JUANES, “ME ENAMORA”

29th September, 2007

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We haven't heard from Juanes since the triumph of "La Camisa Negra", and in the two years since he's beefed up his sound and gotten a haircut: the success of that application of guasca flavor to his tropical rock demands replication. So this taut boogie, with verses that sound like new wave-era stadium rock and a chorus with a cumbia shuffle buried beneath reggae bop, is an attempt to be even more crowdpleasing.

The lyrics are just as much full of dopey I'm-in-love cheer as the title "Me Enamora" (I'm in love with) would suggest: the clipped, staggered tension in the music on the verses is nowhere in the words. But the easy lope of the chorus, and particularly the ecstatic cock-crow of the guitar solo, is fully in line with the breezy sentiment.

He has found the furrow he will plow for years to come: cheerful, mostly uncomplicated music that provides a not-too-intrusive soundtrack to the listener's experience: the moodiness and ambition of some of his earlier appearances here are gone. It's a synechdoche for how rock has been assimilated into the larger pop world since the 1990s: acts like Maroon 5 or Imagine Dragons don't participate in the tradition of rock as carrier of musical or emotional authenticity, and just provide rock textures to the more easily-generalized emotions of pop.

GLORIA ESTEFAN FT. CARLOS SANTANA, JOSÉ FELICIANO & SHEILA E., “NO LLORES”

1st September, 2007

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Gloria Estefan's first album in four years means Gloria Estefan's first #1 in four years, which is roughly an illustration of her fortunes since 1989 -- she is easily the woman with the most #1 singles on the Hot Latin chart, and if she's dominated the 2000s less than she dominated the 1990s, it's because she has more of an empire to maintain; music is only one of her revenue streams, and possibly the least lucrative.

But she's still a brilliant musical mind, and a masterful synthesist; so the big single from 90 Millas, a reference to the distance between Miami and Havana, brings three (four, if legendary Cuban trumpeter Arturo Sandoval is counted) of the most iconic Latin musicians of the later twentieth century onto her celebratory, very Cuban rave-up. Mexican-American fusion guitarist Santana, Puerto Rican Latin jazz guitarist and singer Feliciano, and Mexican-American/Creole R&B percussionist and singer Sheila E(scovedo) are among the only Latin artists to have come close to matching Gloria Estefan's success in the broader US pop market, and Santana's and Feliciano's dueling guitars, one smokily electric and the other tautly acoustic, and Escovedo's erupting timbales bring life and color to what is already a pretty fantastic circular danzón encouraging the listener not to weep, to embrace life and reject fear or regret.

Formally, this is yet another of Estefan's nostalgic tours of pre-Castro Cuban music, but thanks the fire brought by her guests it's closer to everything-and-the-kitchen-sink salsa -- born in hustling immigrant New York -- than to the classicist Havana forms she's often defaulted to.

And that engagement with something like the present tense doesn't stop with her similarly middle-aged peers -- the song was issued with two official remixes, one a celebratory reggaetón featuring the all-conquering duo Wisin y Yandel, and the other a Miami hip-hop jam featuring a still little-known Cuban-American Dirty South rapper calling himself Pitbull. Both the remixes cut out Santana's guitar, which is a bit too bluesy to play nice with contemporary hip-hop, but Gloria and her "no llores, no llores, no llores" chanting singers are intact.

Pitbull even thanks her for the opportunity at the end of his remix -- in two years, "I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)" would make him a household name, though he won't appear on this travelogue for several years more. He and Gloria share a reverential attitude toward Cuba (and an all-American loathing of Castro), along with a canny pop ear and willingness to raid from anywhere to sustain their global pop empires.

CONJUNTO PRIMAVERA, “¡BASTA YA!”

25th August, 2007

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The third entry on this blog was a double entry, because two singers had recorded the same song and traded each other the #1 spot with it for several weeks. That this, more than twenty years into the chart's existence, is only our second encounter with two artists going to #1 with the same song isn't something I would have predicted all the way back in 2010, when it seemed like the Hot Latin chart might be much more of a wild west than it turned out to be.

But I'm glad for yet another opportunity to revisit Olga Tañón's rendition of Marco Antonio Solís' "¡Basta Ya!", because I was very unfair to it when it came around in 1996. I was comparing her to Selena and finding her wanting, when I should have been hearing her as her own person (which I think I did achieve in her later entries). And hearing the glassy keyboards and pulsing strings of 1996 adult-contemporary translated to the crisp accordion and and saxophone of 2007 conjunto (itself hardly unchanged since the 1970s) only reinforces how immortal that melody is: very few of the gloopy mid-90s ballads I protested against at the time could have been translated as successfully to such a fast-paced two-step as this is.

I believe this is our last encounter with Conjunto Primavera; why they were awarded the nod to be essentially the only Mexican regional act of the 2000s to appear at #1 still escapes me (they're good, but are they noticeably better than their norteño peers?), but their chihuahuense sound, accordion and sax peeling off licks in unison at harmonic intervals (a bit like Thin Lizzy's twin guitars), has been a welcome reprieve from the more globally-oriented modern pop that has been dominating the chart more and more.

I often like the globally-oriented modern pop too; but one of the reasons I wanted to do this project in the first place was because I love how heterogenous Latin music (maybe especially in the U.S.) is: regional Mexican, tropical Caribbean, and urban South American musical traditions all have their own specific pleasures that even the most exciting pop futurism can never replicate. So a salute to Conjunto Primavera: we first heard them covering Juan Gabriel, and that we bid them farewell covering Marco Antonio Solís feels fitting. ¡Viva México!

FANNY LÚ, “Y SI TE DIGO”

18th August, 2007

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Another case of a delayed number one (tip of the hat once more to chart analyst Chris Molanphy's AC/DC Rule, though he's discussing albums), where the single after the breakthrough hit is the one that goes to #1 on the Hot Latin Chart. We've seen it most notably before with Daddy Yankee, whose worldwide hit "Gasolina" primed the pump for "Rompe" to become the first reggaetón #1; and now Fanny Lú, already well-known in Colombia as a television presenter, hits #1 with the single after "No Te Pido Flores", the song that made her famous throughout Latin America.

A word I haven't used before on this travelogue, even though it's occasionally applied, is unavoidable here: "tropipop," a specifically Colombian mixture of traditional genres like vallenato and cumbia with Caribbean genres like merengue, salsa, and bachata, plus international pop. It was coined to describe Carlos Vives' collaborations with Emilio Estefan, and it's generally been quite commercially successful, if not very respected by practitioners of either traditional Colombian or Caribbean genres -- surface-level pop stars taking sounds without respecting the history, is what the charge boils down to -- and there hadn't been a female tropipop star before. Until producer José Gaviria decided that Fanny Lú, who had been trying to get a music career going since the mid-90s but kept having to give her television career higher priority, should be the female face of the genre.

And so that's what this is: if it sounds like bachata timbales, vallenato accordion, merengue bounce, and generalized international pop singalong melodies, that's tropipop. Not that bets weren't hedged: there was also a bachata version in which she duetted with Toby Love, and a merengue version with Eddy Herrera; but neither of them is quite as solid as the original; and the original isn't quite as solid as "No Te Pido Flores." She seems to be imitating Shakira's phrasing a bit here, but expresses none of her wit: it's a straightforward love song, subcategory "I don't have the courage to tell you how much I love you." It's perfectly pleasant, if rather anonymous and a touch overproduced -- those massed background vocals, for example, are highly unnecessary; she's not such a weak singer as to need the support.

But this isn't the last time we'll see Fanny Lú, and when we do again it will be with one of the signature songs of the era, so this isn't just the valley after a peak; there's a higher peak coming.

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “OJALÁ”

30th June, 2007

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This is most likely the last time we will see Marco Antonio Solís on this travelogue; he's been a regular presence here since 1988 (and he's been having Mexican hits since 1975), but the chart is drifting away from the kind of traditional Mexican pop he does very well, and younger and flashier sounds are gaining prominence. In the present tense of when I'm writing this, 2019, he hasn't released an album of new material for six years, the longest he's ever gone before; if he does stage a comeback in the age of urbano (he's not quite sixty yet), I'll be pleasantly surprised.

The 2006 album Trozos de Mi Alma 2 (Pieces of My Soul 2) was an album of new recordings, but it wasn't new material; like its predecessor in 1999, it was Solís covering songs he'd written but given to other singers. I didn't note it at the time, but his 1999 #1 "Si Te Pudiera Mentir" (If I Could Lie to You) was originally recorded by Rocío Dúrcal in 1990. And his version of "Ojalá" sounds like classic Rocío Dúrcal: carefully-produced mariachi-inflected pop, with studio orchestration that replicates the soft-rock sound of 70s pop where Dúrcal had her heyday and Solís got his start.

So who sang the original? Well... Paulina Rubio, in 2004. And if you click on that link you'll get a lesson in what production can do to a song. It was only an album track (her big singles from Pau-Latina, "Te Quise Tanto" and "Dame Otro Tequila" appeared here), but it's still as dense with mid-2000s genre-mashup technofuturism as everything else on the album, mariachi horns snaking across a glitchy, twitchy soundscape which she actually takes at a slightly slower pace than Solís would two years later, purring lyrics which he delivers in his traditional trumpet-like belt. Of the two performances, I'm aesthetically constituted so as to prefer Rubio's, but that doesn't mean I dislike Solís's in the slightest: I enjoy both his soft-focus traditionalism and her lively personality-driven pop. Her hissed ad-lib at the start, "quiero que te arrastres, güey" -- I want you to crawl, dude -- is sublime.

Because the song is, in both versions, a kiss-off, with the title "Ojalá" (literally derived from the Arabic for "God willing" but generally used as an informal expression of hope) in the chorus introducing a series of wishes that the betraying lover will meet with similar terrible fates. It's a wallow in hatred and revenge fantasies, and it's even kind of funny (Solís's first line, roughly "I don't know what name to call you, I looked in the dictionary and couldn't find it," is some classic country songwriting). A terrific song, regardless of version, and perhaps the best farewell to this blog that Marco Antonio Solís could have devised. Three weeks at #1 (interrupting Enrique Iglesias' much longer reign to either side), a victory lap for a long-serving craftsman before ceding the floor to the youth coming up, as always, from behind.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “DÍMELO”

19th May, 2007

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When Iglesias fils first burst onto this travelogue in 1995 with back-to-back-to-back number ones, I was at a loss to understand how the Enrique Iglesias I knew (and had a certain affection for) from popwatching in the early 2010s had emerged from that very unprepossessing whiner. Even when I liked some of his later material over the years (nearly all of which we've gotten to sample, as no one has ever hit number one as regularly as him), I rarely recognized him. So this single, parenthetically declared (The Ping Pong Song) in its English-language release, is notable for me as being the first time I recognized him as the same man I knew from later hits.

It's been four years since his last number one, the longest he's ever gone without an appearance here, and he seems to have figured out exactly what his lane would be for the next decade. (It's not far from what I predicted in my discussion of the 1999 hit "Ritmo Total".) R&B producer Sean Garrett (best known for Usher & co.'s immortal "Yeah!") gives him a thoroughly modern, high-tech track with a memorable, even novelty-esque rhythm sample, compresses and pitch-corrects his voice so that his limitations are invisible, and layers digital textures around him to keep the track exciting even during the maundering verses. (Apparently every sound on the track apart from Enrique's voice is from a single well-known loops package, which if not a first on this travelogue is at least indicative of where we are in terms of production history.) The synthesized blasts of sound in particular indicate the direction chart pop would be taking in the near future, as four-on-the-floor dance music took over from more varied R&B-based beatmaking.

The result is my favorite Enrique Iglesias song since "Ritmo Total," although like that song I prefer the Spanish-language version to the more well-known English-language one -- Iglesias is no Shakira in terms of ability to creatively shift between languages. "Dímelo" is less incoherent than "Do You Know," although neither of them are deathless lyrics. It's a typically self-involved love song with a strong central image: "¿Dímelo por qué estas fuera de mí / y al mismo tiempo estás muy dentro?" (Tell me why you're outside of me / while at the same time you're deep inside?) It doesn't quite make sense in Spanish either, which is one way to make excellent pop: arresting, unidiomatic phrases that make the listener pause over them is a great way to keep them in the air, as Swedish songwriters have found for some time.

CHAYANNE, “SI NOS QUEDARA POCO TIEMPO”

12th May, 2007

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I think I've often been unfair to Chayanne here, as I often am to handsome young men who sing earnestly romantic songs without gesturing toward any particular regional musical tradition. International balladry, vaguely contemporary in production but wholly conventional in writing and composition, is probably my least favorite body of musical production: not because it's impossible for real emotion or exquisite performances to come out of it (if anything, quite the opposite), but because without obvious genre markers or any grounding in personal history I can't hear a way into it. The instinct I always have is: "This is between the singer and whoever, real or imaginary, he's singing to; it's got nothing to do with me."

This was my reaction here -- at least until the pre-chorus line "Y la melancolía / me ataca por la espalda sin piedad" (and melancholy / attacks me from behind, merciless) made me pause in my tracks. Wait, is this a song about depression?

Well, it's a song about loss, whether real or imagined; the chorus is delivered in a conditional tense, as the title (If We Had Little Time Left) should have made obvious, and the middle eight is more or less a thesis statement: "Nadie sabe en realidad que es lo que tiene / hasta que enfrenta el miedo de perderlo para siempre" (nobody really knows what they have / until they face the fear of losing it forever). Which in English sounds like the tag line to a Spielbergian apocalypse-made-personal or a Nicholas Sparks-style sentimental romance; but the glory of pop music is that it can compress such narratives into three-minute shots of emotion without having to drag us through three-act structures and lingering closeups.

The production supporting Chayanne's throaty rasp here is more muscular than usual: 90s-style post-alt rock production with crashing drums and chugging guitars. There's a certain kind of comfort to it for older or middle-class listeners, particularly in the age of reggaetón, but Chayanne so clearly belongs to an older generation that (as of this writing at least) this song will be his last appearance on this travelogue. It won't be for lack of effort; his late-2010s singles are collaborations with reggaetoneros old and young. But as a valedictory, "Si Nos Quedara Poco Tiempo" works very well.

JENNIFER LOPEZ, “QUÉ HICISTE”

5th May, 2007

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This is only Ms. Lopez' second appearance on this travelogue, and her first appearance by herself -- her debut was eight years ago, in a duet with Marc Anthony, who (as of this #1) she has been married to for three years. And although he doesn't sing on this song, his fingerprints are all over it: the principal melody was, the story goes, given to him in a dream by Rocío Dúrcal (who had only recently died), insisting that it was "for Jennifer." So Anthony, along with a Colombian songwriting husband/wife team he regularly collaborated with, has the writing credit for the song. Which (of course, since I'm writing about it) paid out: a #1 Latin hit, respectable placement throughout the European charts, even Lopez' Spanish-language debut on the Hot 100.

But Lopez is no Dúrcal: she has a dancer's, even an actor's voice, and her singing here is more dramatic (aided of course by tense, massive production) than technically polished. There's nothing wrong with that: in fact it gives her songs something of an everywoman quality, easy to belt along with in the car or in a late-night rage over the fucker who ruined your life. Because it's a kiss-off song, and a really good one, full of righteous fury and reclaimed self-respect, a woman leaving behind a man who destroyed their happiness with uncontrolled anger and words he couldn't take back.

But the lyrics, poetic and specific as they are, are secondary to the production, alternating between quiet, tension-building verses under which plucked guitars and scraping strings burble, and explosive choruses where power chords, rock drums, and swirling strings lend force to Lopez' full-throated denunciations. It's not surprising that the production was handled by Anthony's long-time salsa collaborator Sergio George (or that a salsa remix was made) -- the punchiness and drama of contemporary tropical music underlies the whole thing, even if the tense, sawing rhythms are much more old-world than the liberatory dancefloor beats of salsa.

It's a really good song, one of J. Lo's career highlights, even if its mixture of rock instrumentation and high drama don't quite seem to fit together at a decade's remove. Writing about the mid-to-late 2000s in the late 2010s has been an exercise in trying to see truthfully: it's just far enough away that it feels fundamentally different from the present, but not far enough away for a coherent nostalgia to have accrued around it. Everything still feels awkward and unfinished, like prologue to now; remembering that it felt then like the culmination of history (as is habitual for me with earlier periods) is still work.

JUAN LUIS GUERRA Y 440, “LA LLAVE DE MI CORAZÓN”

31st March, 2007

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The moment has perhaps never been riper for one of Juan Luis Guerra's hyperliterate, musically inventive, and shrewdly contemporary songs to make a return to this travelogue. Alejandro Sanz (like Shakira, from an entirely different direction) is one of his few peers in terms of intellectual sophistication, and the rise of reggaetón, the first post-hip-hop Latin music form, means that neither his Caribbeanness nor his engagement with the contemporary has to be watered down for mass appeal.

It doesn't hurt that this song presses down on two nostalgia buttons at once: its merengue foundation bears 1950s mambo horn charts, while Guerra's dense, motormouthed lyrics are undeniably post-hip-hop, though for a rather more old-fashioned value of hip-hop than the younger reggaetoneros might recognize; it's much more patter song than boom-bap. But Guerra isn't just mixing Dominican merengue and Cuban mambo (which would develop, in Puerto Rican New York, into salsa), he's also delivering half the lyrics in English, and particularly a formalized pop-song kind of English which listeners to old rock & roll, doo-wop, or British Invasion records would recognize. The effect is kind of a mashup of all the different kinds of music he might have heard on the radio as a young child, energetic as hell and supporting a typically screwball lyric about a guy calling into a radio psychologist who gives love advice to talk about the girl he met online.

Because it's 2007, online dating is going mainstream (although Guerra was broaching the topic here a decade ago), and even though the video casts the caller as an overweight dude (and a young Zoe Saldaña as the out-of-his-league object of his affections), it's not mean-spirited: once he enters the black-and-white nightclub space where Guerra y 440 are playing, he's as dapper and smooth as anyone else, which is part of the point of the throwback music: elegance isn't an inherent virtue but a stylistic choice, and the contemporary is capacious enough to contain whatever of the past we still find useful.

CONJUNTO PRIMAVERA, “ESE”

17th March, 2007

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Why Conjunto Primavera has been the only Mexican regional act to have reliably punctuated the #1 spot in the mid-2000s is a question I don't think I'm at all qualified to answer. The portion of this travelogue that has been taken up by regional Mexican music has dwindled since the 1990s, and Primavera, who were here all along but whose first #1 wasn't until 2003, are just about the only holdouts. That will shift in the coming years, as banda gathers pop strength, but regional Mexican music will remain only a minor strain among all the Hot Latin #1s, although of course a much richer part of the full tapestry of the chart.

This song once more strikes me as the kind of thing they could have recorded at any time between 1988, when the band's current lineup was settled, and the present: the usual questions that a music critic tries to ask about a #1 song -- why this song? why now? -- can only be answered with an elaborate shrug. Presumably, the chart being now well into the download era, "Ese" was assisted by digital sales, like many of its contemporaries have been. But also presumably it was huge on the Regional Mexican format, although I would consider it an unlikely candidate for crossover to the broader Latin Pop format.

It's a now familiar sound: norteño-sax, with keyboards imitating a churchy organ, a guitar keeping time, and Juan Dominguez' airy saxophone supporting Tony Melendez' starchy, wounded vocals. delivering an old-fashioned lyric in a strictly conventional tableau: the singer begs the object of the song not to weep over the one who broke her heart, because he's here and has loved her all along. The lyric is full of Nice Guy Energy, although because it isn't formalized into an ideology it's not more than averagely toxic.

ALEJANDRO SANZ FT. SHAKIRA, “TE LO AGRADEZCO, PERO NO”

10th March, 2007

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The third in a trilogy of songs that have been winding through the #1 chart for almost two years, at least in terms of how I've received them. The Shakira/Alejandro Sanz duet "La Tortura", in the summer of 2005, was the longest-reigning #1 song on the Hot Latin chart at the time that I began this blog in 2010, a crowning glory of mid-2000s Latin pop. Then Sanz's solo hit "A La Primera Persona" was only on top for a week in November 2006,  a compact illustration of the difference between pop thrillpower and tasteful male auteurism. Now "Te Lo Agradezco, Pero No," its video a direct sequel to that of "A La Primera Persona," only reigns for only one week: Sanz is still very much the auteur here, Shakira playing a duet partner rather than expressing her own thoughts in her own vivid language. But her very presence lends more color and drama to the song: the music moves to a danceable rhythm (and Sanz himself enters into some choreography in the video, a first for him, apparently at Shakira's insistence), and uses a sturdy Afro-Latin chassis even though the body is auteurist European pop.

And if "La Tortura" was about a woman's rejecting a man's take-me-back whinging, and "A La Primera Persona" was about a man pitying himself over lost love, "Te Lo Agradezco, Pero No" forms a sort of resolution: both man and woman reject the other's overtures at reconciliation, because they are adults and can recognize the toxicity of their past entanglements: they've both hurt the other, and they're setting each other free. Sure, there's still feelings, sure, they will probably return in the future, but they don't belong to each other. All of this, however, is inference and implication: Sanz' lyrics are typically telegraphic and a bit gnomic, and rhythm and sound matter more than laying out a coherent narrative. Multiple readings can reside in any good pop song, and this is a very good pop song.

It begins as a maundering bolero, with acoustic guitar and swaying conga rhythms giving propulsion to Sanz's throaty murmurs, but as the song builds, more and more elements are introduced, including subtle electronic percussion, so that by the time Shakira enters, whispering in unison with Sanz, it's developed into a catalan rumba, the combination of flamenco passion and Afro-Cuban rhythm that served as a particularly Spanish response to the modernism of Anglophone folkies like Bob Dylan. (Sanz works very much in the lineage of Dylan; and of Gato Pérez). And then, after the second chorus, a Memphis soul horn chart breaks out, turning the song into full-out Latin jazz, which Sanz's phrasing and harmonic leaps have been anticipating all along. The chorus is pure 70s r&b, and as more and more voices get added to it it takes the pull of gospel; and when Sanz breaks out into a half-rapped improvised montuno it's a gesture toward both salsa and r&b traditions.

It's notable that none of the traditions Sanz is folding in are particularly new: genre as a capacious grab-bag of historical authenticities is a familiar mode to many postmodern artists of his generation, among whom I'd include people as different as Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, Juan Luis Guerra, or Manu Chao. The gestalt is the point, much more than recreating any one tradition in particular. Shakira, too, has worked in this synthesizing manner (see "Suerte"), and if the traditions she's engaging with here feel more particular to Sanz than to her (her vocal timbre is much more muezzin than gitano), that seems to be exactly what she wanted when she approached Sanz with the desire to be on the other side of the "ft." this time.

MANÁ, “MANDA UNA SEÑAL”

3rd March, 2007

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The third Hot Latin #1 in a row from Maná's 2006 album Amar Es Combatir (to love is to struggle), and it's time for me to acknowledge that whether I like it or not Maná were speaking to the broader Latin-music audience in the late 2000s in much more meaningful ways than I have been able to understand on this travelogue so far.

But I'm getting closer with this song. It helps that it's a straight-down-the-line power-pop song, with 80s guitar chugs and sparkling harmonies and anthemic choruses, and so feels closer to the derivative, romantic, essentially conservative heart of Maná than incorporating Afro-Latin rhythms or post-grunge posturing does.

I want to be skeptical here of my usual conflation of post-80s rock with conservatism; outside the Anglosphere, rock means different things, and especially on a different time scale, than what the usual histories of US and British fads claim are set in stone. But it is noteworthy that Maná is having bigger hits than ever at the moment that reggaetón is challenging the settled assumptions of the Latin-music industry: Maná are the very definition of a settled assumption, and their not exactly dominance but certainly resurgence here in the 2000s might be comparable to something like the way the rock gods of the 1960s and 1970s reentered the US charts in the late 80s as a sort of comfort food to aging Boomers weirded out by hip-hop and hair metal.

To use a word with more currency in Hispanophone theory than Anglophone, Maná have never made particularly autochthonous music: and reggaetón's refusal to embrace the Estefan-bred crossover ideal, as seen in the paltry "Latin Invasion" of 1999 and the rather less paltry career of Shakira -- reggaetón remains defiantly aimed at an urbano audience, forcing Anglophone audiences to come to it (as they actually did with "Gasolina") rather than seeking to ingratiate itself by crooning in translated English -- is an assertion of greater autochthony, and particularly a darker-skinned, poorer, and urban autochthony, than the comfortable Latin middle class, both in the US and elsewhere, is comfortable with. They're comfortable with Maná, a crossover act in everything but language; Maná makes extremely comfortable music.

It's impossible not to read all of this from the vantage point of 2019, of course, which has proved the reggaetoneros right and the ingratiating middle class wrong; as concentration camps for darker-skinned, poorer, and urban Hispanophones proliferate, as border-wide fortresses are raised to protect the wealthy and white from rising tides and the tropical poor those tides will displace, as Us and Them become ever more deeply riven by race, language, and class, Maná's ode to romantic questing, expressed in beautifully poetic literary Spanish and accompanied by totemic sounds from the past four decades of sensitive white male guitar heroics sounds more and more hollow, an aristocratic fashion for dressing in the workingman's clothes of yesteryear while the mob cries out for justice.

LUIS FONSI, “TU AMOR”

24th February, 2007

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Fonsi's fourth appearance here, and he's more invested in the legacy sounds of rock than ever, to a degree which seems inexplicable in today's post-urbano landscape.

 "Tu Amor" is one of those most unlikely of hits -- a new track on a greatest-hits compilation (Éxitos 98:06, in which the use of a colon rather than a dash turns the title from a mere descriptor into a Biblical pun) -- the occasional success rate of which continues to inspire the practice. It's a relatively undistinguished midtempo ballad, chugging along with no variation in tempo, just dynamics, while Fonsi's romántica-oriented voice, unsuited to the more idiosyncratic emotional signifiers of rock, wails glibly over top.

It was only #1 for a week in the interregnum between radio-only and streaming-plus calculations of the chart, which presumably means it was popular in digital downloads (this was two weeks after the release of the deluxe edition of the compilation). Fonsi was at his first commercial peak in the late 2000s, still young enough to be a heartthrob, but mature enough that, having found his voice, he could produce great music and not just generic imitations of it. If this leans more toward generic than great, it's firmly in line with contemporary trends: in the mid-to-late 2000s blustery ballads were all the rage on international versions of Pop Idol and X Factor, and it would be a couple more years before dance music became the center of international pop again. (And Fonsi will be there too. Stay tuned.)

HÉCTOR EL FATHER, “SOLA”

3rd February, 2007

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2007 opens with another moody, minor-key reggaetón from a long-serving pioneer in the genre. Héctor El Father and Tito El Bambino had been performing as Héctor y Tito since 1996, making a name for themselves in Latin rap and reggaetón circles until they split up in 2004. Héctor's solo career exploded; he signed up with Jay-Z under the imprint Roc-La-Familia, which no doubt played a role in this song getting to #1: these were the peak Roc-A-Fella years.

But after only two more years in the limelight, Héctor would step away from reggaetón, turning his MC name literal by becoming an evangelical minister. He is still a significant presence in Puerto Rico's Christian media, preaching over the radio.

There's nothing particularly sacred about this song, but it is, perhaps inevitably, sanctimonious. As a message song primarily in the second person, addressing a woman in an abusive relationship from the point of view of the man who "loves" her and is miserable watching her suffer, there's an undercurrent of victim-blaming (of the "just leave him" variety) and a heavy focus on his own feelings rather than any actual support for her. But no doubt it was still originally heard as a socially conscious song -- acknowledging the damage that men do to women wasn't exactly high on original-recipe reggaetón's priorities -- and I'm sure people in situations I've never been in have used it for solace or courage.

The fragments of repeated melody, bellowed in Héctor's doleful baritone, turn the dembow pulse into a persistent knocking rather than an invitation to dance. Every subaltern genre begins as sex-and-violence dance music and is turned into emotionally cathartic music over time. If I'm not particularly impressed by this entry in the transition reggaetón was making into expressing the full range of human emotions, it was still part of a necessary movement. Crudely-expressed sentimentalism is part of every genre too.