22nd September, 2012
I loved Arjona's first #1 from the Independiente album, which I called "a literary prank in pop-song clothing," the bracingly cynical "El Amor." But it's the rare pop craftsman who entirely refuses to acknowledge on which side his bread is buttered, and this, the fourth single from the album, is a straightforward love song, with less of the usual literary wordplay and more simple sentiment than he's ever deployed in this travelogue before. It's as if he knew it would be his last chance to spend a week at #1 before the chart changed over to streaming data, and so he gave his fans the big anthemic I-love-you song they wanted -- and the video underlines this with a live rendition in Buenos Aires, with thousands of beautiful young Argentines caught on camera singing along with tears in their eyes.
Sad to say, it leaves me almost entirely unmoved -- I've made my criticisms of Arjona's very standard rock-derived production and singing styles before, and this performance lives up to every one of them. As with all Arjona songs, the pleasures are in the abstract, intellectual construction of the songs and not in the bodily surge that carries me along with them.
Because there's not none of that literary wordplay: but because it all circles tightly around the very simple phrase "Te Quiero" (I want/love you), there's less to say about it. The ultimate effect is that of a Leonard Cohen song being performed by late-period U2: the mismatch between the intelligent self-composure of the lyrics and the generic overwroughtness of the performance is kind of interesting, but not so much that it bears repeated exposure.
Only one song left before streaming data takes over and pummels the relatively diversity of genre, nationality, generation and audience that the old Hot Latin chart once championed into an indistinguishable paste. Let's hope it's a good one.
No comments:
Post a Comment