ANDY & LUCAS, “SON DE AMORES”

18th September, 2004

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One of the beauties of Billboard's old method of determining chart placements for various musical subcultures -- like R&B, hip-hop, country, alternative rock, or Latin -- being primarily about what was popular on the playlists of radio stations which served those audiences is that one-week miracles like this were still possible. Another Andy & Lucas will never happen in the streaming age, which is set up to reward the broadest-audience music possible as long as it's given the appropriate genre tag, regardless of whether the music's core audience cares about it, with endless reigns only occasionally broken up by viral sensations.

There was nothing particularly viral about Andy & Lucas, aside from the age-old sensation of cute boys singing sensitive love songs. The flamenco-inspired guitar runs which open and interrupt the song are more an indication of their Spanish nationality, as if their lisping accents hadn't given it away, than an indication of musical virtuosity. There hasn't been as simplistic, or even simple-minded, a song as this on this travelogue for quite some time -- maybe not since "Aserejé," which at least had the virtue of being fun.

But the comparison points to Spain's odd-man-out place in this travelogue. Enrique Iglesias aside (and a argument can be made that he really belongs more to Miami than to the mother country), Spanish artists can only really be novelties on the Hot Latin chart after the millennium. Which would have surprised me back in the 80s, when Rocío Dúrcal and Julio Iglesias were a regular presence; but one consequence of the increased Latinx population in the US over the last thirty years is that it's more and more Central American and Caribbean, so that the white, Iberophilic Latinos who once made up a much more significant portion of the Latin music audience are less significant, and Spain now plays an even more diminished role in Latin pop than the UK does in US English-speaking pop.

All of which is by way of skirting the fact that while Andy & Lucas are certainly cute and give good puppy-dog eyes, there is almost nothing to say about the song: its pseudo-profundities are nostrums that were old when the book of Proverbs was written, and its one lyrical stroke of inspiration, the three-syllable rhyme of "calor y frío" (heat and cold) with "escalofrío" (shiver) is still pretty goofy. Everything else is super generic, from the electronic shuffle of the rhythm to the rise and fall of verse and chorus. I hope the young people who made it #1 for a week in 2004 remember it fondly; that's probably the best use it could have.

MDO, “TE QUISE OLVIDAR”

13th January, 2001

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Son by Four had ridden the crest of a larger boy-band moment in global pop, but they were far from the first. MDO, now without a single Puerto Rican left (the 2000 lineup was Dominican, Cuban, Mexican, Tejano, and Italian-American), were back with a... well, decidedly not a brand-new invention. A sturdy old invention, lustily sung and expensively produced. written by Venezuelan singer-songwriter Carlos Baute: "Te Quise Olvidar" (I wanted to forget you) is a we-broke-up-but-you-haunt-my-memory song, steroided up to a power ballad, and even the middle-eight tribal harmonies are (though great) too little, too late.

But the lyrics are surprisingly frank for a boy band: the chorus is about how the singer has sought forgetfulness by having sex with another woman, but to no avail. Which fits well with Baute's womanizing persona, but sounds refreshingly adult in the mouths of young men whose uniform white dress, outstretched hands, and cupid's-bow lips are presumably targeted at a rather less adult demographic. (I confess I have never studied the lyrics of the millennial boy bands very closely; maybe I'm wrong and they were all about sophisticated adult sexual triangles.) But that's the most interesting thing about the song.

SON BY FOUR, “CUANDO SEAS MÍA (MISS ME SO MUCH)”

30th December, 2000

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I haven't tracked it in this blog, but the entire back half of 2000 has been punctuated by Son by Four's "A Puro Dolor" -- nearly every song we've looked at since has had its chart reign interrupted by the return of the millennium's silkiest salsa band. Now, here at the end of the year, Son by Four are back with their second, and final (as of press time), number one.

As a piece of popcraft from songwriting to production to performance, it's far superior to "A Puro Dolor," with a tense, dramatic arrangement, gorgeous tropical instrumentation, and Ángel López singing to save his life. Despite the title ("When you are mine") setting the emotion in the future, it's a grownup song about adult relationships (the physical very much included), where "A Puro Dolor" is sheer adolescent bathos. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call "Cuando Seas Mía" an undiscovered gem, but if I were assigning these songs numbers out of ten it would easily clear the 6.

But it only topped the chart for a week at the slowest point of the year, and that was it, from our vantage point, for Son by Four. Ángel López left the group several years later for a solo career which has so far only fizzled (he campaigned for Bush in 2004), and the rest now produce Christian music for the evangelical Latin market. Gentle as doves they may have been, but in the cutthroat music business serpent's wisdom is preferable.

SON BY FOUR, “A PURO DOLOR”

1st April, 2000

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Over the past year or more of Hot Latin #1s we've tracked how the Latin Pop industry (as variously constituted over some two dozen countries and innumerable regional and local scenes) worked to consolidate its selling power by issuing music in various formats, whether generic or linguistic. Following in the footsteps of Gloria and Emilio Estefan, who were the first to crack the crossover code in the 1980s, and of poor abbreviated Selena, who blazed a new path in the 1990s, a new generation of pop stars has effortlessly taken to code-switching between language and genre, a game which will only grow more high-stakes as the music industry recedes from its turn-of-the-millennium apex. This song represents that apex, a confluence of luck, dedicated craft, and industry willingness and preparedness to immediately exploit any available market.

Which isn't to say that the song, or the band, don't matter; but its gargantuan success spread far beyond the limited capacity of either, so that any examination of "A Puro Dolor" necessarily becomes not about the story within the song, but the story about the song.

That story: Son By Four were a Puerto Rican boy band in the best boy-band tradition, dating back to doo-wop legend: a group of friends who could harmonize behind one angelic-voiced singer and won local talent contests and a record-label exec took a flyer on them. Panamanian composer and producer Omar Alfanno, whose brief career as a singer in the 80s had led to more remunerative behind-the-scenes roles working with legendary salseros as well as up-and-comers, agreed to write songs and produce for them. He remembers writing this one in ten minutes to fill out a major-label debut, and any deep study of the song's lyrics, composition, and arrangement will bear that out: it's a wholly generic love-as-pain song, in a long and often far more distinguished Spanish-language tradition.

But because it was 2000, it was released in both a ballad version and an uptempo salsa version, to get both romantic pop airplay and tropical play, to squeeze a few more nickels out of it before Son By Four inevitably ended up on the ash-heap of pop history. And it became a hit, starting almost immediately in early 2000, as Ángel López's creamy lead vocal and the smooth harmonies of the other three injected 90s R&B smoothness into Latin radio if not for the first time (we remember the Barrio Boyzz, among others) then at a moment when listeners were particularly receptive to it. It was a wider boy-band moment, as anyone alive in 2000 will surely remember: Backstreet, N'Sync, and the rest were also busy injecting 90s R&B smoothness into music that a non-R&B audience could feel comfortable with. Son By Four were in the right place at the right time: riding both the boy-band wave and a return-of-salsa wave (see also in these pages Marc Anthony, Jerry Rivera), they were also perfectly positioned to take advantage of Latin Pop's new-found legitimacy in the wider Anglo pop world.

Because as soon as it was clear that "A Puro Dolor" was a phenomenon, they were rushed back into the studio to record an English-language version, "Purest of Pain", which didn't set the Anglophone charts alight but did respectably. They would also record a ranchera version (inexplicably not online) for the Regional Mexican market. And although Son By Four themselves weren't involved, a cumbia cover and a Brazilian cover were two more of the biggest Latin hits in 2000, keeping Omar Alfanno (and the record label) happy and the song blanketing pan-Latin consciousness throughout the year and beyond.

The Latin Grammys held their first ceremony in 2000. Son By Four won the inaugural Pop Song of the Year and Tropical Song of the Year, and performed with N'Sync, who were peddling their Spanish-language version of "This I Promise You." In total, "A Puro Dolor" spent 20 weeks at the top of the Hot Latin chart, a record at the time, and which even in the streaming era of slow turnover and epic chart reigns has rarely been exceeded. (As of this writing, it's only been broken twice in sixteen years.) Not bad for a song the success of which even its composer couldn't understand; Alfanno told Billboard a year after its release that he had gone back to the piano to try to analyze the song's structure to figure out what had made it a hit, without success.

But that's pop for you: mercurial, fickle, inexplicable, infuriating, adorable, unforgettable. It's why, despite feeling that we've heard it all before, that there are no surprises and no innovations left, we keep listening.

MDO, “NO PUEDO OLVIDAR”

27 March, 1999

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It took until the end of the second decade of this travelogue, but we have finally encountered the group whose name was synonymous with Latin Pop, at least in the US, for the half-decade leading up to the beginning of it. Menudo (for it is they) hit their peak of popularity before 1986, and since then their passionate fanbase had been too small a portion of the overall Latin-music audience in the US to push them to the top before the late 90s made unabashed teenpop fashionable again.

Then again, this isn't quite the world-famous Puerto Rican boy band Menudo, kept famous today by Anglos who remember the 80s shaking thing their heads about how crazy Latin pop culture is; this is four of the five guys who were in Menudo in 1996, when the rights to the name were sold by Edgardo Díaz, the Puerto Rican svengali who had cooked up the concept back in the 70s, to a Panamanian company. So they called themselves MDO and carried on. There was no difference in the sound or the concept: cute boys singing love songs and dancing, and not doing either very well. "No Puedo Olvidar" (tr. I can't forget) isn't one of the more deathless songs we've encountered; its strongest selling point is the drum loop which suggests that someone involved in the production heard M/A/R/R/S at some point. The voices are pretty but personality-free, the lyrics are the definition of bland, the melody is just sticky enough to hang around but not enough to do anything once it's there.

But hey, it's M(enu)DO at number one! Good for these boys, all of whom joined between 1991 and 1995, long after the group's heyday, and only two of whom were even Puerto Rican (Alexis Grullón is Dominican, and Abel Talamántez is Tejano). It's too bad the teenpop-friendly climate didn't catch them on a better single. But stay tuned.

SERVANDO Y FLORENTINO, “UNA FAN ENAMORADA”

9th May, 1998

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1998 was, globally speaking, the year of the boyband. In the wake of the dissolution of British stalwarts Take That, a new generation of groups like the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, Boyzone, Steps, 98º, and Westlife rushed in to fill the void. The pull of this rising global tide was felt in Latin pop as well — former boyband icon Ricky Martin established himself as a solo artist (not unlike Robbie Williams in the UK), and Servando y Florentino scored, Hanson-like, a solitary left-field #1 out of the Venezuelan pop-salsa scene.

Seventeen and sixteen respectively the week this song hit #1, Servando and Florentino Primera had been homeland heroes for several years already as the voices of La Orquesta Salserín, one of the primary competitors to Menudo throughout the Americas. Like Enrique Iglesias, they had a respectable pop lineage: their father, Alí Primera, had been one of the shining lights of Venezuelan nueva canción in the 60s and 70s; and like Marc Anthony, they stood by the relative authenticity of salsa despite their unabashedly pop profile.

Not that Marc Anthony had anything to worry about. "Una Fan Enamorada" ("a [female] fan in love") is very much boyband material, from the plushy pop-disco melody (recalling an earlier era of boyband, the Bee Gees) to the lyrics' apparently-sympathetic-but-on-examination-not-really portrait of their own fanbase. Such songs are always exercises in ego-stroking for the singers — even when they approach the tragic near-perfection of Eminem's "Stan," the unspoken premise is still how great the artist must be to inspire such cracked devotion in the first place. "Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny."

And Servando and Florentino aren't quite up to even the relatively gentle rigors of the song. The highest reaches of the melody scrape against the limitations of their immature voices, and even the closest thing salsa has to a sure thing, the funky breakdown at the end, is rendered glib and pointless by their inability to riff convincingly. Like too many boybands, they were the sound of a season, and struggle to be heard to any great effect beyond.

BARRIO BOYZZ, "CERCA DE TÍ"

18th December, 1993

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The potted biographies you can find online make them out to be a late-breaking Latino response to the New Kids On The Block, who were of course a later-wave white response to New Edition. All of which means that the Barrio Boyzz came along fairly early in the life cycle of the modern boy band — they far predated the Backstreet Boys, but not Take That — but in the life cycle of Latin Pop's response to American urban pop (at least insofar as it's tracked by these number ones, a woefully incomplete story if there ever was one), they take John Secada's new jack swing beat and inject smooth r&b harmonies. Result: a Latino version of Boyz II Men, even down to the ersatz classicism.

It's still a ballad, but the well-known melody (it's a cover of Bread's "Make It With You," not that you needed to be told) gives it a classic gauzy-pop feel, the punchy beat gives it some urgency, and these guys — all bilingual (the better to maximize profits) Puerto Ricans from New York — can sing, which is an improvement on NKOTB. Their ethnic and geographical origins are worth noting, by the way: this is the first time that New York, the US city with the largest Hispanic population, has entered our story. There's a reason for that: Nuyoricans tend to be more assimilated, so they don't often drive the Spanish-language market the way Californian, Texan, or Floridian Latinos do. (Plus, of course, they're a much smaller percentage of the New York population than they are elsewhere; there's just more of everybody in New York.) And it didn't last; aside from one rather important duet, they won't make another appearance here, and they never did crack the English-language market at all.

"Cerca De Tí" means "close to you," and you can guess the rest of the lyric's sentiments from there, even if you didn't know the original. The point isn't the romanticism of the words, but the romanticism of the sound, and secondarily of the hunky, sweet-faced boys on album covers and in video clips. The boy band as we know it may have originally been a Puerto Rican invention — Menudo, with their rotating lineup and assumed disposability, are often considered the template for the modern form — but against the accelerated vocal-group competition of the early 90s, Barrio Boyzz were ultimately just too anonymous to overcome a lack of material that stood up even to this glossy 70s retread.