Only the second banda sinaloense song ever to hit #1, and the second within the same year: 2009 is as diverse a year for Hot Latin #1s as there has been on record to date. Which says as much about the changing formats of Latin radio airplay within the US in the late 2000s as it does about audiences (or even the specific virtues of the individual performers, which we'll get to). For decades, Billboard had divided its Latin charts between Hot Latin, Tropical, and Regional Mexican, because that was more or less the divide in radio formats: Hot Latin (across the country) played pop music in Spanish, generally whatever was popular throughout continental Latin America and Spain, Tropical (keyed to the New York and Miami markets) played what was popular among the Caribbean diaspora within the US, and Regional Mexican (keyed to the Southern California and Texas markets) played what was was popular among blue-collar Mexican immigrants and their children.
There had always been plenty of overlap between the Hot Latin and the Tropical formats, as we've seen, and Regional Mexican had also made plenty of inroads into the Hot Latin chart as well, depending on the year and the region. But several trends over the past decade -- including the massive growth of native Spanish speakers within the US (between 1990 and 2010, their percentage of the population almost doubled), the consolidation of commercial radio in the hands of a few major corporations, and the rise of truly national Spanish-language media (Telemundo and Univision did not segregate their music programming by region) -- meant that Regional Mexican music began to have a stronger presence than ever in the Hot Latin charts just at the moment when the strongest threads in that chart had become Puerto Rican reggaetón and Dominican bachata, both Tropical genres.
And "Lo Intentamos" (we tried it) actually begins with traditionally Cuban percussion, sounding almost like a bolero, before the full banda comes in and the foursquare stomp of the drums solidifies the rhythm. But it's never quite as oompah as so much banda is: this is a highly contemporary pop song written by a man whose long apprenticeship took place in the United States, where he'd been a seasonal migrant laborer, as well as in Mexico. Structurally, it has R&B and rock in its DNA as well as banda, and it's easy to mentally recast the swaying tempo as a rock & roll ballad.
Espinoza Paz was born in Sinaloa in 1981, where he began writing songs as a childhood hobby, and first crossed the border at the age of fifteen, following the footsteps of his father, who had also been a migrant worker in the US. After a decade of work and struggle, he finally managed to sell a brace of songs to an established banda singer in 2004, gaining a foothold in the industry; his first major-label album, which marketed him as a singer/songwriter of the people, was released in 2008, giving him the minor hit "El Próximo Viernes." The follow-up Yo No Canto, Pero Lo Intentamos (I don't sing, but let's try it) gave him this, his sole Hot Latin #1.
It's a superb song, romantic and sad and vernacular -- the language is very plain and unadorned in a kind of way that many Spanish speakers sneer at, dismissing it as simpleminded underclass music aimed at uneducated first- or second-generation immigrants who are losing touch with, or never knew much, Spanish. Maybe so; but they deserve popular music that speaks to and for them just as much as, and maybe more than, university graduates and Europeanized Latin Americans do. Paz expresses his regret at not doing enough to keep his lost love, and the pain that her new love gives him, in basic, universal language, and his untrained voice struggles to keep up with the melody as it pushes into a higher register.
Within three years, he will announce a short-lived retirement from music in a bid to regain control of his career; he will never again be as popular as he was around the turn of the 2010s, as the genre of banda moves away from his slightly callow, aw-shucks persona. But we only have a few more years left in which banda can break through to the top of the chart at all; the streaming era is coming up quickly.
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