J BALVIN, “GINZA”

17th Oct, 2015

Wiki | Video

I haven't been mentioning here whether or how these songs have intersected with my previous critical attention, because I have to imagine that that is only interesting to me, but I'm going to waive that forbearance in this case because I do think it says something noteworthy about the song that "Ginza" was at #10 on my year-end list of songs for 2015, a year in which I was as disconnected from the radio, the wider Latin audience, and what my peers were paying attention to, as I have ever been. I was actually surprised to learn that I would end up writing about it for this blog: it seemed so unlike the kinds of things that I had a hazy impression would be clogging up the mid-2010s once I finally reached them. (In 2015, I was still mired in 1999 here, and thought I might be forever.) 

But "Ginza" pushed through that disconnect thanks to the Singles Jukebox, where I compared Balvin negatively to the masculine authoritativeness of Daddy Yankee and Wisin (not yet hearing how he and his South American peers were remaking reggaetón into a more flexible, bubbly pop genre), but much more than Balvin's mushmouthed simper, the fizzy, bubbly electro sounds of the beat (courtesy of Colombian producers Sky Rompiendo and Mosty) stuck with me, an insinuating groove that fell exactly in line with the music I was admiring most at the time, including Drake's "Hotline Bling" -- both of which were taking inspiration from the inventive, lower-key dancehall and soca riddims then emerging. 

The song is named after an Instagram filter Balvin used to use a lot (remember Instagram filters?), which itself was named, of course, after the high-end shopping district in Tokyo; it never makes an appearance in the lyrics, which are very straightforward horny dance-as-metaphor-for-romance verses. It's a back-to-basics approach to reggaetón that feels consonant with punk stripping away the artifice and bombast of dinosaur rock -- or rather, more accurately to both rock and reggaetón history, replacing it with different, and perhaps more marketable to key demographics, forms of artifice and bombast.

It's noteworthy that the video takes cues from video games (especially Assassin's Creed) before dropping into a standard neon-lit dance space brought to you very aggressively by Pepsi Cola and Coors Lite -- it's a deliberately internationalist, middle-class, brand-friendly approach that has none of old school Puerto Rican reggaetón's up-from-below need to prove itself or pride in a racialized minority identity.

And it's the song that made Balvin a superstar; "Ay Vamos" had been #1 for a week, while "Ginza" sat atop the chart for 22 weeks (the longest reign for a song credited to only one person to date), and was equally huge across Latin America and Europe. It's still his all-time most successful song, and a decade later there are still thousands of reggaetón songs released every year in its image.

Airplay Watch:

• J Balvin, "Ginza"
• Discussed above.
• Farruko ft. Shaggy & Nicky Jam, "Sunset"
• Reggaetón meets reggae proper, thanks to Jamaican guest Shaggy. This is Puerto Rican singer Farruko's first appearance here in the lead position, although his guests steal the show.
• Maluma, "Borró Cassette"
• Another entry from the mid-decade Colombian wave of pop-reggaetón, featuring a handsome young man who can handle both vulnerable singing and gruff toasting.
• La Adictiva Banda San Jose de Mesillas, "Después de Ti, ¿Quién?"
• A slowie from a popular banda sinaloense. Singer Memo Garza has a lovely croon, but it's the melting woodwind-and-brass arrangements that get to me.
• Álvaro Soler ft. Jennifer Lopez, "El Mismo Sol"
• A Europop hit (sung by a Spaniard, produced in Germany) given a western-hemispherical push with the addition of J. Lo. Flamenco handclaps can't disguise the oompah bounce.
• Daddy Yankee, "Vaivén"
• The dance-forward Zumbafication of 2000s-era reggaetón continues apace, although Daddy Yankee seems a bit more inspired on the verses than he has lately.
• Yandel, "Encantadora"
• Yandel's most successful single as a solo act, letting the midtempo lope of the dembow riddim simmer sultrily as he sings about a predatory woman.
• Prince Royce, "Culpa al Corazón"
• Royce has never sounded more like Romeo, both in terms of literary songwriting and virtuosic accompaniment; which means he's still very much in his shadow.
• Carlos Vives, "Las Cosas de la Vida"
• The feel-good champion is back with another feel-good anthem; this one leans more towards rock than vallenato in his characteristic stew, but with a euphonium solo.

NICKY JAM & ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “EL PERDÓN”

21st Mar, 2015

Wiki | Video

The mid-2010s return of reggaetón with a new center of focus in Colombia rather than Puerto Rico (see J Balvin two weeks ago) now features reggaetón's first comeback story, compelling enough to put this song at #1 for 30 weeks.

Nicky Jam, born in Massachussetts to Puerto Rican and Dominican parents but whose early years were chaotic and ended up having to support himself in Puerto Rico at the age of eleven, released his first Spanish-language rap EP at fourteen years old in 1995 -- the same year he got hooked on cocaine. He was in a reggaetón duo with Daddy Yankee for a bit in the early 2000s before his substance abuse issues became too much for the older star to deal with; Yankee went on to rule the world with "Gasolina," and Nicky spiralled in relative obscurity, almost dying from an overdose in 2010.

It was his relocation to Colombia -- and specifically Medellín, Balvin's hometown -- that turned his life around. Colombians, having only received reggaetón from a distance, treated him like the legend he never really was in Puerto Rico (shades of the UK's reaction to US music in the last midcentury), and he got into the romanticism of vallenato, which encouraged him to sing instead of just rapping. Surrounded by Colombian collaborators, he got clean and started making new music again -- and when Enrique Iglesias came calling, hung up on him because he assumed it was a prank.

Eventually, of course, they worked it out. "El Perdón" (forgiveness) was written exclusively by Nicky -- Enrique generously forewent his usual writing credit -- and although it's literally a song about spiralling after a romantic breakup and asking for an ex's pardon, it's also very easily legible as a song addressing Nicky's own history in the music industry (and maybe especially, for fans hungry for a good gossip narrative, with Daddy Yankee), proving that he's changed. His singing voice, rougher and flatter than Enrique's, is authoritative but vulnerable, and the fact that the entire song is sung, with no rap verses, is an indicaton of reggaetón's future sustainability as a flexible genre outside of its original hip-hop/dancehall lineage.

It's also, of course, an indication of Colombia's emblanquecimiento -- whitening -- of reggaetón, as several observers have noted. It's not a coincidence that Afro-Colombian musicians have tended to draw more directly from Jamaican, Dominican, or US Black sources than from reggaetón in the years since. But that's for another day.

In the meantime, "El Perdón"'s reign at #1 almost exactly matched all of Daddy Yankee's #1 reigns combined before it. The listening public had made its preference clear: not only was reggaetón back, but reggaetón romántica specifically was its top priority.

This is foreshadowing.

Airplay Watch:

• Pitbull ft. Gente de Zona, "Piensas (Dile la Verdad)"
• Cuban expat pop-reggaetón summit with a heavy montuno piano hook. Pitbull's genial ringmastering is getting a bit long in the tooth by this point, but Gente de Zona do enough to keep the energy up. 
• Nicky Jam & Enrique Iglesias, "El Perdón"
• Discussed above.
• Juanes, "Juntos (Together)"
• Throwback cumbia-rock blend for the soundtrack to a Disney movie about a Latino track team in the 1980s coached by Kevin Costner. Perfectly adequate.
• Wisin & Carlos Vives ft. Daddy Yankee, "Nota de Amor"
• Cumbia, vallenato and reggaetón are all represented in another Colombia–Puerto Rico summit. DY casually blows both his collaborators out of the water.
• Romeo Santos, "Hilito"
• Chiming bachata that didn't rate a music video. Dwoopy synth sounds introducing the middle eight make it stand out from Santos' typical classy, narcissistic eroticism.
• Daddy Yankee, "Sígueme y Te Sigo"
• As if recognizing the new youthful middle-class appetite for reggaetón, the (forty-year-old) reining champ returns with a song about social-media popularity, with a video set in a high school.
• Yandel, "Calentura"
• Horny, half-rapped reggaetón with big sine-wave synths is still big business in the Puerto Rican wing of the industry; entirely of a piece with Yandel's recent solo work.
• Gente de Zona ft. Marc Anthony, "La Gozadera"
• Marc Anthony becomes the most recent enormous Latin star to co-sign Gente de Zona's party-hearty unity-flavored reggaetón. Salsa accents included to make him feel at home.
• Ricky Martin ft. Yotuel, "La Mordidita"
• Fun, flavorful electroswing-flavored merengue from an elder statesman who simply refuses to age and a rapper from the venerable Cuban hip-hop group Orishas. 
• Wisin, "Si lo Hacemos Bien"
• Dramatic, paranoid reggaetón in classic Wisin y Yandel fashion, just with Wisin singing the Yandel parts, which makes it less smoldering and more tough-guy vulnerable.

ARIEL CAMACHO Y LOS PLEBES DEL RANCHO, “EL KARMA”

14th Mar, 2015

Wiki | Video

Mexican regional music is so heavily drowned out by urban Caribbean sounds in the streaming era that it almost exclusively takes an extraordinary event for it to break through to the #1 spot even for a single week. In this case, that extraordinary event was the death of Ariel Camacho in a car accident on February 25, 2015, at the age of twenty-two.

Camacho had been one of the most promising figures in Mexican regional of the 2010s, bringing attention to the little-heard sierreño (tr. of the mountain range) genre. He began his career as a teenager by posting faceless videos to social media platforms in which he played a twelve-string guitar and sang songs by elders like Miguel y Miguel as well as his own compositions; they earned him enough popularity that a Mexican record label sought him out and got him to form a trio with friends on rhythm guitar and sousaphone. Their spare, almost skeletal sound was a novelty in a musical universe dominated by large-scale banda arrangements, and Camacho's songwriting, which dipped into the violent glamor of the narcocorrido as well as more traditional songs of love and heartbreak, was raw but promising. After two minor-label singles in 2013, his debut album El Karma was released in both Mexico and the US in the fall of 2014, produced by regional star Gerardo Ortíz (who has appeared twice in my Airplay Watch), with the title song receiving a relatively lavish video.

They did well enough that Camacho and his Plebes shot another four videos by the end of the year, a rate not unusual in the high-turnover, newly social media-driven world of Mexican regional, especially one aiming at a youth audience. When Camacho died, there was enough recorded material banked to release a posthumous album -- after that, Los Plebes hired a new singer and continued on as Los Plebes de Ariel Camacho, eventually splintering even further into configurations that won't trouble us here.

But the mourning that drove this nearly year-old song (the single went to streaming services on August 5, 2014, but the video had been uploaded to YouTube on March 11th, 2014, though I couldn't swear to when it was made public) to the top of the streaming chart was not mindless: Camacho y los Plebes had released a new single the day before his death, which you might expect to have received the bulk of the outpouring. But "Te Metiste" is a reverent, uncomplicated love song; "El Karma," the stark, first-person tale of a violent killer whose drug trafficking wealth has made him a target for reprisals having his family taken ransom, and whose attempt to kill the kidnappers ends in his own death, with the grim final line "Nadie de la parca se puede escapar" (Nobody can escape their fate), was a much more fitting memorial. 

But also, it had the benefit of already being familiar to his audience: the song had first been noticed in any of Billboard's charts back in August (the Digital Sales chart, on the single release) and grown slowly before reaching a natural premortem peak at #16 on the Hot Latin chart in January. In their article about the event, Billboard noted that its one-week #1 status was driven heavily by streaming, with YouTube receiving 86% of the traffic. It was the first Mexican regional #1 of the streaming era; it will be quite a while before there's another.

Airplay Watch:

• Ricky Martin, "Disparo al Corazón"
• A curious power ballad driven by banjo as much as the standard swelling strings, drum hits and keyboards. It's a generic enough love song that the video shows it applying to parental as well as romantic love, but Martin's committed-as-always performance gives nothing away.

J BALVIN, “AY VAMOS”

7th Mar, 2015

Wiki | Video

Picture a crusty, several-generations-old image of a Rat Fink-esque illustration of a yellow smiley face screaming so widely that its gums show, spittle in the corners of its mouth, over the words LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOOO in Impact typeface.

Reggaetón's second generation -- at least as recorded by the top of the Hot Latin chart -- begins here, with a white Colombian applying the low-key fuckboy attitude (not to mention nasal singing) popularized by Drake to the head-bobbing skank of the Caribbean. It's over ten years old at this point, and it comes ten years after Puerto Rican reggaetón's initial high-energy breakout into the broader Latin-music conversation, and twenty-five years after the dembow riddim was first applied to Spanish-language dancehall by Panamanians in New York. But this is the point where it becomes clear that reggaetón was not just a late-2000s early-2010s fad, but an ethos, a tent at least as big as salsa or merengue was before it, as generational a dividing line as hip-hop or house was in the 1980s and 90s, as normal for young musicians to latch onto and build an identity around as rock had been in the 1960s.

José Álvaro Osorio Balvin had been born into an upper-middle-class family in Medellín in 1985, but after his father's business went under, the family was forced to move into a rougher neighborhood, where Balvin learned how to code-switch between the rich and working class. In the late 90s and early 2000s, he spent time in the United States, first as a privileged exchange student and then as an illegal visa-overstayer doing construction work. He began rapping in bald imitation of Daddy Yankee at the same time he was studying business at a prestigous universtity back home in Medellín, putting out his first underground record in 2004.

That tension between upperclass origins and underclass coding has remained in his music -- not unlike the Torontonian I compared him to above -- and has also made him more appealling to the Latin American middle class who always kept the original reggaetón generation at the kind of arm's length that white suburban US did with hip-hop. Puerto Rico -- a small, impoverished, racialized appendage of the United States -- is one thing; Colombia -- a large, relatively wealthy nation and one of the five epicenters of 21st-century pan-Latin media -- another. J Balvin, with his European features, economics degree and Nirvana tattoos, was safe for 2015, within the constantly-shifting meaning of safe within the global urban-capitalist socioeconomic imaginary, in ways that Daddy Yankee was not safe for 2005.

All of which is a lot of weight to put on the back of "Ay Vamos" (Hey, let's go), a midtempo electronic reggae song with a nagging "ahhhh, ahhhh" hook and mumble-rap lyrics about talking a girlfriend out of fighting with him. The dembow riddim is foregrounded in a way it hasn't been at #1 since at least Chino y Nacho in 2010, which means that Balvin gets to ride a loping beat contrasted agains the one-drop organ skank, sounding laid-back and cool where the Yankees, Wisins, Yandels, and Omars of the world have all been big, bombastic, and hyper in recent years, trying to impress with the scale of their achievements. Balvin sees that the future is more fugitive than all that busyness: intimacy has its own attraction.

Airplay Watch:

• Maná ft. Shakira, "Mi Verdad"
• Discussed in the previous entry.

MANÁ FT. SHAKIRA, “MI VERDAD”

28th Feb, 2015

Wiki | Video

A pair of Nineties veteran acts joining up for a laid-back swayalong feels like the kind of thing that the streaming-era chart had no room for anymore; and the fact that it only went to #1 for a week in February 2015, one of a series of one-week wonders in late winter sandwiched in between monumental chart runs, seems more a product of chance (or perhaps of Billboard tinkering with its chart calculus) than of true blanket popularity. (On the airplay chart, it managed a whole two weeks at #1.)

Not that I'm complaining! While I've been largely cool on Maná in these pages, I've consistently adored Shakira, and maybe predictably, I find that her sweet-and-sour voice is exactly the ingredient needed to pull Maná out of their latter-day doldrums and sound vividly, achingly sincere, like a sharp, high clarinet cutting through thickets of droning strings.

The lyric is constructed on a dialectic of "mentiras" (lies) and "verdad" (truth) -- the verses list all the falsity and betrayal that exists in the world, from cheating lovers to lying politicians, while the chorus calls the eternal romantic "you" the singer's truth, a refuge from the painful deceptiveness at large in the rest of existence. Although in the video, Shakira caresses a visibly pregnant belly (she gave birth to her second child the month before the single's release), transforming the "you" from romantic to parental love. And in the comments on the video, that seems to be the favorite reading: many family relationships and losses are related there.

The bolero rhythm underlying the verses, and the foursquare rock rhythm of the choruses, have their own implications (the tricksy, scheming Afro-Latin tradition versus the open, honest, white-coded sound?), although Maná are a rock band and believe in rock dynamics above everything. But this is their farewell (as of this writing) to this travelogue, so I can't be sorry that they brought on my favorite Colombian ringer to leave a better taste in my mouth than they might have otherwise.

Airplay Watch:

• Maná ft. Shakira, "Mi Verdad"
• Discussed above.