RICARDO ARJONA, “EL PROBLEMA”

7th December, 2002

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Ricardo Arjona's relatively complex and poetic singer-songwriter rock has been a necessary counterweight to the more demotic and direct millennial-era pop which had largely enveloped the top of the Hot Latin chart over the past few years; but this, his biggest-ever hit, is as direct and pounding as any dance song, even if the lyrics' simple structural conceit is still a highly poetic one.

The bulk of the song is made up of couplets whose lines begin "El problema no es que..." and "El problema es que..." (The problem is not that... / The problem is that...), in which the first line describes a difficulty about the beloved, and the second details how it impacts the lover. From the first, relatively benign line "The problem wasn't not finding you / The problem is forgetting you," it grows increasingly obsessive and even masochistic, until lines like "The problem isn't that you hurt me / The problem is that I like it" and "The problem isn't the wounds / The problem is the scars" signal, if the repetitive pounding rock of the music and Arjona's grainy shouting hadn't already, that we're in darker territory than usual.

The music, though, is more varied and even uplifting than just "pounding rock" -- a gospel choir gives its usual unearned gravitas to Arjona's distorted self-pity, and crisply funky piano and guitar runs recall the Rolling Stones at their decadent peak in the early 70s. Arjona's classic-rock instincts work for him on "El Problema," as his first-person character edges into the same kind of psychological unpleasantness that Jagger's protagonists plumbed regularly. None of which really explains why it was such a huge hit in 2002 and 2003: even Arjona, who made it the lead single off Santo Pecado (Holy Sin) was befuddled by the song's success, claiming he never expected it to be played on radio. Maybe it's as simple as that there's a greater hunger for emotional masochism in the pop audience than is generally assumed: I know I relate, strongly.

LAS KETCHUP, “ASEREJÉ”

9th November, 2002

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All right, settle in.

One of the reasons I wanted to start this blog, way back in 2009, was that I saw British people talking about "Aserejé" as a glorious piece of ephemera that came from nowhere and led to nothing, and I suspected that there was more to it than that, that there was a history there invisible to Anglophone eyes. As it happens, I had never heard the song: I lived in the only major market (the United States with the English-language overlay switched on) where the song was not a massive hit, and had not happened to be interested in both pop and the broader world in 2002 -- my interest in the UK's experience of music at the time was entirely NME-led, to my regret.

It took me this long to get to it, and I can't be sorry it did, because my knowledge of Spanish girl group and novelty pop history would have been incomplete without the researches into 1977 I did in 2012 and 2014 or the deep dive into 80s Iberian pop I did in 2015. But even this blog contains hints of what would come: Mexican girl group Pandora a decade ago, Mexican pop group Onda Vaselina four years ago, Nuyorican hip-hop group Barrio Boyzz, novelty dances from Banda Blanca to Azul Azul, pseudo-flamenco from Gipsy Kings to Enrique Iglesias and most prominently, Ricky Martin's own novelty crossover.

It's the surf guitar from "Vida Loca," mixed down and looped throughout the chorus as a constant drone (and in so doing, getting back to the Eastern origins of the surf twang) that is Las Ketchup's most prominent association with current Latin pop trends, but there are others: the affection for, but cultural distance from, hip-hop (the nonsense refrain is a Hispanicization of the opening bars of "Rapper's Delight"), the acoustic dance-pop instrumentation (throw in accordion and it could be a Carlos Vives song), and even the vague Orientalism (a constant feature of Iberian roots music) is consonant with Shakira's contemporary gestures towards her Lebanese heritage.

But all of that is incidental, and possibly coincidental. What Las Ketchup are really in dialogue with is in their own country's history of novelty girl-group songs, from the unison-sung flamenco-rock of Las Grecas, whose Franco-era "Te Estoy Amando Locamente" was as heavy as Zeppelin, to the electro-pop of Objectivo Birmania, whose "Los Amigos de Mis Amigas Son Mis Amigos" was a hookup anthem for the movida madrileña, to the flamenco-house of Azúcar Moreno, whose "Bandido" lasted better than the songs that beat it at the 1990 Eurovision.

Although Las Ketchup were from Andalusia, "Aserejé" doesn't include any traditional flamenco signifiers, unless the lyrics' coding of their hip-hop-loving protagonist as Roma counts, but rather gestures towards Western European urban music. The rootsy shuffle-and-guitar of the backing track represents an early-2000s pop assimilation of 90s worldbeat pioneers like Manu Chao and Rachid Taha, in which Spanish, French, American (often via-Britain), and Arabic musical traditions were blended: if the result sometimes sounded painfully generic, that's one of the hazards of attempting to boil a continent's worth of musical diversity down to its common denominators.

But part of that global mish-mash is Catalan rumba, the urban Barcelonan variation on the Cuban-influenced "rumba" palo of flamenco, as popularized in the 70s by Peret and continued in the 90s by Spanish-pop heiress Rosario Flores (among many others). A greater emphasis on rhythm (as befits its Afro-Cuban origins) and less on florid emotional virtuosity made Catalan rumba one of the default roots musics of post-Franco Spain: "Aserejé" just barely qualifies, as its rhythm aims for dance-pop consistency rather than "gitana" funkiness, but the great joy of millennial-era dance pop was its ability to assimilate any cultural tradition and return it to the world: 2010s dance-pop flattens everything into the build-and-drop patterns of EDM, leaving textural differences as the only distinguishing characteristics between songs.

But, background aside, what do I think of the song? It's a pleasurable enough way to pass the time; its four-week run at the top of the Hot Latin chart is about right. I always appreciate novelty songs more than I actually enjoy listening to them, and my generalized American chauvinism includes the entire hemisphere: despite the length of this post, the most exciting and interesting Latin Pop in the millennial era was not coming out of Spain. "Aserejé"'s most noteworthy quality is its global success, which (like that of Psy and OMI a decade later) was less dependent on the specific qualities of the track itself and more on the popular appetite for a particular kind of nonsense in a given moment. 

THALÍA, “NO ME ENSEÑASTE”

26th October, 2002

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Two singles, two number ones: Thalía, after a decade of hard pop work, has fully arrived. She is part of the generation of pan-Latin modernizers like Enrique, Marc, Ricky, Alejandro, and Shakira, and although a silly gender-essentialized literalism might suggest that she has the most in common with Shakira, she actually reminds me more of Enrique Iglesias. A similarly limited range, thin voice, and reliance on expressiveness over sonority means that she's carried by production more often than the burnished voices of Marc Anthony, Ricky Martin or Alejandro Fernández are. (Shakira's even more unconventional voice is its own animal.) But unlike Enrique, Thalía knows how to use her voice to ends other than balled-fist self-pity.

This was the second single from her 2002 album Thalía, and since "Tú y Yo" was an uptempo jam, "No Me Enseñaste" (you didn't teach me) is therefore by venerable pop tradition a ballad. At least on the album it was: the single release, in a now-familiar attempt at covering all bases, contains the "Estéfano Mix" (a club version), the "Marc Anthony Mix" (a salsa version), and the "Regional Mix" (a cumbia version). When she performed the song at the 2002 Latin Grammys, the first half was the ballad original and the second half was the salsa mix, in a triumphant performance that cemented her belated but complete arrival on the US Spanish-language music scene.

Although the "Estéfano Mix" is period trance (and so has perhaps aged better than any of the others for an EDM-centric music scene), Colombian superproducer Estéfano had also co-written and produced the original. The lyric, surprisingly wordy for such a straightforward pop song, is nominally about loss (the central line is "you didn't teach me, love, how to live without you"), but Thalía doesn't play it that way: her gospelly woah-oahs at the end are a celebration of getting over the bastard. Love didn't teach her, goes the narrative of her performance, so she taught herself.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “MENTIROSO”

28th September, 2002

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The nadir of the mid-to-late 90s on this blog, when every other single was Enrique Iglesias proving himself incapable of wrangling his strangled whine of a voice into the power-ballad patterns of classic Latin pop, returns!

It's not the song's fault. It would be easy to imagine lovely, powerful, dramatic readings from contemporaries like Marc Anthony, Alejandro Fernández, or Ricky Martin; even Luis Miguel at his most sleepwalking would outperform Iglesias here. It's a good song, and a shimmering production in both the pop and mariachi versions (a cross-genre promotion which made for perhaps the least natural fit for Iglesias' voice), with a lyric confessing to a man's deceptive, predatory behavior towards a woman, all justified because "es que te quiero tanto" (it's that I love you so much).

To a degree, the callowness, self-pity and perpetual adolescence of Iglesias' vocal performance matches the weaselly "I'm a good guy because I'm admitting how bad I am" lyric, but it's hard to believe that any of this was intentional, or that it was received by Latin pop listeners in that spirit. The quivering jaw and tremulous emotion in every line (somehow simultaneously over- and under-sung) strikes me as so patently phony that it's hard to enter sympathetically into the head of a listener who hears it as fulfilling any aesthetic, emotional, or even erotic requirement.

But plenty of selfish, immature brats engage in romantic and sexual partnerships: it must appeal to someone.

JENNIFER PEÑA, “EL DOLOR DE TU PRESENCIA”

24th August, 2002

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The hunger, as much spiritual as commercial, for a replacement for Selena had been an undercurrent of the Latin music industry since her death. One of the likeliest candidates was Jennifer Peña, whose first large-stage performance had been at a Selena tribute concert at the Astrodome in 1995, when she sang "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom" at eleven years old. She was already being managed by Selena's father; her debut album as a singer fronting Jennifer y los Jetz,  would be released the following year.

But like Selena herself, her career was less one of meteoric success than of constant work, slow movement forward, and gradual leveling-up. Libre, released in 2002 when she was eighteen, was her fifth album, but the first attributed entirely to her name and also the first after jumping from EMI, where the Quintanillas had signed her, to Univision, which had also broken Selena widely in 1993. She retained the cumbia sound which was her signature, but with production from Rudy Pérez and Kike Santander, aimed more squarely at the broader Latin Pop market.

It worked, clearly. "El Dolor de Tu Presencia" (the pain of your presence) is both a lush r&b ballad and a skanking cumbia jam, with pure pop harmonies and a bassline that won't stop. Although it was written by Rudy Pérez, it's very much a teenager's song, moaning about how the boy she's in love with is in love with her best friend, tearing their friendship apart and causing her pain. Still, it's smartly produced and sung with a warmth older than her years.

A power-ballad pop version, all swelling strings and crashing drums, was also released, which no doubt had a lot to do with bringing it to #1 (cumbia remained popular on the border, but not necessarily in the larger US Latin Pop market), but the cumbia rendition made the video, which cuts shots of her mooning over the love triangle with shots of her dancing in front of her cumbia band, acknowledging that after all, everything's a performance.

THALÍA, “TÚ Y YO”

20th July, 2002

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It would no doubt be unfair to attribute the high-gloss sheen, uptempo rock attitude, and high-octane production on this single entirely to the example set by Shakira's English-language makeover, or even to the generational game change led by Ricky Martin now more than three years ago. My examination of the Hot Latin chart solely from the vantage point of its #1s has left me disgracefully ignorant as to the bulk of Thalía's career; but her previous appearance here almost exactly two years ago was less than a knockout.

It's not her fault that the luck of the charts has cast her as playing catch-up: certainly the production and even the instrumentation of "Tú y Yo" sounds exactly like a sequel to "Livin' La Vida Loca," or even to "She Bangs," but it can be understood more in terms of a trend-hopping victory lap than as trend-hopping desperation. The music industry was still feeling relatively imperial in 2002, so multiple renditions of the song were issued: the video version, as linked above, plus a cumbia version featuring the Corpus Christi genre-straddling band Kumbia Kings, founded by Selena's (Q.E.P.D.) brother A. B. Quintanilla; the album version, edited down from the video, and a year later, an English-language rewrite with lyrics by Kara DioGuardi.

The industry formula for "Latin crossover hit" had been perfected by this time, thanks to Desmond Child's Ricky Martin hits, hits by Enrique Iglesias and Marc Anthony, and (sigh) Santana's "Smooth" -- uptempo rock music featuring a montuno piano line, a rhythm section heavy on cowbell, and bright horns that emphasize dynamics rather than carry the melody. The production was handled by the song's co-writer, Colombian hitmaker Estéfano, who has appeared here primarily as the wizard behind Chayanne, and if the formula is predictable it's still effective: Thalía's emotionally-driven performance, snarling and whimpering as necessary, is all personality and no dull virtuosity. She's an excellent pop star still well in her prime -- this song went to #1 a few months before she turned 31 -- and if the song ends up being more about a generalized feeling of excitement than any specified emotion, with fill-in-the-blank lyrics, that's a long pop tradition too.

CHAYANNE, “Y TÚ TE VAS”

15th June, 2002

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The last time Chayanne appeared in these pages, I complained that (at least as far as his #1s history goes) he lacked a real identity beyond "smoldering jawline," his thin voice and limited expressiveness held hostage to his choice of material, and his production rarely keeping up with the times. As if in answer to my complaints, his new #1 begins with a twitchy electronic rhythm which sounds exactly like 2002.

Unfortunately, it's then overlaid with a pillowy bed of bombastic ballad signifiers, less of its time than of the generic "anywhen" of adult contemporary, and all that's left is emoting.

Surprisingly, the emoting works. That's because the song itself is a good one, architecturally well-constructed, and Chayanne's overdriven performance matches the heightened emotions that the chordal structure, the pacing, and the production dynamics evoke. For this, we can thank the song's writer, an almost forgotten name which we only met once, in 1991: earnest Venezuelan singer-songwriter Franco de Vita. I sneered rather heavily at him then, in terms that I now think are not entirely warranted, but his emulation of pop craftsmen like Billy Joel pays off here: "Y Tú Te Vas" (and you leave) is a strong song, its sound structure able to overcome a self-pitying lyric. When Chayanne allows a little pseudo-soulful grit into his voice on the chorus, it's the most effective singing I've ever heard from him.

The video is exactly as lavish and generic as the song: but I like it because its sympathies are never entirely with Chayanne, who smolders ineffectively; the woman leaves anyway, and all his self-pity is for naught.

PILAR MONTENEGRO, “QUÍTAME ESE HOMBRE”

30th March, 2002

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In the years immediately predating the reign of reggatón (a reign which has mutated and transformed enough that it's now possible to talk of reggaetón generations, but that's for the future), Puerto Rican music made itself more and more central to the Hot Latin #1 spot. It had always shown up there -- Puerto Rico was the third most frequently represented nation in US-oriented Hispanophone pop behind Mexico and the mainland US -- but in the 90s whole years went by without PR representation. The gravitational well around Ricky Martin surely had something to do with it, but improving economic conditions on the island around the turn of the century also helped: the generation of Puerto Ricans who had helped create salsa in the 50s, 60s and 70s were giving way to a new generation less geographically bound to either New York or San Juan, more internationalist in both outlook and reception.

Which may be an odd way to start off a song from a Mexican singer. But "Quítame Ese Hombre" (Take That Man Away from Me), a cover of a 1988 single by Puerto Rican pop singer Yolandita Monge, written by the great Cuban songwriter José Luis Piloto, a rather stately and high-toned request that the singer's new lover erase all traces of the old, unsatisfactory one. For Pilar Montenegro, no doubt, the song's non-Mexican provenance mattered not at all: she wanted a good, familiar tune which her throaty delivery and skimpy video outfits could adorn. Her primary career has been as an actress, primarily in telenovelas, and this is her sole appearance on the travelogue.

With all due respect to her vocal and self-promotion talents, that appearance is probably due more than anything else to the production of Cuban-American Rudy Pérez, whose production work has regularly appeared here (he ran in Estefan circles during the 80s), sometimes noticed and sometimes not. Listening to Yolandita Monge's and Pilar Montenegro's versions of the song back to back is an education in production shifts from the late 80s to the early 00s: if the 80s sounds better today, that has more to do with fashion trends than with the skill or acumen of the producer.

CARLOS VIVES, “LUNA NUEVA”

23rd March, 2002

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Hooray, he's back!

As we've seen twice now, Carlos Vives had been a journeyman pop star since the mid-80s (the release of his first album coincides with the beginning of this travelogue), but it was only in the millennial era that he began to top the chart regularly. "Luna Nueva" (new moon) unveils no new facet to the beachy singalong persona which has given him these hits, but its agreeable uptempo rattle and uncomplicated love-song lyrics make it one of the most enjoyable songs we've encountered all year.

Its categorization, as I'm coming to expect with Vives, is more perplexing. It uses the rock-based instrumentation of his pop-vallenato band, but the shuffling rhythm and squawking, not swinging, accordion is closer to Mexican corrido. As always, he's a synthesist, and his pan-Latinism is one reason he's here at the top of the Hot Latin chart rather than merely famous in South America or the Caribbean.

In the video, he plays an inmate of a psychiatric hospital that functions more like a prison, literalizing the title line in the chorus, where he wants to love "con desespero, como loco en luna nueva" (with wild despair, like a madman in the full moon). It's a cartoonish and offensive depiction of mental illness, which is probably why it's not on his official channel. But the internet doesn't forget.

CHARLIE ZAA, “FLOR SIN RETOÑO”

23rd February, 2002

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Two years into the new millennium, Latin music is less regionally-oriented than ever. Charlie Zaa, born Carlos Alberto Sánchez, is Colombian, and grew up singing in his father's local orchestra, which played cosmopolitan Latin dance music for hotel crowds: which meant, in the 70s and 80s, salsa and merengue and big-band cumbia. When Zaa began his own career in 1990, it was with a series of salsa bands: he went solo in 1996, with a smash album covering midcentury Mexican (and pan-Latin) boleros and waltzes. Following the money, he continued the formula for the next half-decade, hitching his wagon to the Estefans in 2001, and scored his first (and to date only) number one hit with the standard "Flor Sin Retoño" (Flower Without Bloom), written by the great Mexican composer Rubén Fuentes and made famous by legendary crooner Pedro Infante in 1954.

It's one of the classic boleros, an extended floral metaphor for the damage men do to women (legible as either the traditional concern over "deflowering" or a more modern understanding of abuse), which sticks so tightly to the metaphor that it becomes a fable. One that (of course) prioritizes the man's feelings; but in the closed systems of patriarchy, truth often has to be smuggled in through metaphor.

In 2002, Zaa was not yet thirty, and his youthful good looks are made much of in the video, which does its best to corrupt the song's central metaphor by turning the woman/flower a sorceress who has bewitched him -- but the lame CGI visuals are nothing compared to the sexy, detailed shake and sway of the music. Infante's production in '54 was no slouch, but Zaa's transcontinental production adds Cuban montuno punchiness to the bolero rhythm, as well as muted mariachi horns, romantic strings, and his own honeyed, close-miked voice to create a bigger-than-life sound, not unlike Gloria Estefan's excursions in to Cuban musical history, that I want to call nostalgic immediacy.

Like Luis Miguel, he's plowing a limited furrow; but unlike him (and like Alejandro Fernández or Carlos Vives), he lets the dynamism and attitude of the postmodern present inhabit the spirit of the classicist past. If we're not to see him again, I'm glad to have met him here.

LUIS MIGUEL, “CÓMO DUELE”

2nd February, 2002

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Luis Miguel's fourth album of bolero and other romantic Latin standards in a decade, especially considering everything else that has changed since 1991, suggests an exhaustion of ideas, of ambition, even of desire. He produced it by himself, apparently unwilling to wait for his usual collaborators Armando Manzanero and Bebu Silvetti, and reviews at the time were unkind, accusing him of prioritizing his bank account over any artistic growth or integrity.

They have a point. "Cómo Duele" was one of two originals on the album, co-written by Manzanero for Miguel, but its pompous strings from the Royal Philharmonic and light disco guitars never approach the painstakingly gorgeous production from the early-90s albums Romance and Segundo Romance. And Miguel, though his voice remains a burnished instrument, sounds as though he's sleepwalking through the song, gesturing towards drama but never embodying it.

He was still on top of the world: the tour broke box-office records, even while the album itself only sold middling (for a Luis Miguel album). He won a Latin Grammy for it, the usual reward for making a lot of people a lot of money. But he is more definitely than ever a relic, left in a nostalgic, going-through-the-motions past while the Latin pop produced by his peers and his juniors rapidly transforms and evolves around him.