AVENTURA, “POR UN SEGUNDO”

31st January, 2009

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The first new #1 of 2009 is a generational marker. Bachata has appeared here before -- as one element of Juan Luis Guerra's postmodern mélange, as another flavor of nostalgia for Gloria Estefan to swim around in, as a tropical accent for Maná to wear and shrug off as casually as U2 had the blues -- but it has always been handled with the reverence of tradition or nostalgia. Now, as the widescreen r&b-infused bachata of Aventura crashes into the top spot, bachata has become thoroughly pop, vivid and urgent and capable of containing multitudes. But the title of this single's parent album, The Last, signals what stage Aventura has reached in the lifespan of a pop band, and it's only been our misfortune that they haven't appeared on this travelogue sooner.

Aventura formed in the Bronx in the 1990s, where brothers Lenny (guitar) and Max (bass) Santos  developed a unique and innovative style, borrowing from rock and funk to beef up the traditional bachata sound for the hip-hop generation. Singers and songwriters Anthony "Romeo" Santos and his cousin Henry (despite the common last name, they aren't related to Lenny and Max) developed melodic lines more like contemporary r&b than traditional bachata, and Romeo's fluid, angelic singing style and pinup good looks made it easy to market Aventura as a bachata boy band within the Dominican diaspora.

Their first big single, "Obsesión" featuring Judy Santos (also no relation), was an unlikely European smash in 2002, though it didn't make the Hot Latin chart at all, only scraping the bottom of Tropical Airplay. But by 2005, they were collaborating with Don Omar on "Ella y Yo", a bachata/reggaetón hybrid that hit #2 on the Hot Latin chart during the epic reign of "La Tortura". Two years later, the adorable "Mi Corazoncito" got stuck at the same spot behind "Me Enamora". Aventura had broken out of the bachata ghetto and were Latin hitmakers whose audience was only growing: The Last was eagerly anticipated by a ravenous fanbase, and its debut single, "Por Un Segundo" hitting the top of the Latin charts in its third week of release as a digital download was something of a coronation: "the kings," as Romeo murmurs while Lenny arpeggiates into eternity.

Because "Por Un Segundo" is that rare phenomenon, the overdue #1 that actually deserves to be there just as much as any of its (wildly popular and beloved) predecessors that fell short. Giselle Moya's wordless vocal counterpoints to Romeo's chorus add an evocative, pseudo-Eastern quality to the track, and the detailed richness of the production sounds as expensive and polished as any Usher or Ne-Yo song from the same year.

And Romeo's songwriting lives up to it: the story told by "Por Un Segundo" (for a second) is that of a man realizing with a start that the fairy-tale love he's been deluding himself exists between him and his object of affection was a mirage; in fact, she's marrying someone else. With its intricate rhymes (influenced by hip-hop) and richness of imagery ("por un segundo me ahogo en los mares de la realidad" / for a second I am drowning in the seas of reality), it's one of the best lyrics in recent memory, and when he playfully builds the last verse almost entirely out of previous Aventura song titles, it's the sort of assured flex you only get from a performer operating at the top of his craft, entirely aware of the historic nature of the moment.

Stunningly, this isn't even the best single from The Last; but that will have to wait. For now... the kings, yes sir!

RICKY MARTIN, “JALEO”

9th August, 2003

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Since 1999, Ricky Martin's uptempo #1s have been notable for their everything-but-the-kitchen-sink aesthetic, in which elements from all over the pop diaspora are jammed together with less concern for coherence than for energy. "Jaleo" is the next step in that process, still as loud and kinetic as anything produced by Desmond Child, but with more unity of aesthetic: it manages to predict certain elements of global 2010s pop even while representing millennial-era mash-up culture at its lavish height.

The change in producers is one reason. Child had moved on to reality-show fodder like Clay Aiken by 2003, and Martin tapped up-and-coming Puerto Rican producer and songwriter Tommy Torres. We've actually met his handiwork already: MDO and Jaci Velásquez had put Torres's compositions on the map back in 1999, but Martin's 2003 album Almas de Silencio was his highest-profile outing. I didn't think much of the brooding ballad rock on "Tal Vez",  but "Jaleo" is straight fire: electronic pulses keep the rhythm while timbales, arabesque strings, and guitars both flamenco and metal provide flourishes. But it's Martin's voice, thick with performed passion, that is the highlight here: no matter how cartoonishly horny "Vida Loca" or "She Bangs" playacted at being, "Jaleo" feels like the sweat and churn of actual desire.

Or maybe that's my cultural tourism showing, in which the exotic is conflated with the erotic through the gaze of colonialism: this is after all the most capital-L Latin track we've heard from Ricky Martin. "Jaleo" is a term of art from the flamenco tradition, and means the handclap-and-shout breakdowns in a flamenco performance: the song uses it as a synonym for passionate physical activity, which could be simply dancing or much more intimate. In the lyric, Martin plays an ageless lothario who has seduced countless lovers but is obsessed (of course) with only "tu" -- a desire which is consuming him. There's a strong theatrical element to the song's structure, with the verses strethching out in tantalizingly delayed gratification, and heartstopping crescendos on the line "Atrapado! Moribundo!" (Trapped! Wasting away!), while the chorus spins into (a musically stereotyped representation of) a whirling dervish, babbling "jaleoleoleoleoleoleoleola" to infinity.

The faux-Middle Eastern elements in "Jaleo" are of a piece with its faux-flamenco texture: the video, as if to generalize all Latinidad into a single indistinguishable mass, was shot in Brazil, with capoeira dancers showing up halfway through. But that generically thrilling quality also means that it's not far from actual post-millennial Middle Eastern pop, which has taken inspiration from the dynamism and showmanship of Martin and Torres (as well as from a host of other influences, Western and Eastern) and applied it to local styles, with the result that uptempo dance music from Morocco to Iran is among the world's most consistently exciting.

Even so, "Jaleo" is a relatively goofy and silly song, like most of Ricky Martin's uptempo numbers. He is above all else an entertainer, but one still operating at a very high level. That can't be said for all his contemporaries.

SHAKIRA, “SUERTE”

6th October, 2001

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"Suerte que mis pechos sean pequeños / y no los confundas con montañas."

Long before scattering verbal seeds so that a thousand Twitter memes might blossom had become one of the necessary attributes of a successful pop star, Shakira's verbal flights very nearly memed her into oblivion: everyone who addressed her new English-language makeover brought up the "breasts are small and humble" line as an example of her weirdness or perhaps of her limited facility with English. (And everyone else replied that the line was the same, and just as unexpected, in the Spanish version. This conversation will never stop happening, until the end of time.) But look at her grin in the video during the line: she knows exactly what she's doing.

The fact that Shakira Mebarak Ripoll knew exactly what she was doing when she dyed her hair blonde, began writing in English, and contracted with the Estefans to produce her next album has long been a sticking point for those who had admired her '90s shaggy brown mane, her wild Spanish-language creativity, her proud Latinidad. It felt like a betrayal: no longer Latin America's signature alt-rock act, a Southern Hemispherical riposte to frozen-north icons like Björk or Radiohead, she was now just another bottle-blonde global pop star, joining the Britneys and Beyoncés in Anglophone hegemony.

While this is a valuable and necessary take, I think it overrates the importance of alt-rock and underrates the importance of pop -- Shakira may be differently beloved than she was in the 90s, but she is undeniably more, and more widely, beloved. And she has never gone fully Anglophone: her English-language songs nearly always have (often much better) Spanish-language counterparts -- "Whenever, Wherever" is only okay compared to "Suerte," one of her greatest pop songs in a career stuffed with them.

"Suerte" is very early-2000s, in that there's not a particular tradition of music it is set in. Rather, it's a mash-up of many different influences, incorporating Andean huayno and panpipes, Middle Eastern arabesque, and global dance music, including a prominent funk bassline, tribal drumming, and surf guitar: worldbeat, to use a popular if meaningless catchphrase of the era, but with a strong pop sheen. It was the era of Missy Elliott, the Neptunes, and Richard X, in which imperial pop raided global sounds, an analog globe converging into a united digital future until George W. Bush and Diplo ruined it for everyone. But it was also characteristic of the way Shakira had always worked: of Colombian and Lebanese heritage, she mixed East and West, North and South, as a matter of course, and her dancing, which seamlessly blends Afro-Latin and Eastern Mediterranean traditions, is one of the great pop marvels of the millennial era.

But while she's one of her generations's great dancers and great musical synthesists, she's also one of its greatest lyricists: "Suerte" is a fantastic love song in a style that owes as much to modern poetry -- it's romantic, and funny, and quotidian, and heavily imagistic -- as to modern pop. (Modern poetry listens to pop, of course, Frank O'Hara just as much as Warsan Shire.) "Lo que me queda de vida / quiero vivir contigo" (What is left to me of life / I want to live with you) is such a clearer and more heartfelt sentiment than "I'll be there and you'll be near / and that's the deal my dear" that -- although the latter is striking too -- it's easy to see why some observers thought English was a misstep for her. Luckily, we don't have to bother about her English here: which won't always be the case.

This is only the third time we've met Shakira on this travelogue, which feels wrong: she was and is a much bigger star than that, and some of the songs that happened not to make it to #1 include some of the best songs not only of her career but of pop music entirely. In some ways "Suerte" is a lesser rewrite of "Ojos Así", and "Objection (Tango)" is the best tango song the twenty-first century has produced. But although her presence here will continue to be infuriatingly intermittent (especially as compared to figures like the one who recorded the song that replaced this at #1), she has not yet tapped out. We are still living in the Shakira era, and that in itself is reason for hope.