MARC ANTHONY, “VIVIR MI VIDA”

18th May, 2013

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A Nuyorican cover of a song in Arabic and French song by a singer born in Algeria and resident in Luxembourg, produced by a Swedish team: the anodyne feel-good façade of Obama-era globalization reaches something of a crescendo here, with a string of decisions made by individuals who may be nothing but sincere in their motivations but who end up producing a symbol of a global consensus rapidly fading into the rearview in 2025.

Let's start back in 1992, when thirty-two-year-old Algerian raï singer Khaled, having recently moved to France and dropped the prefix "Cheb" (young) from his stage name, released the single "Didi", produced by American quirkmaster Don Was, whose addition of a new jack swing beat, a celebratory horn chart, and funk pop bass to Khaled's lovestruck performance turned him into a global star with a musical footprint across continental Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. He maintained that position for the next decade-plus with a series of raï hits intermingled with Western dance sounds, one of the ambassadors of the 90s vision of "world music" -- and in 2012, at the age of fifty-two, he staged a comeback with "C'est la Vie", produced by Swedish-Moroccan superproducer RedOne, a canny admixture of raï and post-subprime dancepop, with RedOne's signature airy synth blasts and thumping beats overlaying Algerian hand percussion and syncopated keyboard patterns not a million miles away from the montuno figures of Afro-Cuban mambo. It's a big-tent singalong in Arabic and French, and the video, with its photogenic cast of ethnically diverse dancers and models expressing a genericized, unthreatening joy, is virtually a pro-immigration ad campaign aimed at the European petty bourgeoisie, sentimental but vacuous.

"C'est la Vie" was Khaled's biggest hit since "Didi," soaring up a lot of European charts and setting hugely across the Middle East; and like "Didi" it inspired a bunch of covers, foremost of which was the salsa reimagining by Marc Anthony and Sergio George which is our actual topic today. But let's go back to the early 90s again.

We first met Marc Anthony on this travelogue in 1997, but he'd been making music since 1988, initially as an English-language singer on Latin freestyle and underground house tracks produced by the likes of Little Louie Vega and Todd Terry. But in 1993, after being bowled over by Juan Gabriel's "Hasta Que Te Conocí," he devoted himself to singing in Spanish, and specifically to salsa: his cover was where the real Marc Anthony was born. He's eight years younger than Khaled, but their careers still moved in an odd parallel: both were singers of a specific postcolonial ethnic music closely identified with immigrant enclaves in the imperial core; both also reached out to the broader western pop landscape and were celebrities -- rockstars, even -- beyond their minority identities; both had high-profile marriages whose troubles were splashed over the tablod press.

Marc Anthony's divorce from Jennifer Lopez was fresh news in early 2013, and the song was widely understood at the time as being a man's declaration of happiness over his newfound independence from an allegedly difficult to please woman. The Spanish lyrics are credited exclusively to Anthony, although the chorus at least is not too far of from the original. Compre the Spanish "Voy a reír, voy a gozar, vivir mi vida, la la la la la" (I'm going to laugh, I'm going to enjoy myself, live my life, la la la la la) with the French "On va s'aimer, on va danser, oui, c'est la vie, la la la la la" (We're going to love, we're going to dance, yes, that's life la la la la la). The video very highmindedly casts the song as a tribute to his fans, particularly in his hometown of New York, but the fact that the fans in the video are mostly very young women is its own indication of the kind of rockstar imagery that was being invoked.

Ultimately I enjoy "Vivir Mi Vida" a lot more than "C'est la Vie," if only because the salsa instrumentation doesn't insist on itself as much as RedOne's bombastic thumping; the sparse Latin percussion, with its generous empty spaces, leaves room for a subtler kind of dancing than slamming trance, and Sergio George's arrangement is full of the kind of detail and narrative that the club-oriented repetition of the original has no room for. Both are still pretty cheesy singalongs, even chantalongs aimed as much at soccer terraces as dancefloors, so maybe it's just my greater familiarity with salsa than with raï that makes Marc Anthony's feal realer to me.

Airplay Watch:

• Don Omar, "Zumba"
• Discussed in the previous entry.
• Intocable, "Te Amo (Para Siempre)"
• A beautiful middle-aged tejano ballad that I'm even more annoyed than usual that the streaming-era chart didn't give me the chance to dig more deeply into. 
• Marc Anthony, "Vivir Mi Vida"
• Discussed above.

DADDY YANKEE, “LIMBO”

2nd February, 2013

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I was mostly disconnected from popular Latin music in 2013. I had moved to Chicago in the beginning of the year, and no longer had a car, so the dedicated radio-listening time I had had for the past decade vanished out from under me. But also, I was listening to less and less music overall, as joblessness and depression shoved me into an abyss, and I grabbed onto other interests in desperation and clung to them instead. It has been twelve years, and I'm only now starting to try to return to having a normal relationship with art, instead of alternately burying myself in it and running away from it as too demanding.

All of that to say, I hadn't really heard "Limbo" before now. Or maybe I had, and it just slid off my brain as though buttered, without leaving a trace behind. It's that kind of song. At first, I was cheered -- isn't that the reggaetón riddim? No, not quite, it's too fast. It's a tresillo, but not the same cadence. And then there's a beat drop, and it just pounds into undifferentiated EDM mush. The lyrics are in Spanish, but it's not exactly aimed at the Spanish-language market. As in his previous appearance here, he shouts out the Zumba fitness program, and this time it's more than just a shout-out: "Limbo" was commissioned specifically by Zumba, and Yankee's description of the song's intent, reproduced on Wikipedia, is as brand-friendly and corporate as they could wish: it is supposed to "invite the imagination, ignite creativity, to step away from the norm and bring something completely different."

Well, one thing about a song written for a fitness company: it's going to be energetic. And that energy is the best thing about it, with Yankee as motormouthed hypeman for an active session, his horndog persona entirely sanded down to a cheerful movement instructor. It still works exactly as it's supposed to, because its ambitions are so low; but it gives you absolutely no reason to listen to it if you're not breaking a sweat.

Airplay Watch:

• Tito El Bambino & Marc Anthony, "¿Por Qué Les Mientes?"
• Discussed in the previous entry.
• Carlos Vives ft. Michel Teló, "Come Le Gusta a Tu Cuerpo"
• Cheerful Colombian vallenato auteur Vives invites similarly cheerful Brazilian sertanejo chantalong huckster Teló for a very fun accordion-led dance tune with lots to chant along to in both Spanish and Portuguese.
• Don Omar, "Zumba"
• Another song obviously commissioned bythe same company as "Limbo," this one intended for a dancealong video game. Omar is even more of a cipher than Yankee, but he always was: the music is slightly more interesting, in part because there's a merengue percussion line. 
• Romeo Santos, "Llévame Contigo"
• Another of Santos' stylish, swooningly romantic bachata with unusual musical flourishes, this one about begging a woman who is leaving him to take him with her.
• Prince Royce, "Te Me Vas"
• Another bachata about a woman leaving him, but Royce is nowhere near Santos' level either as a singer or a lyricist: he just complains about it. The musical flourishes are more obvious and feel rather Disney Channel.
• Thalía ft. Prince Royce, "Te Perdiste Mi Amor"
• A third bachata #1 in a row -- the loss of regional music in the streaming #1s is really felt here -- although this is easily the worst of the three. Thalía is a pro but no bachatera, and Royce switching between English and Spanish shows just how much of his appeal is in his voice's tone rather than his control over it.

TITO EL BAMBINO & MARC ANTHONY, “¿POR QUÉ LES MIENTES?”

19th January, 2013

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The streaming-era chart can still be punctuated by one-week wonders, especially on songs like this that unite two proven hitmakers who can marshal their overlapping fanbases to stream their newest single. Although radio helped as well: the single was released in November, and it peaked at #1 on the Airplay chart two weeks before it made its appearance here. It would remain there for two further weeks, while the streaming-included chart moved on to a more resounding crossover hit.

I took Tito El Bambino's previous appearance here as a breath of fresh air, but this song harkens back to his first appearance back in 2009, another high-drama cumbiarengue song combining classic Latin tropical arrangements with modern plainspoken urbano -- unless I'm much mistaken, this is the first time that the word mierda (shit) has been heard at this chart's #1.

The full line is "me trataste como mierda ante la gente" (you treated me like shit in front of people), an accusation toward a former partner who is now attempting to cause drama about the singer's current partner; the entire song is a refusal to be pulled back into the self-pitying narcissistic vortex of a toxic ex, which would, I'll admit, be more attractive to me coming from women towards a presumptively male interlocutor. But Tito and Marc make it work, particularly Marc -- who had recently been in the news for his separation from Jennifer Lopez; art is not biography, but fans undoubtedly read this song in reference to her.

But then Marc Anthony could make anything sound gripping and real -- El Bambino's more vacuous tonality, digitally smoothed and auto-harmonized as it is, has to rely on reggaetón-trained rhythmic variation in order to even the playing field and not be outshined on his own song. He doesn't quite pull it off, in my estimation: the penultimate chorus, which he takes instead of Marc Anthony, feels weightless by comparison with all the others. But I have to applaud the construction and especially the arrangement of the song: with its glossy strings, punchy horns, and busy percussion, it has a classic Latin sound but enough of a modern bite to make it more than an exercise in nostalgia.

Airplay Watch:

• Tito El Bambino & Marc Anthony, "¿Por Qué Les Mientes?"
• Discussed above.

WISIN Y YANDEL FT. CHRIS BROWN & T-PAIN, “ALGO ME GUSTA DE TI”

20th October, 2012

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The first #1 of the streaming era is almost a caricature of the immediate effect that replacing the carefully-calibrated audiences of radio with the undifferentiated firehose of streaming had on the chart. Puerto Rican reggatoneros-turned-dancepop-bros Wisin y Yandel are familiar faces to the #1 spot, but their guests on this track, the uncancellable Virginia R&B bad boy Chris Brown and the cuddly Atlanta electro-soul king T-Pain, provide the crossover juice that made this not just the last Hot Latin #1 of 2012 but the first of 2013, with an unbroken thirteen-week reign that had only been exceeded four times in the history of the chart: 1986, 1988, 2005, 2007. (It had been matched two additional times, by "Rompe" and "Danza Kuduro".) But long unbroken (or briefly punctuated) reigns are now the new norm: the rest of 2013 will only feature seven different songs at the top of Billboard's principal Latin pop chart.

So in an attempt to reconcile this new chart with the history I've traced heretofore, each new entry on this travelogue will end with an Airplay Watch: a list of songs that were at #1 on the Latin Airplay chart (a new chart calculated using the old Hot Latin metric) during the reign of the Hot Latin #1 under discussion, with brief capsule reviews, excluding only songs that will become future Hot Latin #1s.

But for the body of this post, we'll still have to wrestle with this thing, a jocular party anthem in a vein that was feeling pretty exhausted by this point. Puerto Rican producers Luis O'Neill and Chris Jedi do their best thumpa-thump, sine-synth imitation of megasuccessful Swedish maestros like Dr. Luke and RedOne, but it's not 2008 anymore for anybody, and the Chris Brown and T-Pain bits just make me want to put on "Forever" or "Can't Believe It" instead. Even Wisin and Yandel sound pretty checked-out themselves, running through standard come-ons and exhortatons to party as though their stock portfolios will dip if they don't. Even the big-budget crossover reggaetón of "Sexy Movimiento" feels like it was ages ago, never mind the hungry, horny, beat-forward "Rakata", their first single (which still hit #2 back in 2005; they've always been a creature of the charts.)

If the first song of the streaming era was a better or more distinctive effort rather than just about the most generic party crossover thing the era could produce, I still wouldn't have been thrilled about the change; but watching this thing stick in the craw of the chart for months on end just as I was attempting the most foolhardy and ultimately destructive change of my life didn't help my feeling that everything was going to shit, that the idiots and the algorithms that catered to them were winning, that nothing interesting or beautiful or meaningful would ever happen again.

Stay tuned, I guess.

Airplay Watch:

• Wisin & Yandel ft. Chris Brown & T-Pain "Algo Me Gusta de Ti"
• Discussed above.
• Leslie Grace, "Will U Still Love Me Tomorrow"
• One of my favorite minor hits of the period, from a Dominican New Yorker bachatera attempting to replicate Prince Royce's playbook by leading off with a classic US pop song in Spanish and English. Grace would go on to have a middling pop career of often very fine Latin pop and little notice before being cast in the film adaptation of In the Heights, and is now primarily known as an actor.
• Arcángel, Zion & Lennox, Lobo, RKM & Ken-Y, "Diosa de los Corazónes"
• The "Danza Kuduro" beat gets another workout on this posse cut/pretty-boy summit from two Puerto Rican duos and two Puerto Rican solo singers (although Arcángel had been in a duo with De La Ghetto). A lot of energy and tremulous vocalizing to very little effect.
• Gerardo Ortíz, "Solo Vine a Despedirme"
• One of the tragedies of the streaming makeover of the chart is that great Mexican regional hits like this are now relegated to footnotes like this one. Ortiz takes this heartbroken farewell song at such a breakneck clip that it's practically punk rock.
• Prince Royce, "Incondicional"
• A bachata cover of the 1989 Luis Miguel hit, dispensing with Miguel's dramatics for Royce's smooth airiness.
• Gusttavo Lima, "Balada (Tchê Tcherere Tchê Tchê)"
• A pop-sertanejo singalong, the spiritual successor to "Ai Se Eu Te Pego", a year later. I probably like it better, because it's more rhythmically interesting, but it's just as vacant of meaning.
• Enrique Iglesias ft. Sammy Adams, "Finally Found You"
• A late and unimpressive entry from Iglesias' Swedish-produced club-pop phase. Guest Sammy Adams is a terrible rapper, but Daddy Yankee doesn't do much better on the Latin-market version.
• Carlos Vives, "Volví a Nacer"
• Discussed in the previous entry.
• Gocho ft. Yandel & Wayne Wonder, "Amor Real"
• Producer Gocho takes another crack at an above-the-line hit, with Yandel along for moral support. The reggaeton riddim haunts the song like a ghost, intangible even as the actual beat echoes it in absentia.

CARLOS VIVES, “VOLVÍ A NACER”

13th October, 2012

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This is it: the final #1 of the Hot Latin chart as it had been calculated since its beginning in 1986. Despite my ignorant speculation in early entries on this blog, it had always been an airplay chart; commercial singles of Spanish-language pop were uncommon in the U.S. after the 1960s, as label consolidation created pressure to direct consumers toward higher-ticket albums. Where the charts were concerned, radio formats were a rough but workable approximation of audience: if a song was popular in the Black or Latin communities, regardless of actual genre, it showing up on the R&B or Hot Latin charts meant something.

So Billboard shifting, in October 2012, to a streaming-heavy calculation for its flagship genre charts meant that audiences no longer counted. As an infamous illustration, the streaming switchover meant that Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" would hold the #1 spot on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart for months in early 2013, whereas on the R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart, which used the old calculation, it peaked at #34. But it had the "hip-hop" tag on streaming services, so that's the bucket it went into, even though the core audience for the music wasn't much embracing it. (And in fact it had more play on rock stations than R&B ones, peaking at #13 on Rock Airplay.)

But the Latin audience, being both more diffuse (Texas, California, New York and Florida all have very different Latin-music histories and cultures, as different as the countries they saw the most immigration from) and coming with a significant language barrier, would be affected differently. I'll be discussing some of those effects in future installments, but the most immediate and obvious would be the virtual disappearance for many years of genre variety from the top of the chart: pending the unexpected, this is the last we will see of accordion-led Colombian vallenato. Urbano -- the useful catch-all term for Latin music derived from hip-hop, dancehall, and electronic dance -- will rule the top of the chart for the rest of the decade, with glacial turnover as whatever song with "Latin" in its metadata is being played most at parties sticks around for months at a time.

Don't get me wrong, that will include a lot of great music. The chart as calculated by airplay gave kind of a false impression: because it combined inputs from widely different audiences (Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York, Cubans in Miami, Tejanos in Texas, Chicanos in Los Angeles, not to mention all the rest of the Hispanic diaspora across the country), it actually delivered more genre diversity than individual listeners were likely to experience from their preferred radio stations. Which of course made it ideally suited for my purposes, as a genre-agnostic magpie wanting to get my arms around as much Latin music as possible. But we've already seen how the airplay chart had diminished reggaetón and other forms of urbano ("Gasolina" getting stuck at #17 while a Juanes rock  anthem reigned at #1 is the canonical example) -- urbano is going to be some of the most exciting and interesting music of the 2010s and 2020s, so getting to look at it in all its explosions and contradictions is going to be fascinating.

But before that, a farewell to Carlos Vives, who will not, as of this writing, be gracing this travelogue again (the closest he will come is a duet with fellow Colombian Shakira in 2014, which will stall at #2 behind a third Colombian; but that's a ways off yet). The chart that started with the Spanish Rocío Dúrcal and the Mexican Juan Gabriel has seen many shifts in taste and fashion over the course of its young life, and if we had to have a valedictory for the past twenty-six years from someone who has been a regular presence for the past thirteen, you could hardly ask for a better selection. Always pleasant to hear from, with one foot firmly planted in the soil of local tradition but one eye always cocked to the horizon for the freshness and modernity of international pop success, he's a Latin Grammy favorite who has aged gracefully into an upbeat, avuncular sound that challenges no boundaries and invites everyone into the jolly, communal celebration.

"Volví a Nacer" (I was born again) is a love song said to be inspired by Vives' second wife, Claudia Elena Vásquez, who married him in 2008. Like so many of the love songs we've looked at over the years, it's replete in hyperbolic expressions of devotion and achievement for the sake of the beloved, the kind of vows a medieval knight-errant would recognize as proper to his lady love. Of course the religious symbolism of the title is present (that too is very medieval, which is another way of saying Catholic, which is another way of saying Latin), but it's submerged in the more human anxiety of whether the lover will remain with him.

The music, swelling from piano ballad to vallenato jig to rock & roll guitar heroics, is similarly a wide tent, with massed voices in the chorus just begging for a singalong. If it doesn't quite convince me to sing along here in the fall of 2024, that may not be its fault: the more muted, paranoid atmostphere of the 2020s can't help being a little skeptical of populist bonhomie. While I don't doubt Vives' sincerity, it's not just the sturdy, gospelly uplifting chords that end up sounding a little naïve.

RICARDO ARJONA, “TE QUIERO”

22nd September, 2012

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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.

MANÁ, “HASTA QUE TE CONOCÍ”

15th September, 2012

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One of the few upsides of having taken forever to get through this blog is that songs that had yet to be released when I began it are able to force me to revisit and revise some of the ill-informed, unconsidered, and shallow takes I gave in the first few years of its existence.

Juan Gabriel, first as a songwriter and then a week later as a singer, was the auteur who more than any other defined the first five years of Hot Latin #1s, and I never really appreciated what made him great when I was writing about those years. It was not until his final #1 as a singer in 2001 -- which I only got to after his death in 2016, when I was finally capble of understanding the full breadth of his achievement -- that I really gave him his due in these pages.

But it wasn't in these pages, but in the waning years of the music-writing community on Tumblr, that I really revised my understanding of Juan Gabriel: my somewhat bellicose and overheated in memoriam included twinned valuations of "Debo Hacerlo," a #1 which I had done less than justice to back in 2010, and its immediate predecessor, the epic-length power ballad "Hasta Que Te Conocí," which peaked at #2 and so which I had been ignorant of until his death, when I dove into his discography and learned, to my mortification, that "Debo Hacerlo" had always been a kind of Frankensteined remix of "Conocí," the kind of obvious context that any Spanish-language listener in the eighties would have known immediately and which this blog would theoretically exist to elucidate for English-only readers. I've mentioned before how embarrassed I am by the first two decades covered by this blog, but that entry might be the one of which I'm most ashamed.

I'll go ahead and reproduce my post-mortem Tumblr blurb for "Hasta Que Te Conocí" here, in order to give a starting point for considering Maná's 2012 cover:

In 1986, he had no worlds left to conquer. (The savage wilderness to the north had never counted; it would have been beneath his dignity to mouth their crude, unliterary tongue.) The supreme center of Mexican music, he moved with ease between the internationalist pop of the capital, the classicist ranchera of the provinces, and the party-hearty rock of the border. His songs were sung by Spanish divas and juvenile sensations, he was the face and voice of the television age. With no horizontal territory left to claim, he could only build up: to pierce the sky with monuments to his own emotional torment and eccentric but undeniable musicianship.

“Hasta Que Te Conocí” is an sprawling pop edifice built from ranchera materials, but on a plan only Juan Gabriel could have conceived. An extended ambient ballad built on folkloric repetition and declarations of prelapsarian innocence serves as introduction, his perfectly-timed phrasing the only element of rhythm. When he finally pivots to the title phrase, tight mariachi strums and doomy horns build tension as he lays out his accusation of heartbreak and betrayal. It winds tighter and tighter, until the whole arrangement rises into an extended march-cum-tango-cum-montuno, horns pealing dolorously as Gabriel’s voice raises at last in emotional refusal, the tightly-constructed argument thrown out the window for a repeated, sobbing “no te quiero verte más.” The original studio version is stunning enough, but for the full, extravagantly emotional, experience see his epochal 1990 concert version or even his rendition from earlier this year, arranged and conducted by his longtime champion, composer Eduardo Magallanes.

(I will leave my reevaluation of "Debo Hacerlo" for the clickthrough; I may even have more to say later this year thanks to assorted music nerd challenges on Bluesky.)

Despite my insistence that only Juan Gabriel could have conceived of or pulled off the weird, ungainly, intensely personal structure of "Hasta Que Te Conocí" (tr. "Until I met you"), it's been a frequent target for cover versions in the years since 1986, much in the way that similarly extravagant slabs of high camp in the Anglophone canon like "Bohemian Rhapsody" or "Total Eclipse of the Heart" have been. Merengue, rock, and hip-hop versions all reached the lower reaches of the Hot Latin chart between 1987 and 2009, but the most successful covers would by Marc Anthony's faithful 1991 salsa cover (which reached #13) and, of course, this 2012 rendition by veteran rockers Maná.

I've been very hard on Maná in these pages, especially their latter-day resurgence as a mainstay of the #1 spot -- and it's a little comical that I implied they were in some way antithetical to Juan Gabriel in their first appearance here, given the fact that this cover was waiting for me -- but I have to admit that this is a sensitive, well-delivered cover, primarily in gentle bolero time until they go all Santana on a montuno coda, with Fher keeping his dudely rock bellowing to a minimum. But I can only come to that conclusion after spending weeks away from Juan Gabriel's original: when I listen to them back to back, Maná's limited emotional landscape and unimaginative rock instrumentation stand out in stark relief.

I have no memory of hearing this on the radio at the time, but like so many entries this year, it was only at #1 for a week: the last grains of sand of the airplay-only Hot Latin chart are running out fast.

ALEJANDRO SAENZ, “NO ME COMPARES”

8th September, 2012

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Including this song, there are four Hot Latin #1s left until Billboard changes its source for chart calculation from radio airplay to streaming data. This will have a flattening effect on the top of the chart, with a decade to come of months-long reigns of whatever song with the "Latin" medatata tag is most popular at parties and in clubs, occasionally interrupted for a week at a time by some viral meme or another. My entries for the entirety of 2012 have been functioning as a kind of valedictory for what the chart used to be: diverse, disunified, serving widely different audiences and admitting women at its upper reaches far more frequently than  it ever will once streaming rules. But these last four songs before I start engaging almost exclusively with thumping male bravado have been looming almost as ominously as the Return of Reggaetón has, and it's because they too are thumping male bravado, just in a different mode than is suited for clubs.

I've enjoyed, or at worst been pleasantly surprised by, Alejandro Sanz' previous entries here, both as a duet partner for Shakira and on his own, but this impassioned ballad betrays little of his literate musical eclecticism, drawing musically from early-2000s electro-acoustic adult contmporary and lyrically from the exhausted tradition of men bellowing after a lost love. True, the lyrics are far more poetic, with evocative and even provocative imagery in a deeply Spanish tradition, than is typical in pop, but they remain a mere collection of phrases tracking a conventional sentiment and have no surprises to give. Sanz is in fine voice, using his flamenco-descended "gitano" rasp to undeniable effect, but the one-note moodiness of the song means that his performance is also unsurprising, just builds along with the music's conventional swell from mopey intro to self-justifying chorus.

Still, I will miss hearing from Spain on this travelogue. I have mostly merely tolerated the contributions of the Iberian peninsula as compared to the hungrier, more vibrant Latin American scenes, but just as the Anglophone U.S. charts have frequently been at their most interesting when there was a lot of cross-pollination from the UK (the mid-60s, the early 80s), European insularity and self-regard can apply a pseudo-sophistication to the fundamentally Western-hemispherical forms whose absence will be felt once the top of the chart gets turned over almost entirely to tropical bangers.

TITO EL BAMBINO, “DAME LA OLA”

1st September, 2012

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Over the past few years of coverage, I've continued to use the "reggaeton" tag for tropical urbano dance songs that don't actually use the reggaetón rhythm, often because the performers got famous doing reggaetón and would return to it by the end of the decade, so it's more of a scene tag than a strictly musical one. But one effect of doing that is that a tabulation by tags might not be able to indicate just how good it feels to finally get the proper dembow riddim in a #1 song again, even if it is just a goofy horndog one-week-wonder.

I have no specific memory of hearing this song at the time, although it's familiar enough that I'm sure I did. It has very little distinctive about it; for example, it's neither as rhythmically, melodically, musically, or even lyrically interesting as Tito El Bambino's previous appearance here -- but that was a proper song, carefully written and produced to appeal to a wide number of audiences, and this is just a club banger. I say that with love: I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about "El Amor" despite its virtues, while "Dame la Ola" strikes me as a breath of fresh air despite, perhaps even because of, its genericness.

"Dame la Ola" literally means "give me the wave," but the wave it's requesting is not a motion of hands but of hips. "Give me a shake" might be a closer translation; "dance up on me" might be truer in sentiment. The video, all sunshine, tourist-friendly boardwalk, and a rail-slender model gyrating unconvincingly, does a good job indicating what thin gruel this is for fans of reggaetón's origins in whining-and-bouncing dancehall. But even so, this is this travelogue's first reggaetón proper song, with no other genre inmixing, since 2008. Even if it's shallow and lame, it feels good.

ELVIS CRESPO FT. ILEGALES, “YO NO SOY UN MONSTRUO”

25th August, 2012

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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.

CHINO Y NACHO FT. JAY SEAN, “BEBÉ BONITA”

18th August, 2012

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I genuinely adored Chino y Nacho's "Mi Niña Bonita", both at the time and in retrospect when I wrote about it here; but although this entry gets them out of being one-hit wonders, it has similar faults to many other attempted follow-ups to one-hit wonders: a lyric that reminds listeners of the previous song, a big-name (or as big as the budget allows) guest, an attempt to revamp a sound to keep up with musical fads. They've stripped out the reggaetón riddim, replacing it with a generic dance rhythm, invited British-Punjabi pop idol Jay Sean to croon some generic English-language sentiments, and infantilized the object of their affection even further, from niña bonita (pretty girl) to bebé bonia (pretty baby).

The result is a tune that slips off the mind as soon as it's been heard. Listeners seemed to agree; unlike the previous entry, which stuck around for three weeks, it's another of 2012's string of one-week #1s. Name recognition, quite possibly, was the only reason it charted this high in the first place, and the name that seems to bear the most weight is Jay Sean's: the musical bed powerfully recalls his three-year-old international smash "Down" -- which itself had been boosted by Lil Wayne's guest spot in a pop moment when Weezy F. Baby could do no wrong. 

But perhaps the most contributing factor to the rote anonymity of the song is that great Dominican producer Richy Peña, who gave "Mi Niña" its charming gloss, has been traded out for Reggi El Auténtico, a Venezuelan newcomer just starting out on a vaguely notable career of producing and contributing songwriting for a host of Latin artists.

There's nothing actively wrong with "Bebé Bonita," and it fulfills its functions as a pleasant way to soundtrack dancefloor flirtation, as an eminently licensable piece of agreeable music for a youth-oriented advertising campaign, and as a career extender for the above-the-title names. They won't trouble us again; although Chino y Nacho have continued to have a hitmaking career, airwave-dominating success has been largely confined to Venezuela. But we'll always have "Mi Niña Bonita."

ROMEO SANTOS, “LA DIABLA”

4th August, 2012

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The fourth and final #1 off of Formula, Vol. 1 reached the top fifteen months after the first, a feat which would seem to cement Romeo Santos as one of the major voices of contemporary Latin pop, a reliable hitmaker for years to come. But while his subsequent albums will regularly spin off singles that do well in the charts, this particular feat remains unmatched; only two more #1s will (as of this writing) fight their way through the incorporation of streaming data later in 2012, and one of them will be goosed by a more famous Anglophone feature.

But that's for the future to worry about: "La Diabla" (the she-devil) is a remarkable piece of work even in this year of vivid and unusual one-week wonders. Paired with "Mi Santa" in video form (a juxtaposition which evokes, but hardly rises to the level of commenting on, the misogynistic madonna/whore binary), the song recounts, in abstracted poetic imagery, a love affair with a heartless woman who takes the singer for all he's worth, leaving him with nothing but a broken heart. Which is of course an ancient theme: Jezebel, Salome, Nimue, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Mata Hari: sexually available but cruel women who lead to men's destruction are so common in poetry and litererature as to be almost unremarkable. But they're not a very frequent theme in pop music, in part because pop tends towards the Dionysian and so generally celebrates sexuality rather than otherwise, and in maybe greater part because ordinary women have significant purchasing power within pop and aren't generally interested in that kind of narrative.

So Romeo embracing the trope despite so clearly marketing himself for the female gaze is another sign that his solo career is about establishing himself as an auteur in line with traditional markers of masculine artistic prowess: casual misogyny masked by flowery metaphor is part of staking a claim to literary respectability. As if to underscore the gesture, there are 70s rock elements in the mix beneath the bachata flourishes. A burbling synth here, a snappy electric guitar solo there: nobody does salable misogyny like a rock star publicized as a poet.

DON OMAR, “HASTA QUE SALGA EL SOL”

21st July, 2012

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Don Omar's history in these pages has been checkered: other than his initial 2006 appearance with a rare reggaetón tearjerker, he has primarily been the face of glib international megahits based on already-familiar tunes and propelled by rather generic tropical party rhythms. "Danza Kuduro" was more soca than kuduro, "Taboo" was a trance-pop update of the "Lambada" tune, and "Dutty Love" was a midtempo love horny song that borrowed Jamaican vocabulary. This is his final appearance on this travelogue (as of this writing), and is entirely in keeping with the latter-day bombastic-but-hollow party anthems that he is known for.

"Hasta Que Salga el Sol" (until the sun comes up) has left perhaps the smallest footprint of any of his 2010s #1s, but it might be the best of them. Or maybe just hearing a batucada in a pop song is an effective way to bypass my critical faculties. Lyrically it's extremely simple, just a celebration of partying all night delivered in Omar's signature half-growl, half-holler, cycling through the same few stanza patterns again and again. Musically, though, it's fascinating, a hard dance song with drums borrowed from Brazilian Carnaval sambas, an extremely funky bassline, and chiming guitar accents that make me think of contemporary indie rock. Credit to Ray "El Ingeniero" Casillas, a New York-based producer who seems to specialize in big-tent Zumba-friendly productions for the boldface names in Latin music.

The only official video is a lyric video, about which the only interesting observation I can make is that the ecstatic, oh-ee-oh-oh choruses are spelled in a way that follows English conventions, not Spanish ones, giving away the market the song was meant for. And indeed, unlike the vast majority of the other songs covered here, it only appeared on three non-US charts. In the US, its most notable appearances have been as the theme song for Miss America 2012 and in a dance event at Disney World; corporate cuddliness may well be Don Omar's most salient legacy. 

WISIN Y YANDEL FT. JENNIFER LÓPEZ, “FOLLOW THE LEADER”

7th July, 2012

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The rolling timeline of this blog's updates means that the cultural meanings of the songs I'm writing about, even filtered through as limited a lens as my generally out-of-touch sensibility, have drastically shifted by the time I get to them. In 2012, I thought this song was great: it was exactly what I wanted out of modern pop, blending English and Spanish without making a big deal out of it or trying hard to cater to one market or the other, merely confident in its ability to appeal to both. Jennifer López's authoritative diva choruses gave Yandel's burly raps and Wisin's AutoTuned wheedling something to focus around; and they lent her a structural range that some of her solo work lacked.

Eleven years on, however, "Follow the Leader" no longer sounds modern, but very much a product of its time. Latin pop production (at least of the kind that interests me most) has shifted in the past decade toward grittier, more syncopated rhythms and away from the Eurodance maximalism provided by the Swedish production house Cave Music. In hindsight it's a late, and not a particularly distinguished, example of post-subprime pop, the gleefully vulgar, party-centric but apocalyptically-minded genre embodied by Ke$ha and occasionally referenced in these pages: but López's steely self-assuredness doesn't let the apocalypse creep in.

Wisin y Yandel are credited as the principal performers, with López as a guest, because its parent album was the duo's 2012 Líderes; but as a single, it acts much more like a Jennifer López song with the boys along for the ride. Notably, it was performed during the finale of the eleventh season of American Idol, where López had been a judge for two years (and would be for another three) -- and it has the generic feel-good sentiments of a singing-competition reality-show number. Wisin and Yandel's horndog personas are sanded down, and Jennifer López as "the leader" sounds more like a Zumba instructor than anyone who wields a more complicated or interesting form of power. The video, in which the three of them engage in parkour chases across the rooftops of Acapulco, is sufficiently high-energy but even less narratively coherent.

In another few years I could reverse on it and fall in love again; right now, it falls between the stools of being too far away to still feel keyed to the energy of the moment, but not yet far enough away to have gained a nostalgic glow. It's just faintly embarrassing, where some of its contemporaries have aged into either hardy perennials or underrated gems.

GOCHO, “SI TE DIGO LA VERDAD”

30th June, 2012

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The "post"-reggaetón era continues: producer turned would-be heartthrob singer Gocho, who netted his first Puerto Rican hit when he made the beat for Don Omar's "Dale Don Dale" as far back as 2003, earns an unlikely week-long #1 by applying urbano slickness to a straightforward merengue. Although as Billboard acknowledged, a remix with Wisin was probably the key element in getting it all the way to the top, another indication that the personnel of reggaetón's first imperial era, if not the sound, is still a key ingredient in urban tropical Latin success.

And that shallow industry analysis is about all that there is of interest to say about the song. It's nice to hear some genuine merengue this late in the game instead of a more commercial merenhouse adaptation, and Gocho acquits himself fine as a singer, although he's devastatingly free of personality. But the lyrics are the generic (if romantically heightened in classic Spanish love-song fashion) lamentations of a man wanting to be taken back by a lost lover; on the remix, Wisin's guest verse only lards on more evocative imagery.

The law by which urbano singers don't hit #1 until the single after their breakthrough hit applies here: "Dándole", a livelier, hornier, and more party-forward merenhouse track where rapper Jowell of reggaetón duo Jowell y Randy is incorporated from the start rather than tacked onto a remix, was the first single from Gocho's 2011 album Mi Música, but it peaked at #22, a full year before "Si Te Digo La Verdad" was given a last-ditch marketing push. But like Daddy Yankee's "Gasolina" before it, "Dándole" will have to be contented with greater lifetime streaming numbers than the #1 followup. 

JUANES, “LA SEÑAL”

5th May, 2012

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The reign of "Ai Se Eu Te Pego" at the top of the chart in the spring and early summer of 2012 was interrupted for only a week by a familiar face in a new context.

The old 1990s MTV Unplugged series, which had run its course in the US by the turn of the millennium, was kept alive mostly in international markets, where live music still had some youth-culture cachet; Juanes' edition, recorded February 1st 2012 in Miami Beach, isn't even listed on the series' English-language Wikipedia entry. The resulting album was his third live album overall, and the catalog of hits he played that night was deep, and frequently documented here. But "La Señal" was new, and as a single it struck enough of a chord with the Spanish-language radio audience that it nudged past Michel Teló's bland come-ons with its own bland platitudes.

We've seen a lot of men with guitars ruminating on life over the years here, and Juanes is no Alejandro Sanz, Ricardo Arjona, or Juan Luis Guerra (he's closer to Maná's Fher or Luis Fonsi). "La Señal" (the sign or the signal, but it could also mean the omen, portent, or signpost) attempts to reach for Greater Meaning, but all it has to do it with is the stripped-down language of rock, and ultimately Juanes' rhythnic capabilities are greater than his poetic ones.

But those rhythmic capabilities shouldn't be counted out. "La Señal" is clearly the product of a post-Jason Mraz world, and the unusual arrangement (a violin takes a solo as though this were the Dave Matthews Band) makes the song more sprightly and energetic than the bathetic lyrics would suggest. It's still ultimately a confused, inarticulate song stringing together longstanding rock tropes (freedom, desire, love, the road) into a mishmash of wants and demands, but it sounds great while it lasts.

Apparently Juan Luis Guerra was the producer for the live set and album, which may be part of why it sounds so great; but I'm petty enough to wish he'd taken a pass at the lyrics, too.

MICHEL TELÓ , “AI SE EU TE PEGO!”

14th April, 2012

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I have partly been looking forward to and partly dreading this song as it came nearer in the timeline. Looking forward because I so rarely get to discuss Brazilian music in these pages, dreading because I had very little to say about this song in particular. And it's barely a song, just a horny chant, an accordion riff, and a couple dozen words of putative context, all repeated over a bed of delighted cheering because it was recorded live, like about 90% of Brazil's most populist music genre in the 21st century, sertanejo. Like many sertanejo stars, Teló is a handsome cipher; and that's about all I had off the top of my head.

But then I did my due diligence and looked into the background of the song, and the story is fascinating. According to not just internet gossip but the Brazilian courts, the song's hook was composed in 2006 by a group of five Brazilian teenage girls in their shared hotel room on a vacation to Disney World in Orlando, in reference to their shared crush on the tour guide. In an evening of youthful high spirits, they developed a little dance along with the chant of "Nossa, nossa, assim você me mata, ai se eu te pego" (rough translation: omg, omg, you're killing me, oh if I get you). Two years later, after returning home -- which was the northeastern Brazilian state of Paraíba -- two of them went with another friend to Porto Seguro in nearby Bahía to celebrate graduation, where local singer Sharon Acioly saw them doing the dance and chant in the crowd and invited them on stage to teach it to the audience.

After which Sharon began incorporating the verses into her performances: this 2009 video shows her dropping the chant into a funk set as a means of hyping up the crowd. She eventually set it to a rudimentary melody, and another Bahían music promoter, Antônio Dyggs, saw her performing that, and worked it up (while drunk, he would later claim) into a song for the forró (rural northeastern Brazilian music) market, calling it "Ai Se Eu Te Pego," crediting Acioly and himself as the songwriters. Dyggs managed a forró group called Os Meninos de Seu Zeh, and they were the first to record his worked-out version. It became something of a local hit, and other nordestino groups jumped on the tune, the biggest of which was Cangaia de Jegue in 2010, whose slowly-paced forró version might have been meant to evoke reverie but just sounds dragging now. Electronic forró band Garota Safada (featuring future solo star Wesley Safadão) brought up the tempo significantly, but apparently Michel Teló, on tour in the northeast, heard Cangaia de Jegue's version first.

Teló is from the southern (and whitest) region of Brazil, and was involved in the music scene from an early age, first performing as an elementary school child and getting his first accordion at the age of ten. He was sixteen when he joined the gaucha band Grupo Tradição, and sang with them for 11 years, finally quitting in 2008 to go solo. (Gaucha music is a more traditional kind of country than sertanejo has become, possibly analogous to western in country-and-western.) He had already been very successful with Grupo Tradição, and that success only continued in his solo career, with a gold record and a number-one song before recording "Ai Se Eu Te Pego" in 2011.

The immediate cause of "Ai Se Eu Te Pego" becoming an international hit was a viral YouTube video of the twenty-year-old soccar star Neymar dancing to it in the locker room to the bemusement of his teammates, which sparked a trend of soccer players dancing to the song on the field throughout Latin America and the European League, boosting digital sales of the song on all continents. The United States was late to taking notice of the song, but its attention was still significant enough that Teló felt it necessary to record a redundant English-language version; compare its impressive 46 million views to the 1.1 billion of the original.

Ultimately the song came and went, an evanescent summer hit even more evanescent than most, since it had very little meaning beyond the dance and an innocently horny sentiment, a "Macarena" for the 2010s but without the staying power of the original because there's nothing confounding about it: it's exactly what it appears to be, and nothing more.

The three girls who originally taught the chant and dance to Sharon Acioly have apparently been compensated from her portion of the song's earnings, but the other three who were involved in the Disney World trip were still tied up in a legal authorship dispute as of the last reporting on the case in 2013; I haven't been able to find anything on the case since.

As if to make up for the variety of one-week hits we've had, "Ai Se Eu Te Pego" was at the top of the Hot Latin charts for ten weeks in the summer of 2012, interrupted only by one week of another live song. I've resented it for years for taking up so much real estate that could have been devoted to even more variety; and although learning the song's backstory has reconciled me to it a little, it's still barely a song, and I still have very little to say about it.

DON OMAR FT. NATTI NATASHA, “DUTTY LOVE”

7th April, 2012

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Reggaetón proper is still bubbling just under the surface of urban tropical pop. Although this is formally mostly just Latin dancehall, gesturing towards Jamaica with the title (which never appears in the lyrics) and towards Trinidad with occasional steel-drum accents, the dembow riddim is audible almost in negative, a clipped pulse embedded beneath a sugary haze of pleasant beachy instrumentation that could, quite intentionally, come from anywhere.

Don Omar, who we've heard from several times before, is Puerto Rican, and Natti Natasha, who we will hear from again, is Dominican, but they met and collaborated in New York, and the polish proveded by producers A&X, Link-On, and DJ Robin ends up neither Puerto Rican nor Dominican, but a generic "island sound" calculated to please the widest possible audience by sanding off any cultural specificity that hasn't already been assimilated into the global pop consensus.

Which makes it sound as if I despise this song, and I don't: but there's very little to latch onto. It excels at capturing a vibe, but no more than that: Omar and Natti Nat are, despite the repetition of their names, virtually anonymous chroniclers of a generic romantic encounter in which he initiates, she's unsure because of bad past experiences, and ultimately they lose themselves in a dance which functions as a perfect synechdoche for other physical pleasures.

It's another 2012 number one that only lasted a week at the top (although the year's 400-pound gorilla, which will take up residency at #1 and refuse to leave for months on end, draws near), but for once it feels like it. No video was filmed to prolong the hype cycle, and although it won a Billboard award in the Latin Airplay category, it has not particularly become a classic. Don Omar's biggest hits all came before and Natti Natasha's biggest hits will all come after: "Dutty Love" is our introduction to one of the handful of women who are ever allowed to be massive urbano stars at a time, and little else.

JUAN MAGÁN FT. PITBULL & EL CATA, “BAILANDO POR EL MUNDO”

31st March, 2012

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"Inténtalo" was the first new #1 of 2012 to get a second week at the top, although they weren't consecutive. The one-week wonder that followed its second reign was this, an echo of the airwave-blanketing #1s of 2011, when party anthems by Pitbull and Don Omar sprawled over months. But the post-subprime blip is already shifting into other gears: this cheery club-ready celebration of women going out and partying will be replaced by another one-week wonder with a stronger dancehall orientation.

Like "Hips Don't Lie", "Loca", and Don Omar's 2010s appearances here, "Bailando por el Mundo" is a reworking of a less successful version of the song. Barcelonan DJ Juan Magán had released "Bailando por Ahí" early in 2011, and it was a local hit, and something of a culmination of a decade-long career. Magán had been making the specfically Spanish genre of hardcore techno known as "mákina" since 1999 with a series of collaborators, and was part of the first Spansih reggaetón act, Guajiros del Puerto, in 2004. (They drop the n-word like it's generic rap slang in the first seconds of their biggest hit, "Veo Veo", in case you wondered how appropriative they were.) He moved on to club music with the act Magán & Rodríguez in 2007, where he started calling his music "electro latino," which primarily seems to have meant raiding Latin American music for sounds and ryhthms to give texture to otherwise very generic house and trance beats: their biggest hit "Bora Bora" borrowed vallenato accordion as a signature sound. When he went solo in 2009, Magán aimed even more squarely at broad pop success.

"Bailando por Ahí" went to #1 on the Spanish charts in October 2011, the same month that "Bailando por el Mundo" was released, with Cuban-American rapper and empresario Pitbull and Dominican rapper El Cata taking Magán's verses and making them both more vivid and more generic: the original song gestures towards wistfulness (preserved in the chorus-ending line "fueron los días más felices para mí" (they were the happiest days for me)), but Pitbull and El Cata are more interested in boasting about their own importance and success than in Magán's loose character study about a woman going out with her friends to party in Madrid. Not that the original is some great achievement in aesthetic sensitivity: the thumping merengue-house and zig-zagging accordion are winningly schlocky but little else.

My memory of this song in 2012 is primarily of ignoring it. I was exhausted by Pitbull at this point (although it's worth noting that this is by far his best showing as a rapper on this travelogue), and Magán's party-happy music wasn't interesting enough to overcome my generic contempt for Spanish DJs compared to the far more more fascinating electronic pop coming from Latin America itself, particularly the amazing Santiago scene that I was deep into at this time. But Javiera Mena, Alex Anwandter, and the rest are in no danger of showing up here; so the limited pleasures of "Bailando por el Mundo" sound better in retrospect.

PRINCE ROYCE, “LAS COSAS PEQUEÑAS”

17th March, 2012

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I've catalogued a number of firsts in the thirteen years (!) I've been writing this blog, but here's another: the first time I (along with everyone else who blurbed it at the Singles Jukebox) am quoted in the "Critical Reception" section of the song's Wikipedia page. My blurb, in its totality, and with links added for context, reads:

It’s deeply unfortunate that this boring lullaby is the Jukebox’s introduction to Royce. Not that he’s ever really been a cause for pulse-rate-raising (unless his duet with Daddy Yankee counts), but his early singles had more sparkle and snap to them — he even made “Stand by Me” interesting, and in the twenty-first century! — and with the exception of the obligatory steel-guitar solo (it is bachata, after all) this one just kind of sits there. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except the “na na na na na na” hook sounds almost exactly like Mike Birbiglia’s Kenny G impression.

Which at this distance feels a little like kicking a puppy. Is "Las Cosas Pequeñas" twee sentimental gloop? It absolutely is. But twee sentimental gloop has its place in the pop ecosystem, and in 2023 I'm kind of entranced by how all-in the production goes in on its tremulous bathos: celeste twinkles, vibrating string sections, dramatic piano ripples. The steel-stringed guitar solo and Royce's sense of rhythm are about all that make it bachata: otherwise it's a straight down the middle r&b song that could have been produced ten, twenty, or thirty years earlier.

Which may feel like a betrayal of bachata authenticity, but Royce was never marketed as authentic (as noted, his first single was a Spanglish cover of the Ben E. King standard), and if teen-idol pop isn't allowed to be bathetic it's fighting with one hand tied behind its back. It's still a little painfully generic, but I don't have it in me to despise it anymore. Maybe I'm just in a mellow mood, happy to luxuriate in another one-week wonder before the chart takes on streaming and everything flattens out much more. "Las Cosas Pequeñas" is itself a cosa pequeña (little thing), and contra the message of the song, it's not worth getting too worked up about.