ANA GABRIEL, “LUNA”

19th February, 1994

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The strings come in all cinematic and lush, overwhelming in their voluptuous sensuality, and we are certainly no longer in the 1980s, or even in the early 90s. We have arrived at a high-water mark for certain iterations of popular culture, a period towards which people who were there at the time look back with increasing nostalgia, unrecoverable, a golden age of corporation-sponsored pop musc. The CD has definitively replaced the LP and the cassette, and the industry is reeling in the surplus that high markups, overextended running times, and the more-or-less constant discovery of previously untapped markets are providing. For established stars like Ana Gabriel, nothing is out of reach, no sound too expensive, the keyboard-and-plastic guitar of her first number one (which sounded glossy and burnished even then) now a distant memory.

And so she dives into memory and tradition, as so many of her peers did in the 90s, recovering old forms; the largest untapped market being, as always, the past. It was the decade of the reissue, and all music got its story told and retold through official corporate channels, unless there were artists with enough clout and certainty to tell history their way, to override the cults of authenticity and white-guy taste to bring up ghosts that didn't fit neatly into the Rolling Stone or Rough Guide versions of history. "Luna" is old-fashioned Mexican or even Spanish pop, a monologue addressed to the moon about the lover far away who is is, presumably, also staring at the same celestial object. It's a conceit as ancient as Homer (and for kids of my generation perhaps best remembered as the conceit behind the duet in An American Tail), and if the music isn't quite as ancient it's still venerable, from the Verdian strings to the "Spanish Harlem" guitar line keeping the beat.

Gabriel herself even seems muted with the weight of history; her signature Anglo-rock-derived rasp turns into an Italianate sob, and although the song is beautifully structured, a gesture towards classicism that ends up being a classic in its own right, she sort of gets lost in it. Which is one of the dangers of messing around with history; it takes a very strong voice not to drown in those tides.

ANA GABRIEL, “EVIDENCIAS”

8th August, 1992

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After the first few seconds of this song washed over me, I started writing this entry in my head. "Of course, just because Jon Secada felt like a level-up doesn't mean that the lands and seas have changed. Pop never develops in a straight line, and it's neither retrograde nor particularly surprising that the next song after the most modern-sounding one we've had to date sounds like it could have been recorded in 1985."

And if you've listened further than the first couple of verses, you should be laughing at that, because it's not the straightforward lovesick ballad it starts out being. Which doesn't mean it's ever entirely surprising — except during the middle eight, where we suddenly break into a funky tropical rhythm and some bluesy guitar licks — but once Gabriel gets revved up the song is a march, not a ballad, too uptempo even to be a power ballad. In the general shape of its chord structure, it recalls the AM pop of the 70s, and Gabriel's distinctive voice over that inevitably draws comparison to what Janis Joplin might have recorded in 1977 or 78, had she lived and gone on to work with Lindsey Buckingham or Richard Carpenter.

But of course this is 1992, and if the alternative explosion is felt at all at these highest reaches of Latin Pop, it is in the freedom to extend and play with song structure rather more than has been done before. The lyric is still highly traditional — she opens by saying "If I say I don't want to love you any more/It's because I love you" — but Ana Gabriel, no stranger to bucking pop convention, will throw royal fanfares, boogie-woogie piano, rumba timbales, and blues-rock power chords into her souped-up triumphal march of admitting defeat, and given her commercial track record, nobody will tell her differently.

VIKKI CARR & ANA GABRIEL, “COSAS DEL AMOR”

31st August, 1991

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Over the past forty years, Vikki Carr has had two almost entirely separate careers singing popular music. By which I don't mean that she had one, then she had another: she's maintained both of them side-by-side, and fans of one often know nothing of the other. Fans of traditional pop, especially the brassy 60s variety, know her as the pair of iron lungs behind "It Must Be Him," a 1967 ballad that grandly ignored all pop change since about 1953. She's maintained one foot in the trad-pop and easy listening tradition ever since, collaborating with jazz musicians, playing cabarets, and even dabbling in pop-country the way so many easy-listeners did in the 70s. But she was born Florencia Bisenta de Casillas Martinez Cardona in El Paso, Texas, and beginning in 1971 with "Que Sea Él" (the Spanish-language version of "It Must Be Him"), she maintained a Latin Pop career on the side. In the 1980s, her smooth vocals and penchant for ornate arrangements became hugely successful among the Spanish-language market, and she's cultivated that side of her career so well that she's one of the Dueñas Grandes of Latin Pop.

Here she duets with Ana Gabriel (and much as we may adore Vikki Carr, let's not kid ourselves that it was anything but Ana Gabriel's magnificent hot streak that kept this at #1 for two months) on a song where she plays the wiser older woman to Gabriel's passionately distraught young blood. Just in terms of construction, it's a solid duet, each woman getting a chance to shine, with call-and-response sections that highlight the textural differences between their voices and give the song tremendous forward momentum.

But with all that, it's still a ballad, a tremendously soppy one, and horrific in terms of its sexual politics (Carr more or less advises Gabriel to strip herself of personality in order to be whatever the man she's afraid of losing wants her to be). Love, as seemingly always in Latin Pop, is presented as tragedy, an arbitrary grand passion that will inevitably betray and leave desolate. It's just easier for me to take when it's a man complaining about it.

ANA GABRIEL, “ES DEMASIADO TARDE”

8th December, 1990

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Those who have followed the low-level mystery of format release in this travelogue may be intrigued to learn that although this song reached the top of the Hot Latin chart in December 1990 and stayed there through February of 1991, I can find no release of the song dating back earlier than 1992, on a greatest-hits compilation called Personalidad. Whether this is because the Internet in its infinite wisdom has overlooked recording the existence of any Latin single release before about 1994, or because the makers of tracklistings of Rapidshare downloads (which gentlemen and scholars are the only people anywhere who bother giving discographical details on artists that the rest of the Internet is too bougie, white and indie-rock to give a fuck about) got something wrong somewhere, I can't say.

But Ana Gabriel, though one of the more frequent visitors to the top spot here, is also one of the most welcome presences whenever she appears. I've complained passive-aggressively about the domination of 1990 by ballads, and while this is undeniably a ballad — it even starts with those same glistening, watery keyboards that every goddamn song since "Volaré" has started with — it has stronger roots than most of this stuff. You see, it's a ranchera song.

I note from a quick perusal of my tags that I haven't had occasion to talk about ranchera before, so I'll do it now. The easiest shorthand is to call ranchera "Mexican country music," and while it does serve some of the same functions and even grew out of some of the same cultural conditions (the word itself means "from the ranch," i.e. cowboy music), its roots are as much in showbiz as in the fields and hills of Mexican labor. The first ranchera stars were singing actors like Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete (cf. Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and the "western" half of country-and-western), and cowboy hats are just as required and just as affected in ranchera as they are in Nashville.

This being the overproduced early 90s, of course, the signifiers of Golden Age ranchera — the moaning horns, the keening accordion, the weeping vocals — aren't present, but the strict timekeeping of the guitar and the melodic form is puro jalisquero. And Ana's singing, pitched halfway between her usual tuff brio and the sob of tradition, would be campy if it didn't also feel so honest. "It's too late" is the English translation of the title, but even if I didn't understand Spanish, that sense of ravishing, inevitable loss hangs over her performance, giving it a shiver of real sorrow that the ballads we've been hearing have all been missing, however well-sung.

ANA GABRIEL, “QUIÉN COMO TÚ”

5th May, 1990

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It's possible that anything would have been a disappointment after "Simplemente Amigos," but while Ana Gabriel's throaty howl is still in fine form, and the production floats and soars with all the shiny bombast of early-90s rock balladry, as a song "Quién Como Tú" (tr. "who like you") is too lightweight to really live up to the emotion she invests it with.

The song addresses someone (man? woman? the sexual ambiguity that haunted "Simplemente Amigos" is still present, but that might only be because second-person pronouns aren't gendered in Spanish) who is in love with (and also sleeping with) someone else (again, possessive and objective pronouns aren't gendered), and the singer appears to feel a certain way about it all. But it's difficult to say exactly what; the only expression of emotion she makes is "I have nothing to hope for though I'm left in the air." It's unclear who she was hoping for, the lover or the beloved, and though the ambiguity neatly serves to fit just about any situation to which listeners might wish to apply it, as a standalone song it's unsatisfying.

Lyrically, anyway. As I said, the production's gloriously bombastic, with lovely plastic-sounding guitar lines giving way to big drums and strings and hair-metal backgrounds. Ana Gabriel's certainly in no danger of losing the title of queen of Mexican pop here; but the first cracks in her marble edifice are visible.

ANA GABRIEL, “SIMPLEMENTE AMIGOS”

2nd September, 1989

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Well, this was unexpected.

Not the fact of Ana Gabriel's reappearance in this travelogue (I'd peeked ahead), or the fact that she was peddling another ballad — according to my theory, September is prime ballad territory — but the song's subject matter.

In these posts I've usually started out by talking about the sound of the song, then worked my way into discussing the lyrics; since Spanish isn't my first language, that's often seemed like the most natural way to approach them. But there are times when the lyrics suggest so much, and are so startlingly different from what I in my ignorance would have expected, that they insist on being dealt with first. Here, then, are the lyrics to "Simplemente Amigos" in full (my translation); I'll meet you again below:

ONLY FRIENDS

Always, like usual, from day to day the same

There's nothing to say in front of people like this

Friends, only friends and nothing more

But who knows in reality what happens between the two

If each one when night falls feigns a goodbye

How much I would give to cry to them of our love

Tell them that when the door closes we love each other uncontrollably

That we wake up embracing, hungering to go on loving each other

But I know that in reality they won't accept our love

Always, with looks we always give each other all our love

We speak without speaking, everything is silent where we walk

Friends, only friends and nothing more

But who knows in reality, what happens between we two

If each of us when night falls feigns a goodbye

How much I would give to cry to them of our love

Tell them that when the door closes we love each other uncontrollably

That we wake up embracing, hungering to keep on loving each other

But I know that in reality they won't accept our love....

No, oh no, they won't accept our love

No, oh no, they won't accept our love....

I might as well confess that I'm generally unsympathetic to the pop convention whereby every love is threatened by an unspecified They. The origin of that convention, the girl-group songs of the sixties, grew out of a specific time and place, the class-conscious (which often went musically coded as race-conscious) bourgeoisie of the American Northeast, and had specific enemies in mind: parents, school boards, The Man. Even Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach" located the resisting force in a character; but more often since the 80s pop expresses a generalized truculence aimed at anyone who would in any way sideline or doubt the Intensity of What We're Feeling. Even with a song I love very much, like Alicia Keys' "No One," I'm always left with the nagging feeling that she's being overdramatic: you ain't no Capulet, girl, hush up and live your damn life. Exactly no one is stopping you.

But I do not feel that way about this song. The reason should be obvious: even though the song is scrupulously careful not to give away any identity tags about the "we," the psychology of the closet is too obvious to go unremarked. With the benefit of hindsight, she could hardly have been more blatant if she had sung "amigas simplemente amigas." (I, uh, don't have to explain gendered nouns, do I?)

Ana Gabriel has always stated that she sang it in solidarity with her gay fans, and I see no reason to doubt her; the internet is rife with speculation — and plenty of flat-out assertions — that she's gay, but she says she loves women as people, not as lovers. It hardly matters; her gay following is large and devoted, and she doesn't have to be a lesbian to be an outspoken defender of gay rights in the Mexican media. (Her vocal style, it turns out, is only one of the things she has in common with Melissa Etheridge.)

From what I can tell, the song has long been understood as an anthem of gay identity in Latin Pop, even if people who wish to believe otherwise are able to do so; and Gabriel's assumption of it as one of her signature songs is something I did not expect to encounter so early in this travelogue. Clearly that has more to do with my own prejudices and assumptions — Latin audiences are more conservative, gay rights didn't really gather steam until the 90s in Latin culture, pop stars are normatively heterosexual — than with reality. (And the fact that the word "reality" is repeated twice, with opposite meanings, in the lyrics of "Simplemente Amigos" is no accident: in pop, reality depends a lot on who's looking.)

But I'm glad to acknowledge reality over my assumptions. Frankly, that undertow makes the song a lot better, far more intense and gripping than some half-hearted run through a memory of West Side Story.

ANA GABRIEL, “AY AMOR”

23rd January, 1988

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Fifteen songs in, this song is only our third to feature a female vocalist. I don't know what your understanding of pop is, but mine is more or less predicated the female voice. Which is among the reasons that taking this travelogue has been both educational and challenging for me: I've had to patiently work out the differences between hearty male singers that I would otherwise instinctively dismiss as "all the same." But Ana Gabriel cannot possibly be mistaken for Daniela Romo or Rocío Dúrcal, and it's not only the timbre of her voice that sets her apart.

The immediate comparison I want to make with this song is to "Total Eclipse Of The Heart." There are obvious points of reference: the big, crashing production, the rock-operatic melody, and Gabriel's own raspy but perfectly controlled voice; but where Jim Steinman and Bonnie Tyler stretched out, luxuriating in an operatic running time (nearly seven minutes!) and setting several themes against each other, Gabriel remains a pop traditionalist, singing a spare three-minute-plus song as simplified and direct as the title (which translates to "oh love").

She wrote it herself; she sang it in the 1987 OTI Festival (the Latin Pop version of the Eurovision contest, which ran from 1972-2000) and won the chance to represent Mexico in the finals — it didn't win, but the song was a major hit in both Mexico and the U.S., tying with Daniela Romo's "De Mí Enamórate" for the longest time spent at the top of the Hot Latin chart yet (fourteen weeks) and not incidentally launching her as a major pop star in the Latin American market. (She remains the Mexican cantadora [female singer] with the highest ever international sales.)

And it's the sort of song which inspires that kind of response: not only does it sound big — we've had that before, from Romo and Julio Iglesias — it sounds unmistakably modern. The much-bemoaned-by-me thinness and plasticness of 80s Latin Pop is nowhere to be found here; this isn't just a ballad, it's a power ballad, and Gabriel sings it like a rock star. It made her one; and as Wikipedia puts it, she became a success in three separate fields: Rock En Español, Latin Pop, and Ranchera. She will appear in at least two of these guises again (and again) throughout this tale; but rarely sounding better (I'm going to guess) than she does here.

That scratchy, impassioned vocal style, in 1988 falling decidedly out of favor in Anglophone pop circles (Bonnie Tyler, Kim Carnes, and the 80s Tina Turner were about its last exponents in female pop, unless you count Marianne Faithfull's cult) would have a sizable impact on Latin Pop over the next decade; rock was not yet uncontroversial in many traditional communities, and while the most flamboyant inheritor of Ana Gabriel's technique will not be a part of our history (as of early 2010, anyway; you never know), this is an early loosening of the metaphorical tie.

The lyrics are more or less standard stuff; Gabriel was not yet one of the great poets of Latin Pop. (Will she ever be? Stay tuned.) The dramatic heft of the production isn't quite matched by a chorus that runs "Oh, love/I don't know what it is about your look/That day after day conquers me more and more." (Though it, uh, sounds better in Spanish.) But I do admire one line in the second verse: "Y busco entre mil cosas una que me hable de tí" ("and I search through a thousand things for one that speaks to me of you"), which is such a perfect encapsulation of a universal but very specific emotion that I have high hopes for Ana Gabriel's many return engagements on this stage.