5th June, 2010
In retrospect the week-long reign of this song was merely a prelude to the summer-shattering hit that followed it, a companion piece in many ways. But I remember this week, because I was checking the Hot Latin chart every week in order to write this blog, and the cosmopolitanism and wide-eyed optimism this song, and especially its reign at #1, represented gave me wings. (It's only somewhat an accident that the slowdown of the chart, once streaming data started showing just how geologically-slowly actual listening habits changed, coincided with my own lack of will to continue updating.) My delight in it was probably at least somewhat responsible for my thrilled reception of Juan Luis Guerra himself when he made his first appearance here, way back in 1993.
I've rated all his appearances here pretty highly, but "Bachata en Fukuoka" might be my favorite JLG #1, as much due to my own nostalgia for the vanished world of a decade ago as to anything intrinsic to the record. But the record itself is great too: a romantic bachata about Juan Luis Guerra's own pleased discovery on tour that East Asian audiences were already familiar with the bachata, mambo, and merengue he was playing for them. The port city of Fukuoka as representative of Asia could have been chosen for the meter, but also its relative unfamiliarity to Western ears, as the sixth-largest city in Japan, shifts the focus away from busy cosmopolitan uban centers like Tokyo or Kyoto and into the humdrum Japanese everyday. Beaches are beaches everywhere in the world, from Japan to the Dominican Republic.
The recording's arrangement, with brief keyboard parts meant to evoke the sound of a koto, is elegant and dreamy without forsaking the danceability of bachata (or the Cuban mambo that the middle eight breaks into, hauntingly, eye-wateringly). The video is one of the best of the modern-era videos in this travelogue, a magical-realist short film that takes the Japanese urban landscape seriously, without exoticization or condescension. As he always has, Juan Luis Guerra feels like an adult making art who occasionally appears in between adolescents making money, regardless of the actual ages of the people involved.
The lyrics are well-crafted enough that the song's inspiration -- the after all relatively banal observation that globalization flows in all directions -- is submerged in more specific imagery, from seagulls wheeling on the beach to wearing your lover's skin as an overcoat. The repetition of Japanese 101 vocabulary can feel, with distance and age, a bit cringey (especially as younger Westerners are often more casually otaku than their elders), but within the context of the US Hot Latin chart in 2010 it felt almost radically expansive, an acknowledgement that Latin pop was, and deserved to be, as globally dominant as its Anglo counterpart.
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