WISIN Y YANDEL FT. CHRIS BROWN & T-PAIN, “ALGO ME GUSTA DE TI”

20th October, 2012

Wiki | Video

The first #1 of the streaming era is almost a caricature of the immediate effect that replacing the carefully-calibrated audiences of radio with the undifferentiated firehose of streaming had on the chart. Puerto Rican reggatoneros-turned-dancepop-bros Wisin y Yandel are familiar faces to the #1 spot, but their guests on this track, the uncancellable Virginia R&B bad boy Chris Brown and the cuddly Atlanta electro-soul king T-Pain, provide the crossover juice that made this not just the last Hot Latin #1 of 2012 but the first of 2013, with an unbroken thirteen-week reign that had only been exceeded four times in the history of the chart: 1986, 1988, 2005, 2007. (It had been matched two additional times, by "Rompe" and "Danza Kuduro".) But long unbroken (or briefly punctuated) reigns are now the new norm: the rest of 2013 will only feature seven different songs at the top of Billboard's principal Latin pop chart.

So in an attempt to reconcile this new chart with the history I've traced heretofore, each new entry on this travelogue will end with an Airplay Watch: a list of songs that were at #1 on the Latin Airplay chart (a new chart calculated using the old Hot Latin metric) during the reign of the Hot Latin #1 under discussion, with brief capsule reviews, excluding only songs that will become future Hot Latin #1s.

But for the body of this post, we'll still have to wrestle with this thing, a jocular party anthem in a vein that was feeling pretty exhausted by this point. Puerto Rican producers Luis O'Neill and Chris Jedi do their best thumpa-thump, sine-synth imitation of megasuccessful Swedish maestros like Dr. Luke and RedOne, but it's not 2008 anymore for anybody, and the Chris Brown and T-Pain bits just make me want to put on "Forever" or "Can't Believe It" instead. Even Wisin and Yandel sound pretty checked-out themselves, running through standard come-ons and exhortatons to party as though their stock portfolios will dip if they don't. Even the big-budget crossover reggaetón of "Sexy Movimiento" feels like it was ages ago, never mind the hungry, horny, beat-forward "Rakata", their first single (which still hit #2 back in 2005; they've always been a creature of the charts.)

If the first song of the streaming era was a better or more distinctive effort rather than just about the most generic party crossover thing the era could produce, I still wouldn't have been thrilled about the change; but watching this thing stick in the craw of the chart for months on end just as I was attempting the most foolhardy and ultimately destructive change of my life didn't help my feeling that everything was going to shit, that the idiots and the algorithms that catered to them were winning, that nothing interesting or beautiful or meaningful would ever happen again.

Stay tuned, I guess.

Airplay Watch:

• Wisin & Yandel ft. Chris Brown & T-Pain "Algo Me Gusta de Ti"
• Discussed above.
• Leslie Grace, "Will U Still Love Me Tomorrow"
• One of my favorite minor hits of the period, from a Dominican New Yorker bachatera attempting to replicate Prince Royce's playbook by leading off with a classic US pop song in Spanish and English. Grace would go on to have a middling pop career of often very fine Latin pop and little notice before being cast in the film adaptation of In the Heights, and is now primarily known as an actor.
• Arcángel, Zion & Lennox, Lobo, RKM & Ken-Y, "Diosa de los Corazónes"
• The "Danza Kuduro" beat gets another workout on this posse cut/pretty-boy summit from two Puerto Rican duos and two Puerto Rican solo singers (although Arcángel had been in a duo with De La Ghetto). A lot of energy and tremulous vocalizing to very little effect.
• Gerardo Ortíz, "Solo Vine a Despedirme"
• One of the tragedies of the streaming makeover of the chart is that great Mexican regional hits like this are now relegated to footnotes like this one. Ortiz takes this heartbroken farewell song at such a breakneck clip that it's practically punk rock.
• Prince Royce, "Incondicional"
• A bachata cover of the 1989 Luis Miguel hit, dispensing with Miguel's dramatics for Royce's smooth airiness.
• Gusttavo Lima, "Balada (Tchê Tcherere Tchê Tchê)"
• A pop-sertanejo singalong, the spiritual successor to "Ai Se Eu Te Pego", a year later. I probably like it better, because it's more rhythmically interesting, but it's just as vacant of meaning.
• Enrique Iglesias ft. Sammy Adams, "Finally Found You"
• A late and unimpressive entry from Iglesias' Swedish-produced club-pop phase. Guest Sammy Adams is a terrible rapper, but Daddy Yankee doesn't do much better on the Latin-market version.
• Carlos Vives, "Volví a Nacer"
• Discussed in the previous entry.
• Gocho ft. Yandel & Wayne Wonder, "Amor Real"
• Producer Gocho takes another crack at an above-the-line hit, with Yandel along for moral support. The reggaeton riddim haunts the song like a ghost, intangible even as the actual beat echoes it in absentia.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “HOTEL NACIONAL”

14th January, 2012

Wiki | Video

We couldn't escape the early 2010s without hearing from the kitschy throwback that was electroswing, and although I'm biased this might be the best electroswing hit of the era, most especially because it wasn't particularly trying to be one.

Gloria Estefan's Little Miss Havana, released on the 25th anniversary of her 1986 dance hit "Conga," was an eclectic dance album taking inspiration from the dancefloor-centric diva music of the late 2000s and early 2010s, inaugurated by Lady Gaga and complicated by Ke$ha, Katy Perry and Britney Spears in comeback mode, but filtered through the Estefans' cheerful Latin branding. The first single I heard from Hotel Nacional, and the one I really fell in love with, was "Wepa", a hard-jacking merengue-house number producd by Pharrell Williams, like most of Little Miss Havana. "Hotel Nacional," on the other hand, was produced by a young Venezuelan DJ who went by the name Motiff, an Estefan family protegé who would go on to have some success behind the scenes in Latin pop over the next decade.

The combination of swing instrumentation and electronic rhythms had been established as a winning, if terminally uncool, formula by Australian novelty band Yolanda Be Cool and producer DCUP with "We No Speak Americano" in 2010, a light house number that heavily sampled and interpolated Renato Carosone's 1956 Neapolitan hit "Tu Vuò Fà l'Americano", itself something of a novelty hit in postwar Italy, imitating American (and international) big-band music but shouting out rock & roll: its mandolin solo is in imitation of rockabilly electric guitar solos, but in a southern Italian idiom. Other entrants in the nascent electroswing genre that I noticed at the time (not being particularly attunted to it) included Caro Emerald, Sam and the Womp, Dominika Mirgova, WTF!, and of course Alexandra Stan. Most of which leaned more heavily on the electro-novelty end of the genre than to the swing end; but if there's one thing Gloria Estefan has proved herself capable of in these pages, it's careful attention to musical history and bringing a vanished past to campy life for a modern audience.

Not that "Hotel Nacional" is in any way as soulfully resonant an achievement as "Mi Tierra" or "No Me Dejes de Querer," to name two songs covered here before -- the opening trancey synth blasts make it very clear what decade this is -- but Estefan money can conjure a for-real wind section, not just samples, and Ed Calle's ecstatic clarinet solo over accelerating toms at the end is, intentionally or not, a uniting of prewar jazz, klezmer, calypso, and Cuban son traditions.

The song itself, as is appropriate for the dumb-dancefloor genre, is very little, a collection of dancefloor nostrums and old-fashioned cultural references, sung-spoken mostly in English until breaking into the kind of French that is more cultural signifier than direct communication. Even the refrain "it's time for hoochie-coochie" is slang more than a century old: the term "hoochie coochie dance" was coined to describe Egyptian bellydance (or imitations of it), first popularized in the Americas at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, and soon by extension any salacious dance, although the athletic jitterbugging in the video is, like everything else about it, pretty asexual. (By the end of 2012, Gloria would be a grandmother.)

The official video's YouTube description notes that it was inspired by The Rocky Horror Picture Show, La Cage aux Follies, and Some Like It Hot among others (of which the postmodern cacophony of Moulin Rouge is the most obvious ommission) -- the faint narrative thread of a young straitlaced couple whose car breaks down so they take refuge in a building that turns out to be a deliriously campy rave-up (with extremely limited gender play as compared to any of those movies) is enough to carry it.

I can't pretend I don't love it: my deep love of music history and affection for wide ranges of genre mean that electroswing was always exactly my kind of kitsch even though it never became central to my listening; that would defeat the purpose of it for me. Variety is my highest good, and 2012 is the most varied year this travelogue has seen (or will ever see again, it seems). Buckle in for a ride.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS FT. WISIN Y YANDEL, “NO ME DIGAS QUE NO”

19th March, 2011

Wiki | Video

I was pretty harsh about Enrique's last appearance here, in part because I knew this was coming and was girding my loins in advance. The title of the song, and the cockily-crowed refrain, translate to "Don't Tell Me No," and despite the pseudo-romantic way he dresses it up and the good-time party vibes a team of producers and co-stars surrounds it with, the most forceful sentiment of the song remains a refusal to listen, an overriding of consent, the normalization of assault as a natural extension of masculine desire.

The big trancey synths and hopping club music behind it are extremely early 2010s, post-subprime pop as louche, privileged atavism (and the opposite of what, for example, Ke$ha was using the same basic template to express at the time). The soaring chorus, with its reduplicated, shouting, thin-voiced Enriques, even recalls the hooky pop-punk of ten years earlier, another genre that in its most popular expression was a black hole of whiny male self-regard. There's not a hint of dembow in the rhythm despite classic reggaetón producers Nesty and Victor El Nasi being involved: indeed, only Wisin's rap verse even plays with syncopation at all. Everything else is a foursquare, flat-footed beat that even the whitest listener can pogo along to.

It was only at #1 for a week, sandwiched between "Corazón Sin Cara," and in Iglesias' discography is little more than a footnote compared to the much more massive smashes from his bilingual album Euphoria: "I Like It" and "Tonight (I'm Lovin' You)" were blanketing Anglophone airwaves, while "Cuando Me Enamoró" still lingered on Spanish-language radio. Given his English-language success, it will be a few years before Enrique returns to this travelogue, while Doble-U y Yandel will be a more constant presence. But that's another story.

RICKY MARTIN, “JALEO”

9th August, 2003

Wiki | Video

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.

RICKY MARTIN, “SHE BANGS”

4th November, 2000

Wiki | Video

Tom Ewing's framing of "imperial phases" in pop is an idea I come back to a lot. It's been fueling how I think about the "Latin invasion" of 1999-2000, in which a brief confluence of popular dance songs, broad ethnic affiliations, and carefully managed careerism made English-language stars out of people who were already (or would be anyway) stars in their own right. The point of imperial phases is that they don't last, and in that sense the Latin Invasion (which Chris Molanphy recently dubbed a "mini-invasion") was unlike the twin British Invasions of the 1960s and 1980s, in that it didn't remake US pop in its image, only flourished for a time and then fell.

The clear end of that imperial phase -- perhaps it would be better to describe it as an imperial moment, a (Re)conquista that was always demographically unsustainable -- would be this song, with its lavish CGI video, its endless remixes for every imaginable market, and its all-in marketing bet on Ricky Martin as a hetero sex symbol, only reaching #12 on the Hot 100. "She Bangs" may be more fondly remembered in the Anglosphere than "Livin' la Vida Loca," perhaps because it's a better song (though not a better production), less fueled by casual misogyny, but it wasn't nearly as big a hit. No need to weep for Ricky Martin, of course: his eventual withdrawal from the English-language pop market was the English-language pop market's loss, not his; as Tom noted in his analysis of imperial phases, it doesn't mean the hits stop. We'll be seeing lots more of Ricky Martin around these parts.

But none of this describes the actual song, a pumping jam with flamenco guitars, salsa -- and later swing -- horns, mambo piano, and... surf guitar again. If it's Livin' la Vida Loca, Mark Two (also produced by  Desmond Child), that's not a bad thing to be. Unlike with "Vida Loca," there is an actual Spanish lyric, with the only leftover English phrases "she bangs" and "she moves," appropriately enough, as there are no possible rhythmic equivalents in Spanish. It may not be as misogynist as "Vida Loca," but it's surely as objectifying. Which it's hard to fault Ricky for; nobody ever sounded less lecherous than he does singing this song. Joy this unqualified is almost as rare in pop music as it is elsewhere in life, and just as precious.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “¡OYE!”

5th September, 1998

Wiki | Video

If it's possible to draw conclusions about long-term trends in Latin pop from the very top of the Billboard Latin chart (a very shaky proposition), it might be useful to consider Gloria Estefan a bellweather. On the cusp of the 90s, she pointed to the overwhelming preponderance of adult contemporary that would make up the majority of the decade's number ones; and four years later she predicted the revitalization of traditional roots music that would be the major thrust of the decade's second half. Now, as the 90s wane, she returns with the first #1 to invest in modern club music since José Luis Rodriguez' "Baila Mi Rumba" in 1989. This is rather a large hint as to the direction in which Latin pop (or indeed all pop) is headed; but no spoilers.

But "¡Oye!" (listen!) also positions itself in the newly vital salsa current, as jump-started in this travelogue by Marc Anthony; one of the repeated refrains is "mi cuerpo pide salsa" (my body wants salsa), and the production connects the dots between Nuyorican salsa and Detroit house, never more explicitly than when the electric piano beats out a steady melodic rhythm. As a piece of dance music, it's wonderfully and characteristically inventive, balancing the steady bass 4/4 required for modern dance music with trad mambo (which is to say swing) horn charts, Cuban percussion, and call-and-response gritos (from, I belive, Emilio) that urge a physical response.

The Estefan machine was by now world-conquering, of course — Gloria's only real peer at this point was Madonna — and the slickness and efficiency of the production is a little breathtaking even today. 1998 is, it's worth noting, when the Loudness Wars began to heat up in earnest, which means that from the perspective of 2012, it's when everything begins to sound completely modern, mastered at an ear-popping volume which lets you feel the bass in your gut even through tinny Apple buds.

The final marker of modernity is the fact that the video linked above is a remix. The parent album, Gloria!, was mostly in English, and the original Oye! (the video's here) has English-language verses. This is the Pablo Flores Spanish Mix, which is only slightly different (the clubby synths were Flores' addition — he's been the Estefans' in-house mixer and remixer since the 80s), and as far as I can tell this was the version that got playlisted on Latin radio. (It's the one included on her Spanish-language greatest hits package, for instance.) As this travelogue slowly catches up to the present, and artists continue to record and release multiple versions of their songs in order to maximize revenue streams, I'll have to make more of these judgment calls as to which version to feature on the blog. Which in this case isn't much of a big deal; both versions are fantastic.