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. 

NELLY FURTADO, “MANOS AL AIRE”

12th September, 2009

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If "Loba" made me excited about the Hot Latin charts, "Manos al Aire" (hands in the air) made me intrigued. If the charts were this wide open for being crashed, what else might not appear? It's one of the most unusual crossovers we've seen throughout this travelogue: a Canadian singer of Portuguese descent had a Latin #1 without an equivalent English-language version. Wikipedia says, incorrectly, that she "was the first North American act to have an originally written Spanish song reach #1," and despite the error (even if you don't count Mexico as North America, Selena was Texan born and bred), it's a notable achievement for someone who only learned Spanish as an adult to have a hit with a Spanish-language song.

A lot of that is due to her co-writer, Afro-Cuban singer and instrumentalist Alex Cuba, who grew up in the Havana area but emigrated to British Columbia as an adult and was a regular winner of Juno awards for "world music" in the 2000s. But Furtado was smart enough to refuse to translate the song to English, because the poetic idioms of Spanish and English are different enough that a lovely Spanish-language song about surrendering to love could sound bathetic or self-loathing in English.

The plastic sound of the song, all crisp electronic drums, repetitive palm-muted acoustic guitar chords, and soaring ersatz string sections, was extremely in vogue in the late 2000s, and in its moment sounded a bit like Anglophone pop crashing Hispanophone pop, productively. Furtado's previous record, Loose, had been a smash on the strength of the Timbaland collaborations "Promiscuous" and "Maneater," which were so rhythmically slippery that her limited voice could just be another texture within the soundscape, but it had also contained Spanish-language collaborations with Calle Ocho and Juanes (again). neither of which troubled the Hot Latin chart; for her 2009 Mi Plan, an all-Spanish-language album (and her first after going independent), she gathered collaborators like Cuba, Lester Mendez, and Julieta Venegas to try to solidify her presence in the Latin market.

It worked, insofar as "Manos al Aire" was #1 for four weeks in the fall of 2009, the album went platinum within a month of release, and Furtado won a Latin Grammy for her pains. But her attempts to return to the English-language market in 2012 and 2017 were met with a stony reception, and she has made no further gestures in Spanish since. Perhaps she's wisely sitting out the streaming era, which as one of the surprise winners of the CD era, she can presumably afford to do.

Twelve years later, "Manos al Aire" no longer sounds as revelatory or heart-gripping as it did back when it was my only companion hurtling through the freeway around Piestewa Peak on my way to work. It sounds thin and clipped, all sharp angles and unconvincing sentiment. A surrender to its joys would be a surrender to nostalgia, and I'm wary enough of the people I used to be that I'm suspicious of that. I still love that it happened; three years later, it could not. And I want to squeeze every last drop out of my affection for these years while I can.

JUANES FT. NELLY FURTADO, “FOTOGRAFÍA”

19th July, 2003

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Summer, 2003 was fairly late in the millennial-pop era which had first crested in the late 90s: in the Anglosphere, *NSYNC had parted ways, Beyoncé had gone solo, and even Eminem had started taking himself seriously with 8 Mile. The Latin boomlet of 1999 was experiencing its own growing pains, as the next generation of Latin pop stars were coming into their own; mainstays like Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, and Shakira would have to adapt to new climates.

This song introduces two voices we'll meet again (one more frequently than the other), and whose highest moments of pop imperiality are still some years off. But their careers, intersecting here for the first time, have run in odd parallel. Their debut albums debuted within a week of each other in October 2000, and their first hits, "I'm Like a Bird" and "Nada," though quite different thematically, showed off a shared melodic flair and deceptive lightness of touch (and thinness of voice) that meant they would both be perpetually underrated for years.

"Fotografía," as the title suggests, is in a long string of pop songs about mooning over a lost loved one's recorded image: the Pretenders/Selena, Def Leppard, and a bit later Nickelback have all bettered it in terms of staying power, but for sheer charm, the Colombian Juanes and Portuguese-Canadian Furtado are hard to beat. The thin, shuffling beat, the carefully but not intricately picked guitar, an electronic whine, and eventually an electric buzz, make up nearly the whole of the production: the focus is on their voices, both nasal and unadventurous, sticking closely to the sing-song pseudo-reggae template. Which sounds like a formula for dullness, but Juanes' melodic gifts and Furtado's surprisingly excellent Spanish make the song one of the best Hot Latin #1s of 2003, behind only Shakira and India.

They would collaborate again, reversing the ft. credit on Nelly Furtado's 2006 single "Te Busqué", but since it only hit #1 in Spain, we won't cover it here. But we'll have plenty of time to get to know Juanes: he's only getting started.

CÉLINE DION, “MY HEART WILL GO ON (LOVE THEME FROM TITANIC)”

21st February, 1998

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It's only my decades-long head start that has enabled me to get to this ahead of Tom, Sally, or Marcello; anyone who surveys popular music of the twentieth century is going to have to contend with it sooner or later. In a decade characterized by staggeringly popular songs from staggeringly popular movies — "Everything I Do (I Do It for You)," "I Will Always Love You," "Kiss from a Rose," "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing," "I Believe I Can Fly," and on and on — "My Heart Will Go On" was the most staggeringly popular of them all, just as its parent film was, and it blanketed the earth so heavily in the years following the release of Titanic that people talk about it as having been metastatic, colonizing, inescapable; a very good book was even written about how impossible it is to say anything meaningful about such totalizing work.

Well, I haven't seen the movie. Nor had I consciously heard "My Heart Will Go On" before listening to it for this travelogue. Oh, it wasn't new to me; like anyone else alive, hearing, and capable of long-term memory fifteen years ago, I knew it. But I'd never listened to it. By chance I'd managed not to tune into commercial or contemporary radio during its seasons of dominance; I'd left the television turned off; I'd not been in the kinds of public spaces that pipe in the hits of the day at unignorable decibels. But of course it had seeped in anyway — the pennywhistle opening, the broad and sturdy chord changes, like vast steps leading up to some Brutalist cathedral, and of course Céline's painfully angelic voice sweeping through the pillowy orchestration like a tracking shot through a rote crowd scene: no time to pause for any enlivening bits of business or quirks of personality, we are Setting a Mood.

So of course when I do sit down and listen, it's a bit different than I had remembered, or imagined. The popular image of Céline Dion is that of a non-stop belter, tempestuous in her evocation of tin-pan melodrama, but on the opening verse her voice is as pure and ethereal as Sarah McLachlan's — or perhaps even Sarah Brightman's — and throughout she makes unusual choices, if minor ones. Nobody quite has her phrasing, and if the later choruses get histrionic they're still individual enough to give the pleasure of watching an entirely inimitable performer; the play may be the most frightful nonsense but by God there won't be a stick of scenery left on stage when she's done.

The lyrics are the most frightful nonsense, of course; a weak-minded declaration in the power of romantic love to transcend all limitations even unto death, given the solemn reading of a sacred hymn (those great gulping thwacks of syllables are straight out of praise-and-worship) and cloaked in a fuzzy and unmeaning spirituality, its catechism of willful self-belief and sentimental denial of all hard truths is one of the most overpowering and cringeworthy strains in late-90s pop. It'd be pretty (and awfully convenient to my tastes) to think that it was confined to that decade, that 9/11 killed it off  and that the public ever after has chosen either pure escapism or raw unvarnished Truth, but nothing dies that easily.

In a way, it feels like all the 135 songs I've written about for this blog were just a preparation for this: I had to come to terms with the 90s romántico ballad before I could hear this in its proper context, faux-Irishness, overbudgeted orchestra, climactic arrangement and all. It's perhaps worth pointing out that Céline Dion, a French-Canadian (which is to say, a member of a historically impoverished ethnic minority), is actually culturally closer to the Spaniards, Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and so forth on the Hot Latin chart than to the Hollywood Irishness of the song — and the modern big-voiced ballad, whether Anglophone, Hispanophone, or otherwise, is also Latinate, descended from the Italian bel canto tradition.

So it's fitting that Céline, who belongs to the entire world, not just the Anglophone (much less just the Francophone) parts of it, would usher in another of the momentous firsts in this travelogue: the first English-language song. There will be many more.