ALEJANDRO SAENZ, “NO ME COMPARES”

8th September, 2012

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Including this song, there are four Hot Latin #1s left until Billboard changes its source for chart calculation from radio airplay to streaming data. This will have a flattening effect on the top of the chart, with a decade to come of months-long reigns of whatever song with the "Latin" medatata tag is most popular at parties and in clubs, occasionally interrupted for a week at a time by some viral meme or another. My entries for the entirety of 2012 have been functioning as a kind of valedictory for what the chart used to be: diverse, disunified, serving widely different audiences and admitting women at its upper reaches far more frequently than  it ever will once streaming rules. But these last four songs before I start engaging almost exclusively with thumping male bravado have been looming almost as ominously as the Return of Reggaetón has, and it's because they too are thumping male bravado, just in a different mode than is suited for clubs.

I've enjoyed, or at worst been pleasantly surprised by, Alejandro Sanz' previous entries here, both as a duet partner for Shakira and on his own, but this impassioned ballad betrays little of his literate musical eclecticism, drawing musically from early-2000s electro-acoustic adult contmporary and lyrically from the exhausted tradition of men bellowing after a lost love. True, the lyrics are far more poetic, with evocative and even provocative imagery in a deeply Spanish tradition, than is typical in pop, but they remain a mere collection of phrases tracking a conventional sentiment and have no surprises to give. Sanz is in fine voice, using his flamenco-descended "gitano" rasp to undeniable effect, but the one-note moodiness of the song means that his performance is also unsurprising, just builds along with the music's conventional swell from mopey intro to self-justifying chorus.

Still, I will miss hearing from Spain on this travelogue. I have mostly merely tolerated the contributions of the Iberian peninsula as compared to the hungrier, more vibrant Latin American scenes, but just as the Anglophone U.S. charts have frequently been at their most interesting when there was a lot of cross-pollination from the UK (the mid-60s, the early 80s), European insularity and self-regard can apply a pseudo-sophistication to the fundamentally Western-hemispherical forms whose absence will be felt once the top of the chart gets turned over almost entirely to tropical bangers.

ALEJANDRO SANZ FT. ALICIA KEYS, “LOOKING FOR PARADISE”

21st November, 2009

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First Shakira, then Nelly Furtado, now Alicia Keys popping up at the top spot on the Hot Latin chart -- I was not, in 2009, aware enough of trends or discourse to realize that this was not representative of a new flourishing in Latin pop, but rather the end of an era in mainstream US pop. All three women had broken through into Anglophone stardom in 2001, with "Whenever, Wherever," "I'm Like a Bird," and "Fallin'," respectively; but eight years later, none of them remained at the top of the Anglophone heap, and the more forgiving Latin charts provided a graceful descent from their 2000s-era peaks.

That's one way to look at it, anyway, and probably the one that the Anglocentric readership of this blog (such as it has), with their knowledge that Furtado and Keys have been irrelevant chartwise for the last decade, plus Shakira having mostly disappeared from Anglo airwaves, would probably naturally assume. The way I looked at it at the time was no doubt idealistic, and probably also condescending to the already rich history of Latin pop: I thought maybe it presaged more interconnection between the English- and Spanish-language sides of the industry, a world in which songs largely in Spanish could have as much chance with English-speaking audiences as songs with the amount of English as this one had had with Spanish-speaking ones.

I wasn't wrong, necessarily -- but it took longer than I expected, with a heavy swing towards masculine voices in both Spanish-language and English-language chart pop, to happen. A kind of masculinity that Alejandro Sanz, gruff and limited as his voice is compared to Keys' professionally liquid tones, could not represent. His name is before the "Ft.," and the single was taken from his album Paraíso Express, but Keys' is the first voice you hear in the duet and arguably makes the most impact in the song. Which fits in fine with Sanz' past performance here: he's a great collaborator who knows how to make his duet partner stand out. The jangly backing track was supposed to evoke the British Invasion of the Sixties, but it sounds to my ears more like the commercial jangle of post-R.E.M. Nineties bands like Gin Blossoms. Which is fine (I loved the Gin Blossoms when I was fifteen and they were all over the radio), but by belonging to neither world it only emphasizes the difference in tonality and tradition between Sanz, with his flamenco-derived rasp, and Keys, with her polite R&B dramatics.

Of course I've been excited in these pages before about songs that mash global musical traditions together, and there's a spark of that here, but it never fully catches into a full conflagration. Maybe Alicia Keys is too limited a singer, maybe Alejandro Sanz is too polite to push her, maybe they're both simply taking the easy route: but even the straightforward, literal English lyrics and the cerebal, conceptual Spanish-language ones seem like both of them are singing past each other rather than to each other, much less together. Whatever the future of Latin pop is, it's not this.

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.

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.

SHAKIRA FT. ALEJANDRO SANZ, “LA TORTURA”

4th June, 2005

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Although I love it, I ended my summary of "La Camisa Negra" last week by admitting that it is, after all, only a minor classic. That is the limit to which guitar-led rock music can ever aspire in the twenty-first century: major classics require more of an electronic kick.

And so we arrive here, to the single that set the pattern which so much of the Hot Latin chart would live up to over the next decade and more. It is the first reggaetón #1 proper -- which is to say, the first song to hit #1 which uses the beat universally recognized in its moment as belonging to reggaetón -- which also makes it one in a long list of colonial trend-jackers to be more commercially successful, and earlier, than the originators of the music. Like the Original Dixieland Jass Band, Pat Boone, and Vanilla Ice before them, Shakira and Alejandro Sanz are coded white (Sanz isn't even Latin American, but straight-up Spanish) and so able to break barriers that the musicians of color -- usually descended from African slaves -- who created their various genres could not.

So it's a testament to Shakira's (and to a lesser extent Sanz's) ability to synthesize a wide range of musical material in order to articulate a genuine artistic vision that the song is actually good -- much better, indeed, than "Tiger Rag," Boone's version of "Ain't That a Shame," or "Ice Ice Baby."

The narrative impetus of the song is one we've heard hundreds of times over the course of this travelogue: Sanz plays a man who comes crawling back to his former lover, begging her to take him back; "Yo sé que no he sido un santo/Pero lo puedo arreglar amor" (I know I haven't been a saint/But I can make it right, love), while she acknowledges the pain he has caused in the classicist ranchera-inflected chorus: "Ay, amor me duele tanto" (Oh, love hurts me so). But if it the song were a ranchera ballad being buoyed by swooping strings or an oompah rhythm, it would end in a reconciliation: his self-description as a bird who must fly (consciously evoking classic Southern Rock imagery) returning to its nest would be the final word. But it's not a ranchera, it's a reggaetón, and the democratic bump and grind of the music allows her to give as good as she gets: "Not by bread alone does man live/And I can't live on excuses." The song closes with a striking reversal, as she acknowledges that yes, it was torture to lose him, but he can go on crying for pardon, she will cry for him no more.

This is a turning point in more than one way, not only for this blog, but for all of Latin pop. I've repeatedly expressed, sometimes at wearying length, how gross and artificial I find so much of the romantic machismo that has has recurred in the lyrics of song after song over the twenty years since the chart began in 1986. Exceptions to stifling gender conventions have not necessarily been hard to find -- Juan Gabriel, Ana Gabriel, Juan Luis Guerra, Ricky Martin, and Shakira's early work stand out -- but they have been just that, exceptions to a pervasive cultural narrative that it is the man's prerogative to act, and then beg forgiveness, while it is the woman's lot to feel pain, but ultimately to believe in love and forgive. I don't want to suggest that this is a narrative unique to Latin music. Of course you can find a lot of the same attitudes throughout rock, soul, country, and hip-hop; but Latin machismo, perhaps because it has been so thoroughly analyzed by Latin feminists, is particularly easy to identify. Shakira is thoroughly aware of that  analysis -- the titles of her 2005 and 2006 albums, Fijación Oral and Oral Fixation, are even a pun on male sexual inadequacy -- and as a declared feminist herself, her refusal to let the man off the hook draws a line in the sand.

Of course it would be too much to claim that from here on out there will be no more machismo in Hot Latin #1s -- the coming wave of reggaetón will certainly have its regressive elements, and there will be rock and banda and more besides -- but the sheer scale of "La Tortura"'s success means that it had an inevitably outsized influence on the culture, and that it will be harder for any male singer to play the regretful cheater without Sanz's deliciously weaselly performance ringing in his head. Because the twenty-five weeks it spent at the top of the chart accounts for nearly half of 2005, and even with its sales split between physical and digital it still ranks as one of the top-selling singles of all time. It was the first-ever entirely Spanish-language video to be aired by the flagship MTV channel (and I haven't even mentioned the video, which goes into greater detail about the narrative between Shakira and Sanz, including a remarkable choreography which draws parallels between the convulsions of sobbing and of orgasm), and it still sounds thoroughly modern when much else that hit #1 in 2005 sounds increasingly trapped in the amber of the past.

There will be much more space to discuss reggaetón in the future, including the first authentic Puerto Rican reggaetón #1 coming up soon; but for now the fact that it is the soundtrack to even a qualified example of feminist liberation should be noted. Reggaetón, like all other genres, will have generations; and it will be useful, once enough time has passed, to remember its popular roots.