25th August, 2012
When Elvis Crespo first appeared on this blog, I said he would only appear here once more; two weeks after I posted that, he notched his third Hot Latin #1, and I've been waiting over a decade to eat my words.
The pop world of 1998 was so thoroughly different from the pop world of 2012 that the slick, ladies'-man Crespo of those early appearances fit in with the Enrique Iglesiases, Ricky Martins, and Marc Anthonys of the flamboyant premillennial Latin pop wave. By contrast, in 2012 he is a corny elder making a goofy, whiny love song with the similarly aging merenhouse group Ilegales. The bouncing beat and "yo no soy un monstruo" (I am not a monster) refrain are hooky enough to spin it onto radio playlists, and Ilegales' rap breaks come near enough to reggaetón-era rapping to sound not entirely out of place in the 2010s, but the music video, set in a high school where the Crespo stand-in male model is the target of relentless bullying until a similarly outcast girl gives him a makeover, is so deeply embarrassing a way for a group of grown men to be representing their song that it very nearly made me write it off entirely.
Very little could sound more derivatively early 2010s. The chunky dancefloor synths, the faddish AutoTune that flattens Elvis Crespo's voice once-distinctive voice into a nasal whine, the hypey "oh, oh ohhhohhohh" backing vocals. And the unrelenting merenhouse beat sounds, like so much contemporary tropical pop that fell in between the two magisterial reggaetón eras, wan and old-fashioned, crying out for a dembow judder.
In fact, the repeated snippets of tight little melodies over an unvarying beat do sound a bit like an echo in prefigure of Dominican dembow, which was still more or less an underground phenomenon, not yet hooked up to the immense flattening power of the Internet to become the signature dance sound of the Dominican Republic (much to the horror of traditional merengue and bachata audiences). But when the most interesting thing about a song is how well it compares to something it isn't, there's not much left to say about the song itself.
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