19th March, 2011
I was pretty harsh about Enrique's last appearance here, in part because I knew this was coming and was girding my loins in advance. The title of the song, and the cockily-crowed refrain, translate to "Don't Tell Me No," and despite the pseudo-romantic way he dresses it up and the good-time party vibes a team of producers and co-stars surrounds it with, the most forceful sentiment of the song remains a refusal to listen, an overriding of consent, the normalization of assault as a natural extension of masculine desire.
The big trancey synths and hopping club music behind it are extremely early 2010s, post-subprime pop as louche, privileged atavism (and the opposite of what, for example, Ke$ha was using the same basic template to express at the time). The soaring chorus, with its reduplicated, shouting, thin-voiced Enriques, even recalls the hooky pop-punk of ten years earlier, another genre that in its most popular expression was a black hole of whiny male self-regard. There's not a hint of dembow in the rhythm despite classic reggaetón producers Nesty and Victor El Nasi being involved: indeed, only Wisin's rap verse even plays with syncopation at all. Everything else is a foursquare, flat-footed beat that even the whitest listener can pogo along to.
It was only at #1 for a week, sandwiched between "Corazón Sin Cara," and in Iglesias' discography is little more than a footnote compared to the much more massive smashes from his bilingual album Euphoria: "I Like It" and "Tonight (I'm Lovin' You)" were blanketing Anglophone airwaves, while "Cuando Me Enamoró" still lingered on Spanish-language radio. Given his English-language success, it will be a few years before Enrique returns to this travelogue, while Doble-U y Yandel will be a more constant presence. But that's another story.
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