ENRIQUE IGLESIAS FT. ROMEO SANTOS, “LOCO”

19th October, 2013

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It's been a litle while since we had to consider Enrique Iglesias, a one-time constant feature of this travelogue. He hasn't had a solo #1 since 2008 -- two Wisin y Yandel collabs and one with Juan Luis Guerra are his only appearances since -- and his first post-streaming appearance being a duet with the second-biggest solo hitmaker of the year (behind only Marc Anthony) is perhaps indicative of the kinds of high-budget cross-promotional synergies that are now necessary to drive big hits even from the most famous, reliably high-performing, and enormously beloved names in the Latin music industry.

It's also been a while since I've mentioned how I felt about a song at the time. Largely that's because starting in 2013 I was disconnected from Latin radio, having given up my car and with it the hours a day I spent jacked into the airwaves; podcasts and à-la-carte streaming now accompanied me on public transit instead. But I heard "Loco," and I loved "Loco." I hadn't actually remembered "Loco" until it started playing (although I recognized the single art from my 2013 year-end list) -- but those opening lines struck me with the familiar force of a Proustian madeleine. "Te pido de rodillas" (I beg you on my knees) -- and I found myself shocked that this was 2013 instead of two or three years earlier, when I was much more deeply immersed in Latin radio. I guess my tapering-off was more gradual than I remembered.

The songwriting is credited to Iglesias, his frequent collaborator in these years Descemer Bueno (stay tuned for more), and Dominican producer Lenny Medina, which makes sense: Romeo's literate, vivid lyrics are nowhere to be found. But Romeo is credited with co-production of this bachata version of the song (theres's also a banda version with Roberto Tapia for the Mexican market and a pop version with India Martínez for Spain), and his shrewd understanding of the ways that bachata can be applied to a standard pop structure make this a much more successful adoption of bachata on Iglesias' part than his previous effort.

Not that he's not again outclassed vocally -- Romeo can sing rings around him, and the contrast between Iglesis' hangdog huskiness and Santos' angelic fluidity makes for a slightly uneven listening experience. (In the other versions, Roberto Tapia's stentorian belt produces an even more schizoid effect, while India Martínez is the only singer on Enrique's unenthusiastic level, and the result is pure mush.) But the melodic structure is solid, the lyrics -- a standard admiration/complaint about loving a woman to the point of madness -- are good, and the overall effect is that of a minor classic. Would I think this if I hadn't loved it deeply in 2013 and I was just judging it as I've judged the other songs I have no associations with? Possibly.

But all we can play with are the hands we're dealt.  

Airplay Watch:

• Enrique Iglesias ft. Romeo Santos, "Loco"
• Discussed above.

ROMEO SANTOS, “PROPUESTA INDECENTE”

28th September, 2013

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"It feels good to be king," mutters Romeo Santo during a typically florid instrumental break. The not-quite Mel Brooks quotation feels entirely sincere, and only proved more so as the song soared to a global success that not even the streaming chart could really capture. It was only #1 on the Hot Latin chart for a total of four weeks in late 2013 and early 2014, but it is currently the second most-lucrative Latin song of the 2010s, behind only a certain 2017 smash. A lot of its enormous success was cumulative, though: the YouTube video reached a billion views in 2016, and although Romeo had had enormous success for a good decade prior, both with Aventura and as a soloist, it has become perhaps his definitive song for an audience that was still in elementary school when Aventura was breaking records.

The title is a direct translation of the English phrase "indecent proposal," and the lyrics live up to that steamy suggestion. Santos' lyrics have always been aimed at an adult audience, but he strips away some of his literary floweriness here in order to make a nakedly sexual advance, asking permission to seduce the listener in his car, raise her skirt, and "medir tu sensatez" (measure your sensitivity). His usual florid bachata guitar and percussion are joined occasionally by a delirious tango bandoneón, coloring the romantic Latin musical present with perhaps the ultimate avatar of the romantic Latin musical past, and placing himself firmly in the lineage of such towering Latin lovers as Carlos Gardel (and, from earlier in this travelogue, Luis Miguel).

I'm not sure that self-assignment is wholly convincing: he's a little too glib, a little too confident in his own inability to do wrong, to reach those heights, and this song, while gorgeous, isn't as affecting as much of his back catalog. Granted, I'm not in the best position to judge the effectiveness of an allosexual come-on to a heterosexual woman; but to my mind, Romeo has always been more seductive in songs where he is less certain of his chances. Those days are gone forever, though: Romeo Santos is now an institution too big to fail, with the sophomore album this was the lead single of, Formula Vol. 2, carefully engineered to do exactly twice the business of his solo debut, itself already a global smash with numrous #1s.

Still, his transition into becoming an institution means he's that much less of a pop star, and no longer needs to be down in the muck throwing elbows to fight for chart position. This is not quite our last glimpse of Romeo Santos -- although his final #1 (as of this writing) will probably be more about his duet partner than him -- but the necessity of managing his stardom portfolio will increasingly overshadow his artistic efforts. His albums still go reliably multiplatinum, but from here on out they're a smaller and smaller part of the Romeo Santos brand.

Airplay Watch:

• Carlos Vives, "Bailar Contigo"
• A joyous rock 'n' vallenato singalong straight out of Vives' middle-aged comfort zone.
• Romeo Santos, "Propuesta Indecente"
• Discussed above.
• Yandel, "Hablé de Tí"
• Wisin notched a solo Airplay #1 last time, so now it's Yandel's turn: a rubbery dance song with his usual AutoTune-heavy crooning and some millennial whoops to peg it firmly to the mid-2010s. Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall dominates the video, lending it a more futuristic air than the music strictly earns.

PRINCE ROYCE, “DARTE UN BESO”

7th September, 2013

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Our final encounter (to date) with Prince Royce in the main travelogue is his second-biggest hit (certified 31x Platinum in  2021, second only to "Corazón Sin Cara"'s 5x Diamond as of 2025). I've been fairly patronizing about Royce's glib, liquid vocal style and relatively shallow material in these pages, largely because the obvious comparison to his bachata senior Romeo Santos does him no favors, but this is easily my favorite of his #1s, as good a marriage between his jejune, open-hearted style and the wide-eyed internationalism of the music as exists in the top layer of his catalog.

The opening ukelele strums are powerfully evocative of the acoustic reggae-pop peddled by the likes of Jason Mraz a couple of years earlier, and although the tune slips into generic bachata rhythms for the bulk of it, that beachy skank returning to punctuate the reverie every so often is an indicator of the breezy, uncomplicated romanticism that Royce is at his best when peddling. The twinkly orchestration of "Las Cosas Pequeñas" returns on the chorus, but its cod-philosophical lyrics vanish here, replaced by a simple, adolescently naïve love song.

He just wants to "darte un beso" (give you a kiss) but that's as far as his physical imagination goes; the rest of his romantic hopes are entirely abstract: a generic desire to make sure you are protected, feel good, and lack for nothing. Which is indistinguishable for any young person's hopes for themselves, and suggests that he doesn't really know the object of his affections as an individual (the opening verse more or less confirms this: his entire relationship with them consists of looking and thinking), and is merely projecting his own desires onto them.

I'm not suggesting that this lyrical solipsism was intentionally crafted to reveal the limitations of the singer's romantic knowledge and imagination -- as far as I know it's entirely sincere, and the people who loved the song and played it over and over took it exactly as the portrait of pure, selfless, and aspirational love it purports to be. Most young people's romantic lives are exactly this naïve and unreflective. And if Royce can't really make me believe that it's exactly as sincere as it's supposed to be, that's for once not a failure of him selling the material: both his delivery and his meaning are exactly as glib as each other. 

Airplay Watch:

• Prince Royce, "Darte un Beso"
• Discussed above.
• Tito El Bambino, "Carnaval"
• A merengue throwback with soca accents, revamping the classic 1985 Dominican carnival tune by Fernando Villalona for a modern island-urbano audience.
• Wisin, "Que Viva la Vida"
• Another entrant in the "Danza Kuduro" sweepstakes, with Wisin's signature guard-dog barking on the rapped verses and the chorus so heavily AutoTuned it might as well be Yandel. 
• Ricky Martin, "Come With Me"
• A banger aimed at gay dancefloors squarely in the 2009–2011 mold, produced by an Australian team in the image of Dr. Luke or RedOne. The "Spanglish version" linked here is only slightly more interesting than the English-only version that was big in Australia and nowhere else.

MARC ANTHONY, “VIVIR MI VIDA”

18th May, 2013

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A Nuyorican cover of a song in Arabic and French song by a singer born in Algeria and resident in Luxembourg, produced by a Swedish team: the anodyne feel-good façade of Obama-era globalization reaches something of a crescendo here, with a string of decisions made by individuals who may be nothing but sincere in their motivations but who end up producing a symbol of a global consensus rapidly fading into the rearview in 2025.

Let's start back in 1992, when thirty-two-year-old Algerian raï singer Khaled, having recently moved to France and dropped the prefix "Cheb" (young) from his stage name, released the single "Didi", produced by American quirkmaster Don Was, whose addition of a new jack swing beat, a celebratory horn chart, and funk pop bass to Khaled's lovestruck performance turned him into a global star with a musical footprint across continental Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. He maintained that position for the next decade-plus with a series of raï hits intermingled with Western dance sounds, one of the ambassadors of the 90s vision of "world music" -- and in 2012, at the age of fifty-two, he staged a comeback with "C'est la Vie", produced by Swedish-Moroccan superproducer RedOne, a canny admixture of raï and post-subprime dancepop, with RedOne's signature airy synth blasts and thumping beats overlaying Algerian hand percussion and syncopated keyboard patterns not a million miles away from the montuno figures of Afro-Cuban mambo. It's a big-tent singalong in Arabic and French, and the video, with its photogenic cast of ethnically diverse dancers and models expressing a genericized, unthreatening joy, is virtually a pro-immigration ad campaign aimed at the European petty bourgeoisie, sentimental but vacuous.

"C'est la Vie" was Khaled's biggest hit since "Didi," soaring up a lot of European charts and making waves across the Middle East; and like "Didi" it inspired a bunch of covers, foremost of which was the salsa reimagining by Marc Anthony and Sergio George which is our actual topic today. But let's go back to the early 90s again.

We first met Marc Anthony on this travelogue in 1997, but he'd been making music since 1988, initially as an English-language singer on Latin freestyle and underground house tracks produced by the likes of Little Louie Vega and Todd Terry. But in 1993, after being bowled over by Juan Gabriel's "Hasta Que Te Conocí," he devoted himself to singing in Spanish, and specifically to salsa: his cover was where the real Marc Anthony was born. He's eight years younger than Khaled, but their careers still moved in an odd parallel: both were singers of a specific postcolonial ethnic music closely identified with immigrant enclaves in the imperial core; both also reached out to the broader western pop landscape and were celebrities -- rockstars, even -- beyond their minority identities; both had high-profile marriages whose troubles were splashed over the tabloid press.

Marc Anthony's divorce from Jennifer Lopez was fresh news in early 2013, and the song was widely understood at the time as being a man's declaration of happiness over his newfound independence from an allegedly difficult to please woman. The Spanish lyrics are credited exclusively to Anthony, although the chorus at least is not too far of from the original. Compare the Spanish "Voy a reír, voy a gozar, vivir mi vida, la la la la la" (I'm going to laugh, I'm going to enjoy myself, live my life, la la la la la) with the French "On va s'aimer, on va danser, oui, c'est la vie, la la la la la" (We're going to love, we're going to dance, yes, that's life la la la la la). The video very highmindedly casts the song as a tribute to his fans, particularly in his hometown of New York, but the fact that the fans in the video are mostly very young women is its own indication of the kind of rockstar imagery that was being invoked.

Ultimately I enjoy "Vivir Mi Vida" a lot more than "C'est la Vie," if only because the salsa instrumentation doesn't insist on itself as much as RedOne's bombastic thumping; the sparse Latin percussion, with its generous empty spaces, leaves room for a subtler kind of dancing than slamming trance, and Sergio George's arrangement is full of the kind of detail and narrative that the club-oriented repetition of the original has no room for. Both are still pretty cheesy singalongs, even chantalongs aimed as much at soccer terraces as dancefloors, so maybe it's just my greater familiarity with salsa than with raï that makes Marc Anthony's feal realer to me.

Airplay Watch:

• Intocable, "Te Amo (Para Siempre)"
• A beautiful middle-aged tejano ballad that I'm even more annoyed than usual that the streaming-era chart didn't give me the chance to dig more deeply into. 
• Marc Anthony, "Vivir Mi Vida"
• Discussed above.
• Katherine Alexander, "Put It in a Kiss"
• A forgotten electroswing novelty produced by Dominican producer Maffio adapting the rhythms and melody of Irving Berlin's "Puttin' on the Ritz" to cheerful Zumba-friendly ends. Stuck around for three weeks in January 2014 while "Vivir Mi Vida" and its two late-2013 successors swapped  back and forth before being replaced by the first new Hot Latin #1 of 2014.

DADDY YANKEE, “LIMBO”

2nd February, 2013

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I was mostly disconnected from popular Latin music in 2013. I had moved to Chicago in the beginning of the year, and no longer had a car, so the dedicated radio-listening time I had had for the past decade vanished out from under me. But also, I was listening to less and less music overall, as joblessness and depression shoved me into an abyss, and I grabbed onto other interests in desperation and clung to them instead. It has been twelve years, and I'm only now starting to try to return to having a normal relationship with art, instead of alternately burying myself in it and running away from it as too demanding.

All of that to say, I hadn't really heard "Limbo" before now. Or maybe I had, and it just slid off my brain as though buttered, without leaving a trace behind. It's that kind of song. At first, I was cheered -- isn't that the reggaetón riddim? No, not quite, it's too fast. It's a tresillo, but not the same cadence. And then there's a beat drop, and it just pounds into undifferentiated EDM mush. The lyrics are in Spanish, but it's not exactly aimed at the Spanish-language market. As in his previous appearance here, he shouts out the Zumba fitness program, and this time it's more than just a shout-out: "Limbo" was commissioned specifically by Zumba, and Yankee's description of the song's intent, reproduced on Wikipedia, is as brand-friendly and corporate as they could wish: it is supposed to "invite the imagination, ignite creativity, to step away from the norm and bring something completely different."

Well, one thing about a song written for a fitness company: it's going to be energetic. And that energy is the best thing about it, with Yankee as motormouthed hypeman for an active session, his horndog persona entirely sanded down to a cheerful movement instructor. It still works exactly as it's supposed to, because its ambitions are so low; but it gives you absolutely no reason to listen to it if you're not breaking a sweat.

Airplay Watch:

• Tito El Bambino & Marc Anthony, "¿Por Qué Les Mientes?"
• Discussed in the previous entry.
• Carlos Vives ft. Michel Teló, "Come Le Gusta a Tu Cuerpo"
• Cheerful Colombian vallenato auteur Vives invites similarly cheerful Brazilian sertanejo chantalong huckster Teló for a very fun accordion-led dance tune with lots to chant along to in both Spanish and Portuguese.
• Don Omar, "Zumba"
• Another song obviously commissioned by the same company as "Limbo," this one intended for a dancealong video game. Omar is even more of a cipher than Yankee, but he always was: the music is slightly more interesting, in part because there's a merengue percussion line. 
• Romeo Santos, "Llévame Contigo"
• Another of Santos' stylish, swooningly romantic bachata with unusual musical flourishes, this one about begging a woman who is leaving him to take him with her.
• Prince Royce, "Te Me Vas"
• Another bachata about a woman leaving him, but Royce is nowhere near Santos' level either as a singer or a lyricist: he just complains about it. The musical flourishes are more obvious and feel rather Disney Channel.
• Thalía ft. Prince Royce, "Te Perdiste Mi Amor"
• A third bachata #1 in a row -- the loss of regional music in the streaming #1s is really felt here -- although this is easily the worst of the three. Thalía is a pro but no bachatera, and Royce switching between English and Spanish shows just how much of his appeal is in his voice's tone rather than his control over it.

TITO EL BAMBINO & MARC ANTHONY, “¿POR QUÉ LES MIENTES?”

19th January, 2013

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The streaming-era chart can still be punctuated by one-week wonders, especially on songs like this that unite two proven hitmakers who can marshal their overlapping fanbases to stream their newest single. Although radio helped as well: the single was released in November, and it peaked at #1 on the Airplay chart two weeks before it made its appearance here. It would remain there for two further weeks, while the streaming-included chart moved on to a more resounding crossover hit.

I took Tito El Bambino's previous appearance here as a breath of fresh air, but this song harkens back to his first appearance back in 2009, another high-drama cumbiarengue song combining classic Latin tropical arrangements with modern plainspoken urbano -- unless I'm much mistaken, this is the first time that the word mierda (shit) has been heard at this chart's #1.

The full line is "me trataste como mierda ante la gente" (you treated me like shit in front of people), an accusation toward a former partner who is now attempting to cause drama about the singer's current partner; the entire song is a refusal to be pulled back into the self-pitying narcissistic vortex of a toxic ex, which would, I'll admit, be more attractive to me coming from women towards a presumptively male interlocutor. But Tito and Marc make it work, particularly Marc -- who had recently been in the news for his separation from Jennifer Lopez; art is not biography, but fans undoubtedly read this song in reference to her.

But then Marc Anthony could make anything sound gripping and real -- El Bambino's more vacuous tonality, digitally smoothed and auto-harmonized as it is, has to rely on reggaetón-trained rhythmic variation in order to even the playing field and not be outshined on his own song. He doesn't quite pull it off, in my estimation: the penultimate chorus, which he takes instead of Marc Anthony, feels weightless by comparison with all the others. But I have to applaud the construction and especially the arrangement of the song: with its glossy strings, punchy horns, and busy percussion, it has a classic Latin sound but enough of a modern bite to make it more than an exercise in nostalgia.

Airplay Watch:

• Tito El Bambino & Marc Anthony, "¿Por Qué Les Mientes?"
• Discussed above.