The moment has perhaps never been riper for one of Juan Luis Guerra's hyperliterate, musically inventive, and shrewdly contemporary songs to make a return to this travelogue. Alejandro Sanz (like Shakira, from an entirely different direction) is one of his few peers in terms of intellectual sophistication, and the rise of reggaetón, the first post-hip-hop Latin music form, means that neither his Caribbeanness nor his engagement with the contemporary has to be watered down for mass appeal.
It doesn't hurt that this song presses down on two nostalgia buttons at once: its merengue foundation bears 1950s mambo horn charts, while Guerra's dense, motormouthed lyrics are undeniably post-hip-hop, though for a rather more old-fashioned value of hip-hop than the younger reggaetoneros might recognize; it's much more patter song than boom-bap. But Guerra isn't just mixing Dominican merengue and Cuban mambo (which would develop, in Puerto Rican New York, into salsa), he's also delivering half the lyrics in English, and particularly a formalized pop-song kind of English which listeners to old rock & roll, doo-wop, or British Invasion records would recognize. The effect is kind of a mashup of all the different kinds of music he might have heard on the radio as a young child, energetic as hell and supporting a typically screwball lyric about a guy calling into a radio psychologist who gives love advice to talk about the girl he met online.
Because it's 2007, online dating is going mainstream (although Guerra was broaching the topic here a decade ago), and even though the video casts the caller as an overweight dude (and a young Zoe Saldaña as the out-of-his-league object of his affections), it's not mean-spirited: once he enters the black-and-white nightclub space where Guerra y 440 are playing, he's as dapper and smooth as anyone else, which is part of the point of the throwback music: elegance isn't an inherent virtue but a stylistic choice, and the contemporary is capacious enough to contain whatever of the past we still find useful.
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