One of two songs that briefly interrupted Flex's twenty-week reign in the back half of 2008 was this midtempo chug through nostalgic Mexican pop.
Maná formed in 1986, two years after singer Marisela had a big hit with "Si No Te Hubieras Ido" (if you hadn't left), a soft-rock ballad written and produced by Los Bukis frontman Marco Antonio Solís, who is also the second voice on the choruses. By the time that Solís included his own recording of the song on his album of re-recordings Trozos de mi Alma (pieces of my soul), Maná was a globally successful band who had changed the sound of Mexican pop: Solís' version, though still a syrupy ballad, has a muscular rock arrangement, and went to #4 on the Hot Latin chart in 1999. A year later, there was an awkward salsa version by Puerto Rican singer Charlie Cruz, but it only reached #40.
So when Maná included it on their 2008 live album Arde El Cielo (the sky is burning) as one of two covers (the other is José Alfred Jiménez' classic ranchera "El Rey"), it was as an acknowledgement of Mexican pop history and a desire to place themselves within that lineage. I've quarreled with the Mexicanness of Maná before (which I should again stress that I am in no capacity to judge, being only an outside observer), but whether or not their audience considers them an internationalist improvement on Mexican regionalism, Maná certainly wants to be seen as operating within a Mexican (and broader Latin) tradition at least as much as in the international rock tradition that Fher's throaty vocals and their chugging guitars point to.
It's those relentless, uninflected chugging guitars which make this a more or less failed rewrite of the song. The swooping emotional drama that Marisela and Marco Antonio Solís communicated in their readings of the lyrics' emotional devastation, a drama that was no doubt goosed up by glossy strings, dissipates into friendly sway-along karaoke in Maná's hands, which comes off like a third-hand story rather than a portrayal of heartbreak.
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