BARRIO BOYZZ, "CERCA DE TÍ"

18th December, 1993

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The potted biographies you can find online make them out to be a late-breaking Latino response to the New Kids On The Block, who were of course a later-wave white response to New Edition. All of which means that the Barrio Boyzz came along fairly early in the life cycle of the modern boy band — they far predated the Backstreet Boys, but not Take That — but in the life cycle of Latin Pop's response to American urban pop (at least insofar as it's tracked by these number ones, a woefully incomplete story if there ever was one), they take John Secada's new jack swing beat and inject smooth r&b harmonies. Result: a Latino version of Boyz II Men, even down to the ersatz classicism.

It's still a ballad, but the well-known melody (it's a cover of Bread's "Make It With You," not that you needed to be told) gives it a classic gauzy-pop feel, the punchy beat gives it some urgency, and these guys — all bilingual (the better to maximize profits) Puerto Ricans from New York — can sing, which is an improvement on NKOTB. Their ethnic and geographical origins are worth noting, by the way: this is the first time that New York, the US city with the largest Hispanic population, has entered our story. There's a reason for that: Nuyoricans tend to be more assimilated, so they don't often drive the Spanish-language market the way Californian, Texan, or Floridian Latinos do. (Plus, of course, they're a much smaller percentage of the New York population than they are elsewhere; there's just more of everybody in New York.) And it didn't last; aside from one rather important duet, they won't make another appearance here, and they never did crack the English-language market at all.

"Cerca De Tí" means "close to you," and you can guess the rest of the lyric's sentiments from there, even if you didn't know the original. The point isn't the romanticism of the words, but the romanticism of the sound, and secondarily of the hunky, sweet-faced boys on album covers and in video clips. The boy band as we know it may have originally been a Puerto Rican invention — Menudo, with their rotating lineup and assumed disposability, are often considered the template for the modern form — but against the accelerated vocal-group competition of the early 90s, Barrio Boyzz were ultimately just too anonymous to overcome a lack of material that stood up even to this glossy 70s retread.

LOS FANTASMAS DEL CARIBE, “POR UNA LÁGRIMA”

11th December, 1993

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Their second number-one hit off their first album, and if they show no sign of diminishing returns their combination of cumbia rhythms, synth keys and fey vocals was never all that astonishing in the first place. If anything, this melody is even more nursery-rhyme than that of their first entry, and the Casio presets even more goofy.

But their combination of tropical ritmos and electronic playfulness makes me think, unexpectedly, of the most futuristic Latin music I know today, the electro-cumbia propagated by the ZZK club and record label out of Buenos Aires, where sound sculptors from all over the world like Frikstailers and El Trip Selector fuse the urgent stasis of cumbia with up-to-the-minute glitch, microhouse, and acid electro, creating avant-garde dance music that still pulses with authentic heat. Los Fantasmas aren't trying todo anything so ambitious, of course; they're party music for parties without any low end, and they use electronic keyboards and drumpads more because, hey, it's 1993 than on any strict aesthetic grounds. But the joy in bringing out novel sounds and setting them against the old rhythm is the same.

The song is, if not a traditional one, then one that sounds traditional: "Por Una Lágrima" means "with one tear," and the singer is accusing his girl of crying false tears to cover up her unfaithfulness to him, a lover's complaint as ancient as love poetry itself. It doesn't at all match the bouncy music, but in a way that's a relief; we've had enough self-pitying ballads lately. Self-pitying dance music is much better.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “CON LOS AÑOS QUE ME QUEDAN”

13th November, 1993

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So "Mi Tierra" was an uptempo dance song. More in line with traditional American pop practices than with Latin ones, La Gloria's second single off the album is a ballad — or at least it's taken at a slow tempo, which isn't quite the same thing. It's still unmistakably tropical, with a back-and-forth beat that seems to fall halfway between Cuban son and Dominican bachata, with gorgeous guitar filigrees by legendary Mexican guitarist Chamin Correa that draw together two continents' worth of guitar tradition, bossa nova and tejano and trova and blues and flamenco and milonga all blinking out of the spaces between the notes.

Her performance is almost as supple and fully as tender. No virtuoso in terms of technique, for most of her career she's been notable as a vocalist mostly for her enthusiasm and brio rather than the elegant carefulness of her phrasing. But here she tackles a song whose melody is structured like traditional pop, the sort of song a jazz singer would take up, and draws the emotion out of it by sheer force of personality. I've taken to reading along with the lyrics while listening to the song, and I was tearing up by the second chorus, both the sentiment and her performance were so pitch-perfect. That shouldn't be a surprise; nothing gets to me like nostalgia.

And this is a very nostalgic record; arranged by the great Cuban jazz bassist Cachao, it uses great swaths of Hollywood strings like Max Steiner, arranging emotions in cubist friezes while Estefan's plaintive voice runs through a lyric not all that far away from the Luis Miguel entry it replaced at the top of the chart. "Con Los Años Que Me Quedan" means "with the years I have left," and the phrase is the first half of a vow, the second half of which is "demostraré cuánto te quiero" ("I will prove how much I love you"). The impulse to exaggerated displays and promises of affection is a familiar one to us from previous ballads, but the implicit acknowledgement of mortality is a new note, which is to say, of course, a very old note. Very little of this travelogue has ever concerned itself with looking backwards; as is proper to all pop, Latin Pop is concerned with the present and the future, and it takes someone of Estefan's stature and confidence to make what is essentially a 1950s torch song set in a Havana café still resonate with enough people long enough to take up residency at the top of the Latin chart for several weeks.

She wrote it with her husband, as she has most of her hits since 1984, and as with "Si Voy A Perderte," it's an entirely different song in the English-language version, which is less intimate in its emotions and more of a conventional "someday-we'll-be-together" study in deferred romance. Same melody, same backing track, different songs — this sort of two-for-the-price-of-one song will become increasingly common the closer we get to the present, as the Latin market increases in clout and visibility in the US, and as more Latin stars try to cross over in the other direction. Gloria Estefan, who's been playing both markets off each other since 1977, just had a head start on everyone else.

LUIS MIGUEL, “HASTA QUE ME OLVIDES”

23rd October, 1993

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It would be easier to find something to say about Luis Miguel's eighth glisteningly-produced, immaculately-sung hit in four years if he changed his game up more often. As it is, the differences between "Hasta Que Me Olvides" and his previous entry, "Ayer," is primarily a matter of the production. "Ayer" was near-symphonic in its lush production; here Miguel waxes merely opulent.

"Hasta Que Me Olvides" means "until you forget me," and the verses are a catalogue of all the things he will do to stave off that inevitable day — promises of fidelity, of obsession, of self-immolation, all in high-flown language that would be a little inaccessible if his voice didn't make the emotions clear. In fact some of the lines have such complex syntax that I'm not quite sure what they're saying, and translation software can only take you so far.

But the song is less an excuse for poetry (it's always just another love song in the end) than it is for Miguel to exercise his gift for timing and phrasing; and the way he pauses and then crashes, with a rush of melisma, on the penultimate "hasta que me olvides" in every chorus is a masterclass in pop ballad singing, keeping the emotional atmosphere fraught without overwhelming the listener with technique or pushing too far into insincerity.

JOSÉ Y DURVAL, “GUADALUPE”

16th October, 1993

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I was starting to panic about the lack of information about José y Durval on the Internet, when a stray Youtube comment pointed me to the fact that they were originally called Chitãozinho e Xororó, and that's where their Wikipedia page is. To sum up: they're a Brazilian sertanejo duo (sertanejo is more or less Brazilian country-pop, the traditional rural form of caipira given a modern pop gloss) who used their given names when they recorded for the Spanish-language market because Spanish speakers are just as bad as English speakers when it comes to pronouncing foreign names.

"Guadalupe" was the theme song to a hugely successful American telenovela of the same name, and it's on that basis (and presumably no other) that the song was a hit: it stayed at the top for a week, then vanished. Produced in Miami, the telenovela's high-drama operatics about organized crime, bastard children, insanity, and true love (at least as far as I can make out; I haven't seen it) has precious little to do with the old-fashioned regional ballad that José y Durval sing about the title character. As something stirring to play over the credits, it's only adequate; our last telenovela theme was far more dramatic and involving, but then Juan Gabriel wrote it, and he hasn't been seen in these parts for many years.

CRISTIAN CASTRO, “NUNCA VOY A OLVIDARTE”

18th September, 1993

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And another young varón thinks he has a shot at the Luis Miguel throne. You get the impression he's studied Miguel closely: not just the histrionic vocals, but the bolero rhythms, the expansive production, and even the record sleeves, where he stares off into the distance with smoldering sexuality in his eyes, shout that this is a teen idol who wants to be taken seriously as a romantic pop star.

He comes of good show-business stock, this young Castro: his mother was a noted singer and actress, and his father was a comedian and actor, one of the Valdés clan who popularized pachuco comedy with Tin-Tan in the 1940s and 50s. A child actor in the eighties, he released his first album when he was eighteen. A year later, he released Un Segundo En El Tiempo, from which this song was the first single.

It's a strong song, originally performed by the norteño outfit Grupo Bronco in their pop-friendly Mexican-country style. Castro adds such modern (i.e. "rock") signifiers as an alto sax and turns it from a two-step into a power ballad, emoting his guts all over the place. Luis Miguel has nothing to worry about; the kid has none of his sense of restraint or timing, and oversings it rather badly. The music holds up its end, and he doesn't manage to embarrass himself too much — it was after all a significant hit, and will become one of his signature songs — but in terms of 90s Latin pop idols, he along with everyone else, dwells very much in one man's shadow.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “MI TIERRA”

7th August, 1993

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Unlikely as it sounds, this is only Gloria Estefan's second appearance in these chronicles. She was far and away the most popular Latin act in the Anglophone market, having racked up a string of hits comparable to Madonna's or Janet Jackson's, at least for consistency if not longevity. I was barely paying attention at the time, and even I remember "Mi Tierra" as a sort of back-to-her-roots move after the campy strut of "Go Away."

But the Latin market was more astringent, demanding songs in Spanish, and Mi Tierra, at long last, complied. Her first all-Spanish-language album, it was less sleek and modern than much of the music she had been making, with or without the Sound Machine. Not that she had ever been particularly cutting-edge or critically acclaimed, rock purists recoiling from her dance-pop diva roots and diva fans skeptical of her sometimes corny sense of humor and often-weak material. Mi Tierra was that particularly rockist move, the back-to-roots record, and let her diva tear into some meaty emotions with mature sensibilities and precise control, and she was rewarded for it in Grammies, sales, and the loving embrace of Latin Pop radio. For the rest of the 90s, Gloria Estefan will be a much more recurrent figure here — just as she begins to fade from sight in English-language pop.

The first single off the album, "Mi Tierra" ("my land") is practically a textbook in Cuban dance styles, beginning with a folk-African drumbeat and shimmying into a guajira, a son, a rumba, and finally, when the horns come in, puro salsa. The lyrics are perhaps the best set of lyrics we've seen to date on this journey, an impressionistic, fragmented, and emotionally charged immigrant's monologue. Estefan herself was born in Cuba but her family escaped to the US when Castro took power; she has not returned. The song is as much an exile's song as an immigrant's, full of longing for the beloved homeland and musical reverie, but as she works her way up to the climax of the song (just before the horns come in), she grows more and more passionate: "sufro eso dolor que hay en su alma, aunque estoy lejos yo lo siento, y ¿un día regreso?" ("I suffer that pain born in [my country's] heart, though I am far away I feel it, and will I return one day?") The question hangs in the air for the briefest of seconds, before the answer is pounded out in three sharp hits: "Yo no sé." ("I don't know.")

Even the music dies away with the anguish of the unresolved, impossible-to-resolve question, before rushing back in harder and fiercer than ever, the horns blare in reckless joy, and even soothing disco strings flutter in. But the flutes still shriek unquietly, and the drums as frantic as ever: the call-and-response returns, as she cries out that she will remember, she will bear witness, her blood runs hot, she carries her tierra within her, and the voices ring back in response "mi tierra ... mi tierra ... mi tierra" in nasal unison after the fashion of traditional Latin American backing singers. The music rises again, the horns implacable, the disquiet overwhelming, and ends on the highest pitch of emotion possible, leaving the listener exhilarated but (if they have understood the words) emotionally drained.

It's a hell of a song, and I hear more in it every time I return to it. It was even a minor hit on various English-language charts, including in the UK and Australia; and I have to wonder why it's not talked about more. Is the Spanish language too daunting? The Cubanismo too specific? Estefan herself too easily dismissed as a pop lightweight? (I've done it myself, based mostly on the fact that everyone I knew who liked her in the 90s were women in their forties.) Consider this a call for Gloria Estefan Reappraisal Month. Or at the very least, point me to the places I've missed where people have given her her due.

LUIS MIGUEL, “AYER”

17th July, 1993

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Jon Secadas may come and Jon Secadas may go, but Luis Miguel is forever. At least that's how it feels now that we are well into the 1990s, as Miguel continues his streak of two hit songs off every album every year, like the hitmaking romance machine he is.

"Ayer" remains true to the Luis Miguel ethic: big, polished, finely crafted, orchestral — very orchestral. Where before Miguel has used classical instrumentation as a sort of filigree on his pop songs, here he attempts a pop-operatic fusion. You could say it was in the air; Guns N' Roses' ridiculously orchestral "November Rain" had been a worldwide smash, and Whitney Houston and Céline Dion were having major hits with studio orchestration that was recorded with the clear, even prissy fidelity of classical recordings rather than the compressed vamping traditional with strings and horns in pop. But far more than at attempt at currency, the hugeness and grandeur of the orchestration is driving home a more timeless point: Miguel is the King of Latin Pop, the most ambitious, accomplished, and able-to-afford-a-symphony-orchestra belter around. Jon Secada may well sound cheap by comparison; as who would not?

"Ayer" ("yesterday") is a song that may not quite live up to the tempestuous orchestration (though Miguel's voice, even more controlled and versatile an instrument than it has been to date, has no problem). Today he dreamed of her, they came together in a whirlwind of passion, oh but it's only a dream. In truth she is lost forever, they tore themselves with love, promises were exchanged, but ... there is a lacuna. He doesn't say how or why it ended, only acknowledges that now, woken from the dream, he realizes that he loved her, and it hurts. Of course it's all said much better — if he doesn't stint on the orchestration he doesn't draw the purse strings tight on the lyrics either. But ultimately it's kind of a weak story for the storming orchestration, and I can't help feeling that he's making too much of it. Maybe if you hadn't taken her for granted in the first place.

JON SECADA, “SENTIR”

3rd July, 1993

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Four singles off the debut album, four songs at the number one spot. Nobody else has had a hit rate like this in Latin Pop, at least not since the chart began; and nobody with comparable success disappeared as quickly. This isn't quite the end of Secada's reign — as with all earthquakes, there were followup tremors for some time afterwards — but it's the beginning of the end. What began sounding like a revolution turns out to be something of a dead end.

At least immediately. Secada did not lead the charge on Cuban-American r&b singers invading the Latin chart, but there are few recurrent figures on the chart today who don't owe at least something to his example. But we'll get to that when we get to them; in the meantime, "Sentir" is an impassioned ode to self-involvement, Secada emoting all about his emotions ("sentir" means "to feel," and boy does he ever) and how their intensity and urgency are all that matter. The you of the lyric (presumably a woman, though he could just as easily be singing into a mirror) exists only as an object of sentiment, the most important thing in the world because his feelings declare it so.

Of course plenty of love songs could be criticized on such grounds; the real grounds for dismissal is that this song retreads ground he's mined plenty of times already. Fourth singles have to introduce us to a new aspect of the performer, or they're just going to be watered-down retreads of what caught our attention in the first place, and "Sentir" only spent two weeks at the top before the chart, and the audience, moved on. Unless Secada could pull off another "Otro Día Más Sin Verte"/"Just Another Day Without You" hat trick, his days too were numbered.

LOS FANTASMAS DEL CARIBE, “MUCHACHA TRISTE”

12th June, 1993

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Los Fantasmas Del Caribe, or The Ghosts Of The Caribbean, were a Venezuelan tropical outfit whose very first single was an unexpected dance hit throughout the Spanish-speaking world. This is that single.

"Muchacha Triste" means "sad girl," but the music doesn't dwell on her sadness. It's got a light synth-reggae beat — plus our first glimpse of a genre that will only grow in importance as we continue, cumbia (the chk-chka-chh triplets in the rhythm), and nothing can sound sad at that bouncy tempo. Anyway, the lyrics focus much more on the singer's swoony love for the muchacha triste, who is repeatedly encouraged to come give him a kiss, than on anything about her.

I'd call it an an evanescent, summery anthem if it didn't feel even too lightweight to be called an anthem. Despite being Venezuelan and therefore creditably Caribbean, it sounds almost British to me. The high, childish vocal melody reminds me of Scottish twee-pop, and the cod-reggae synthesizers with no discernable low end bring to mind Culture Club. But it contains the notes just on the edge of souring which marks working-class Latin pop, and if the voices are fey the funk is real. They dressed like pirates for a reason: George Clinton and Adam Ant must be acknowledged.

LA MAFIA, “ME ESTOY ENAMORANDO”

10th April, 1993

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Not since Los Lobos have we seen this particular configuration in this particular spot: La Mafia are, rarely for the #1 Hot Latin spot, a band; and even more rarely, they're U.S. citizens. Texans, born and raised, from the city of Houston, and if they sing in Spanish and play a particularly safe and sanitized version of the plaintive border pop music called tejano, that's perhaps less because they're aiming for global Latin pop dominance and more because regional pop in the 90s tended towards the safe and sanitized. This was the decade that begat alt-country, however unnecessarily; while adherents could hear the pain and glory in John Michael Montgomery, others heard only the slow, waxy merging of all romantic pop into one homogenous ball of keyboard-heavy gloop.

Tejano will also have its crowd-pleasing alternative forms in the years ahead; but for now, this spare, almost minimalist rendition of a soulful countryish melody, with its hushed vocals and bluegrassy harmonies on the chorus, is a great low-key introduction to one version of the genre. The song is a ballad, and a soppily conventional one at that ("me estoy enamorando" just means "I'm falling in love," and the rest of the lyrics don't get much deeper), but the stark backing and crisp drums add unexpected heft to the naked melody until it sounds almost profound, like a folk or gospel song without the specificity of either.

RICARDO MONTANER, “PIEL ADENTRO”

13th March, 1993

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Ricardo Montaner continues his string of polished ballads that are far more erotic than they sound to an Anglophone. "Piel Adentro" means "skin inside" or "skin within" and a Google search turns up, besides this song, sex-and-dating sites.

But for all that, it's still as crashingly romantic as the music sounds. He's looking back on the sex as a metonymy for the relationship, and it apparently wasn't a good one — love turned to dust, he goes sleepwalking through it, the usual surprisingly specific images which are a feature of Latin Pop the way they very much aren't of Anglophone pop of the same breed and vintage.

Montaner has carved out a space for himself as a purveyor of primo ballads here in the early 90s; could he possibly challenge Luis Miguel, unquestionably the reigning champion of Latin ballads since the late 80s, for his throne? On this evidence, probably not; his voice deals capably with the big dramatic chord changes, but it doesn't do more than that. He doesn't have Miguel's gift for nuance or phrasing, and as the song crashes its way to a finish, he starts to sound winded, like a sprinter forced to run a steeplechase.

JON SECADA, “CREE EN NUESTRO AMOR”

27th February, 1993

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This is Jon Secada's third single, and third appearance at the top of this chart; a skeptic might be forgiven for thinking that Latin Pop was so devoid of new ideas or talent that a single shirtless Cuban-American singing adult-contemporary fluff with a vaguely urban beat represents a tidal wave of the New and the Now, and a general dissatisfaction with what the rest of the Latin universe was offering up.

There are two responses to make to this: first, an acknowledgement that Jon Secada's charms are beginning to pale. We've seen him run through his paces, and there are no surprises here, unless you count the shift from muted, ballady piano chords to snapping not-quite-new-jack-swing beats which does for an intro here. Even the melody is familiar, and Secada's bag of tricks — oh, look, he's going into falsetto on the third chorus — is starting to sound like a cheap copy of himself. If "Otro Día Más Sin Verte" was a breath of fresh air, this is that same air after having been recycled a couple dozen times through the system, a photocopy of a photocopy that retains the outline but loses the distinctiveness and clarity of the original.

The other response is, of course, that the number one spot is a very narrow, and in a lot of ways unrepresentative, stripe on any chart. At this point in history, reggaetón was being popularized by El General, rock en Español was being popularized Stateside by Maná and Café Tacuba, and cumbia was beginning to make waves outside of South America and rural Mexico. Not to mention the first hits of a new generation of pop stars — Mexican, Puerto Rican, Colombian, estadounidense — who won't crest up to the number one spot for several more years, and who will profoundly transform Latin Pop into something modern and sleek and danceable, and change Anglophone pop too, in the process. That Jon Secada happened, during these weeks, to sell the most records, is no indication of the earth-and-sea-shaking shifts under way elsewhere on the charts.

But even Secada, in his way, was transformative: before him, it was a relative rarity to find an American — that is, a United States of American — at the top spot on the main US Latin chart. It will not be a rarity from here on out. Latin Pop is growing more American, and America is growing more Latin. This is a change which will not slow down in the years to come.

JUAN LUIS GUERRA Y 440, “EL COSTO DE LA VIDA”

20th February, 1993

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Now this is what I'm talking about!

Within the first few notes, "El Costo De La Vida" shimmered its way into my favorite of the songs I've listened to for this project. It's something we haven't heard before, something we haven't even come close to hearing before; even the few trópical tracks we've had before weren't this light-footed and funky, big muscular salsa or jacking dancehall instead of goosey, jiving merengue with bachata guitars and afro-pop percussion.

Or rather afro-pop guitars and bachata percussion. If it's not easy to draw a clear distinction between the dance music of the Dominican Republic and the dance music of Western Africa, there's a reason for that; not only is the music of the Caribbean more African than European or native (a mixed heritage to which Guerra refers when he sings "una raza encendida, negra, blanca y taína" — "a race on fire, black, white and Taíno"), but twentieth-century African pop has long drawn inspiration from the music of the Caribbean.

But then this isn't a song produced by anonymous, collective Caribbean, or even Dominicans — Juan Luis Guerra (both with and without his muso band 440) is one of the major figures of modern Latin Pop, and it's only the vagaries of US airplay that has kept us from considering him before now. Most of Latin America was introduced to him in 1989, when "Ojalá Que Llueva Café" ("if only it rained coffee") became the biggest Dominican hit to date, and introduced his hyperliterate, danceable fusion of merengue, bachata and highlife to an international audience which ate it up. If there's a comparable figure in Anglophone pop, it would be as if Billy Bragg had had George Michael's career — only he never went away. (Not to upset a certain bunny, but stay tuned for lots more Guerra over the years.)

"El Costo De La Vida" means "the cost of living," and as usual with the phrase there's an implicit "high" in there. Both an unrelentingly funky dance track, with the call-and-response and punctuating horns typical of tropical music, and a sharp-tongued analysis of the political and economic woes of the early 90s (although, he noted with despair, very little about it would need to be updated to reflect 2010), it was also, if Wikipedia can be trusted, a source of controversy, as certain [citation needed] listeners heard anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism in its litany of ills (accurately! see below) and certain [citation needed] countries actually banned it from airplay, afraid of pissing off the US. That it reached number one here anyway (if only for a week) is a testament to its innate danceability rather than to the radicalism of the Spanish-speaking population in America.

That radicalism: "Democracy cannot grow if corruption plays chess." "Unemployment also bit me/No one cares, because you see/We don't speak English/Or Mitsubishi/Or Chevrolet." "We are a perforation in between sky and sea/Five hundred years later a race on fire/Black, white and Taíno/But who discovered who?" All of it punctuated with chirrups and "ya ves" ("now you see") because, after all, this is a dance song. But it's also a political song, and a literary political song at that.

Not only is this now my favorite song I've heard so far in this project, the more I listen to it and study the lyrics and shimmy to its intoxicating rhythm, it's fast becoming one of my favorite songs ever. One of the key tracks of the 90s, of world music history, of pop music generally. This is me grabbing you by the lapels and shaking you: listen to this song.