Why Conjunto Primavera has been the only Mexican regional act to have reliably punctuated the #1 spot in the mid-2000s is a question I don't think I'm at all qualified to answer. The portion of this travelogue that has been taken up by regional Mexican music has dwindled since the 1990s, and Primavera, who were here all along but whose first #1 wasn't until 2003, are just about the only holdouts. That will shift in the coming years, as banda gathers pop strength, but regional Mexican music will remain only a minor strain among all the Hot Latin #1s, although of course a much richer part of the full tapestry of the chart.
This song once more strikes me as the kind of thing they could have recorded at any time between 1988, when the band's current lineup was settled, and the present: the usual questions that a music critic tries to ask about a #1 song -- why this song? why now? -- can only be answered with an elaborate shrug. Presumably, the chart being now well into the download era, "Ese" was assisted by digital sales, like many of its contemporaries have been. But also presumably it was huge on the Regional Mexican format, although I would consider it an unlikely candidate for crossover to the broader Latin Pop format.
It's a now familiar sound: norteño-sax, with keyboards imitating a churchy organ, a guitar keeping time, and Juan Dominguez' airy saxophone supporting Tony Melendez' starchy, wounded vocals. delivering an old-fashioned lyric in a strictly conventional tableau: the singer begs the object of the song not to weep over the one who broke her heart, because he's here and has loved her all along. The lyric is full of Nice Guy Energy, although because it isn't formalized into an ideology it's not more than averagely toxic.
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