ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “SI TÚ TE VAS”

2nd December, 1995

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And so we close out 1995, perhaps the most tumultuous year at the top of the Latin chart yet, with the arrival of a new voice bearing an old name. The people's princess is gone, the youth, invitation, and opportunity she represented having dissipated in the San Antonio night. Instead, we have another form of royalty.

He dropped out of college — the University of Miami, he was no scholar — to record this album, having secretly borrowed money from his nanny to record demos which he sent out under a fake name, because he didn't want the old man's prestige influencing the decisions. Of course, once the marketing people found out. . . .

Julio Iglesias was one of the greatest singers of the twentieth century, an interpreter of great sensitivity and a richness unusual in pop. His son inherited little of his burnished vocal quality; Enrique's voice is instead rather thin and pinched, if perhaps more nimble, better suited to a less stately pop era. But he has similar control and, which is what matters in pop, a similar ability to orchestrate emotions; listen, here, to how he clips his voice on the very edge of rock grittiness on the chord change.

But there will be plenty more opportunities to discuss Enrique Iglesias in the years to come; he currently holds the record for the most number ones on the Hot Latin chart, and is unlikely to be unseated any time soon. To the song. At first hearing, it's what I've been mentally cataloging as Another Fucking Ballad; but wait. It's actually been a while since we've had a straight-up ballad in this travelogue, and despite the tempo this isn't particularly Adult Contemporary. The hard drum sound, entirely devoid of syncopated rhythm; the guitar and organ which, though muted and in the background, pull hard in the direction of classic rock; Iglesias' own half-croon, half-groan. This is almost not Latin Pop at all, at least not in any of the traditional senses we've come to identify, neither regional nor tropical nor even, really, romántico. This is just pop that happens to be in Spanish, and could easily be otherwise.

Which make sense for a U of M dropout, who's lived in Florida since he was ten; his heritage is Spanish, but his instincts are all American — or international, same thing, thanks cultural imperialism. Even if he speaks with a Spanish accent (and you can hear the Spaniard when he sings "corathón" in the first line), he's been an international jet-setter all his life, identified with no tradition except that of wealth and privilege, provided with no cultural shorthand except that of universal human emotion. He perhaps oversells it here; he's young, and the song needs an injection of meaning; the premise ("Si Tú Te Vas" means "If You Leave") is some of the most well-covered ground in pop, and the lyrics don't distinguish themselves. Not for the first time, a good story, great personal attractiveness, and a strong publicity blitz have conspired to launch a new pop sensation.

But just how sensational he turns out to be will, of course, be a recurring theme in these pages for some time to come.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “ABRIENDO PUERTAS”

21st October, 1995

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This song begins what, scanning the horizon, looks like becoming a semi-annual tradition: another Gloria Estefan album, another Gloria Estefan number-one single. After having thoroughly ingratiated herself to the Latin Pop audience with Mi Tierra (the album that produced three chart-topping songs), she'll never again go without that audience's appreciation for her work — at least as of press time. And she repays that appreciation with some of the most joyful and glorious music we've yet encountered in this travelogue.

"Abriendo Puertas," as even a Sesame Street-level Spanish education should tell you, means "opening doors," and the light, scattered-tempo vallenato rhythm of the song reiterates the dance-yrself-free message of the lyrics, which on the chorus run something like "And we're opening doors, and we're closing wounds/Because in the new year we're going to live life/And we're opening doors, and we're closing wounds/Step by step down the path we're going to find our way." It's the sort of pleasingly universalist message that could, frankly, be a hit at any time, but in the fall of 1995 it perhaps inevitably recalled the great grief of that year (at least as far as US Latin Pop fans were concerned), and its call to get up and dance anyway, to tear down barriers and dismiss failure as a lie, sounds both thrilling and, well, healing.

That vallenato rhythm is worth remarking on: it's a close cousin of the cumbia rhythm that Selena exposed us to, with similar origins in the mixed-race cauldron of coastal Colombia, and the guitar/accordion combination (unrelated to the similar combination in Mexican norteño) is one of the genre's trademarks. Perhaps unusually for the highly-vertically-integrated Estefans, the song was written and arranged by Colombian songwriter/producer Kike Santander, who will be a name to remember in the years to come, as the late 90s fade into the 00s.

Still, Gloria and producer husband Emilio, ever the ambassadorial multiculturalists, make a point of letting the opening guitar sound not only tropical but African — a hint, perhaps, of Congolese rumba echoing back to her own native Cuban rhythms? — and mix the rest with salsa horn charts, funky urban bass, Afro-Cuban percussion, and a call-and-response chorus that could have grown out of any of the above, but which in this travelogue is a Gloria Estefan hallmark. They don't call themselves the Miami Sound Machine anymore — they're bigger than Miami, and far more eclectic than any Sound Machine — but she's had the same band her whole career, and they've kept up with her every swerve and wild goose chases. If she sounds now content — like she could just make variations on this record for the rest of her career and not miss a thing — she has perhaps earned it. How many other openers to fifteenth albums sound so irrepressibly joyful?

LUIS MIGUEL, “SI NOS DEJAN”

30th September, 1995

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Let this be a lesson never to assume. You listen to and write about Latin Pop over the course of several years and start thinking you know what the parameters are. But 1994 and especially 1995 have messed with my assumptions so much that WHAT IS HAPPENING seems to be the only appropriate response. Not only have we seen a decisive shift in genre, away from bland romántico ballads towards distinctively flavored regional music whether uptempo or down, but this is the second live cut in a year to make the top of the chart.

Yes, of course it's Luis Miguel at the height of his powers, and nearly anything he recorded was bound to end up here. But this isn't the Luis Miguel we've become familiar, even overfamiliar with in the past eight years. He's looser than he's been in ages — since he was a teen idol, in fact — and deviates from his usual velvet-lunged passionata by letting the band behind him, massive string section and all, play with tempo, even vamp a little. It's a mariachi orchestra, but the song is pure pop in its harmonics and structure, and if it's still a controlled looseness, closer to Sinatra Swings! than to the near-punk of La Mafia's live cut, he doesn't let the side down, acquitting himself handily outside the clinical, glossy perfection of his studio cuts.

"Si Nos Dejan" means "if they let us" (or "if they leave us," but not in this context), and it's either a silly trifle of a love song in which the Always Unspecified They are all that's standing in the way of true love, ultimate happiness, a new dawn, and all the rest, or it's a really powerful, political song about the inescapability of power dynamics and how the system crushes personal happiness with ruthless thoroughness. I think it's the former, but multiple readings is what happens when you don't specify.

SELENA, “TÚ, SÓLO TÚ”

22nd July, 1995

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That's all there is; there isn't any more.

This is our farewell to Selena, just over a year since we first properly said hello to her. We're gliding inevitably on to the horizon, and she must remain behind. If this hurts more than any other voice which has gradually faded from these pages — we've seen the last of Ana Gabriel, of Yuri, of Jon Secada, to name just three who have given us pleasure over the years — it's because Selena held more than just the promise of future musical success in her voice, in her beauty, in her ambition. She could have been so much more. She could have beaten back the inequalities of race and language, bridged the gap between Hot Latin Tracks and the Hot 100, belonged not just to a single region, not just to a single language, but to the world.

And in a way, she did, at least briefly. Her death made her more famous than her life to date had done; and Dreaming Of You, the somewhat motley collection of tracks she had been working on in various studios at the time of her death, rushed out to assuage the grief, was her biggest-selling album ever. "Tú, Sólo Tú" was the second single from that record; the first, and the one song you probably know by her, "I Could Fall In Love," was the biggest Latin song to hit the Hot 100 since "La Bamba" back in 1987. It peaked at #8 there, and became something of a generational classic, especially in the urban US. It also raced up the Hot Latin chart, of course, reaching #2; only the simultaneous #1 of "Tú, Sólo Tú" kept it from being included in this travelogue.

But "I Could Fall In Love" was an R&B ballad, perfect for teary memorializing; "Tú, Sólo Tú" is a mariachi waltz, so perfect a companion piece to "El Palo" that this period of our travelogue is starting to look less like a generational shift in listening patterns and more like black magic. But it's not just a soundalike throwback; "Tú, Sólo Tú" is a genuine classic, written by the great ranchera composer Felipe Valdés Leal for the 1949 film Perdida, where it was sung by La Torcacita (Matilde Sánchez), and would be covered by virtually every ranchera singer ever, perhaps most notably Pedro Infante and Linda Ronstadt. Selena's performance of it is respectful without being reverential; she digs into the emotion of the lament in her own way, rather than trying to resurrect a bygone vocal style, and towards the end begins to sound a bit like Ana Gabriel in the hoarseness of her moans.

Which brings us more or less full circle; she first came to our notice doing something like an Ana Gabriel imitation. But where the music there was thin and tentative, a bad memory of the underproduced 80s, she — and Latin Pop as a whole — had reached the place where she could glory in sumptuous history without being held back by it. There's a kind of confidence here, confidence in the power of the song and of the classic mariachi instrumentation to retain their full meaning almost fifty years after the fact; like Dylan forcing rock to look back at folk in order to flower in a million different directions, she's almost with her dying breath helping Latin Pop hurtle into the future by taking stock of its past.

And if she's not quite going to be the bridge we had hoped — too young, too soon, never forget — that doesn't mean there won't be one. But that's getting ahead of ourselves.

JUAN GABRIEL, “EL PALO”

15th July, 1995

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Strictly from the evidence of this travelogue, Juan Gabriel is a man of moods. He was introduced to us very early on as a singer of synth-pop mariachi; he said goodbye with an extended dance mix; he said hello again with a gospelly march; and now he's doubling down on the mariachi — or rather, on ranchera (mariachi is a specific form that generally includes charro costumes), digging into the 1940s and 50s and 60s heyday of classic Mexican music.

In a sense this is a culmination of all the backward-looking pop we've been seeing over the course of the past few years, from Gloria Estefan's exploration of Cuban traditionalism and Luis Miguel's homages to the greats of Latin music to exercises by Selena and Los Bukis in modernized classicism. Even though Juan Gabriel's visits to the top spot tend to be brief these days (this was only there for a week), he's still something of a key figure in Latin Pop, and his embrace of traditional ranchera music on El México Que Nos Se Fue ("the Mexico that left us," or rather, "that got away from us") is another confirmation that the mood of Latin Pop (as measured by US airplay, anyway) has changed considerably from where it was ten, or even five, years ago.

"El Palo" is a Gabriel original, but it sounds entirely traditional (except perhaps in the rapid-fire syllable-spitting at the end, which owes more to American funk and soul than the strict rhythm and ornate instrumentation suggest). A "palo" is a stick, and the repeated phrase which gives the song its title, "palo dado, ni Dios lo quita" is a variation on a Spanish-language proverb which means, roughly, "what's done is done" (lit. "stick given, neither does God remove it"). It's a scales-from-the-eyes end-of-relationship song, and if it's performed in a rather breathless rush as the guitars and guitarróns and vihuelas and harps propel us forward, while the glossy, feathery strings swirl above and around and the horns break in like spotlights to show the track, it's still an old pop theme, and an old romantic-poetry theme before that.

But if the instrumentation, the lyric, and the melodymaking are all traditional ranchera, Juan Gabriel's voice is not. He doesn't have the burnished tones of a Vicente Fernández or a Pedro Infante: his voice is high and thin and cracked (a bit like David Bowie's, in fact), and the sobbing wrench in his voice doesn't sound stylized in the traditional method of ranchera, but real. He's still unpredictable, even when writing and singing what might be the most predictable form of music there is. The signature sounds, harmonic structures, and cries (the grito mexicano, again!) of classic Mexican music are as immediately recognizable as any traditional music anywhere; the flexibility of the form is less noted by outside listeners, but Juan Gabriel makes it sound immediate even while sounding old.

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS & LOS BUKIS, “UNA MUJER COMO TÚ”

3rd June, 1995

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Los Bukis are back! It's been a while since we've heard from them, and in the meantime they've undergone a name change. Marco Antonio Solís, who was always the frontman, songwriter, face, and leader of the band, is billed up front now; the next time we see him, he'll have left behind the Bukis brand entirely.

But if the band was ever more than a collection of guys who played behind Solís, this is a great note for them to go out on. Listening back to their appearances in this travelogue, they've been more consistent than I think I gave them credit for at the time; back to back, their songs form a sort of interlocking pattern of trad-inflected Mexican pop, moving from the synth-heavy production of the 80s to the rhythm-centric production of the 90s. Of course, there were solid rhythms on their earlier songs, and there are synths here. Maybe the real difference is that the trad is just a little more inflected than previously.

The song is a bolero, and Solís gives it the rich, full vocal that bolero tradition demands — and I'm pleasantly surprised. This is the first time I've been impressed by his singing; not that he's Luis Miguel all of a sudden, but especially on the middle eight, where he has to make a difficult leap alone, he acquits himself so well that you can see exactly why he felt that the band wasn't necessary any more. Still, the sensitive arrangement and tasteful guitar and percussion figures enhance the pleasure, and if this isn't quite in the Gloria Estefan range of superbly evocative traditionalism, it's dreamy enough to do.

SELENA, “FOTOS Y RECUERDOS”

15th April, 1995

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And like that, she's gone.

On March 31st, after an argument with a former employee and president of her fan club, Selena turned to leave the Days Inn room where they had agreed to meet and was shot deep in the right shoulder. She died of blood loss just over an hour later in a Corpus Christi hospital.

The immense and immediate public grief that followed was the occasion of most Anglophone music fans' first hearing of her. Tom Brokaw called her "the Madonna of Mexico" on the evening news, but he was wrong. She was the Madonna of America — of that portion of America which, just as free and proud and God-fearing as any other, has worked harder, lived on less, and built more (at least west of the Mississippi). Mexico? Please. Selena was from Texas.

(Which isn't to say she wasn't proud of her Mexican heritage, same as anyone can be of their Irish or Italian or whatever. Just noting acts of erasure where I see them.)

And by now hopefully you'll have clicked play and wondered why I haven't yet mentioned the song. It's a great song even if you don't know Spanish, and you recognized that guitar line right away. But although it was her first number one after her death, it was the fourth single from Amor Prohibido, and so even if the imagery was kind of apt (see below), there was always going to be a feeling of exhaustion to whatever song took this place.

But the fact that it's a rewrite of perhaps the most buoyant, sparkling song of ache and loss ever written (even if Chrissy Hynde's new-wave Kinksisms have little in common with Selena's skanking cumbia) very nearly lifts it above mere fourth-single roteness and into something grander, more eloquent: a self-eulogy. The Spanish lyric, written by Ricky Vela, takes its lead from the opening line of the original — "I found a picture of you" — and sticks to the image. Selena sings "tengo fotos y recuerdos" ("I [only] have photos and memories") over the title melody, and while her background singers gamely imitate the "ooh ahh" chants which Hynde had borrowed from Sam Cooke, the chain-gang metaphor is lost in translation. Still, the rising "oh-oh-a-oh-ohhh" and the descending, patient guitar figures of the original remain, and in any language it's a beautiful song.

We will see Selena from this deck only once more; we barely got to know her, and already she's slipping out of sight. It would probably be too much to say she changed everything. But she changed enough; the rest of this travelogue will be that much better for all the ways she pushed Latin Pop forward.

LA MAFIA, “TOMA MI AMOR”

8th April, 1995

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When the Hot Latin chart goes norteño, it goes norteño all the way. Forget the politesse of Bronco's string arrangement, or La Mafia's own concessions to electronic modernism — this is the raw stuff, accordion and rhythm section and a singer gritando puro campesino. It's a rare example of a live hit, always unusual outside of 70s AOR, and the fact that it was only on the top of the chart for a week detracts nothing from the fact that hey, it was at the top of the chart at all.

But it's not just the crowd noise that makes this the rawest, most rock & roll record we've encountered yet in our journey. The stiff polka-descended rhythms might not sound very raucous, but the accordion positively shreds, and the gritos aren't a million miles away from Joe Strummer's Peter Pan crows on "London Calling," or from cowboy whoops presaging heavy sales at the saloon and a gunfight in the morning. Sure, people who aren't used to norteño might mutter "Chicken Dance" to themselves, and the lyrics are very nearly simple enough to be a playground chant, but there's a magnificent energy to the song, an organic looseness that suggests that maybe more Latin Pop should have been released to radio from concert recordings.

"Toma Mi Amor" means "take my love," but the verb "tomar" ("take") is also used to mean "drink" — and La Mafia doesn't hesitate to let the suggestiveness bubble up to the surface. It's a bar-band singalong from South Texas, where bar bands are just as likely to be brown as white, and their crowds are composed of shitkickers, hard-working alcoholics, and horndogs either way.

BRONCO, “QUE NO ME OLVIDE”

11th February, 1995

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It’s been building up steam for a while now. The tejano pop of Álvaro Torres and La Mafia broke the ground; the unashamedly rustic cumbia rhythms of Selena laid the foundation; and even Luis Miguel’s revisiting the style in his immaculately polished manner helped to get people used to the idea. But Bronco is the first actual norteño outfit, unmediated through the gloss and synths of contemporary pop, to hit the top of the Latin chart since it began. In Anglophone pop terms, it’s like a country-blues singer suddenly hitting the top of the charts in 1995 — and not being a one-off either, but making the top spot safe for roots acts ever after.

But norteño is pop in a way that blues and even traditional country are not (at least not anymore). Partly this has to do with the shifting demographics of the Latin Pop audience in the 1990s; where from the beginning of the chart in 1986 it had been driven by urban, middle-class Cuban-Americans and Puerto Ricans in the East and North and Mexican-Americans who had long lived in the American West, beginning in the mid-90s the boom in immigration of poor Mexicans and Central and South Americans to the U.S. pushed Latin Pop towards including more diverse voices: poor people’s music, in fact.

(The reason for this mid-90s boom in immigration? Conservative pundits pretend to be baffled and blame the inherent criminality of brown skin, but I’ll drop a hint: it begins with N and ends with AFTA.)

Those horns, descanting brightly in muted chords, are the first sign: this is traditional Mexican music. José Guadalupe Esparza's high, emotional vocal style is another —— and then the whoop, half laugh, half sob, entirely artificial, the grito mexicano that more than any other sound defines norteño as something particular and vulgar and sets on edge the teeth of listeners for whom the music codes as poverty, as ignorance, as hickface, as hidebound fakery set to a grossly inelegant march (exactly the reaction I had as a child to the honky tonk whine of country, incidentally), for whom norteño is the music of abuelos, of campesinos, of the patria they want nothing to do with. It is firmly itself, not Americanized, not assimilated, not conducive to being remixed or anglicized. There have still been no norteño hits in English (unless "Ring of Fire" counts), almost alone among global pop musics, because once the blues barrier was broken back in the 20s another sound of Otherized Poverty, with which all Americans are familiar second-hand but never first, had to rise to take its place.

But this is still pop-norteño, those lush strings particularly taking the place of what would, a year earlier, be synthesizers. And I'm not entirely convinced they're not; but it's the mid-90s and gestures towards "authenticity" of any stripe are appreciated more than the sonic novelty and futurism that peaked once in the 80s but will peak higher still in years to come.

The song? It's a traditional-sounding lament (though written by Esparza) — "Please Don't Forget Me" would be a rough translation of the title's sentiment, and the rest can be extrapolated from it. It's the fact of the song, more than the song itself, that excites me. So much more is to come.

LA MAFIA, “ME DUELE ESTAR SOLO”

21st January, 1995

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La Mafia's previous appearances in these pages have been piano ballads, tasteful — of their kind — and even excessively polite, as though they had put on their good suits in order to enter the charts and were reluctant to turn around for fear something might break. But something happened between then and now; even though their previous single was off the same album, it's highly unlikely this one would have made it to the top if it weren't for the gravitational force exerted by the high-mass formation of a new star.

Tejano, the specifically Texan homebrew of cumbia, norteño, and American r&b and pop, was the new sound of Latin radio, and the way La Mafia presses hard on cumbia's Caribbean beat, skanking hard at reggae tempos, may be the funkiest sound we've had to date. As well as one of the tackiest — speaking as someone who grew up in the late 80s and early 90s, there are class and taste implications in the cheap keyboard sounds and drum-machine presets La Mafia use here that still trigger hot floods of embarrassment deep in my subconscious. But I'm learning to own it, to even rejoice in it (the unlikely reappearance of similar off-brand synth textures on the radio in 2011 is some help here), and the groove bounces enough to forgive anything.

Or maybe I'm just overidentifying with the lyrics. "Me Duele Estar Solo" means "it hurts to be alone," and the fact that the self-pitying lyrics are sung with such a smooth, carefree delivery over a very sunny bounce only appeals even more to someone who prefers to wrap unflattering self-pity in a breezy irony that dares anyone else to feel sorry for me. (I didn't say I succeed.) If it's a little hard to imagine raising a maudlin glass to the chorus, that's only because bopping to the rhythm might spill the beer.