pam-pam-pam, la toco y pam-pam-pam" is perhaps more of a reference to the sexual legend of the lambada than to the actual song (although it structurally echoes the original "Llorando Se Fué" lyrics). I'd translate it "Dancing I touched her and she let me/I seize the opportunity and bam-bam-bam, I touch her and bam-bam-bam."
But in the video (shot in Brazil, and it wants to make sure you know it), the rhythmic "pam-pam" of the title is keyed to the hip and thigh movements which will later be formalized in English as twerking. Some Anglophone musicologists' dismissive attitude toward reggaetón as "just" dancehall in Spanish sometimes makes me eager to catalog the ways in which reggaetón has developed into its own distinctive genre: but it should never be forgotten that all post-hip-hop Afro-Caribbean music, from Jamaican dancehall to Puerto Rican reggaetón to Dominican dembow to New Orleans bounce, feeds on each other, especially in the real physical spaces in which the music is celebrated.
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