12th March, 2011
The bachata wave continues to crest even as Aventura steps away from the spotlight. The music industry, having discovered the appeal of "Dominican R&B," is loath to let it fade, and a young Bronx-born heartthrob with a sweet voice and utterly sincere songwriting is the perfect substitute for Romeo Santos' more emotionally complicated songwriting while the latter steps away from the spotlight to build up his solo material.
Geoffrey Royce Rojas, the son of a taxi driver and a beautician, was twenty when his debut album, Prince Royce, was released through an independent Miami-based label. His first single was a bachata cover in Spanglish of Ben E. King's "Stand by Me," a statement of his hybrid identity as both a Dominican and a New Yorker; the follow-up, however, was the one to watch. "Corazón Sin Cara" took more than a year to reach #1, first released to radio in February 2010. It started to gain traction by the summer, and had actually fallen from the top spot on the Tropical Latin chart before the mainstream Latin audience caught on to it, finally bringing it to #1 Hot Latin in the spring of 2011.
The song's title translates directly to "Heart without a face," a reference to the Spanish idiom he sings in the chorus, "El corazón no tiene cara," (the heart has no face), which is used in equivalent ways to the English "love is blind" -- a song about loving past superficial appearances, it's very much of a piece with One Direction's contemporaneous "What Makes You Beautiful" (which would be released later in 2011), a song reassuring the teen idols' self-conscious, self-critical young female audience that love is not dependent on beauty, and especially not on a one-size-fits-all standard of beauty.
It's not quite mawkish, because Royce's fluid singing around the rhythms of the song rescues it from the syrupy strings larded on towards the end, but his lyrics are entirely conventional (Romeo's wordplay and sharp wit are beyond him at this point). Still, the 2010s are going to be an era that demands a certain amount of social responsibility from its teen idols, and Royce is ahead of the curve there.
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