ENRIQUE IGLESIAS FT. DESCEMER BUENO & GENTE DE ZONA, “BAILANDO”

17th May, 2014

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Forty-one weeks at number one. Only one other behemoth, lurking ahead in the shadows of 2017, will (as of this writing) beat its record. But that's with streaming; on the old airplay-calculation chart, "Bailando" only notched a respectable twenty, still several weeks behind "La Tortura" in 2005. Radio, which perforce must please both the fans of a record and those who have grown tired of it, has to be higher-churn, while streaming numbers reflect only the fans; skip rates are (to my knowledge) not factored. This naturally feeds the line-go-up appetite of the record labels, but to the detriment of listeners, who may have more options than ever to actively hunt down, but whose passive listening gets trapped in narrowcasted halls of mirrors, in which the active choices of millions of others get reflected back to them in a burning point, and the winner takes it all.

And there has not been a winninger winner in the history of the Hot Latin chart than Enrique Iglesias: this is his twenty-fifth entry at #1 (but not his last), while his nearest competition (Luis Miguel and a certain malevolent lagomorph (cf. the "bunnied" entry at the Popular FAQ)) currently languish at 16. The success of this song must seem to some degree a foregone conclusion: its spring single release is an obvious bid for song-of-the-summer status, and its uptempo, gladsome vibes make it an ideal party soundtrack for old and young alike; the elders can enjoy the flamenco clapping and guitar, while the youngsters can dig the electronic rhythm (it's yet another descendant of "Danza Kuduro") and hip-hop shouting by guests Gente de Zona, who never overpower Enrique and in fact make him sound fresher and more hip than he has in years.

It was the song at #1 when President Obama announced his intent to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba; both of the featured artists were from Cuba (Gente de Zona being the first successful Cuban hip-hop and reggaetón act to circumvent the cultural embargo), and the feeling of optimism that Cuba, which had been the most fecund and innovative center of musical ferment in Latin America in the century before the Revolution, would at last be allowed to join the modern era of pan-Latin collaboration and interchange, was high in the mid-2010s.

All that optimism feels naive and even cruel now, when it appears that the United States government is intent on making the rest of Latin America join Cuba as a pariah state if they refuse to be be a client one. And of course, any dialectical analysis could have told you that capitalist investment by way of record-label promotion is no substitute for genuine political solidarity.

In 2025, Gente de Zona are latecomers jumping on the reparto bandwagon in Cuba -- reparto being a street-level electronic dance music related to Puerto Rican reggaetón and Dominican dembow, with busier percussion and a wholly homegrown sense of build-and-release dynamics born in the Havana repartos (neighborhoods) by impoverished MCs and DJS the mid-2000s. In the 2020s, it's become a fashionable sound in pan-Latin urbano, always hungry for new fresh sounds it can chew up and recycle into gleaming hypercapitalized pop. Nigerian afrobeats, Brazilian funk, Colombian ritomo exótico, and Guadeloupean bouyon are being similarly cannibalized at the moment; while Barcelonan rumba flamenca has only recently fallen out of fashion again.

But back in 2014, flamenco was the fresh sound being chewed up and recycled, as it has periodically been over the course of this travelogue, including by Iglesias himself fifteen years prior. The flamenco-pop boom centered around Rosalía is still some years off, so this song can sound oddly prescient as well as old-fashioned at the same time.

There was an English-language version that featured Sean Paul's motormouthed toasting, as well as two Portuguese-language versions aimed at the Brazilian and Portuguese markets respectively; none of them are as interesting to me as the original, and even that is more in a what-could-have-been sense than in itself.

Airplay Watch:

• Ricardo Arjona, "Apnea"
• A big dramatic piano-strings-and-rock ballad about drowning in his feelings for a departed lover, with an extremely well-written poetic throughline that leaves me utterly cold.
• J Balvin ft. Farruko, "6:00 AM"
• Colombian reggaetón-pop, incorporating more dancehall and tropipop elements, shows its face for the first time on this travelogue. The song is pretty minor, but shows promise.
• Enrique Iglesias ft. Descemer Bueno & Gente de Zona, "Bailando"
• Discussed above.
• Romeo Santos, "Eres Mía"
• Formula is right. This slinky bachata is about seducing a woman engaged to someone else.
• Carlos Vives ft. Marc Anthony, "Cuando Nos Volvamos a Encontrar"
• Two middle-aged masters of their domains deliver a starry-eyed romantic duet starting in Vives' usual rock n' vallenato style and building to Anthony's usual big-band salsa style.
• Juan Luis Guerra & 4.40, "Tus Besos"
• An adorable bachata with Fifties slow-dance doo-wop aesthetics. Guerra remains the master of genre.
• Romeo Santos ft. Marc Anthony, "Yo También"
• Another summit of big names; this time Romeo bends to Anthony's salsa stylings, and naturally gets himself outsung.
• Víctor Manuelle, "Que Suenen los Tambores"
• A much better salsa song, perhaps because it doesn't have to support two massive music-industry egos, and is about the joy of music instead of some cooked-up romantic drama.
• Gerardo Ortíz, "Eres una Niña"
• Mexican regional assimilates bachata, with brass and woodwinds instead of guitar. Gerardo still sings foursquare, though (complimentary).
• Don Omar, "Soledad"
• Dramatic, po-faced reggaetón with merengue típico accents that just ends up sounding like he's trying to make the "Danza Kuduro" template work as a ballad.
• Voz de Mando, "Levantando Polvadera"
• Good old-fashioned norteño with tuba basslines, accordion fingerwork, and inventive drumming whose rhythmic switch-ups make for an exciting storytelling device.