ROCÍO DÚRCAL, “COMO TU MUJER”

10th December, 1988

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We began with her, and we end 1988 with her; and unforeseen revivals aside, we will not meet her again.

It's tempting to call this the passing of the old guard in Latin Pop — or an old guard anyway — but as any honest pop follower knows, there are no clean breaks. Dúrcal, who began her career in as a girl singer in 1950s Spain, may be the earliest-born singer to top the Hot Latin chart (I haven't crunched the numbers yet), but she doesn't sound particularly old here, just authoritative.

That relative agelessness is due in part to the production, massive and tender by turns (while being very much of its moment), with those great trombone farts punctuating the hook; but it's also due to the direct, even stark simplicity of the song. This is nothing like the vague postcard-prettiness of the song with which she ushered in this project: instead of romance-novel guff, this is a showcase for adult passions, with real regret, rejection, and hungry longing despite it all. And where "La Guirnalda" was written and produced by Juan Gabriel, who gave her a pretty frame in which to pose, "Como Tu Mujer" was written and produced by Marco Antonio Solís, who pulls out stops he had left firmly in place with Los Bukis.

The lyrics are a monologue, a woman confronting her cheating lover. She still loves him — the first thing she says is that she's given him her life and more besides — but he's laughing, playing with her trust in him, and in a moment of breathtaking otherworldliness for ears used to the norms of Anglophone pop, she insists that she has to leave in order to prevent God from punishing him. Religion isn't a common enough theme in pop for there to normally be a noticeable gap between the way (ex-)Protestant English speakers and (ex?-)Catholic Spanish speakers approach it, but when it does make its presence known it's a very different beast.

The title, "Como Tu Mujer," translates as "As Your Woman," and comes from the final line of the chorus*:

Es lo mejor, me vuelva libre si tú vas a ser

El hombre aquel que siempre quise ver,

Aunque a tu lado no me puedo ver

Como tu mujer

Which I translate as:

It's better this way, I'll be free again if you will be

That man that I always used to see,

Though I can't see myself at your side

As your woman

I'm not sure anything this indebted to traditional gender norms (playboy man, suffering woman) can be called feminist, but the way it takes a principled stand for what's right is certainly better than, say, "Stand By Your Man."

*I say chorus, but like a lot of the songs we've seen, the structure isn't the standard ABABCB of Anglophone pop, but more like ABCDBCD. Which is a perfectly legitimate structure, of course — I just have to guard against thinking "oh I've heard this bit already" and remain caught up in the emotion of the singer.

ROBERTO CARLOS, “SI EL AMOR SE VA”

19th November, 1988

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Although you can't tell just by looking (or listening), this is the first Hot Latin #1 by a pop star who usually sings in another language. (Los Lobos don't count because they were never pop stars, just a rock & roll band with a lucky hit.) Roberto Carlos is Brazilian, and his long, hit-filled career has mostly been in Portuguese, with occasional side trips to the Spanish-language market, as though just to prove he could. He's the kind of silky-voiced ballad singer that is much more successful in Romance languages than in English, with this song in particular sounding as much like French chanson as Latin romántica.

("Romántica," I should point out, is the catch-all marketing term for much of the music we've been seeing and will continue to see on this journey: modern Latin ballads, generally with only a hint of any originating local or national tradition. For example, mariachi singers can also sing romántica, but they don't sound very mariachi when doing it.)

"Si El Amor Se Va" translates as "When Love Goes Away," and the lyric is more or less a high romantic list of all the terrible consequences of love’s disappearance — "faltan los detalles/Y en las mismas calles/Nada es igual" (the details fade, and in the same streets, nothing is the same). And then the key changes, and he sings "Pero cuando está" ("but when it's here"), followed another list of the happy changes when love returns. "Vuelve la confianza/Nace la esperanza/Todo es especial" (trust returns, hope is born, everything is special). It's very much the sort of thing that could have been sung a hundred years ago in the streets of Madrid, or Lisbon, or Paris, or Rio de Janeiro at that, and the production takes the hint and sounds very like what hymns recorded in the 80s sounded like.

Or country songs — there's something very period George Jones about the way the stark opening, just Carlos' voice over cheap synth chords, builds and builds as new elements are introduced, ending with a lighters-up singalong choir. Which may be a reminder that neither country nor Latin pop are as far from hymnody as many Anglophone pop fans would like.

ANGELA CARRASCO, “BOCA ROSA”

22nd October, 1988

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Tracing the contours of the #1 Hot Latin songs throughout the year, I'm starting to see a pattern emerge: the summer and early fall contain upbeat songs, songs for dancing, for public display, and even when they're talking about lost love they do it with a smile. But as the nights grow longer and the air colder — even in Miami and Los Angeles, where a significant portion of the Hot Latin audience resides — the songs grow more reflective, more poetic, more in line with the long tradition of Spanish love poetry and song. And the singers grow older, more traditional too.

The Dominican-born Angela Carrasco's boom years were the 1970s, and here she assumes the confidence of a pop survivor, taking a witchy, gothic synth cathedral of an intro (it sounds a bit like a slightly cheaper take on the Siouxise of five years previous) and singing instead in a Diana Ross purr over a light synth tango rhythm.

That hint of tango — the Argentinean dance-music-turned-art-song that is global Latin culture's strongest riposte to American jazz — serves to locate this song in a specific tradition going back much further than anything we've come across yet. It comes on like a less-ironical "Love For Sale" from the opening line: "Vendo una boca rosa, ¿quién me la puede pagar?" (I sell a pink mouth; who can buy it?). We are in the eternal twilit, noir-shot underworld of tango song peopled by romantic pimps, sarcastic prostitutes and "hombres necios" (foolish men) who fall into the "trampas hechas de labios" (traps made of lips) among whom only Cole Porter and Kurt Weill, of all the major songwriters in the American tradition, would walk easily.

But of course it is still 1988, and it is still the top reaches of the Hot Latin chart, and so there is a nagging synth hook that owes more to mariachi horn lines than to tango bandoneones, and if a disco remix is more easily imaginable than a faithful tango reading, that may be due more to Carrasco's kittenish mock-sultry performance than to the structure of the written song. Except via self-conscious revivalism, tango can only be glimpsed through the distorting lens of modern pop, which (as with the way swing informed 80s R&B) is how it should be.

MARISELA, “YA NO”

1st October, 1988

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This may be an appropriate moment for noting, in an offhand sort of way, the ways in which history both remembers and forgets. Marisela is precisely the kind of low-level star that gets forgotten by history (or did before the age of the Internet and obsessive documentation of everything). She may have been called "the Latin Madonna," but any blonde female singer in the 80s was; she may have hit the top of the Hot Latin chart, but it was only for a week (and there was no return engagement); and she certainly had a voice, but her lack of attendant personality (at least any discernible from this distance) consigned her to the dustbin of one-hit wonders whose Wikipedia pages are silently scolded about citing references and sources.

Not counting "La Bamba" (because why would we?) this is the second hit song based on an English-language original from the first generation of rock & roll; but unlike what Luis Miguel did with "I Only Want To Be With You," "Ya No" is a fairly direct translation of Barbara George's 1962 R&B hit "I Know (You Don't Want Me No More)." Which makes sense: Marisela first sang the song in English for the soundtrack to the forgettable 1988 those-sensual-Latins movie Salsa: The Motion Picture. It was her first real breakthrough into the larger pop market after about four years of bubbling-under popularity in Mexico (she was born in the U.S., but Mexico was her primary market). Said bubbling-under came thanks to a romantic involvement with Marco Antonio Solís, who gave her songs he wasn't using and gave her extra column inches when he threw her over for another pretty, vaguely talented starlet who needed his promotional help. However, "I Know" would equally be her last breakthrough to the larger pop market; she would slip back into regional obscurity, cultivate a devoted if minor fanbase, and record sporadically with diminishing returns over the next two decades.

Her "I Know" is what you would expect: heavy on 80s synthesized production, some massive timbale hits in order to tie it into the salsa of the movie, but otherwise a standard, gospelly take on the song, with a choir of backup singers high in the mix. "Ya No," however, is a slightly odder beast. It was produced by Enrique Elizondo, who seems to have taken the bouncy hook and the crashing timbales and fed them into a sequencer with New Order and Madonna presets, creating a much more exciting rhythm track that introduces, occasionally punctuates, and plays out the song. Unfortunately whenever Marisela sings it's the same old vaguely r&b-ish shuffle (the choir makes an appearance too, mixed mercifully down), so Elizondo's clubbification is only partly successful, but those bursts of electronic percussion are something to look forward to.

FRANCO, “MARÍA”

3rd September, 1988

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Wikipedia has this to say about this song:

"María" is a song written by Marcelo Molina and performed by Cuban singer Franco. It was released in 1988 as a single from Franco's album Definitivo and became his second number-one single in the Billboard Top Latin Songs chart, after "Toda La Vida" in 1986.

Now you know as much about it as I do, or from what I can tell, as much as anyone anywhere on the Internet does. I spent more time tracking down and manipulating the jpeg of the album cover than I will writing about the song — generally I try to like music, or at least work out how to like it, but this song has defeated me.

If there's an Anglophone equivalent, it's Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," except this could never have anything as interesting as Rickrolling happen to it, because Franco doesn't even have Astley's dorky charm: he's a toothy smile and an anonymous voice, and the fact that this is his second appearance in this story is the kind of thing that makes me wonder whether it's worth telling.

I don't even need to translate the lyrics: he's just met a girl named María, how does he solve a problem like María, oh María love to love oh his María; there are only so many changes that can be rung on the name. The song is too thin and insubstantial, especially compared to the monster that preceded it, for me to want to even put any effort into learning how it came to spend most of September at #1, then make a return engagement after the next entry fizzled out. How does a song that can't possibly be anyone's favorite song do that?

Rick Astley is fundamentally mysterious to me too.

YURI, “QUÉ TE PASA”

14th May, 1988

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If Juan Gabriel gave us our first taste of modern dance music — oddly elongated and strangely unecstatic as it was — Yuri plunges us right into the cross-currents of post-disco baile: this isn't some paranoid, agonized personal statement set to robot rhythms, but a massive splash of fun which topped the Hot Latin chart throughout the summer of 1988, a giddy call to dance and selfhood which deserves to be rated along with the best of Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, the Bangles, and Donna Lewis as a creamy pinnacle of 1980s pop, with day-glo instrumentation and cocaine-funky rhythms, orgasmic whoops and sexy salsa breakdowns.

This was Yuri's peak as a pop star; we'll meet her again, but this was the culmination of about a decade's worth of hard work, success, and more success after that, invisible to the exclusivity of a #1 list that didn't start until 1986. She had her first hit in 1979, and was one of Mexico's biggest pop stars in the decade that followed; in fact I knew her name and the curves of her cleavage (if not her music) well as a thirteen-year-old in Guatemala in 1991 looking through newspapers that were way sexier than the ones back home. (Hers may be the earliest name I ever knew to appear in these charts, unless Amy Grant or Barbra Streisand turns up.)

Like Madonna, her self-presentation was more important than her vocal ability; unlike contemporaries like Ana Gabriel or Daniela Romo, she didn't have the kind of voice that could make you thrill regardless of the song. But she could play up her sexuality (she posed in Playboy in 1986), and her dance moves, and she could work with canny producers and get great songs and be nearly the first "manufactured" pop star to appear on this chart.

"Manufactured" is in quotes here because I don't subscribe to the criticism implicit in the word (and neither should you); "self-made" might be a better adjective. What I mean is that she successfully engineered a pop career without coming out of a more "authentic" tradition first, whether regional, tropical or folklórico (the three traditions in Latin music which are most often set against pop; in American music the closest historical analogues would be country, r&b, and folk). Everything about Yuri, from her hair color to her musicianship, was artificial; which only means she was a late-twentieth-century pop star.

But simple-minded party songs, however giddily danceable and well presented by a sexy singer, are a dime a dozen; "Qué Te Pasa"'s historic run at the top of the chart (the longest stay at forteen weeks, a record unbroken for the rest of the millennium) needs more explanation. Which, if you understand the lyrics, it has; they are very nearly existential in their insistence on the Party as source of meaning. "El amor y desamor/Son plumas en el viento" ("love and lack of love are feathers in the wind") is a shockingly wise, practically Brelesque lyric in a giddy pop song, and the imagery of leaving behind depressive solitude for communal ecstasy could be tailor-made for 2000s indie vs. poptimist fights. "Qué te pasa" translates as "what's up with you?" and could easily be interpreted as "what's wrong with you?" or "what's your deal?" as the verses urge the listener to stop moping, get out on the balcony, and dance.

But the middle eight proves that the song isn't just about bullying the shy and depressive into uncomfortable partying: "Stop looking already/For that five-legged cat*/It doesn't make any sense/In the depths just like me/With your soul in pieces/Begin again/Always from zero."

It's a call to arms (or to feet!) that more of us could always use. Thin production or not, this has become one of my favorite pop songs in the few weeks I've been listening to it, and while I'm still a little surprised that I'm taking Yuri (Yuri! The one with the breasts!) seriously, this is exactly what I was hoping to find when I began this project.

*A Hispanic idiom meaning something so rare as to be unobtainable.

LOS BUKIS, “Y AHORA TE VAS”

23rd April, 1988

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We're still on the earlier legs of our journey, early enough for me to still be obsessed with marking firsts. And this is two big ones: the first real regional (pronounced rayhee-oh-NAL) song, which I'll get into later, and our first encounter with a man who will be a more-or-less constant companion throughout the next two decades: Marco Antonio Solís.

Solís, with his cousin Joel, founded Los Bukis in the early 70s in Michoacán, one of Mexico's southwestern states. From their first single ("Falso Amor," 1975) they became one of the most popular bands in the country, with strong followings in the United States and Puerto Rico. Their name means "the kids" in the Yaqui language of northern Mexico, and that identification with the indigenous underclass (however superficial) pointed to the sort of panamericanismo to which most Latin Pop stars would at least pay lip service in the years to come.

But Los Bukis were no trad outfit, singing old songs in old styles and busking for tourist dollars. (It's worth noting here that the questions of authenticity and keeping-it-realism which exercise so many commentators in the American and Anglo pop spheres have very little to do with how Third World pop stars actually make use of their own native pop forms. Solidarity with the poor is better expressed financially than through canons of taste.) Their regionalismo was a glossy, uptown take on the country-fried rancheras and corridos, with plush up-to-date instrumentation and a versatile, tempered instrument in Solís' lead vocals. Like a Mexican version of the countrypolitan movement of the 1960s, Los Bukis gave their listeners a thoroughly Mexican, thoroughly modern music that worked just as well in the bustling urban centers as in the open spaces of the countryside: an aspirational music for the emerging middle class on both sides of the border.

"Y Ahora Te Vas" ("and now you leave") was written by Solís, who wrote nearly all the group's material (his going solo several years down the road, spoiler alert, was less an escandalo de pop than a foreordained conclusion; no one flocked to Los Bukis concerts to see the other guys), and is a solid if unpretentious regional song. My comparison of the genre with country music in the American market is both illuminating and misleading; like country, regional relies on specific images to tell universal stories, but unlike country it's not really relegated to a specialized market (at least in Mexico, and since we're telling the story of Latin Pop in the U.S., there's going to be a lot of overlap with the story of Mexican pop).

It's a breakup song, the kind that George Jones did so well — "and now you're leaving, knowing I couldn't find/The motive in your soul, the love I feel for you/To whom will you give everything you never gave to me/Who will cry for you, as I do, some day" — the faithless beloved throwing over our creamy-voiced hero, but he'd take her back in a heartbeat nevertheless. The instrumentation is dominated by cheap synthesizers, but in 1988 that still coded as uptown, classy, and American in regional music. The occasional interpolation of regionalismo into our story has its own story of change, cool, and identity which doesn't always correspond with the shifts in the larger Latin Pop scene. But more about that when we come to it.

JUAN GABRIEL, “DEBO HACERLO”

16th April, 1988

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There are three reasons this installment of our journey is running a bit late. First, I'm having a hard time concentrating enough to write anything at all, as readers of my other blogs might have noticed. Second, I recently went through the spreadsheet I've compiled of all the Hot Latin #1s to date and I think got a little intimidated at just how many there are left to cover. I should catch up to the present in a couple of years, but damn. A couple of years. I never make plans more than two weeks in advance. And third, tackling this song in particular has seemed more and more foolhardy the more I've listened to it.

Let's begin with the dry, three-minutes-on-Wikipedia basics: recorded two years earlier, this was Juan Gabriel's last original song for six years thanks to a dispute with his label and publishers. (Shades of another major pop star of the 1980s going into the 1990s.) It is an uptempo dance song with elements of freestyle, mariachi, merengue, and house. And it is nearly ten minutes long.

We've had uptempo songs before: the Franco/Emmanuel double-header, Luis Miguel's Dusty Springfield cover, and of course Los Lobos. But this is the first Dance Song in the modern meaning of the phrase, with electronic rhythms and the sort of bloated running time that would raise suspicions of this being the twelve-inch version if there had ever been a seven-inch. But no; this is it, the song as it appeared on Gabriel's "farewell" compilation of the same name, and as far as I can tell the song as it was played on the radio in late 1987 and early 1988.

And it's the kind of song worthy of that running time. Not only does it have a hot beat that practically demands dancing (I broke into a white-boy boogie almost reflexively the first time I heard it), but Gabriel's performance, pushing himself to the very edge of his range, almost in tears, is a hell of a swan song. He pitches the opening just an emotional notch below opera, with as many dramatic flourishes as he can muster, and when the beat drops he simply rides it. It's a tropical beat, equal parts Havana and Miami (which for thirty years have practically been the same thing) the punchy horn charts which accompany it practically the only concession to the Mexican mariachi on which he made his name in the 70s and early 80s. Aside, that is, from his own near-frenzied performance.

(Mariachi, of course, practically requires being sung with a sob in one's voice. Or more strictly speaking, norteño does. This isn't the moment to get into the distinction, but there is one.)

Structurally, this song is a complete mess, following Gabriel's own circuitous route through whatever sections he apparently felt like singing at the time. There's no particular chorus, although everything gets repeated more than once; there are about five different main hooks, and though it's compulsively danceable throughout it changes tempo so many times and so abruptly that I'd imagine it would be a DJ's nightmare. (If you're feeling brave, though, I dare you to throw it on at a busy club night and see what happens.)

But ultimately, I don't have a whole lot of reference points for this kind of thing. The best I can do is gesture vaguely in the direction of Miami Sound Machine, the only outfit I know of that was making anything like this in the 1980s (we'll be meeting their most famous alumnus before long), and not even they were as garish and cheap-sounding as this can be.

Because while I don't have a lot of reference points in professionally recorded music, I'm intimately familiar with some of the sounds in this song: they were produced by the same cheap not-even-Casio keyboards that I fooled around with as a kid in the 80s: those telltale tinny "bass" notes and the upward flourishes on some "harpsichord" setting or other irresistibly recall the embarrassment I felt when I tried to show off to a more worldly-wise friend and he mocked those sounds. I rarely played with the keyboard again. (Come to think of it, that was probably the first instance of snob-oriented criticism making my revise my musical opinions. It would not be the last.) So I have instant and deeply-set aversions to some of these sounds; but the propulsiveness , rhythmic density, and luxuriant emotionalism of this song overwhelms everything else.

Even the lyric is something of a mess; he needs a love, he's tired of being alone, but he's also rejecting a lover — and finding one, all to the same thumping beat and righteous salsa horn charts. If nothing else, it's a tremendously camp performance (though by Anglo standards what piece of Latin culture isn't?), the kind of florid, flamboyant spectacle that not only invites but practically compels comparisons with Prince or Michael Jackson. The electro-soul, the rhythmic chokes and sighs . . . I can't help wondering what kind of collaborations might have taken place had Gabriel not chosen to walk away at just this moment.

It was only at the top of the chart for a week. You could hardly expect more from a nine-and-a-half-minute camp techno-tropical suite.

ANA GABRIEL, “AY AMOR”

23rd January, 1988

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Fifteen songs in, this song is only our third to feature a female vocalist. I don't know what your understanding of pop is, but mine is more or less predicated the female voice. Which is among the reasons that taking this travelogue has been both educational and challenging for me: I've had to patiently work out the differences between hearty male singers that I would otherwise instinctively dismiss as "all the same." But Ana Gabriel cannot possibly be mistaken for Daniela Romo or Rocío Dúrcal, and it's not only the timbre of her voice that sets her apart.

The immediate comparison I want to make with this song is to "Total Eclipse Of The Heart." There are obvious points of reference: the big, crashing production, the rock-operatic melody, and Gabriel's own raspy but perfectly controlled voice; but where Jim Steinman and Bonnie Tyler stretched out, luxuriating in an operatic running time (nearly seven minutes!) and setting several themes against each other, Gabriel remains a pop traditionalist, singing a spare three-minute-plus song as simplified and direct as the title (which translates to "oh love").

She wrote it herself; she sang it in the 1987 OTI Festival (the Latin Pop version of the Eurovision contest, which ran from 1972-2000) and won the chance to represent Mexico in the finals — it didn't win, but the song was a major hit in both Mexico and the U.S., tying with Daniela Romo's "De Mí Enamórate" for the longest time spent at the top of the Hot Latin chart yet (fourteen weeks) and not incidentally launching her as a major pop star in the Latin American market. (She remains the Mexican cantadora [female singer] with the highest ever international sales.)

And it's the sort of song which inspires that kind of response: not only does it sound big — we've had that before, from Romo and Julio Iglesias — it sounds unmistakably modern. The much-bemoaned-by-me thinness and plasticness of 80s Latin Pop is nowhere to be found here; this isn't just a ballad, it's a power ballad, and Gabriel sings it like a rock star. It made her one; and as Wikipedia puts it, she became a success in three separate fields: Rock En Español, Latin Pop, and Ranchera. She will appear in at least two of these guises again (and again) throughout this tale; but rarely sounding better (I'm going to guess) than she does here.

That scratchy, impassioned vocal style, in 1988 falling decidedly out of favor in Anglophone pop circles (Bonnie Tyler, Kim Carnes, and the 80s Tina Turner were about its last exponents in female pop, unless you count Marianne Faithfull's cult) would have a sizable impact on Latin Pop over the next decade; rock was not yet uncontroversial in many traditional communities, and while the most flamboyant inheritor of Ana Gabriel's technique will not be a part of our history (as of early 2010, anyway; you never know), this is an early loosening of the metaphorical tie.

The lyrics are more or less standard stuff; Gabriel was not yet one of the great poets of Latin Pop. (Will she ever be? Stay tuned.) The dramatic heft of the production isn't quite matched by a chorus that runs "Oh, love/I don't know what it is about your look/That day after day conquers me more and more." (Though it, uh, sounds better in Spanish.) But I do admire one line in the second verse: "Y busco entre mil cosas una que me hable de tí" ("and I search through a thousand things for one that speaks to me of you"), which is such a perfect encapsulation of a universal but very specific emotion that I have high hopes for Ana Gabriel's many return engagements on this stage.

JOSÉ JOSÉ, “SOY ASÍ”

16th January, 1988

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The last time we saw José José in this space I compared him to Frank Sinatra for his exquisite phrasing and almost jazzy cadences. Well, those have fallen by the wayside now: this is not a gentle, reflective flamenco song, but a roaring ballad of self-justification, a "My Way" for the late 80s.

Though to be fair this is a far more nuanced and even classically structured work than "My Way." In fact it has more in common with the great self-justifications of George Jones in the 1970s as he spiraled into abuse both drug and domestic. Both country music and Latin pop draw on deep wells of tradition that is mostly invisible to the ordinary pop audience — this is what gives both genres a uniform sound to the uneducated ear — and they also play to their dedicated audiences' knowledge of and investment in the singer's personal lives. Just as "He Stopped Loving Her Today" was that much more powerful to a listener who'd been following the Jones-Wynnette soap opera for over a decade, so "Soy Así" gains in emotion and relevance under the knowledge that it was written and sung at a low point in Jose Jose's career, when his wife was leaving him, his manager (and brother-in-law) had abandoned him, and he was drifting into alcoholism and despair, his life an unending circuit of "aviones, camiones, encerrado en un cuarto de hotel" ("planes, trucks, locked in hotel rooms"), as he later put it to the music press.

In that light, the forthright stomp and aggressive rise of this ballad, with its military tempo and big crescendos, is less pompous than angry. Wikipedia translates "Soy Así" as "The Way I Am," but it literally means "I am this way." (Shades of Popeye as well as Old Blue Eyes.) The chorus, with its blustery bangs, goes "I am this way/This way I was born and this way I will die/With all my faults I know it's true/I never deceived you, I never lied to you, I never denied it/I am this way/And I know very well that I will never change/And I accept my fate just as it is/I never deceived you, I never lied to you, I never denied it." In fact the chorus repeats only twice, and it's over, which is one up on "My Way."

We will be meeting José José once more (so far!) in this travelogue, so I won't finish up his life story just yet. But here's a hint: as Frank Sinatra knew well, hit songs rarely do much for personal demons.