JOSÉ LUIS RODRÍGUEZ, “Y TÚ TAMBIÉN LLORARÁS”

28th November, 1987

Wiki | Video

Probably the easiest way to become convinced of Julio Iglesias' supremacy in the art of romantic Latin ballad singing is to listen to the imitators that come nowhere close. Which isn't to say that this sweeping entry in the romantic-ballad sweepstaks of late 1987 is terrible; it's just not up to the contemporary standard of Iglesias, which as the past several entries have shown is frankly pretty damn high.

Rodríguez is the first of our company to hail from South America: born in Venezuela, where his relatively poor family was involved in dangerous political activities during the 1950s, he moved around a lot and went without formal schooling, teaching himself music and stagecraft. With hit songs and commercials, he became a local star in the 1970s, and eager for more, moved to Puerto Rico, one of the hotbeds of Spanish-language pop-culture production. He was cast in two immensely successful telenovelas (Cristina Bazán and El ídolo), the latter of which gave him the nickname "El Puma," and began to have enough hit records that he was invited to participate in the Latin Pop version of "We Are The World" in 1985, "Cantaré, Cantarás." Other participants familiar to the readership of this blog include Braulio, Emmanuel, Julio Iglesias, and José José; the full list is here.

"Cantaré, Cantarás" was written by Albert Hammond — the "It Never Rains In Southern California" guy (and father of a Stroke) — who mostly spent the 80s working in Latin Pop, where his talent for big, heartstring-tugging ballads was more widely appreciated than in the Anglophone pop world at the time. (A Gibraltarian, he's fluent in both Spanish and English.) He and José Luis Rodríguez must have gotten along, because two years later he wrote and produced the album Señor Corazón for him, from which "Y Tú También Llorarás" ("and you too will weep") was drawn, becoming Rodríguez' biggest ballad hit of the late 80s.

Hammond's lyrics aren't a patch on Manuel Alejandro's poetic, refractory stuff for Iglesias, but they have their own emotional appeal: the big swooping chorus goes "And you too will weep/For what could not be/Was a torrent of love/That we threw away/You will return to feeling/Like a teenager again/Anxious to arrive/In time for our rendezvous," which turns in the final chorus to "You will never arrive/In time for our rendezvous/It's too late."

It's worth noting that the mid-80s production with which we started out this trip has mostly fallen by the wayside: although the keyboards here are extremely plastic, they have a sonic depth and sustain that's a world away from the tinny production on "La Guirnalda." The balladic 90s (which is when I first became aware of contemporary pop) are within hailing view from this height. Of course, we still have two more years to go before we get there. What's 1988 got for us?

JULIO IGLESIAS, “QUE NO SE ROMPA LA NOCHE”

14th November, 1987

Wiki | Video

What, again? He was just here! Indeed — and more recently than the strict chronology of this blog might indicate; he and Luis Miguel traded off the top spot a couple of times throughout the late summer and early fall of 1987. A fitting symbolism, in fact: this song would be (as of this writing) Julio Iglesias' last solo visit to the top of the Hot Latin chart, and few people would dominate that spot more completely in the years to come than — but that's getting ahead of ourselves.

Here and now, this second single from Un Hombre Solo did exactly what it was supposed to do and made a worthy follow-up to "Lo Mejor De Tu Vida." Also written and produced by Manuel Alejandro, also sounding like the proverbial million bucks — listen for the harp glissandi and be surprised: it's so closely miked it sounds like a particularly silvery guitar.

But in classic singles-release fashion, the second is the same as the first, But With A Twist! The twist here being the bolero rhythm, which provides a poignant counterpoint to Iglesias' lovestruck crooning: this is a late-night, last-dance kind of song, only just uptempo enough to qualify as more rhythmic than "Lo Mejor De Tu Vida," and so much in love with the classic Spanish romanticism on display that the song very nearly forgets to be contemporary. Luckily some airy keyboard flourishes accenting the rhythm are on hand to remind us of the date on the sleeve.

The lyrics are typically (for Alejandro) evocative, using the concise allusiveness of poetry to build up the scenario without wasting our time on unnecessary details like setting, narrative or identity. And those lyrics, translated in full:

LOS LOBOS, “LA BAMBA”

19th September, 1987

Wiki | Video

This record, on this list, is a first in a number of ways. In fact let's try to catalogue them all:

It's the first time an act from the United States has topped the Billboard Hot Latin Chart. This might be surprising, considering that the Billboard Hot Latin Chart is after all compiled by counting sales and airplay statistics within the United States; surely locals would do better than otherwise. But the competing demographics, loyalties, and audiences measured (probably pretty poorly and incompletely) by the Hot Latin Chart makes that suggestion a massive oversimplification of a reality that I'm in no position to describe in any detail. I'll confine myself to the observation that after this it is not unusual, though I'm not sure it ever becomes unremarkable, for estadounidense-born acts to top the chart.

It's the first time a rock & roll record has topped the Billboard Hot Latin Chart. There may be some cavilling at this: Luis Miguel, Emmanuel, and Franco have all had hits that derive (some of them fairly loosely) from rock music. I can only claim popular usage: it's the first guitar-driven uptempo song with a strong backbeat and audible connections to the music of the 1950s. This is only an important point in the sense that anyone following this blog hoping for much more guitar-oriented rock music will not be very much in luck. Enjoy it while you got it, in other words.

It's the first time a Hot Latin #1 has also (not quite simultaneously) topped the Billboard Hot 100. In fact, it dropped off the top spot of the national pop chart the week before it ascended to #1 on the Latin chart; which suggests several possibilities, most of which are probably true: that records on the Latin chart, which is driven far more by airplay than by sales, tend to take longer to get up a head of steam; that the movie-driven success of the single (see below) in the wider arena was a factor in driving the record up the Latin chart; and that the dreamy Luis Miguel was hard to beat. (This last is reinforced by the fact that the record that replaced "La Bamba" at the top of the chart was also the record that preceded it.) But not only the US pop chart, but at least seven (according to Wikipedia) other international pop charts featured "La Bamba" at the top spot throughout the latter half of 1987. What's notable is that they were all European or Anglophone countries; perhaps Latin America had little use for rock & roll nostalgia in 1987. (Fun fact: as of this writing the Wikipedia Español page for "La Bamba" doesn't mention Los Lobos at all.)

It's the first time a Hot Latin #1 has been released as a commercial single. This is undoubtedly closely related to the above paragraph: the single was for the broader pop market (it was released by the venerable L.A. punk 'n' roots record label Slash, Los Lobos' home at the time), and it would remain rare for Hot Latin #1s to be available as singles until the 2000s. I note this only for the record; even in 1987, we are no longer living in a singles world.

It's the first time a Hot Latin #1 has come in off the back of a movie. It will not be the last. The movie in question, a biopic of Ritchie Valens starring Lou Diamond Phillips, is a blank to me. I haven't seen it and probably never will; I generally dislike biopics and am unreasonably irritated by the movies' colonization of pop. Unreasonably because I love this song and I wouldn't get to talk about it (I will eventually I swear) if a movie hadn't given it the publicity that sent it to #1, irritated because too often conversation about music ends with how it's been used in movies or TV. (I of course reserve the right to talk about music only through the lens of cinema or television if that's how I came to it.)

And it's the first time I knew the record before listening to it for this project. In fact I knew the record before I knew Valens' original; in those heady premillenial days of Napster the first mislabeled mp3 I downloaded was a 96kbps version of this, attributed to "Richie Valen." (Well, either that or "I Melt With You" by "the Cure.") Out of vestigial resentment at the error, I've never listened very much to Los Lobos' version of the song, and it is still my third-favorite, after Ritchie's original and Lila Downs' magnificently haunted 2004 recording.

But Los Lobos have long been one of my go-to bands when I don't know what else to listen to; their musicianship and attention to detail is always welcome, and their ability to blend as many different traditions as possible into one heady rock & roll stew is frequently inspiring. Typically, I like their early work best, from How Will The Wolf Survive? to Kiko — in recent years they've become something of a token Latino band for classic-rock boomers like my dad (like Los Lonely Boys, except not so goddamn jammy), and they've nearly always been more popular with white rocker-types than with the broader Latino audience. But then I am a white rocker-type.

Their "La Bamba" doesn't treat Valens' original as a sacrosanct document (and rightly so, or it never would have been a hit), fleshing out its sound with their ornate full-band orchestration. Instead of Valens' one, they have three guitars dueling for rhythm, ornamentation, and solo space, and Louie Pérez' drum line, shuffling just a little behind the beat, is sexier and funkier than Earl Palmer's straight-up R&B snap in 1958. In fact Los Lobos play up the folklórico roots of the song by adding in elements of traditional Latin music: flamenco flourishes, banda accordion, and into a charanga breakdown in the outro. David Hidalgo's sweet croon of a voice isn't as punchy as Valens' raver (but Valens could also be sweet when he tried, viz. "Donna").

Hmm? The lyrics? "To dance the bamba, you need a little grace." "For me, for you, go man go." "For you I will live, for you I will live." "I'm not a sailor, I'm a captain." Shouldn't you have learned this stuff in second grade?

LUIS MIGUEL, “AHORA TE PEUDES MARCHAR”

22nd August, 1987

Wiki | Video

Get used to that name; we'll be seeing it regularly from here on out. In fact Luis Miguel makes an excellent case study in the evolution (maturation? commercialization?) of Latin Pop: his career mirrors the trajectory of the time period we are covering. Of course Latin Pop has existed for decades before this, but it tended towards parochialism and regionalism: the gooey embrace of transglobal pop stardom is something new, and Miguel is one of its key players.

We meet him for the first time here, at the age of seventeen. He has been in show business for most of his life, scoring his first hit record when he was eleven. (Shades of another child star turned leading light of the global pop overground.) He has just fired his father as his manager and signed on with Spanish pop empresario Juan Carlos Calderón. A standard hitmaking formula is brought to bear, with excellent results: a number-one song, which will give way twice to Julio Iglesias and once to — but that'd be telling. It's a bumptious dance song, funky in that mid-80s cheap keyboard bass way, with a sax solo that dates it as surely and minutely as counting tree rings. And you know the song.

You probably don't know it as "Ahora Te Puedes Marchar," because the original English title of the song was not "Now You Can Leave." It was "I Only Want To Be With You," and it was first released by Dusty Springfield in November 1963, her first single after leaving folk group The Springfields, and the third British-Invasion hit in the US. Ivor Raymonde's billowy Swinging London production is swapped out for a sub-Huey Lewis go-go, and Mike Hawker's giddy lyrics about new love are refashioned into a don't-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out anthem (directed at Miguel's money-mismanaging father?), but the giddiness remains. Miguel sounds downright gleeful to be singing this song, to be on his own, to be making modern dance music out of classic pop.

Most of the album from which "Ahora Te Puedes Marchar" was drawn is taken up with modernized covers of pop songs from the sixties and seventies — "Reach Out," "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me," "Only You," "All By Myself" — and given a glossy 80s sheen. It's very much, even designedly, a disposable teen-pop record; Miguel is only seventeen, and his pouty lips on the album cover don't invite us to expect much more. But you can hear a bit into the future: he has a fine, strong cock's crow of a voice, he's good with rhythm, and he's interested in raiding the closet of history to enhance his own throbbing good looks.

He will come to be called the Frank Sinatra of Latin music; but as of right now, Michael Jackson is the far better comparison. If Jackson had been born in Puerto Rico ten years later than he was, this — triumphalist, a little cutting, and interestingly sexually ambiguous in terms of who his forebears are — might well be the record he'd have made in 1987.

JULIO IGLESIAS, “LO MEJOR DE TU VIDA”

6th June, 1987

Wiki | Video

There are three emotional cycles I went through on encountering this song, over the several listens it has taken me to assimilate it. As best as I can reconstruct them, they are:

1. Goodness, you can tell without looking that whoever sings this is a Star.

2. Nevertheless it is like the most boring drippy ballad evar.

3. Holy shit these lyrics are amazing.

Julio Iglesias is the first name I've encountered on this journey that I know I've heard before beginning it. (The only other challenger, Juan Gabriel, is a more doubtful case; I might have heard of him, but it's kind of a generic name). He is, to put it in as offensively reductive a manner as possible, real-world famous in addition to being Latin Pop famous, and in 1987 had been so for nearly a decade, a man who had breached the Top Ten in the company of Willie Nelson (of all people), who titled an album after the home he subsequently sold to Quincy Jones, who even went to number one in the UK — and it was the Popular crew's discussion of that number one, with its predictable reliance on the British institution of continental package tours as the only lens through which Latin music makes any sense, that first gave me the small inkling of a desire to tackle a project like this, and talk about Latin music from a provincial, blinkered American standpoint.

And here he sounds like the megastar he is, with the most expensive-sounding production we've encountered to date. Listen to it on headphones and marvel at the miles of room in it, with guitars and keyboards and drums and harp and accordion separated out in a mix that creates a soft, glossy pillow for his golden, infinitely tender voice. We've been talking about vocal styles here, perhaps somewhat incoherently; but if Iglesias doesn't have the greatest voice from a technical standpoint, he's a master at deploying his cracked baritone to the maximum emotional and sensual effect. (I'd compare it to Neil Diamond again, but only because pop singers who sound like men are so rare in American pop that he's about the only game in town; and Iglesias is way better than Neil Diamond.)

But after marveling at the surface effect of the song's presentation of That Voice (you couldn't possibly have a production like this for an unknown singer, it would be laughed out of court), I grew restless; it was a slow song, a ballad, and repetitive as all hell. I caught fragments of the lyrics, but my Spanish is Central American vernacular (I'm still not used to Castilian pronunciation), and what I did catch didn't impress me; the phrase repeated at the beginning of each verse translates dully as "You were mine, only mine; mine, mine." I've never liked ballads on first acquaintance, and even today it's rare for one to push through my low attention span to really get across to me.

But then I looked up the lyrics — as I do for every song here, to check them against my ear — and translated them on the fly, and sat staring. They couldn't possibly be that poetic! I looked up the words I was uncertain of. No; they were even more poetic than that.

Manuel Alejandro, the song's composer, has been one of the premier ballad composers in Latin music since the 1960s, and he's worked with Julio Iglesias since the early 70s. Un Hombre Solo, the smash hit record from which "Lo Mejor De Tu Vida" ("the best [years] of your life") was taken, was entirely written and produced by Alejandro. His lyrical style is highly romantic, even extravagant, and I'm still a bit puzzled by at least one metaphor (is "colina cerrada" an idiomatic phrase in some version of vernacular Spanish? its literal translation, "closed hill," defeats my powers of analysis), but his choice of a simple, even basic, structure allied to vivid, poetically-expressed imagery is inspired: the result is a song with a folk-like structure but layered with a patina of García Lorca-like lyricism.

And all this is without getting into the meaning of the lyrics. He sounds tender, but there's an undercurrent of possessiveness, of predation, even of coercion, that mitigates against the common image of Iglesias as some kind of standard "passionate but honorable" Latin lover. But it's also more than just a rape fantasy; there's genuine emotion (sorrow? regret? revulsion?) in his performance. I don't rate these songs (I don't as a rule believe in ratings), but this is the greatest song, in whatever sense of the word you choose to apply, that we've had yet.

My translation of the lyric follows; let me know if I've gotten something wrong. Also, please let me know if you'd like me to include such translations from here on out. I'd most likely be doing the work anyway; would it be useful enough to you that the additional scrolling is worth it? The comments box works.

BRAULIO, “EN BANCARROTA”

25th April, 1987

Wiki | Video

As is no doubt dishearteningly obvious, I've been relying on Wikipedia and half-assed Google searches for my information about the performers that have so far marched down this particular side-street Colonnade of Fame. The trouble with that kind of overreliance is obvious: when Wikipedia fails you, you fail.

So all I know about Braulio García is that he is a Spanish national born in the Canary Islands, that his Wikipedia Español page reads like it was written by his publicist, that his career began in 1971, and that this was his only significant brush with the Billboard Latin chart. Extrapolating from the cover art, he was entering middle age and trying to feel sexy about it; extrapolating from the vocal style he employs on this song, he was a singer not unlike José José.

Except that he doesn't have the precision or control that José does; in fact he reminds me of nothing so much as those country singers with "good" voices, like Eddy Arnold or George Jones, who could have crooned with as much velvet intensity as Sinatra or Nat Cole but preferred to remain in the C&W "ghetto." Braulio's vocal style hints at the emotional extravagance that Latin song from flamenco to mariachi (and this particular pop song splits the difference, as far as one can hear under a production that sounds like Miami updating Bacharach) tends towards, but his touch is light. Like Rocío Dúrcal, he's holding back in favor of the pop moment.

Or maybe I'm reminded of country singers because it's such a country song: "En Bancarrota" means "in bankruptcy," and the lyric is an extended conceit in which his love history is related in terms of finance and banking. In English, it would be a comedy song — puns are usually discouraged in pop this side of Elvis Costello — but here it's simply an appropriate metaphor. His balance is in the red, the account he opened is bottomless/without funds (a pun on fondo), she gave him a "mala nota" (a triple pun; it could be translated "bad check," "bad grade," or "bad [musical] note," and the airbrushed female singers who come in after the line live up to it).

Again, this is mom (or dad) music, not pop in the sense that we think of it today: it's corny, sentimental, and graceful; it doesn't move. It's interesting to note how much these early charts are dominated by singers from Spain; it's my impression (but we'll see) that the western hemisphere will nearly shut the eastern out as the decades pass. I'm a little wary of drawing any comparisons with other former-colonial relationships; we'll just let the idea lie for now.

EMMANUEL, “ES MI MUJER”

28th March, 1987

Wiki | Video

Why do I put “pop idol” in the categories field when Emmanuel comes up in the draw? This song illustrates why: it’s the first song we’ve had here at the top of the Billboard Latin chart that sounds like the 1980s of myth and snark: completely synthesized, airbrushed, and blow-dried. To ears immersed in UK synth-pop, it may sound more 1982 than 1987; but a cursory Google search turns up the fact that it’s appeared on a budget Italo Disco compilation, and that nails the sound and aesthetic so precisely that I’m left wondering why I hadn’t thought of it. This isn’t Anglo pop, it’s Euro.

Which is a useful reminder that, though the Billboard chart doesn’t always necessarily reflect it, being focused on American Latin sales & radio (again, as distinct from Latin American sales & radio), that much of Latin America has closer cultural ties with Europe than Americans of the estadounidense stripe would expect. Spain and Portugal for obvious historic reasons; but Italian pop has always had a strong showing in the market as well, and French, Greek, and various Scandinavian acts have also done well in the American continents south of the Rio Grande. Italo disco – pop based on the Giorgio Moroder template – was the basic lingua franca of international pop in the 1980s and into the 90s; and the only thing particularly Mexican about Emmanuel here is his accent.

It’s not a particularly Mexican accent; I don’t mean that a listener in Barcelona would hear it the way a Londoner hears a Texas twang. It’s Standard Showbiz Spanish, the “accentless” accent that corresponds to the American English television announcer’s dialect, most strongly associated with California. Though if Emmanuel sounds like anyone American, he sounds like New Yorker Neil Diamond, a faint theatrical grit over a showman’s bellow.

It’s a slight irony that Emmanuel, with his manly croon, achieves effortlessly and (as it were) accidentally, what many of the New Pop chancers of five years previous were attempting: a sophisticated, elegant vocal over a sleek, throbbing synthetic sound. (In the attempt, many of them redefined sophisticated, elegant vocals. But no one thinks Phil Oakey or David Sylvain sounded like Sinatra.)

The song itself isn’t particularly notable, or not nearly as notable as its arrangement: a standard love song (the title translates to “she is my woman,” though from context he’s singing “you are my woman”). The only minor point of interest is when he plays with the meaning of the verb “querer.” “Te quiero,” he sings, meaning “I love you,” and then after a pause, adds “tener,” which changes the meaning of the entire phrase to “I want to have you.” Which is a cute, sexy anti-romantic gesture, but Doug Kihn or Corey Hart could have done as well. (They could also have had the same backing track, come to think of it.)

But speaking of the lyrics, this is also the first record we’ve met that an American’s (as in United States of) name is associated with. Co-writer K. C. Porter isn’t necessarily a household name even in the Miami and Los Angeles circles where he works, but his songwriting and production talents did well by Selena and Ricky Martin, to name only two major figures we’ll be meeting along the way. Seeds planted for the future; for now, just admire the totally-vanished aesthetic.