ROMEO SANTOS FT. DRAKE, “ODIO”

15th February, 2014

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I can't be sorry that I dragged my heels on this blog so long that I didn't get to this song until after the Summer of 2024 affixed a permanent asterisk to the featured artist here. Even before then, I still would not have been fulsome about his contribution -- the graceful skittering of bachata, particularly Romeo Santos' bachata, just doesn't work with the plodding whinery of Toronto's favorite son -- but in a post-"tryna strike a chord" landscape, greeting this entry in the Hot Latin #1s list with anything but resigned contempt would feel not just immoral but disloyal.

In a pre-streaming world, being #1 for 13 weeks would have been a notable achievement; in 2014, it just feels like a measure of Drake's overwhelming popularity that a song primarily in a language not spoken by most of his audience outperformed everything else in its category while he was between album cycles. Not that the headliner here doesn't matter: a perfectly adequate Romeo Santos solo song could be carved out with some judicious editing, and sold the song to the Latin audience in a way that Drake's vaguely passable Spanish verse could not have, let alone his more typically self-absorbed rap (in which he spits some of the worst game a self-declared lover boy ever has) in English.

But even with Drake excised, it's by some margin the worst song Romeo has had his name on to reach #1 -- the core thrust at the center of his lyric, "I hate the man who makes you happy," may be a relatable (though ignoble) sentiment, but everything else is just going through the motions, a generic canvas that can accommodate his guest's lazy brushstrokes.

I think I've said on this blog, a long time ago, that I was looking forward to the end of machismo and misogyny on this chart. I was a fool to think it would ever go away. 

Airplay Watch:

• Romeo Santos ft. Drake, "Odio"
• Discussed above.
• Yandel, "Hasta Abajo"
• More "Danza Kuduro"-core from the pretty one of the iconic reggaetón duo, this one notable for actually featuring a jacked-up reggaetón riddim underneath the synthesized accordion and soaring AutoTune.
• Juanes, "La Luz"
• The Colombian rocker goes pop, adding synths to his acoustic guitar strumming and fast-paced mapalé dance rhythms for a kiss-me-at-the-festival song that burns bright and fades as quickly.
• Carlos Vives ft. ChocQuibTown, "El Mar de Sus Ojos"
• Shout out to the avuncular Vives for featuring my favorite Afro-Colombian hip-hop trio on this vallenato/champeta rave-up, even if Slow doesn't get a verse. 
• Wisin ft. Jennifer Lopez & Ricky Martin, "Adrenalina"
• The shouty one of the iconic reggaetón duo plays generous host to two famously pretty guests for another uptempo reggaetón-inflected, empty-calorie dance banger.
• Enrique Iglesias ft. Marco Antonio Solís, "El Perdedor"
• Discussed in the previous entry.
• Prince Royce, "Te Robaré"
• Another pretty-boy bachata-cum-R&B song, although this one is the best-arranged and most sincerely-delivered I've heard from Royce since his debut. 

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.

ROMEO SANTOS, “LA DIABLA”

4th August, 2012

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The fourth and final #1 off of Formula, Vol. 1 reached the top fifteen months after the first, a feat which would seem to cement Romeo Santos as one of the major voices of contemporary Latin pop, a reliable hitmaker for years to come. But while his subsequent albums will regularly spin off singles that do well in the charts, this particular feat remains unmatched; only two more #1s will (as of this writing) fight their way through the incorporation of streaming data later in 2012, and one of them will be goosed by a more famous Anglophone feature.

But that's for the future to worry about: "La Diabla" (the she-devil) is a remarkable piece of work even in this year of vivid and unusual one-week wonders. Paired with "Mi Santa" in video form (a juxtaposition which evokes, but hardly rises to the level of commenting on, the misogynistic madonna/whore binary), the song recounts, in abstracted poetic imagery, a love affair with a heartless woman who takes the singer for all he's worth, leaving him with nothing but a broken heart. Which is of course an ancient theme: Jezebel, Salome, Nimue, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Mata Hari: sexually available but cruel women who lead to men's destruction are so common in poetry and litererature as to be almost unremarkable. But they're not a very frequent theme in pop music, in part because pop tends towards the Dionysian and so generally celebrates sexuality rather than otherwise, and in maybe greater part because ordinary women have significant purchasing power within pop and aren't generally interested in that kind of narrative.

So Romeo embracing the trope despite so clearly marketing himself for the female gaze is another sign that his solo career is about establishing himself as an auteur in line with traditional markers of masculine artistic prowess: casual misogyny masked by flowery metaphor is part of staking a claim to literary respectability. As if to underscore the gesture, there are 70s rock elements in the mix beneath the bachata flourishes. A burbling synth here, a snappy electric guitar solo there: nobody does salable misogyny like a rock star publicized as a poet.

PRINCE ROYCE, “LAS COSAS PEQUEÑAS”

17th March, 2012

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I've catalogued a number of firsts in the thirteen years (!) I've been writing this blog, but here's another: the first time I (along with everyone else who blurbed it at the Singles Jukebox) am quoted in the "Critical Reception" section of the song's Wikipedia page. My blurb, in its totality, and with links added for context, reads:

It’s deeply unfortunate that this boring lullaby is the Jukebox’s introduction to Royce. Not that he’s ever really been a cause for pulse-rate-raising (unless his duet with Daddy Yankee counts), but his early singles had more sparkle and snap to them — he even made “Stand by Me” interesting, and in the twenty-first century! — and with the exception of the obligatory steel-guitar solo (it is bachata, after all) this one just kind of sits there. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except the “na na na na na na” hook sounds almost exactly like Mike Birbiglia’s Kenny G impression.

Which at this distance feels a little like kicking a puppy. Is "Las Cosas Pequeñas" twee sentimental gloop? It absolutely is. But twee sentimental gloop has its place in the pop ecosystem, and in 2023 I'm kind of entranced by how all-in the production goes in on its tremulous bathos: celeste twinkles, vibrating string sections, dramatic piano ripples. The steel-stringed guitar solo and Royce's sense of rhythm are about all that make it bachata: otherwise it's a straight down the middle r&b song that could have been produced ten, twenty, or thirty years earlier.

Which may feel like a betrayal of bachata authenticity, but Royce was never marketed as authentic (as noted, his first single was a Spanglish cover of the Ben E. King standard), and if teen-idol pop isn't allowed to be bathetic it's fighting with one hand tied behind its back. It's still a little painfully generic, but I don't have it in me to despise it anymore. Maybe I'm just in a mellow mood, happy to luxuriate in another one-week wonder before the chart takes on streaming and everything flattens out much more. "Las Cosas Pequeñas" is itself a cosa pequeña (little thing), and contra the message of the song, it's not worth getting too worked up about.

ROMEO SANTOS FT. TOMATITO, “MI SANTA”

3rd March, 2012

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Romeo's solo conquest of the Hot Latin chart, and his (temporary) expansion of the language of bachata to a broader pop metier, continue apace. "Mi Santa" was, once more, only #1 for a week, but its lush romanticism, hard on the heels of Daddy Yankee's hyper socatón, Víctor Manuelle's genial salsa, Paulina Rubio's cooing dance-pop, and Gloria Estefan's brash electroswing, point to a chart moment that could be considered either vibrantly, capaciously pluralistic or bored, easily distracted and indecisive, depending on how you wanted to characterize it. I am always on the side of musical diversity, so Romeo inviting a flamenco master to share the spotlight in the same way he had R&B mogul Usher works for me: what a purist might see as a cynical appeal to exogenous markets I prefer to see as a big-tent approach to music-making in which nothing is off the table as long as it works.

And it does work: Romeo, at least in this first album, is a master of synthesis, and his bachata harmonizes as well with Tomatito's fluid fingerpicking dramatics as it had with Usher's fluid vocal dramatics. José Fernández Torres, the third member of an Andalusian Roma musical dynasty to be called by some variation of the "El Tomate" nickname (his son is the fourth), first came to fame backing the brilliant and eccentric cantaor Camarón de la Isla in the 1970s; filling the shoes of the equally brilliant and eccentric Paco de Lucía was no easy feat, but Tomatito's jazz and Afro-Cuban influences did just as much to expand the palette of modern flamenco towards the end of the 20th century. His playing here hardly brings that whole history to bear, of course: some basic runs underneath Romeo's verses, and a passionate, harmonics-leaping solo between choruses are about the limit that a contemporary pop-bachata song can take, and he provides it.

It's Romeo's lyrics that give this song its most potent frisson: "My Saint" is a simple translation of the title, but the cultural connotations would require a whole graduate seminar on Latin Catholic thought. Its deeply considered heresy, referring constantly to the lover as an object of religious veneration and his own devotion to her as a specifically Catholic practice, is in line with the conventions of nineteenth-century French (and Spanish and Italian, etc.) Romanticism, and even, in inverse, with older traditions like Teresa of Ávila; by contrast, the earthy, sensual, and deeply human guitar of Tomatito prevents it all from sounding too saccharine or even ascetic.

The video for "Mi Santa," released in January of 2012, mashed two songs from Formula, Vol. 1 together, so for younger listeners "Mi Santa" is perhaps nowadays thought of as the second half of "La Diabla." But I'll have to wait to discuss that; Romeo isn't done with his album cycle.

MANÁ FT. PRINCE ROYCE, “EL VERDADERO AMOR PERDONA”

10th December, 2011

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Over the years that I've been conducting this travelogue I have occasionally run into cases where it's not clear which version of a song is supposed to be represented on the chart, since multiple versions are in circulation at once. Billboard lists this chart entry as "Maná Featuring Prince Royce," but from my memories of Latin radio in Phoenix in late 2011 and 2012, Maná's original plodding dirge was played far more frequently; I only vaguely recognized the bachata-con-Royce version when listening to it to write this.

Of course, other markets presumably had different experiences: New York radio, for example, would surely have promoted the Dominican element over the Mexican. And one of the charms of the old airplay-only method of chart calculation was that the multiple versions and remixes playing on various slightly different radio formats could be collapsed into sharing a single chart entry. Which became part of the strategy for releasing multiple versions to multiple formats at once: get enough traction on each, and your song would do all the better on the overall chart. But I don't know that I've heard a more awkward combination of genres  than this power ballad-meets-airy bachata that Billboard considered the primary version in 2011.

Ten years later, the YouTube video for Maná's original has more than three times the views than the version with Prince Royce interpolating half the lines in his lovely, emotionally vacant falsetto does. It's easy to read this collaboration as a cynical move: "El Verdadero Amor Perdona" (True love forgives) was the third single from Drama y Luz, but didn't look likely to replicate the success of its two predecessors, both of which appeared here, so goosing its chances by adding a flavor-of-the-year prettyboy singer and a generic bachata bed (the hoary rock en español band played much better bachata when Juan Luis Guerra was their guest) for a conveniently-timed "deluxe edition" of the album worked to keep Maná's streak of Hot Latin #1s alive.

As you may have gathered, I'm not a big fan of either the original or its bachatification. The chorus' rewrite of 1 Corinthians 13 to beg a betrayed lover to take the singer back is emotionally manipulative in both the good sense (pop artisans know how to use chord changes and tension-and-release dynamics to engineer feelings), and the bad ("if you don't forgive me, you never loved me"-ass argumentation). It's easier to take the song less seriously when Prince Royce sings half the lines in his glib, cherubic manner, which might make it even more insidious.

Not that demanding perfect moral rectitude from pop is a meaningful, much less achiveable, goal: pop exists to embody emotions, and the emotion embodied here is a widely experienced and expressed one. My complaint is that it fails to make that emotion irresistible to me: it sounds just as stunted and navel-gazing as it is.

ROMEO SANTOS FT. USHER, “PROMISE”

29th October, 2011

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I think I've mentioned here before that in the early 2010s I was so enamored by bachata and convinced of the truth of the thirty-year cycle of popular music that I believed quite seriously that the future of R&B and romantic music in general was bachata.

(That thirty-year cycle, in brief: jazz had risen in the 1920s, displaced parlor song by the 1940s, then become the establishment; rock & roll had risen in the 1950s, displaced dancefloor orchestras by the 1970s, then become the establishment; hip-hop and electronic dance had risen in the 1980s, displaced rock bands by the 2000s, and so in the 2010s we were due for another shakeup. With perhaps terminal optimism, I thought it would be interestingly unexpected if the future of popular music was Afro-Latin as well as African-American.)

I even made a confident prediction at one point that the first Anglophone R&B singer to make a bachata record would signal a shift in Anglophone tastes. That Usher was the first big R&B star to sing on a bachata song did not disappoint me; but its failure to cross over did. "Promise" only rose to #83 on the Hot 100, shut out of pop radio play as a matter of course, although apparently it was in heavy rotation on MTV (to the degree that any music videos were; the channel had been in an all-reality format for years). But it was a massive hit on Latin radio, spending a total of ten weeks at #1 on the Hot Latin chart over the winter of 2011/2012.

Compare it to the last English/Spanish duet that went to #1 in the winter, "Looking for Paradise". As a collaboration, it's far more successful: Romeo's and Usher's voices are well-matched, Romeo taking the higher falsetto and Usher maintaining his usual liquid tonality without showboating; he's a guest here, and behaves like one. But the skittering rhythm, fluid guitar picking, and fluttering melodies are, as ever, the most memorable element of a bachata song. Although the lyrics suffer slightly from the usual dual-language pop problem of the Spanish lyrics being more poetically expressive than the English, Romeo is not engaging in the extended metaphors and ornate similes that he did with Aventura or on his own: it's consciously an attempt at a big-tent crossover hit, and so circles around the single idea of a man feeling himself trapped by love, and submitting to it gladly, if only he can be assured that his beloved will be faithful to him.

The video takes pains to make clear that Romeo and Usher are both romancing different women, perhaps because the danger of the song being read as two men singing to each other was too high, something that the frequent reiteration of "mami" and "girl" in the chorus already safeguards against. Given R&B history, the meathead association of falsetto singing with suspect heterosexuality is as racist as it is homophobic; but we are still squarely in the "no homo" era, and male sex symbols aimed at a female audience can't be too careful.

Of course bachata did not take over R&B; eventually it even ebbed from mass popularity in the pan-Latin circles represented by the chart, retreating to its Dominican-diasporic roots. But I was not entirely wrong about the thirty-year cycle: although the completeness of earlier displacements has always been overstated, which means that living through another is harder to recognize, because there's always more continuity visible in the present than the tidy periodizations of history suggest. But I would suggest that the most influential (if not necessarily the most profitable) currents of modern pop are now generally Afro-Latin in origin. I'll have more to say about this as we get to it; but while this song may be understood as something of a dead end, it's better constructed and more elegant than many such.

ROMEO SANTOS, “YOU”

28th May, 2011

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A little over a year after Aventura's departure ("Dile al Amor"'s last week at #1 was April 10, 2010), their former frontman returns with a song that at first blush sounds as though nothing has changed. Bori Rivera's fluid fingerpicked guitar solos are a little less show-stealing than Lenny Santos', but they're very much working in the same smoky bachata + r&b idiom, and Giselle Moya's breathy vocals delivering the English one-word refrain functions just as she had on "Por un Segundo", as an erotic signpost marking the object of the lyrics' extravagant desire.

But to the degree that Aventura was a boy band, Romeo's solo debut participates in a longstanding tradition: more sexually explicit, more grown-up, more concerned with establishing his individual persona separate from that of the group. Structurally, "You" is an exercise in delayed gratification, teasing the listener for four unbroken verses of increasingly florid come-ons, as Romeo sings about drinking his lover's fluids and devouring her for hours, before finally hitting a chorus. Then come the taut guitar solos, a spacey bridge, and one more, slightly less impactful chorus. If it's not intended to be analogous to the rhythms of sex, it doesn't do anything to deter the comparison.

At the time I enjoyed it as a splash of cool bachata intermixed with many other flavors on the radio, as I jumped between Spanish- and English-language stations without compunction, seeking music rather than advertising. I don't believe the horniness made much of an impression, only the romanticism and the mild frisson of psychedelic beauty in Giselle's coos. I was still under the impression that bachata might become popular enough to be absorbed into the r&b mainstream, not really yet aware of how closely identified with a specifically Dominican identity it is and would remain.

Eleven years and many millions of A&R dollars later, there are no more international bachata stars than there were in 2011, as the urbano musics whose stars have risen in the meantime have eclipsed it, and it now sounds slightly old-fashioned, no longer thrillingly modern as it was in the pre-streaming early 2010s, when niches could still be big enough to make an impact without ever having to submit to the indignity of going viral.

PRINCE ROYCE, “CORAZÓN SIN CARA”

12th March, 2011

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The bachata wave continues to crest even as Aventura steps away from the spotlight. The music industry, having discovered the appeal of "Dominican R&B," is loath to let it fade, and a young Bronx-born heartthrob with a sweet voice and utterly sincere songwriting is the perfect substitute for Romeo Santos' more emotionally complicated songwriting while the latter steps away from the spotlight to build up his solo material.

Geoffrey Royce Rojas, the son of a taxi driver and a beautician, was twenty when his debut album, Prince Royce, was released through an independent Miami-based label. His first single was a bachata cover in Spanglish of Ben E. King's "Stand by Me," a statement of his hybrid identity as both a Dominican and a New Yorker; the follow-up, however, was the one to watch. "Corazón Sin Cara" took more than a year to reach #1, first released to radio in February 2010. It started to gain traction by the summer, and had actually fallen from the top spot on the Tropical Latin chart before the mainstream Latin audience caught on to it, finally bringing it to #1 Hot Latin in the spring of 2011.

The song's title translates directly to "Heart without a face," a reference to the Spanish idiom he sings in the chorus, "El corazón no tiene cara," (the heart has no face), which is used in equivalent ways to the English "love is blind" -- a song about loving past superficial appearances, it's very much of a piece with One Direction's contemporaneous "What Makes You Beautiful" (which would be released later in 2011), a song reassuring the teen idols' self-conscious, self-critical young female audience that love is not dependent on beauty, and especially not on a one-size-fits-all standard of beauty.

It's not quite mawkish, because Royce's fluid singing around the rhythms of the song rescues it from the syrupy strings larded on towards the end, but his lyrics are entirely conventional (Romeo's wordplay and sharp wit are beyond him at this point). Still, the 2010s are going to be an era that demands a certain amount of social responsibility from its teen idols, and Royce is ahead of the curve there.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS FT. JUAN LUIS GUERRA, “CUANDO ME ENAMORO”

12th June, 2010

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I've been writing -- one might even say complaining -- about Enrique Iglesias on this blog since his first appearance at the end of 1995. It's been fifteen years, and no one has been a more consistent presence here, to my general chagrin and occasional grudging approbation. In great part, this is because I've been comparing the Enrique Iglesias I've been hearing in those trawls through the past with the Enrique Iglesias I remember first clearly paying attention to in 2010, the Enrique Iglesias who chose this as the lead single from his ninth album, perhaps to shore up good faith with his core Latin audience before hitting the Top 40 with songs in English featuring the likes of Pitbull and Ludacris, perhaps to ride the bachata wave that Aventura's farewell was cresting, perhaps because it was just as consonant with the jangly rock en español that Diego Torres, Alejandro Fernández and David Bisbal were having hits with as it was with bachata.

But the poorly-aged video, a montage of narcissistic schoolboys playing dirty to win the attention of their female classmates, and the fact that the song had appeared, a week before the single hit #1, as the theme song to the Mexican telenovela of the same name, are perhaps stronger reasons for "Cuando Me Enamoro" leading off one of Iglesias' most globally successful string of singles. Iglesias has always been a kind of avatar of louche male privilege, and the narrative embedded in the video, of boys as pursuers and girls as the passive rewards of pursuit, is perfectly suited to both Iglesias' persona and to the Latin machismo that he, as rich as he undoubtedly is and as sensitive as he performs being, still perfectly represents.

Juan Luis Guerra's genial artistry co-signing this crass commercialism is the outlier; but as well and casaully as he outsings Enrique on this duet, he is merely a hired gun: the song was written by Iglesias and Cuban former jazzman turned pop songwriter Descemer Bueno, and the form of the song is strictly pop, without any of Guerra's prankish genre-bending. A bachata rhythm section supports a lilting rock sway, and the two men trade nostrums about the grand acts they would perform for love, describe the depths of emotion to which love sends them, and ultimately impute a Christological meaning to secular love ("me viene el alma al cuerpo" -- my soul enters my body, a pop detournement of the doctrine of the Incarnation). It's all perfectly in line with the romantic tradition of Spanish love poetry, and the semi-tropical rhythm and irregular bursts of melody serve the lyric well.

Make no mistake: I adored it at the time. If it ultimately rings hollow a decade later, perhaps especially by comparison with what Guerra had served up on his own only a week prior, put it down to my fuller experience with Enrique Iglesias, and my vastly decreased patience with boys-will-be-boys messaging throughout media.

JUAN LUIS GUERRA, “BACHATA EN FUKUOKA”

5th June, 2010

Wiki | Video

In retrospect the week-long reign of this song was merely a prelude to the summer-shattering hit that followed it, a companion piece in many ways. But I remember this week, because I was checking the Hot Latin chart every week in order to write this blog, and the cosmopolitanism and wide-eyed optimism this song, and especially its reign at #1, represented gave me wings. (It's only somewhat an accident that the slowdown of the chart, once streaming data started showing just how geologically-slowly actual listening habits changed, coincided with my own lack of will to continue updating.) My delight in it was probably at least somewhat responsible for my thrilled reception of Juan Luis Guerra himself when he made his first appearance here, way back in 1993.

I've rated all his appearances here pretty highly, but "Bachata en Fukuoka" might be my favorite JLG #1, as much due to my own nostalgia for the vanished world of a decade ago as to anything intrinsic to the record. But the record itself is great too: a romantic bachata about Juan Luis Guerra's own pleased discovery on tour that East Asian audiences were already familiar with the bachata, mambo, and merengue he was playing for them. The port city of Fukuoka as representative of Asia could have been chosen for the meter, but also its relative unfamiliarity to Western ears, as the sixth-largest city in Japan, shifts the focus away from busy cosmopolitan uban centers like Tokyo or Kyoto and into the humdrum Japanese everyday. Beaches are beaches everywhere in the world, from Japan to the Dominican Republic.

The recording's arrangement, with brief keyboard parts meant to evoke the sound of a koto, is elegant and dreamy without forsaking the danceability of bachata (or the Cuban mambo that the middle eight breaks into, hauntingly, eye-wateringly). The video is one of the best of the modern-era videos in this travelogue, a magical-realist short film that takes the Japanese urban landscape seriously, without exoticization or condescension. As he always has, Juan Luis Guerra feels like an adult making art who occasionally appears in between adolescents making money, regardless of the actual ages of the people involved.

The lyrics are well-crafted enough that the song's inspiration -- the after all relatively banal observation that globalization flows in all directions -- is submerged in more specific imagery, from seagulls wheeling on the beach to wearing your lover's skin as an overcoat. The repetition of Japanese 101 vocabulary can feel, with distance and age, a bit cringey (especially as younger Westerners are often more casually otaku than their elders), but within the context of the US Hot Latin chart in 2010 it felt almost radically expansive, an acknowledgement that Latin pop was, and deserved to be, as globally dominant as its Anglo counterpart.

AVENTURA, “DILE AL AMOR”

23rd January, 2010

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"Tu grupo favorito, mami."

Romeo Santos wasn't wrong. While this song was at #1, Aventura sold out Madison Square Garden four nights in a row, outselling acts like Lady Gaga and Madonna in terms of total tickets sold. By any metric but Anglophone radio play, they were one of the biggest bands in the United States. Imperial periods have not been frequently represented in this blog, because nothing is more arbitrary than a well-timed #1, but it's undeniable that Aventura split up at their peak, and despite reuniting to tour several times over the past decade, have released only the occasional single and collaboration: Romeo's hugely lucrative solo career takes precedence.

"¿Le gusta mi bachata, mijita?"

I noted in Aventura's previous appearance here that their liquid, R&B-inflected version of bachata was tailor-made to give them a boy-band quality very different from the historicized, reverent incorporation of bachata we'd seen hitherto. Bachata, first termed "amargue" (bitter) was originally Dominican blues music, the music of rural or at least lower-class Black Dominicans expressing pain and loneliness, consonant with Cuban bolero and Puerto Rican plena; it was first recorded in 1962, after the death of repressive dictator Rafael Trujillo. Over the years (especially in the 70s and 80s), it gained a reputation for salaciousness (not unlike certain R&B performers in the same years), but by the historicizing 90s, the options were either to modernize, with steel rather than nylon guitar strings, and adopt merengue-style percussion, or to fossilize and become a legacy music. Aventura's role in creating a newly urban bachata for the hip-hop generation can be overstated (Monchy y Alexandra had earlier hits), but they certainly capitalized on it better than anyone else, and Lenny Santos' instrumental break here might be one of the greatest guitar solos of the twenty-first century, taut and compelling, casting a more complex light on Romeo's romantic complaints.

"So nasty!"

Those romantic complaints are, again, extremely smartly written, if you can get over the initial concept of the entire song being addressed to Cupid. (The video literalizes this in a rather meaningless way, with Cupid as an urban-fantasy archer who keeps missing her shots at Romeo's romantic targets, possibly because she wants him for herself.) Romeo, disillusioned with love because it never ends up being reciprocated, renounces it entirely:

Pues dile al amor que no toque mi puerta

Que yo no estoy en casa, que no vuelva mañana

A mi corazón ya le ha fallado en ocasiones

Me fui de vacaciones lejos de los amores

Dile al amor que no es grato en mi vida

Dale mi despedida, cuéntale las razones

("So tell love not to knock on my door,

That I'm not at home, not to come back tomorrow

It has failed my heart on many occasions

I have gone on vacation far away from loves

Tell love it's not welcome in my life

Give it my goodbye, tell it the reasons why.")

I believe I have occasionally grumbled in these pages about over-the-top, extravagant, or hyperbolic expressions of sentiment in Latin pop over the years. Which may be hypocritical, because I adore this, and freely acknowledge that it's hyperbolic to the point of absurdity. But then I've had more use for songs of romantic disappointment than songs of romantic aspiration or romantic fulfillment over the course of my life; and given how prevalent pro-love propanganda is in pop, the salutary effect of the final lines of this song are as counter-culturally thrilling as Huck Finn's "all right then, I'll go to hell" was at an earlier time in my life.

"I don't need no love in my life."

Ending the song singing in vernacular English, repeating the same line four times, with sparkling boy-band harmonies, cemented "Dile al Amor" definitively as not just my favorite Aventura song, but one of my favorite songs period, perhaps ever. It would have been simple enough not to include those final lines, or to keep them in Spanish: "No requiero (el) amor en mi vida" could fit the meter. But Romeo Santos was perfectly aware that he was outgrowing not just the Dominican market, the bachata market, and the Latin pop market, but even the Spanish-language market generally. And besides, he and all the others had grown up in the Bronx; English was as natural to them as Spanish. The juxtaposition of the poetic, elegant (even perhaps too-elegant) Spanish of the main lyrics and the straightforward, working-class, double-negative-as-emphasis English of the coda also has something to say about class in the US, about the intersections of Latine identity with class, not to mention the further intersection of Afro-Latin identity. It remains the common assumption that people who speak Spanish are (like Black people) working-class or lower in the US, and the anti-immigration furor reaching a fever pitch in the Obama years (not to mention afterward) has long been as much a class war as it is a racist desire to keep the working class white. Against which Aventura's demonstration of Spanish as the classy language and English as the basic one does precisely nothing, but the gesture at least brought me to tears more than once on those long Phoenix drives of the early 2010s.

As did the sentiment: the relief of admitting, even to yourself, that you don't need romantic love in a world that demands you perform it is sometimes overwhelming. I would not categorize myself as either asexual or aromantic, perhaps for much the same reasons that another type of guy my age refuses to disbelieve he could still compete at a pro level in his chosen sport if he applied himself, but a dispassionate survey of my behavior over time would draw its own conclusions. More time for nerdy projects like this one, anyway.

AVENTURA, “POR UN SEGUNDO”

31st January, 2009

Wiki | Video

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!

MANÁ FT. JUAN LUIS GUERRA, “BENDITA TU LUZ”

16th December, 2006

Wiki | Video

Like Aerosmith or U2, Maná are more beloved by rock fans for their earlier, hungrier work than for the massive hits that blanketed the pop airwaves in middle age. But their collaboration here with Juan Luis Guerra, who is more of a Bowie figure in remaining perpetually relevant (although perhaps to a smaller coterie) throughout many shifts and phases, feels less like a quick muso-cred cash-in (like, say, U2 baptizing themselves in Muddy Waters) than the natural result of writing a very simple and straightforward song that requires some kind of folk-based arrangement in order to have emotional resonance: and hey, it's 2006, bachata is growing in popularity.

Because although Maná are the above-the-line credit, and wrote the song themselves internally (Guerra really is only a guest), it's a bachata song through and through. It's worth noting that in the whole history of the chart, the only people who have ever had a bachata #1 are Juan Luis Guerra himself and a rhythm-raiding Gloria Estefan. This will change in the near future, as the New York bachata scene coalesces into pop strength; but for now Maná are very much appropriating (not necessarily in a problematic sense) a particularly Dominican sound.

Of course when bachata first coalesced as a local version of Cuban boleros and sons in the hinterlands of the Dominican Republic, it was the furthest thing from a point of national pride for the Dominican elite, who despised its rusticity, its frankness, and its Blackness. (Listening to the earliest bachatas makes it hard to believe that such romantic music was once considered unfit for broadcast, but that's elites for you.) By the late 1980s, though, bachata's national popularity was too undeniable to continue being censored, and the switch to electric guitars and more danceable tempos kept it competitive with merengue, salsa, and the other tropical music burgeoning in the Caribbean. Still, it wasn't really a pan-Latin sound until Juan Luis Guerra became a pan-Latin star; and Guerra was never a bachatero so much as an eclectic musical genius who used bachata, among many other styles, because it was part of his Dominican heritage.

This is the second time Maná has appeared here with a swaying Caribbean rhythm instead of their usual rock-based flatfootedness; if "Bendita Tu Luz" is better than "Mariposa Traicionera", it's because of Juan Luis Guerra's rhythmic intricacy and the nimbleness of modern bachata over the somnolence of traditional bolero: but "Mariposa Traicionera" is more complex in its lyrics (even though, as the YouTube comments point out, it's rather slut-shaming), while "Bendita Tu Luz" is so devout in its declarations of love that it could quite possibly double as a Christian hymn. One more way in which Maná recalls U2, then.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “COMO ME DUELE PERDERTE”

23rd Septmeber, 2000

Wiki | Video

I had trouble believing that this was really the first proper bachata song we've encountered in these pages -- the importance of bachata to the last ten years of Latin Pop has given it a larger place in my internal estimate of Latin pop history -- but that's what the tags say. Of course, I could easily have tagged stuff wrong; but there's no more bachata to the only other song that's used the tag, Juan Luis Guerra's "Costo de la Vida" than there is South African mbube, which is to say that it's used as one flavor among many in his postmodern, intentionally culture-clashing gumbo. La Gloria's bachata is, by contrast, not only traditional but positively reverent, which however musically luscious it is can't help feeling a little politically queasy among the pre-revolutionary Cuban pageantry of the parent album: is she really expressing nostalgia for the Trujillo dictatorship?

But of course she too is a postmodernist, intentionally culture-clashing and remixing the past to project an ideal image of today. (Everyone is, these postcolonial days.) The close-miked violin which decorates the second half of this song isn't particularly bachata (which for most of its history was a low-rent, few-frills music, despised by the Dominican elite as drunkards' laments), and structurally it owes more to Mexico-born songwriter Marco Flores' early training in romántica and pop than to bachata traditions of meter and rhythm. It's still undeniably gorgeous, a swooning love song that would work with any underlying rhythm or instrumental filigree.

Still, as a starting point for pop-bachata history (at least within the context of Hot Latin #1s) it's a pretty great foot forward. Gloria Estefan, entirely without meaning to, has now served as our introduction to two major Latin genres, vallenato and bachata, and if (say) Carlos Vives' pop-vallenato has already turned up to show us how it's "really" done, the future of bachata in this travelogue is brighter still.

JUAN LUIS GUERRA Y 440, “PALOMITA BLANCA”

20th March, 1999

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Our second encounter with Juan Luis Guerra in four months (in chart time, not blog time!) sees a total transformation in approach, content, and even form. Where "Mi PC" was a tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of the brave new computerized frontiers of the late 90s delivered as a whirling merengue, "Palomita Blanca" is an uber-classicist romantic love song delivered as an ornate bachata. They both came from the same album, the 1998 Ni Es Lo Mismo Ni Es Igual (it's neither the same nor equal), one of the hyperliterate, restlessly innovative singer-songwriter's best-selling albums across his multiple fanbases.

The song's title has been used over and over again in popular (and folkloric, and classical) Spanish-language music: the "little white dove" invoked is a traditional Spanish and Latin-American image of purity, hope, and love. Guerra begs the dove to carry his message to a sundered love: "Tell her that the nights have not been quiet / They've talked of love and haven't gone / Tell her that I love her and miss her / That I haven't forgotten and that I've suffered." The harmonies suffusing this chorus are as crystal-saccharine as in the country-rock/soft-rock prime of the Anglophone 1970s (or maybe I'm forcing an association with the café's soundtrack of Pure Prairie League and John Denver leaking through my earbuds as I write this), creating a gorgeous romantic bed for the extravagant neediness of Guerra's lyric.

Since it's missing the complicating irony of his earlier appearances on this travelogue, it would be tempting to call "Palomita Blanca" a lesser work, but pop doesn't work that way. It became his signature love song, the song that even people who wouldn't normally care for his intellectual games and political grandstanding will happily sing along with, the sugar pill (including very traditional gender roles) to make the rest of his more modernist, idea-heavy discography go down more easily. He was always able to pull out something this uncomplicatedly beautiful; that he hadn't before — or that it hadn't been so successful before — is one more element of his skeptical relationship with the pop stardom thrust upon him.

JUAN LUIS GUERRA Y 440, “EL COSTO DE LA VIDA”

20th February, 1993

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Now this is what I'm talking about!

Within the first few notes, "El Costo De La Vida" shimmered its way into my favorite of the songs I've listened to for this project. It's something we haven't heard before, something we haven't even come close to hearing before; even the few trópical tracks we've had before weren't this light-footed and funky, big muscular salsa or jacking dancehall instead of goosey, jiving merengue with bachata guitars and afro-pop percussion.

Or rather afro-pop guitars and bachata percussion. If it's not easy to draw a clear distinction between the dance music of the Dominican Republic and the dance music of Western Africa, there's a reason for that; not only is the music of the Caribbean more African than European or native (a mixed heritage to which Guerra refers when he sings "una raza encendida, negra, blanca y taína" — "a race on fire, black, white and Taíno"), but twentieth-century African pop has long drawn inspiration from the music of the Caribbean.

But then this isn't a song produced by anonymous, collective Caribbean, or even Dominicans — Juan Luis Guerra (both with and without his muso band 440) is one of the major figures of modern Latin Pop, and it's only the vagaries of US airplay that has kept us from considering him before now. Most of Latin America was introduced to him in 1989, when "Ojalá Que Llueva Café" ("if only it rained coffee") became the biggest Dominican hit to date, and introduced his hyperliterate, danceable fusion of merengue, bachata and highlife to an international audience which ate it up. If there's a comparable figure in Anglophone pop, it would be as if Billy Bragg had had George Michael's career — only he never went away. (Not to upset a certain bunny, but stay tuned for lots more Guerra over the years.)

"El Costo De La Vida" means "the cost of living," and as usual with the phrase there's an implicit "high" in there. Both an unrelentingly funky dance track, with the call-and-response and punctuating horns typical of tropical music, and a sharp-tongued analysis of the political and economic woes of the early 90s (although, he noted with despair, very little about it would need to be updated to reflect 2010), it was also, if Wikipedia can be trusted, a source of controversy, as certain [citation needed] listeners heard anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism in its litany of ills (accurately! see below) and certain [citation needed] countries actually banned it from airplay, afraid of pissing off the US. That it reached number one here anyway (if only for a week) is a testament to its innate danceability rather than to the radicalism of the Spanish-speaking population in America.

That radicalism: "Democracy cannot grow if corruption plays chess." "Unemployment also bit me/No one cares, because you see/We don't speak English/Or Mitsubishi/Or Chevrolet." "We are a perforation in between sky and sea/Five hundred years later a race on fire/Black, white and Taíno/But who discovered who?" All of it punctuated with chirrups and "ya ves" ("now you see") because, after all, this is a dance song. But it's also a political song, and a literary political song at that.

Not only is this now my favorite song I've heard so far in this project, the more I listen to it and study the lyrics and shimmy to its intoxicating rhythm, it's fast becoming one of my favorite songs ever. One of the key tracks of the 90s, of world music history, of pop music generally. This is me grabbing you by the lapels and shaking you: listen to this song.