RICKY MARTIN FT. LA MARI & TOMMY TORRES, “TU RECUERDO”

23rd December, 2006

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We close out the raucous, pulsating, hotly contested 2006 (a.k.a. the Year Reggaetón Broke) with an older, perhaps more calcified, Puerto Rican sound.

The inevitable music video has four people on stools before the audience. Only the primary singer, a former boy band member and global hitmaker, is pushed a little forward, which makes him look taller than the rest. To his right on guitar and harmonies is the song's writer and producer, who got his start writing and producing for a later iteration of the singer's old boy band. On his right, eventually making the song a duet, a Spanish singer who pushed flamenco vibes into chillout worldbeat music to comparatively limited success, whose close-cropped haircut is a visible reminder of the cancer she had spent the previous year in treatment for. And on the far side of the line, perhaps the world's foremost traditional cuarto player, picking out delicate emotional lines on the traditional Puerto Rican instrument.

The credit line should really read "Ricky Martin ft. La Mari (of Chambao), Tommy Torres, and Christian Nieves," but of course the instrumentalist gets left off: pop has its caste system. Still, of the four spotlit players (there's a full orchestra behind them, because this is a ballad), Torres is the one whose performance is most anonymous: his sweet pop-derived melodies do little but set up volleys for Martin, Mari, and Nieves to spike. La Mari earns applause in the middle of the song for injecting a little cante gitano into her verse, which is the first time I teared up while listening to it; the second was during the dispassionate fluidity of Nieves' cuatro solo. After which Martin gently improvising as though over a salsa montuno rides out the song on a high note.

It's a gorgeous performance, and if the song itself doesn't quite live up to it, that may be because it's a stitched-together pop recreation of traditional jíbaro music rather than a song emerging naturally from that tradition. Not that a traditional jíbaro would ever float within a million miles of #1; but this, with the r&b-inflected rhythms in Martin's voice, the flamenco hints in La Mari's voice, and the pura romántica in Torres, is even more gloriously miscegenated than most pop.

It's the kind of thing that used to be able to go to #1 in the closing weeks of the year, traditionally slow for music buying or radio adds, giving older or less dominant audiences a time of year to hear themselves represented at #1. There's nothing necessarily festive about it (it's a song about still feeling conflicted about an old flame), but in the year of reggaetón it still feels like sentimental throwback to a classicist never-never land, and so it's holiday music regardless.

MANÁ FT. JUAN LUIS GUERRA, “BENDITA TU LUZ”

16th December, 2006

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Like Aerosmith or U2, Maná are more beloved by rock fans for their earlier, hungrier work than for the massive hits that blanketed the pop airwaves in middle age. But their collaboration here with Juan Luis Guerra, who is more of a Bowie figure in remaining perpetually relevant (although perhaps to a smaller coterie) throughout many shifts and phases, feels less like a quick muso-cred cash-in (like, say, U2 baptizing themselves in Muddy Waters) than the natural result of writing a very simple and straightforward song that requires some kind of folk-based arrangement in order to have emotional resonance: and hey, it's 2006, bachata is growing in popularity.

Because although Maná are the above-the-line credit, and wrote the song themselves internally (Guerra really is only a guest), it's a bachata song through and through. It's worth noting that in the whole history of the chart, the only people who have ever had a bachata #1 are Juan Luis Guerra himself and a rhythm-raiding Gloria Estefan. This will change in the near future, as the New York bachata scene coalesces into pop strength; but for now Maná are very much appropriating (not necessarily in a problematic sense) a particularly Dominican sound.

Of course when bachata first coalesced as a local version of Cuban boleros and sons in the hinterlands of the Dominican Republic, it was the furthest thing from a point of national pride for the Dominican elite, who despised its rusticity, its frankness, and its Blackness. (Listening to the earliest bachatas makes it hard to believe that such romantic music was once considered unfit for broadcast, but that's elites for you.) By the late 1980s, though, bachata's national popularity was too undeniable to continue being censored, and the switch to electric guitars and more danceable tempos kept it competitive with merengue, salsa, and the other tropical music burgeoning in the Caribbean. Still, it wasn't really a pan-Latin sound until Juan Luis Guerra became a pan-Latin star; and Guerra was never a bachatero so much as an eclectic musical genius who used bachata, among many other styles, because it was part of his Dominican heritage.

This is the second time Maná has appeared here with a swaying Caribbean rhythm instead of their usual rock-based flatfootedness; if "Bendita Tu Luz" is better than "Mariposa Traicionera", it's because of Juan Luis Guerra's rhythmic intricacy and the nimbleness of modern bachata over the somnolence of traditional bolero: but "Mariposa Traicionera" is more complex in its lyrics (even though, as the YouTube comments point out, it's rather slut-shaming), while "Bendita Tu Luz" is so devout in its declarations of love that it could quite possibly double as a Christian hymn. One more way in which Maná recalls U2, then.

RBD, “SER O PARECER”

2nd December, 2006

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There's a reason "come to Brazil" is such a common refrain among internet pop fandom that it's become a meme: Brazilian youth culture in the twenty-first century (like Japanese youth culture in the late twentieth) has an endlessly voracious appetite for pop music from all around the globe, and pop acts who cultivate that audience are often richly rewarded.

RBD, a Mexican pop sextet formed in the 2004 telenovela Rebelde (a teen soap in the Degrassi or 90210 tradition with a students-forming-a-band plot like The Heights), cultivated their Brazilian audience early and often: every one of their Spanish-language releases was closely followed by a Portuguese-language version, years before anyone though to have them record in English.

Like many a "manufactured" pop act before and after them, they released material frequently: "Ser o Parecer" (in Portuguese "Ser ou Parecer") was the lead single from their third album in three years. And the video, although released in Spanish, was shot in São Paulo, with the addition of very Brazilian CGI making the urban landscape even more colorful, fantastic, and otherworldly.

The young women, Anahí, Dulce María, and Maite Perroni, trade off the lead vocals, with the young men (Christian Chávez, Alfonso Herrera, and Christopher Uckermann) only joining in for the terrace-chant chorus. A mixed-gender pop group is such an atypical formation that it's hard to say whether it's unusual for the format for the song to be sung from a female point of view (there are no genders in the lyrics, just the eternal "you" and "I"), but it's notable anyway: the strained vocal fry of the female half of the group is far more distinctive here than the smooth anonymity of the male.

Anahí and Maite Perroni have both remained major pop stars in Mexico since the band broke up in 2009; the rest of them (save Herrera, who was always more of an actor) continue to release music to less fanfare. For all RBD's success between 2004 and 2009, this will be their only appearance here: their playful fashion and innocuous sentiments are very much tied to a time and place. Rebelde (the show) was set in an exclusive private school in Mexico City, an embrace of privilege and whiteness that the concurrent reggaetón revolution is, if not actively rejecting (reggaetoneros gotta make money), at least complicating.

ALEJANDRO SANZ, “A LA PRIMERA PERSONA”

25th November, 2006

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When we first ran across Sr. Sanz, as the male foil to Shakira in "La Tortura", I was pretty dismissive of his contribution, approving of his weaselly performance of masculinity without attributing much of the song's punch or heft to him, a European interloper on decidedly American (in the hemispherical sense) turf. But this song has me reconsidering my stance.

Alejandro Sanz was born in Madrid to Andalusian parents, and his earliest musical efforts were entries in a postmodern flamenco revival that was briefly fashionable in late-80s Spain. Even when he made the shift into more commercial adult-contemporary ballad material in the early 90s, his phrasing retained echoes of the throaty "gitano" singing style of flamenco tradition. His 1997 worldbeat album Más remains the all-time best-selling record in Spain, and he responded to that ongoing success by becoming a demonstratively "thoughtful" pop star in the mode of a Sting or a Bono, recording increasingly political material and lecturing at Harvard on Hispanic culture.

His global exposure following "La Tortura" meant that his 2006 album was practically guaranteed to be a hit, which makes this one of the strangest #1s we've ever had, as emotionally florid, hyperverbal and structurally anti-pop as some of Juan Gabriel's most lavish excesses. The flowing, pattery verses recall Bob Dylan at his most motormouthed, though Sanz' soulful, gritted-teeth delivery is in both a flamenco and a rock tradition. The drums beat martially, or funereally, and the trumpet which bursts through the moody, atmospheric instrumentation like a grateful sunbeam could equally be a clarion charge or a variation on "Taps."

Because the point of all Sanz' motormouthed excoriation is the old story: love lost, ego bruised, a man on the hunt for his next source of succor. But there's no confidence that he will get it: the chords perversely refuse to resolve, no chorus ever explodes into certainty, there is only another cycle through the same obsessive refrain. It's a strange art-rock curiosity sitting atop the Hot Latin chart for a week, presumably the beneficiary of early digital download metrics sandwiched in between far more conventional radio pop.

WISIN & YANDEL, “PAM PAM”

4th November, 2006

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It made sense, during reggaetón's first imperial period, when many observers considered it a flash in the pan, a novelty that would be finished in a season or two as the Latin youth audience moved on to the next shiny thing, that one of the hits of the era would join the dots to a flash in the pan of a previous generation. If you're not listening for it, it might be easy to miss the pitched-down flute from Bolivian folklorico group's 1981 rendition of "Llorando Se Fué" in the mix, playing a melody last heard on this blog as played by an accordion in French dance-pop group Kaoma's 1989 "Lambada".

I definitely did not do "Lambada" justice when I covered it in 2010, trying to connect it to contemporary English-language material I already knew rather than working backwards through the Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Peruvian, and Afro-Bolivian roots of the material. But this revival isn't the last time we'll encounter it in the reggaetón era, and the novelty connection I made above is once more an Anglocentric one: the real connection is that the new pan-Latin music of the 2000s is harkening back to an earlier pan-Latinism of the 1980s, giving it a a grittier, minor-key hip-hop gloss, but retaining the dance-centric fusion that an electronic age demands.

But that's just one sound in the stew of sounds cooked up by producers Luny Tunes, Tainy and Naldo for this one-week-wonder, an organic hit which was never released as a single but topped the charts anyway. The lyrics consist largely of the usual boasting: Yandel's refrain "Bailando la toqué y ella se dejó/Me aprovecho y pam-pam-pam, la toco y pam-pam-pam" is perhaps more of a reference to the sexual legend of the lambada than to the actual song (although it structurally echoes the original "Llorando Se Fué" lyrics). I'd translate it "Dancing I touched her and she let me/I seize the opportunity and bam-bam-bam, I touch her and bam-bam-bam."

But in the video (shot in Brazil, and it wants to make sure you know it), the rhythmic "pam-pam" of the title is keyed to the hip and thigh movements which will later be formalized in English as twerking. Some Anglophone musicologists' dismissive attitude toward reggaetón as "just" dancehall in Spanish sometimes makes me eager to catalog the ways in which reggaetón has developed into its own distinctive genre: but it should never be forgotten that all post-hip-hop Afro-Caribbean music, from Jamaican dancehall to Puerto Rican reggaetón to Dominican dembow to New Orleans bounce, feeds on each other, especially in the real physical spaces in which the music is celebrated.

DAVID BISBAL, “¿QUIÉN ME IBA A DECIR?”

28th October, 2006

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We interrupt your regular Latinoamericano programming for a three-week interpolation of furrowed-brow idol pop from Spain. David Bisbal first gained attention on the peninsula as the runner-up of the first season of Operación Triunfo (the Spanish edition of Star Academy) in 2002. He kicked around for a while, failing to win the opportunity to represent his country at Eurovision, before embarking on the kind of pop career that everyone in those early days of reality singing competitions was allowed. Smartly, he hooked up with producer and songwriter Kike Santander, who had helped shepherd the solo Gloria Estefan and Alejandro Fernández to glory, and used that production savvy and his own imitation-soul singing to become Spain's biggest pop star, for a time.

We've not been troubled by him here, but not for lack of effort: his second single went to #3 on the Hot Latin chart in 2002. It would take his third album, Premonición, and its debut single, an ungainly and outdated mix of rock muscle, flamenco noodling, Bisbal's impassioned yowl, and electronic scratching, before he landed at #1 stateside.

The single's cover art makes all too obvious what early-2000s careers he's trying to emulate: Justin Timberlake's Justified fedora, Ricky Martin's Almas de Silencio tight t-shirt and Pietà pose. Unfortunately he doesn't have either man's charisma or lightness of touch, and the result is a self-aggrandizing plod that slides off the memory almost as soon as it touches it. The lyrics are a bombastic, hyperbolic description of doomed love, exactly in line with Hispanist tradition and with nothing whatever new to say.

Not to worry, we'll hear from Bisbal again: the Latin market loves nothing more than a handsome, self-consciously brooding man. Maybe the second time's the charm.

PAULINA RUBIO, “NI UNA SOLA PALABRA”

30th September, 2006

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I compared Paulina Rubio's last entry here, "Dame Otro Tequila", to "Since U Been Gone," a song it preceded by several months. The debt that "Ni Una Sola Palabra," two years later, owes to "Since U Been Gone" is notable, although more in the space which Kelly Clarkson and Max Martin's adaptation of indie-rock aesthetics to chart pop opened for female pop artists using rock sounds to do well commercially than in anything inherent to Rubio, whose appearances here have frequently used rock sounds.

But if "Since U Been Gone" was a pop-auteur's adaptation of the Yeah Yeah Yeah's "Maps," "Ni Una Sola Palabra" (not a single word) is no adaptation, but a union of indie-rock and chart-pop sensibilities. It was written by Xabi San Martín of Spanish band La Oreja de Van Gogh, who weren't indie at all in the cloistered Spanish scene (where they were as central to pop as Mecano in the 1980s) but certainly would be in an American context, and it would require a more overtly pop personality like Rubio's to take their sound from local sensation to transatlantic phenomenon.

The result is the best song we've heard from her yet, and one of her most enduring classics regardless of chart placement: with a chugging power-pop guitar line, an exquisite candyfloss melody, and Rubio's throaty vocals playing with the stuttering descant on "amanece-eh-eh-er," it's become something of a Latin pop radio standard in the years since, the Paulina Rubio song that can hold its head up alongside the Julieta Venegases and Natalia Lafourcades who were even then assuming critically-claimed auteur status in Mexican pop. (We will hear from at least one of them down the line.)

The fact that the song never shifts into a key change, forcing Rubio to strain at the upper level of her range in order to approximate a Clarkson-like banshee wail, is probably why it never reached higher than #98 on the Hot 100; bellowing as an approximation of emotion is littered all over postmillennial Anglophone pop, to the degree that something like this which merely circles around its own tight groove may sound unfinished or undercooked to ears conditioned to expect a build-and-release.

But I think that's a failure to appreciate genre. This song doesn't need catharsis, it's not an emotional break-up song, but a wry song about being emotionally ghosted; puzzlement, rather than pain, is its keynote. The campy video, in which Rubio poses as a superhero over the Los Angeles nightscape, gives the game away: at its core, despite the whining synth and spaghetti-western flourishes, this is a pop-punk song.

MANÁ, “LABIOS COMPARTIDOS”

5th August, 2006

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Maybe it's the date. Thirteen years in the past is long enough to seem embarrassing by its failure to be current, but not so deep in the past to have achieved the varnish of widespread cultural nostalgia. (Of course, i'm in my forties; if you're younger it may seem an eon ago.) It doesn't help that Maná doesn't sound particularly 2006 here, and is closer to the radio-friendly alt-rock of 1996, which sounds particularly ungainly in a chart quickly being reorganized according to the pulse of reggaetón.

The song itself is perfectly serviceable; with a different arrangement, it could have been a ranchera classic, the age-old whine of a man unwilling to share his lover's lips with another, but who can't bring himself to leave her over the infidelity either. If it is infidelity (one irony of hairy rock dudes bellowing this song is that rock was supposed to have relieved us of our sexual hangups back in the seventies. Lennon being a jealous guy was meant as a regretful confession, not a cri d'amour propre); but it's hard to imagine such rigid cultural fetishists as Maná being even aware of polyamory.

The very nineties drumming, which has heard of breakbeats (or, to put it another way, Afro-Latin rhythms) while the rest of the song plods along in a hairy yarl, sounds particularly wan and insignificant compared to the authority and insistence of the dembow riddim, and if the chiming guitars and sub-Bono vocalizing are even more anonymous, it's hardly a point in their favor.

Maná will return, and I may feel differently about them when they do, but it's worth noting that 2006 was so unsettled a time in the US charts, as physical sales tanked, digital sales had not yet fully replaced them, and streaming was still in utero, that this song remains the highest Maná has ever charted on the Hot 100. Why this utterly anodyne moan, which offers so little novelty to the non-Hispanophone, should represent them, other than to confirm the stereotype of rock en español being wholly derivative and failing to transcend its Anglophone models, is a puzzle. But it's not our puzzle.

Onward.

RAKIM & KEN-Y, “DOWN”

29th July, 2006

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Another minor first: the first reggaetón song to replace a reggaetón song at the top of the chart. Industry observers were quick to note all the signposts of a craze, which sounds comic from the vantage point of 2019, but it was not obvious at the time (especially if you were older than thirty and not attuned to Caribbean culture) that reggaetón would transform the pop landscape rather than burning bright before fading away like, say, Selena-era tejano.

But what Rakim (who would soon start spelling his name R.K.M. to avoid tripping over the legendary Long Island MC's trademark) and Ken-Y have introduced to reggaetón's quickly-growing multiplicity at the top of the chart is a pop element. We've seen pop reggaetón before, of course: but where Shakira and Alejandro Sanz were international pop stars borrowing the dembow riddim for some dancehall authenticity, Rakim and Ken-Y were a Puerto Rican reggaetón duo who aimed for uncomplicated pop sheen from the beginning, an unthreatening hearththrob version of Wisin and Yandel. (Four months ago, I contrasted Wisin & Yandel against Andy & Lucas; Rakim & Ken-Y split the difference.)

Rakim raps rather anonymously, Ken-Y croons in a falsetto-free Timberlake imitation, and they shift between Spanish and English so fluidly that it's hard to believe crossover appeal wasn't uppermost in their mind. The production by Mambo Kingz is similarly straightforward and frictionless, and the lyrics are so uncomplicatedly plaintive a recitation of romantic heartbreak (and so entirely free from the sexuality and violence which the moral guardians of Puerto Rican culture used to justify anti-reggaetón legislation) that these two perhaps better merit the comparison (which I levied against Shakira and Sanz) to the role Pat Boone played in rock 'n' roll history.

Which isn't entirely as a villain, but also as a prophet, hailing the domestication, prettification, and (yes) whitening of a once-dangerous music. For Rakim & Ken-Y, although they'll not trouble us again, set a template which pop-reggaetón crossover acts continue to follow to the present day. Late-2010s reggaetón, with its universalizing romanticism, sounds much less like mid-2000s Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, or Wisin & Yandel and much more like Rakim & Ken-Y. For what that's worth.

DON OMAR, “ANGELITO”

22nd July, 2006

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No sooner has reggaetón been grudgingly accepted within the exclusive club of the Hot Latin #1s than it turns maudlin and literary. Don Omar was Daddy Yankee's principal challenger to the title of supremacy within reggaetón's first explosion in popularity; his 2006 album King of Kings was the first reggaetón album to debut at #1 on the Latin Albums chart, but "Angelito" was only at the top for a week compared to "Rompe"'s three-month reign. Don Omar's true imperial era is yet to come; in the meantime, there's this.

I don't know enough about the history of reggaetón to say for certain whether this was notable as being an early ballad in the style, but it's certainly true that it was the first balladic reggaetón to achieve such widespread success, crossing over to listeners who weren't invested in reggaetón but knew a good weepie when they heard it. In that way it's comparable to something like 2Pac's "Dear Mama," a moment of vulnerability all the more notable for the self-aggrandizing celebrations of violence and excess that surround it.

But Omar's not giving away anything about himself: the voice in which he speaks for most of the song is that of AIDS, the death sentence of a woman who loved a stranger incautiously one night and whose soul is the "angelito, vuela" (little angel, fly away) of the chorus. Pop-song PSAs have rarely been more lavish: the funereal opening and sawing strings before the the dembow riddim finally kicks in on the second chorus are time-tested signifiers of Gravitas, while the spoken-word outro, which in a club-aimed track would be reserved for the shoutouts to producer and label (DJ Eliel does get namechecked in the intro) is a lapel-shaking DO YOU SEE giving the song an Aesopian moral: "Vive la vida minuto a minuto y encontrarás en cada uno de ellos un motivo por el cual conducirte en la forma correcta. Te lo aseguro." (Live your life from moment to moment and you will find in each of them a reason to conduct yourself in the proper manner. I promise.)

But while it can be inferred that Don Omar is advocating safe sex, he's cagey enough to allow the moralist-friendly interpretation that he's advocating abstinence. The background to all of this was government repression and censorship, as the rich white upperclass of Puerto Rico used morality laws to raid nightclubs and record stores where reggaetón, born of the largely Black underclass in San Juan, was being disseminated (many thanks to Eduardo Cepeda's hugely informative column on the history of reggaetón), and Omar, an international star working with a major budget (the video, shot on location in Rome, was not cheap) and already dealing with charges of drug and arms possession, was smart enough to walk the line that would keep his work free from the censor's marker.

Ultimately I find "Angelito" more interesting than gripping: the discourse on safe sex has moved so far past its banal sentimentalities that it's more of a period piece than many of its contemporaries. But Eliel's widescreen production is still pretty great, even in the HD era.

SHAKIRA FT. WYCLEF JEAN, “HIPS DON'T LIE”

27th May, 2006

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"Refugees run the seas cause we own our own boats."

Well, Jesus Christ.

Of course I'm thinking about all the stories, all the photos, all the statistics I've seen about Syrian and Libyan and Sudanese and Colombian and Honduran and Burmese and Tibetan refugees since 2006. Of course I'm thinking about the parallels that are being inexorably drawn between rising anti-refugee sentiment in the US and Europe and the doors which were slammed in the faces of German Jews during the lead-up to the Holocaust. Of course I'm aching with a bone-deep misery over the gap between the triumphant utopianism of pop and the squalid murderousness of the actual world.

I understand that, faced with that gap, one reasonable response is to reject pop as a hollow illusion, an opiate of the masses, Huxley's soma drip-fed into our veins to keep us pacified and unprotesting while Orwell's Big Brother raids our pockets for its unending wars. The squalid murderousness is the fact: triumphant utopianism is a useless and possibly dangerous fiction that obscures our view of reality, reassuring us that everything turns out for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Well, maybe. But Huxley and Orwell aren't the only midcentury British writers to engage with the effects of totalitarianism on the human spirit. In The Silver Chair, one of his books for children, C. S. Lewis includes a sequence in which the adventuring heroes are lulled into a trance by the Queen of the Underworld, who induces them to believe that their memories of the Overland, including vegetation and the cosmos, are entirely made up, a story they've been telling each other, and that no world but hers, hewn from rock and glimmering fragilely in the endless darkness within the earth, exists. The spell is only broken when the gloomy, sensible, semi-amphibious character Puddleglum stamps out her fire, and makes the following speech:

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

Philosophically it's unconvincing -- the argument that because humans can imagine a better world than this one, one must exist, is a very debased theodicy -- but poetically it's magnificent. That, I think, is why I will always return to pop: because it can, and almost necessarily does, imagine radically better ways of living and relating to one another than exist today. But they can; four babies dreaming can't make Narnia exist, but millions of Black, brown, and poor folk working together can reshape the world. It's not going to be easy: all extant power structures and our long inheritance of human inequality are arrayed against us. But we have resources they don't: beauty, and joy, and community, and an equally long inheritance of human resilience and creativity.

That inheritance is on magnificent display in this song, one of the most purely perfect pop songs of the decade. Of course when I say pure I don't mean that it's not complex: a vast array of musical traditions, technological interpolations, and yes, capitalist funding went into it. Supposedly beginning life as a sketch of a song called "Lips Don't Lie" with which Wyclef unsuccessfully tried to tempt Lauryn Hill into a Fugees reunion, it was eventually included on the 2004 soundtrack to Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights as "Dance Like This", a duet with Puerto Rican singer Claudette Ortiz. Listen to that, and you can hear the basic framework of the song, including the unmistakable sample of the trumpet flourish from Jerry Rivera's "Amores Como el Nuestro", but it just circles around itself over and over again, a mime of mutual seduction in which Ortiz sounds utterly anonymous and the song itself sounds bored, trailing off without ever having landed.

So when Shakira's label reached out to him for a remix to extend the life of "La Tortura", Wyclef said he had a better song that she would be perfect for. She rewrote the female duet partner's lyrics in her inimitably unidiomatic English and beefed up the production with Wyclef's producer Jerry Duplessis. Recording was done in Miami, Nassau, London, New York, Bogotá, and Vancouver; samples were cleared; and the single was released in February of 2006, three months after Oral Fixation, Vol. 2 was released to middling sales, a major disappointment after the way that "La Tortura" had boosted Fijación Oral, Vol. 1. But if you remember the summer of 2006 at all, you know that "Hips Don't Lie" was inescapable no matter where you were in the world (a Spanish version was also released, but I've never met anyone who heard it). 2006 was the absolute nadir of my engagement with contemporary pop music, and even I loved it.

I love it more now, twelve years later, as the world has grown crueller and more hateful toward the refugees Wyclef keeps repping in the song, as outright hatred (rather than ignorance) of Hispanic and Caribbean culture has grown more vocal and regularized in the Trump era even while Spanish-language and Spanish-English hybrids have become the lingua franca of international pop. The boiling insanity of xenophobia, isolationism, and apocalypse-mongering in the Anglosphere feeds back on itself until it becomes a white hunger for Black and brown death that can't be shocked back into sensible morality by reading stories of boats sinking in the Mediterranean or seeing images of dead babies on beaches.

As counterpoint to which a recitation of seduction between a Lebanese-Colombian and a Hatian-American, both millionaires, as formalized and mannered as a Noh play with its symmetrical verses and inevitable rap-verse peroration, might seem less than effective.

But the heraldic fanfare which opens and punctuates the song seems to announce more than a mere two-person exchange of intimacies: it is the opening of a tournament, a call to arms, a reveille, but most immediately of all it is a summons to the dancefloor. And "baile en la calle de noche, baile en la calle de día" is a utopian ideal, quoting Fernando Villalona's classic 1985 merengue "Carnaval" but in spirit stretching back to at least the liberatory utopianism of "Dancing in the Street" and perhaps even the celebratory 1902 ragtime song "On Emancipation Day" by Will Marion Cook and Paul Laurence Dunbar. (En Barranquilla se baila así, of course, and the soundtrack to liberation has never been exclusively in English; but I still know the Anglophone canon best.)

Of course it can go either way: the organization of culture purely by the logic of capital means that oppressor as well as oppressed can draw cheer, comfort, and hope from subaltern popular music. Which is why the ground is always shifting, why yesterday's utopian promise is today's banal muzak, why every triumph is also on some level a surrender. Like Carnival itself, a Dionysian space carved out of the Church calendar which only reinforces its control over all the rest of the year, pop has been assigned its quarter, and the eschatological promise it makes of dancing in the streets day and night, when the shackles of labor and the promise of state violence have finally been smashed, can only be an endlessly deferred IOU. Until it isn't. Lord haste the day.

No fighting.

ANAÍS, “LO QUE SON LAS COSAS”

15th April, 2006

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Any examination of pop in the 2000s is going to have to encounter singing-competition reality shows sooner or later, and I can only be grateful that this song, more than halfway into the decade, is the first time a song by the winner of a singing competition has appeared here.

The Puerto Rican show Objetivo Fama was on its second season: a combination of Big Brother and X-Factor, it featured hopeful pop stars rooming together in a house/studio while competing to win the favor of judges and the viewing public via performances. The first season had only been open to Puerto Ricans, but the second loosened those rules, and Anaís Martínez, from the Dominican Republic, went all the way. Her prize was a recording contract with Univision, and her debut single was a cover of Puerto Rican star Ednita Nazario's 1991 adult-contemporary classic "Lo Que Son Las Cosas" (the way things are, written by her ex-husband, Argentine pop star Luis Ángel Márquez), which only missed appearing here then thanks to Los Bukis.

Of course I like Ednita's version better than Anaís' -- it's straight-down-the-line early 90s adult contemporary in exactly the vein I'm nostalgic for because that was the first period in which I listened to pop music, where the later cover is overproduced and oversung. It's not bad particularly, but it's missing the context of the original: Nazario had been an Olivia Newton John-esque pop starlet since the late 70s, and was entering middle age singing her husband's song expressing fatalistic regret about relationships ending while in the midst of a very public divorce from him. Anaís' cover performs the emotions with convincing correctness, but she's too young and too obviously well-funded (the kitchen sink is thrown at this very reality-show holleralong) for any but the most generalized emotions to come through.

WISIN & YANDEL, “LLAMÉ PA' VERTE (BAILANDO SEXY)”

1st April, 2006

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One of the reasons for doing this project is to tease out unexpected resonances. So rather than comparing "Llamé Pa' Verte" to "Rompe," its immediate predecessor in reggaetón chart-crashing, I'm reminded instead of the last male duo to appear at #1, all the way back in 2004: Andy & Lucas, two Spanish pretty boys peddling Idol-approved sentimental nostrums. It's not just "real," "raw" music as opposed to "manufactured," "telegenic" pop: Juan Luis "Wisin" Morera Luna and Llandell "Yandel" Veguilla Malavé, rough-voiced rapper and smooth-voiced singer respectively, are if anything better-looking than the rather callow teen pin-ups Andy and Lucas; Yandel in particular serves such excellent smolder that he very nearly outclasses the hip-thrusting bikini-clad models in the video.

It's not even a forthright representation of adult sexuality as opposed to fanciful youthful ideas about romance: dance music is certainly a stylized representation of sexual activity, but the stylization is just as important as the sex. Yes, Wisin and Yandel play booty-calling ("Llamé pa' verte" means "I called t' see you") horndogs, Yandel's chorus extremely unambiguous about the sexual metaphor of the dembow rhythm ("a ella le encanta como lo hago y le doy" -- "she loves how I do it and give it") while Wisin's verses are only slightly more clever in their entendres ("yo tengo la crema pa' tu piquiña" -- "I have the cream for your itch"). In its way, it's just as hyperbolic and idealistic as Andy & Lucas, only making grandiose, exaggerated claims about sexual competence rather than the similarly grandiose claims about emotional competence and eternal devotion that romantic balladry promises.

Perhaps it's simply more realistic: love cannot be guaranteed, but sex can, so reggaetón (especially early, up-from-the-streets reggaetón) concentrates on the latter: not just because of its inherent attractions, but primarily because of its fungibility. Every reggaetonero, like every rapper and dancehall toaster before them, is, before anything else, a capitalist. Which is what makes this, even more than "Rompe," the first street-level reggaetón #1, with no concessions given to the pop market. With nearly a third of the track left to go, Wisin begins to shout out the track's producers and brag about how many records they've sold, the kind of coda designed for a DJ to fade into the next song.

If your primary conception of music consumption revolves (like mine) around songs as discrete units, every mp3 or stream functioning like an imaginary 45-r.p.m. record, this kind of extra-musical information, an essential element of brand maintenance in a musical world ruled by mixes and soundsystems, takes some getting used to; but pop music doesn't belongs to the bedroom listener carefully placing the stylus on "Surfer Girl" any more (and probably much less) than it belongs to the basement raver screaming to be heard over the bass of a song they'd never know the name of if its performers didn't shout it at them repeatedly. Buckle up; the new world is only starting.