JUAN LUIS GUERRA Y 440, "MI PC"

26 December, 1998

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The waning years of the 1990s were, from the perspective of more than a decade later, a minor Gilded Age, a global utopia of brand names and Internet startups. The great struggles of the twentieth century were over, Western capitalism and American hegemony had won, the final eradication of time and distance was at hand via the Web, and there was nothing left to do but set yourself up in a McMansion, keep raking in the money, and spend it on whatever the lords of Madison Avenue and TRL demanded.

It was a time begging to be satirized ― for God's sake, it was a time when a totally earnest commencement address over trip-hoppy washes could become a massive international pop hit ― and while novelists, comedians, television producers, filmmakers, and suck.com gave of their best, pop music rather lagged behind. Of course pop, at least in the United States, is much more likely to set the tone for an era rather than provide a principled opposition, and the occasional "Barbie Girl" aside, very little in any U.S. chart critiqued rather than egged on the brave new era of Internet commerce, upscale mall culture, and bubbling markets ― or at least, not in the Anglophone charts.

The last time we saw Juan Luis Guerra was much earlier in the 90s, with a song protesting (in an ironic, covert, and danceable manner) American imperialism. He's kept up with the times, though, and here delivers a rollicking merengue which poses as a love song in order to satirize online relationships, mass media, aspirational branding, and global celebrity. The title "Mi PC" should need no translation to even the most ignorant of Spanish, but to make it clear, the first verse goes: "Girl, I want to tell you that I have in my computer/A gigabyte of your kisses and a floppy of your personality/Girl, I want to tell you that only you interest me/And the mouse that moves your mouth reformats my head/Girl, I want to tell you that in my PC I only have/A monitor with your eyes and a CD-ROM of your body."

So far so William Gibson ― indeed so far so creepy otaku ― but the chorus is where Guerra takes aim at the world beyond the desktop, by listing all the things his character doesn't want (at least compared to his virtual love). These include: a limousine, a Hugo Boss vest, Cindy Crawford in Berlin, a palace with pagodas, Burger King, a drawing by Miró, a trip to Paris, an airplane ride, Holyfield's ear, a Ferrari convertible, Pizza Hut, a NASA shuttle, and Shaquille O'Neal tennis shoes. The venerable folk/pop practice of defining reality by means of lists gets turned on its head by Guerra formulating his items in the negative, and he plays with cadence and repetition to further disrupt the accumulated meaning of all these signifiers of fame, wealth, and Westernization.

The form he chooses for the song is very much a straight-ahead merengue, though one that's characteristically fast-paced and even frantic, with whirlwind interjections from the brass and a carnivalesque breakdown to punctuate the song's funhouse take on modern society. Which of course means that many of the people who would most enjoy its satire will never take it seriously; the vast majority of pop-culture consmers in the U.S. have long since consigned merengue, like salsa, mambo, and other trad Latin dance forms, to the bin of pure utilitarianism, good only for dancing to or for indicating exoticization. But Juan Luis  Guerra is no Third World postcolonial outsider: he's making his critique from within the heart of the Western pop system. Not only did this song hit #1, but its parent album (almost routinely) went gold and received two Grammys; he had been a Latin superstar for over a decade, living partly in the US and touring worldwide. In another ten years, as Dominican bachata becomes a more integral thread in the Latin pop fabric, he'll even be an elder statesman. But that's looking too far ahead. We'll get there in time.

CHAYANNE, "DEJARÍA TODO"

12th December, 1998

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It's been six years since Puerto Rican pop star Chayanne has bobbed to the surface on these top-of-the-chart waters; although he's been working steadily in the meantime and been relatively successful at it, this still marks something of a comeback for him. Written by Estéfano, a prolific songwriter and producer from Colombia whose previous success stories had  included Jon Secada's debut album and Gloria Estefan's Mi Tierra, "Dejaría Todo" continues Chayanne's success with midtempo ballads. This time, thanks to Marcello Azevedo's nylon-stringed guitar, it has what you might call a stereotypically Latin flavor, a vaguely bolero sway, though not so pronounced that the barreling power-ballad chorus gets tripped up in any kind of polyrhythmic syncopation.

It's a "she's leaving me, my world is ending" song — more or less literally — and if the emotional hyperbole of the lyrics doesn't quite match up with the bland, adult-contemporary longeurs of the production, that's nothing new. Chayanne's voice isn't powerful, but it's pretty and well-suited to the aching romanticisms he's called upon to emote. (Enrique Iglesias, for example, would make an unlistenable fist of what Chayanne relaxes into.) It goes on for too long, as the chorus repeats and repeats, but it remains listenable throughout, Estéfano's production magic keeping each instrumental injection just this side of stultifying. The choral effect on the last several iterations of the chorus is both gilding this particular lily and getting to be a bit tiresome on this travelogue — how many faux-gospel choruses does that make within the past year? — but I'm surprised to discover that I have some affection for Chayanne.

Which is good, because he'll be back.

SHAKIRA, “CIEGA, SORDOMUDA”

21st November, 1998

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And the last piece of millennial-era Latin Pop falls into place. Here we enter the modern world.

Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll had been a child prodigy, writing songs at eight years old and releasing her first album at thirteen; but it wasn't until her third album, Pies Descalzos, that she came into her own: a combination of rock energy, dance rhythms, and pan-global sonics unified by her unmistakable, sweet-and-sour voice and a real brilliance in lyric writing that pushed past conventional expressions of love or self to incorporate bizarre imagery, extravagant hyperbole and unusually rhythmic uses of language. The gospel-tinged "Estoy Aquí", her first mature hit, and the first to do business outside of Colombia, turns the chorus into a breathless rush of syllables imitating the intense everything-at-once emotional whirlwind of the adolescence she was still emerging from.

But that was three years ago, in 1995. And because this travelogue only skims along the surface of the Latin Chart, we have been unable to track her progress. Very few (non-Iglesias) performers begin their careers at the top of any chart; the slow and patient building of a coalition of fanbases, of proving that you make solid work and that listeners can trust you with their ears, hips, and heart, of inculcating enough of an image that it's a surprise and a scandal when you subvert or expand it, is a longer, more arduous, and perhaps more honest task. Shakira in the 90s was not unlike Madonna in the 80s: a bolt of lightning, as ambitious as she was talented, and hard-working enough to compensate for any deficiencies either way. Although I'd say that Shakira was more purely talented than Madonna ever was  as a singer, songwriter, and dancer, and on more or less the same level as an applied theorist of popular music; "Estoy Aquí," in that comparison, would be her early, "Holiday"-era light dance material. "Ojos Así" would be her imperial-era, "Like A Prayer"/"Express Yourself" material. And "Ciega, Sordomuda" would be, oh, say "Into the Groove."

Comparisons can only carry you so far, however: real understanding requires the thing itself. And "Ciega, Sordomuda" is very much a product of the late 90s: the light house beat touches on Swedish pop of the era (the Cardigans, Yaki-Da, Robyn), the mariachi trumpet and guitar were accenting everything from No Doubt to Cake, and even her voice could be similar enough to Alanis Morissette's pained yowl that comparisons litter many of the early English-language introductions to the new Colombian pop/rock starlet. But the sonics of the song, however pleasurable, are only part of what makes it so masterful a piece of pop music: the lyrics, the structure, and Shakira's performance do the rest.

"Ciega, Sordomuda" means "blind, deaf and mute," and are part of an extensive catalog of adjectives she applies to herself as the result of her lover's proximity. (The full list: bruta, ciega, sordomuda, torpe, traste, y testaruda; ojerosa, flaca, fea, desgreñada, torpe, tonta, lenta, nécia, desquiciada, completamente descontrolada. Or: crude, blind, deaf, mute, awkward, clumsy and mulish; haggard, skinny, ugly, unkempt, awkward, foolish, slow, stupid, unhinged, completely out of control ― all of them, naturally, cast in the feminine.) This kind of self-abasement would be unthinkable in English-language pop, especially from such an extremely attractive and self-possessed woman, but it's undoubtedly a faithful report of the kinds of things many of us have felt in the presence of someone who pushes our buttons.

Even her ability with hooks serves the emotional content of the song: apart from the chanting chorus, the swooning "ai, yai yai, yai yai"s that follow the chorus and make space for emotion entirely separate from words are beautiful, sentimental, silly, and sad. Then there's the middle eight, with angry guitars and the bulk of the adjective assault, in which she spits "y no me eschuchas lo que te digo" (and you don't listen to what I'm telling you), admitting that not only is it an incapacitating love, but a hopeless one as well. Shakira's privileging of the contrary and grandly silly vacillations of the human heart over being cool or even making sense has been one of her greatest and most consistent features as a writer over the years.

We'll have plenty of further opportunities to see this in practice: now that she's finally here, Shakira will be a frequent return visitor to the top spot, and indeed the next decade-plus in Latin Pop might well be considered the Shakira Era. Although the chart is getting too busy and diverse for it to be dominated by any one voice, if any voice deserved to dominate, it would be hers.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “ESPERANZA”

24 October, 1998

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And Enrique's back, after more than a year of being absent from the top of the chart. We'll see plenty more of him, to be sure, but he'll never again be as omnipresent as he was with his first two albums. This is a good thing; as the US Latin audience increasingly diversifies, there's much less reliance on the recurrence of any given superstar to anchor an era. There's more diversity at the top of the chart, which — purely selfishly — is more fun for me.

Of course I have to get my fun where I can, because there's precious little here. A straightforward ballad begging forgiveness from a girl called Esperanza (a name which means Hope, because he's hoping she won't leave DO YOU SEE), with plodding instrumentation — the vaguely interesting panpipes providing color in the opening don't do anything else — and lyrics which could only be interesting to a straying boyfriend trying to get back in his girl's good graces. Enrique sings it as well as he sings anything; his strained passion ends up being unintentionally funny when he charges into the second iteration of the chorus on the wrong vowel and has to wrench himself into the right one. Or maybe that's his version of melisma.

The only other interesting thing about the song is that it foregrounds Enrique's Spanishness: Z and sibilant C are pronounced TH in Castilian and Argentinean Spanish, which many other Spanish speakers find funny because it reads as a lisp. Much as US Americans tend to perceive British culture as more foppish and fey than their own, Latin Americans indulge in similar stereotypes about their old colonial power. It speaks to Enrique's can-do-no-wrong superstardom at this point that he took "Esperantha" to the top of the US Latin chart anyway.

CARLOS PONCE, “DECIR ADIÓS”

26th September, 1998

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The first time Carlos Ponce came up, I noted that he had gotten his start in telenovelas; and it's worth noting  that a few months after this, he'd be guest starring on both Beverly Hills 90210 and 7th Heaven as generic Latin pretty boys. "Decir Adiós" doesn't do much to dispel the pretty-boy air; although it has more gravitas than "Rezo," it's if anything even less demanding of his limited vocal capabilities. He gets to growl sandily, and murmur throatily, and the rest of the track's emotion is up to the backing orchestra-plus-wailing-guitar.

The song itself is practically the definition of "generic rock ballad" -- the title translates to "Say Goodbye," a title that has covered hundreds of songs over the years -- and what interest it manages to scrape up is due largely to the dramatic, pause-and-crescendo arrangement led by electric piano, an arrangement which Ponce barrels through with little grace, relying on the inherent sexiness of his voice to carry him through in much the same way as he relied on the inherent sexiness of his look to carry him through acting. I'm afraid I'm immune to those particular charms; I'm left wondering, again, what a really strong singer, a Ricky Martin or a Marc Anthony, might have made of the song.

RICKY MARTIN, “PERDIDO SIN TÍ”

19th September, 1998

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It's a good measure of how much more accomplished a pop performer than his immediate peers Ricky Martin was that this song, a slow ballad based in modern R&B forms, is far more beautiful, superbly phrased and emotionally affecting than anything Enrique Iglesias, who was still singing as though he thought vocal constipation equaled passion, could have hoped to achieve at the time. Some of that, of course, is pure genetic fortune: very few people could sing as quietly and gently as Martin does in these verses here and still have it sound so smooth. Technique counts for a lot, but the quality of the instrument is the difference between pleasure and ecstasy.

The song itself is a sigh of unresolved longing. The title translates to "lost without you," and while the loss Martin expresses is romantic, there are suggestions -- not least in the video -- that it's corporeal as well; that the mourning is not just for lost love, but a lost life. The English-language murmurs in the post-chorus ("I love you; I need you") are haunting in how much is held back in them.

The production does some of the work here, a slow rush of smooth bass, lite breakbeats, and glossy chords, as familiar to adult-contemporary listeners of the 90s as an old shoe, but finessed extraordinarily well. But it's the hushed male chorus (I believe it's simply Martin multitracked) that makes the most emotional impact, circling in increasingly tighter chants that smartly mirror the way that we respond to death or other trauma, the way repeated thoughts circle unceasingly, unresolvingly, in our minds. It's one of the most understatedly lovely ballads we've yet seen; and it's also, despite the ache at its center, one of the most comforting.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “¡OYE!”

5th September, 1998

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If it's possible to draw conclusions about long-term trends in Latin pop from the very top of the Billboard Latin chart (a very shaky proposition), it might be useful to consider Gloria Estefan a bellweather. On the cusp of the 90s, she pointed to the overwhelming preponderance of adult contemporary that would make up the majority of the decade's number ones; and four years later she predicted the revitalization of traditional roots music that would be the major thrust of the decade's second half. Now, as the 90s wane, she returns with the first #1 to invest in modern club music since José Luis Rodriguez' "Baila Mi Rumba" in 1989. This is rather a large hint as to the direction in which Latin pop (or indeed all pop) is headed; but no spoilers.

But "¡Oye!" (listen!) also positions itself in the newly vital salsa current, as jump-started in this travelogue by Marc Anthony; one of the repeated refrains is "mi cuerpo pide salsa" (my body wants salsa), and the production connects the dots between Nuyorican salsa and Detroit house, never more explicitly than when the electric piano beats out a steady melodic rhythm. As a piece of dance music, it's wonderfully and characteristically inventive, balancing the steady bass 4/4 required for modern dance music with trad mambo (which is to say swing) horn charts, Cuban percussion, and call-and-response gritos (from, I belive, Emilio) that urge a physical response.

The Estefan machine was by now world-conquering, of course — Gloria's only real peer at this point was Madonna — and the slickness and efficiency of the production is a little breathtaking even today. 1998 is, it's worth noting, when the Loudness Wars began to heat up in earnest, which means that from the perspective of 2012, it's when everything begins to sound completely modern, mastered at an ear-popping volume which lets you feel the bass in your gut even through tinny Apple buds.

The final marker of modernity is the fact that the video linked above is a remix. The parent album, Gloria!, was mostly in English, and the original Oye! (the video's here) has English-language verses. This is the Pablo Flores Spanish Mix, which is only slightly different (the clubby synths were Flores' addition — he's been the Estefans' in-house mixer and remixer since the 80s), and as far as I can tell this was the version that got playlisted on Latin radio. (It's the one included on her Spanish-language greatest hits package, for instance.) As this travelogue slowly catches up to the present, and artists continue to record and release multiple versions of their songs in order to maximize revenue streams, I'll have to make more of these judgment calls as to which version to feature on the blog. Which in this case isn't much of a big deal; both versions are fantastic.

ELVIS CRESPO, “TU SONRISA”

29th August, 1998

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Every specific form of music has an uneasy relationship with pop. In the most obvious sense, this tension is responsible for things like rockism, for authenticity arguments that always sound more or less the same whether the original purity in danger of being devoured by mass media's ruthless, flattening maw is five hundred years or two months old. But even in critical frameworks that reject the authority of the appeal to authenticity, the idea of something being more like itself the further it gets away from pop remains.

Case in point. (Obviously.) Crespo's first big hit, "Suavemente," was exactly the kind of easily-digestible crossover, with a pitiless hook and miles of melody, that seems engineered for widest possible appeal. Which doesn't mean that the followup is any less hooky or melodic — if you can get the "será tu sonrisa" (it will be your smile) chant out of your head within an hour of hearing the song, you've got far more willpower than I — but it also hews more closely to the traditional merengue form, with its call-and-response and tighter, more insular grooves.

On the one hand, dogmatic merengueros (for whom all non-Dominican merengue is false merengue) would say that it's still too diluted, too Americanized, too pop. On the other hand, a groove's a groove, and from my chart-outwards perspective the heavy increase in danceable music over the past several months of chart action is only a good thing.

ONDA VASELINA, “TE QUIERO TANTO, TANTO”

22nd August, 1998

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One of the flattening effects of examining the Latin chart from this top-down position, as it were, is that we never get much of a feel for the nitty-gritty of a single country's pop scene: with so many competing constituencies making up the US Latin market, it's small wonder the chart moves slowly and relatively lumberingly: flukes excepted, it's the artists that have the widest transnational appeal who consistently show up on this particular radar.

This is one of the flukes. Like most countries, Mexico has long had its little galaxy of well-scrubbed teenpop stars and "manufactured" groups given plenty of time by local variety or light entertainment programs, but that aren't known outside the country -- or even sometimes outside the capital. Onda Vaselina (wave, or sound, of grease) was originally put together in 1989 by Mexican pop lifer Julissa to perform in a production of Grease, at which time their ages ranged from six to twelve. Nearly a decade and several casting changes later, they were perhaps closer in appeal and musicianship to Saved by the Bell: The College Years than to their pop contemporary Ricky Martin.

But then an odd thing happened: "Te Quiero Tanto, Tanto," a seriousface guitar ballad (so seriousface that the chord progression follows vaguely but not actionably in the footsteps of Cat Stevens' "Father and Son") became a hit off the back of the popular telenovela Mi pequeña traviesa (my little imp), and if Youtube is any indication, was the song of choice for Mexican quinceañeras, graduations, weddings, and reunions in 1998. The vocal performances are wobbly, the backing is dull montage-bait, and the song itself is hackneyed and syrupy -- all of which is why, despite myself, I kind of like it. Look at these spunky kids, putting on a show. I wouldn't be surprised if they were trying to save the rec center from some evil developer.

ALEJANDRO FERNÁNDEZ, “YO NACÍ PARA AMARTE”

18th July, 1998

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Three singles from the same album, three number-one hits — this is Enrique Iglesias levels of success, and it's worth taking a moment to step back a bit from the churn of the chart and survey the landscape. The Hot Latin #1 spot has had its dominant artists, of course — Luis Miguel is not yet thirty in 1998, and hardly to be counted out — but the totalizing effect that the new generation (Iglesias, Fernández, and soon enough Marc Anthony, Ricky Martin, and one still unheard voice) is having is unprecedented. From the perspective of 2012, it looks very much like a bubble, like so much else in the late 90s, from Bill Clinton's Pax Americana to the first dotcom rush to unprecedented profits from sales of recorded music. But in 1998, 9/11, Web 2.0, and the cratering of the music industry are still far in the future. So is the splintering of the Latin market, which will make the coming decade fascinating in its novelty, diversity, and unpredictability; but here at the tail end of the twentieth century, the illusion of consensus reigns supreme.

"Yo Nací Para Amarte" does nothing to break the illusion. Alejandro Fernández, with the support of the Estefan machine, has been established as a major young heartthrob, and this third single — written, once more, by Kike Santander — is another swooning ballad in a classicist mode. A bolero, with sensitive finger-picked guitar leads and gently swaying percussion, it leans deliciously florid and is only kept in check by the extraordinary sensitivity of Fernández' vocal performance; listen to the infinitesimal pauses and controlled quaver on the final chorus, and you can hear why Luis Miguel, the reining king of vocal technique, may have cause to worry.

The floridity, then, is all in the lyrics — and they're extremely florid, as you might guess from the title ("I was born to love you"). A declaration of self-immolating desire as hyperbolic and quasi-religious as anything found in medieval courtly-love poetry, it's hard to take seriously as a statement made from one adult to another. From a literary teenager to what he imagines the girl he has a crush on to be, however — but that way lies unprofitable autobiography. Thank God for Fernández' coolly controlled interpretation; the slight irony and distance he provides is the only thing keeping the song upright.

CARLOS PONCE, “REZO”

27th June, 1998

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Carlos Ponce was an actor, pinup, and singer, in that order; he'd been working in telenovelas since 1990, when he was eighteen, and the fact that it took until 1998 for him to release a debut album suggests that music was neither his first passion nor the most efficient use of his talents.

Or maybe I'm just letting the performance influence my reckoning. There's nothing about it which suggests a distinct musical personality: the dreamy-ballad-into-gospel-swayalong format is cribbed from Ricky Martin, the gruff, limited-range singing (until he finally lets off a single falsetto peal in the outro) is reminiscent of nonsinging actors forced to sing anyway from Richard Harris to Johnny Depp, and the indistinctly anonymous instrumentation that puts him front and center makes it clear that it's not music but showbiz that is really being celebrated here. The gospel choir makes up for his own improvisatory deficiencies and lack of mellifluousness; it's almost as if that was the idea.

The song itself is a glib declaration of love: "Rezo" means "I pray," though the connotation leans more towards the recitation of Catholic prayer than to the impulsive spirit of evangelical prayer. Which may be one way of explaining the poor match between song and style; the entirely secular subject of his prayer is that she love him back, "y que mi vida decores con tus gustos, tus colores" (and decorate my life with your tastes, your colors). It's the kind of thing that would be sweet if sung in a romantic comedy and creepily terrifying in real life. Which is true of most pop, probably; but Ponce's not a strong enough musical actor to sell the idea convincingly.

ELVIS CRESPO, “SUAVEMENTE”

16th May, 1998

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Just as Marc Anthony was our first real taste of salsa, Elvis Crespo is our first real introduction to merengue. (The only other song to carry the tag so far is a bachata song, and I was hedging my uninformed bets.) Like salsa, merengue has a long and storied history that has remained mostly submerged throughout this travelogue, although if Billboard had started the chart earlier in the 80s, or even in the 70s, it would probably have made an impact earlier. But merengue's much older than salsa; it was first recognized as a distinctly Dominican style of music in the 1850s, and while its journey from a rural folk music of (probably) African and Taino origin to a mass-popular dance music in the late 20th century was long, involved and achieved through political revolution, generational immigration patterns, and outright class warfare, the basic güiro rhythm is immediately recognizable and irresistable.

"Suavemente" (smoothly) is a song you know even if you think you don't, with a chorus so immediate and recognizable that Pitbull (of course) tried to hop on it for a failed hit last year; while it didn't actually cross over to Anglophone radio, it's so streamlined and punchy that I can't help thinking of it as a precursor to the "Vida Loca"/"Bailamos" mini-Latin Invasion that was more hyped than actual in 1999. (But we'll get to that.)

The lyrics, as is fit and proper to an uptempo dance song peaking just as summer begins to peer around the the corner, are mostly standard fluff about wanting to feel your lips kissing him again — but if the words are empty-headed, the music's turbo-hipped, and there's more genuine eroticism in the complications of the rhythm, the horn charts punctuating the conversation in swing patterns, and the delicious call and response in the second half, than in most of the dramatically "romantic" lyrics we've seen so far.

In 1998, there is no way of knowing that Elvis Crespo would not be another Marc Anthony, Ricky Martin, or Enrique Iglesias; on a purely pop basis, "Suavemente" is at least as accomplished as anything any of them have sent to the #1 spot so far. But we'll only be hearing from him once more before we catch up to the present (at least up through 2012; for the future, anything's possible). Which is probably unfair, but that's the case for most few-hit-wonders. Pop is decidedly unfair.

SERVANDO Y FLORENTINO, “UNA FAN ENAMORADA”

9th May, 1998

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1998 was, globally speaking, the year of the boyband. In the wake of the dissolution of British stalwarts Take That, a new generation of groups like the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, Boyzone, Steps, 98º, and Westlife rushed in to fill the void. The pull of this rising global tide was felt in Latin pop as well — former boyband icon Ricky Martin established himself as a solo artist (not unlike Robbie Williams in the UK), and Servando y Florentino scored, Hanson-like, a solitary left-field #1 out of the Venezuelan pop-salsa scene.

Seventeen and sixteen respectively the week this song hit #1, Servando and Florentino Primera had been homeland heroes for several years already as the voices of La Orquesta Salserín, one of the primary competitors to Menudo throughout the Americas. Like Enrique Iglesias, they had a respectable pop lineage: their father, Alí Primera, had been one of the shining lights of Venezuelan nueva canción in the 60s and 70s; and like Marc Anthony, they stood by the relative authenticity of salsa despite their unabashedly pop profile.

Not that Marc Anthony had anything to worry about. "Una Fan Enamorada" ("a [female] fan in love") is very much boyband material, from the plushy pop-disco melody (recalling an earlier era of boyband, the Bee Gees) to the lyrics' apparently-sympathetic-but-on-examination-not-really portrait of their own fanbase. Such songs are always exercises in ego-stroking for the singers — even when they approach the tragic near-perfection of Eminem's "Stan," the unspoken premise is still how great the artist must be to inspire such cracked devotion in the first place. "Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny."

And Servando and Florentino aren't quite up to even the relatively gentle rigors of the song. The highest reaches of the melody scrape against the limitations of their immature voices, and even the closest thing salsa has to a sure thing, the funky breakdown at the end, is rendered glib and pointless by their inability to riff convincingly. Like too many boybands, they were the sound of a season, and struggle to be heard to any great effect beyond.

ALEJANDRO FERNÁNDEZ, “NO SÉ OLVIDAR”

14th March, 1998

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Bolero, which originated (as a romantic music, anyway; the rhythm is originally Cuban) in the low-life cantina scene of Mexico City in the 20s and 30s, grew into a lot of different permutations as it became the standard pop language of Latin America from the 40s through the 60s; bolero costero (coastal bolero), bolero habanero (Havana bolero, fused with son, rumba, or U.S. rhythm and blues), bolero ranchero. Ranchero stars like Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete — icons of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema in the 40s 50s — sang boleros too, but with a ranchero, or pop-country, flavor.

All of that (limited understanding of) history is what comes to mind on the third single from Alejandro Fernández' Me Estoy Enamorado. The rhythm is definitely a bolero, but the horns erupt into the mariachi cadenzas typical of ranchero, and the sweeping strings belong to both traditions. As a committed fan of even the most banal musical cross-breeding, I was going to like this anyway; but Fernández' performance is exceptional. Big-voiced (naturally), but with uncommon sensitivity around the edges of the floridly sustained notes on the chorus. He's not quite at Luis Miguel's level, but (at least for the moment) he's not a bad replacement.

The song itself lets him down a little. Sure, it's got the appropriate sweep and holds together well melodically (you wouldn't expect anything else from Kike Santander), but the lyrics aren't top-shelf. "No sé olvidar como  lo hiciste tú" (I don't know how to forget the way you did it) isn't eternal love — or rather heartbreak — poetry, though the following image ("tú has quedado clavado en mi pecho como si fuera ayer," you are still stuck in my chest as if it were yesterday) is at least memorable. It hardly matters, of course, with that swaying rhythm and those swirling strings and the plaintive guitar lines and those pealing horns and above all Fernández' masterful voice ... but third singles are third singles for a reason.

RICKY MARTIN, “VUELVE”

28th February, 1998

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And now, as if we were only waiting for Céline to put the capstone on the era, we are fully immersed in modern Latin Pop. Ricky Martin has been a professional singer and entertainer for more than a decade at this point, from his early days in the revolving-door Puerto Rican boy band Menudo to his increasing profile not just in Latin music but crossover dance as well, and he sounds like it, relaxed and professional, with a lively soul/rock delivery — everything Enrique Iglesias wants to be but isn't, not yet.

In fact we haven't heard anything this confident, or this indebted to Stateside R&B, in a long time; not since Selena, or even Jon Secada. Although this is R&B as filtered through Anglo-American pop/rock aesthetics, a loose soul vamp that sweeps up into a declamatory chorus, with broad key changes and plenty of room for a singer to show off, if that's the sort of thing he's inclined to do. Martin's not, for the most part, but that doesn't mean he hasn't got the tools to do it with.

The comparison that keeps urging itself to me is to George Michael, and while I don't want to make too much of it (gay dance-rock-soul men with brilliant smiles who came out later in their careers, after their hitmaking days were behind them), the ease and mastery with which Martin nagivates the funk-flecked power ballad form, swooping up into falsetto on the chorus and engaging gleefully with the gospel choir in the final third, is very Michaelian.

"Vuelve" ("return," both the noun and the imperative) was also the title of its parent album, Martin's fourth, on which he finally scaled the heights of the Latin chart. It was written by the Venezuelan Franco De Vita, who we last saw making a not-so-convincing effort at Anglo-American gospelly rock dynamics. Martin's boyband-bred sense of rhythm is one key improvement, but the big one is that "Vuelve" is not nearly so self-important a song as "No Basta" — while certainly pulling out a big gospel choir for the final chorus is a time-honored Seriousness Indicator, it's impossible to take the grinning sway of Martin's performance as seriously as the lyrics would like us to. Sure, he's begging for his lover's return — without him*, life has no meaning, even air has deserted his lungs — but Martin never sounds anything but totally confident that he* will return.



*I know it's not really kosher to make assumptions about the gender of non-gendered objects of song, especially since Martin was very much still in the closet in 1998, but I'm enough of an English traditionalist that I revolt at the prospect of "hir" or "s/he," and entirely feminine pronouns are equally problematic.

CÉLINE DION, “MY HEART WILL GO ON (LOVE THEME FROM TITANIC)”

21st February, 1998

Wiki | Video

It's only my decades-long head start that has enabled me to get to this ahead of Tom, Sally, or Marcello; anyone who surveys popular music of the twentieth century is going to have to contend with it sooner or later. In a decade characterized by staggeringly popular songs from staggeringly popular movies — "Everything I Do (I Do It for You)," "I Will Always Love You," "Kiss from a Rose," "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing," "I Believe I Can Fly," and on and on — "My Heart Will Go On" was the most staggeringly popular of them all, just as its parent film was, and it blanketed the earth so heavily in the years following the release of Titanic that people talk about it as having been metastatic, colonizing, inescapable; a very good book was even written about how impossible it is to say anything meaningful about such totalizing work.

Well, I haven't seen the movie. Nor had I consciously heard "My Heart Will Go On" before listening to it for this travelogue. Oh, it wasn't new to me; like anyone else alive, hearing, and capable of long-term memory fifteen years ago, I knew it. But I'd never listened to it. By chance I'd managed not to tune into commercial or contemporary radio during its seasons of dominance; I'd left the television turned off; I'd not been in the kinds of public spaces that pipe in the hits of the day at unignorable decibels. But of course it had seeped in anyway — the pennywhistle opening, the broad and sturdy chord changes, like vast steps leading up to some Brutalist cathedral, and of course Céline's painfully angelic voice sweeping through the pillowy orchestration like a tracking shot through a rote crowd scene: no time to pause for any enlivening bits of business or quirks of personality, we are Setting a Mood.

So of course when I do sit down and listen, it's a bit different than I had remembered, or imagined. The popular image of Céline Dion is that of a non-stop belter, tempestuous in her evocation of tin-pan melodrama, but on the opening verse her voice is as pure and ethereal as Sarah McLachlan's — or perhaps even Sarah Brightman's — and throughout she makes unusual choices, if minor ones. Nobody quite has her phrasing, and if the later choruses get histrionic they're still individual enough to give the pleasure of watching an entirely inimitable performer; the play may be the most frightful nonsense but by God there won't be a stick of scenery left on stage when she's done.

The lyrics are the most frightful nonsense, of course; a weak-minded declaration in the power of romantic love to transcend all limitations even unto death, given the solemn reading of a sacred hymn (those great gulping thwacks of syllables are straight out of praise-and-worship) and cloaked in a fuzzy and unmeaning spirituality, its catechism of willful self-belief and sentimental denial of all hard truths is one of the most overpowering and cringeworthy strains in late-90s pop. It'd be pretty (and awfully convenient to my tastes) to think that it was confined to that decade, that 9/11 killed it off  and that the public ever after has chosen either pure escapism or raw unvarnished Truth, but nothing dies that easily.

In a way, it feels like all the 135 songs I've written about for this blog were just a preparation for this: I had to come to terms with the 90s romántico ballad before I could hear this in its proper context, faux-Irishness, overbudgeted orchestra, climactic arrangement and all. It's perhaps worth pointing out that Céline Dion, a French-Canadian (which is to say, a member of a historically impoverished ethnic minority), is actually culturally closer to the Spaniards, Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and so forth on the Hot Latin chart than to the Hollywood Irishness of the song — and the modern big-voiced ballad, whether Anglophone, Hispanophone, or otherwise, is also Latinate, descended from the Italian bel canto tradition.

So it's fitting that Céline, who belongs to the entire world, not just the Anglophone (much less just the Francophone) parts of it, would usher in another of the momentous firsts in this travelogue: the first English-language song. There will be many more.

LOS TEMERARIOS, “¿POR QUÉ TE CONOCÍ?”

7th February, 1998

Wiki | Video

But first...

Our last encounter with Los Temerarios had them whooping it up, slightly unconvincingly, with a live cover of a classic Vicente Fernández ranchera song. This seems to be much more their preferred speed: a heavily -- and nostalgically -- orchestrated song of romantic regret. "Why did I meet you?" is one translation of the title and first line of the song ("why did I know you" -- very much including the Biblical sense -- is another), and you can guess the development of the lyrical theme from there. She belongs to another, and he (or the character played by Gustavo Ángel) is in anguish because he can't have her. The chorus then sweeps into t a declaration that he knows she truly loves him, but is afraid to tell her man that he (Ángel) is the only one who can make her dream.

I don't buy that at all, and not just because I try to be skeptical of guys who claim to know women's minds, especially when the women aren't around to speak for themselves. The very production urges us against him: his voice, so close-miked that he barely sings above a whisper, is creepily intimate, and the sugary, pan-60s nostalgia of the orchestration, calling to mind both late doo-wop and classic ranchera, sounds more like a fantasy built up in an obsessive's head than a properly sweeping setting for his tragiheroic narrative of self.

Of course all this too is in my head, unsupported by any literal reading of the text -- and maybe I'm grasping at straws to keep yet another ballad interesting. Still, the gestures towards pops past are intriguing. We'll see more of Los Temerarios in the next decade, and based on the gap between this and their previous number one, I have absolutely no idea what to expect from them.