J BALVIN, “AY VAMOS”

7th Mar, 2015

Wiki | Video

Picture a crusty, several-generations-old image of a Rat Fink-esque illustration of a yellow smiley face screaming so widely that its gums show, spittle in the corners of its mouth, over the words LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOOO in Impact typeface.

Reggaetón's second generation -- at least as recorded by the top of the Hot Latin chart -- begins here, with a white Colombian applying the low-key fuckboy attitude (not to mention nasal singing) popularized by Drake to the head-bobbing skank of the Caribbean. It's over ten years old at this point, and it comes ten years after Puerto Rican reggaetón's initial high-energy breakout into the broader Latin-music conversation, and twenty-five years after the dembow riddim was first applied to Spanish-language dancehall by Panamanians in New York. But this is the point where it becomes clear that reggaetón was not just a late-2000s early-2010s fad, but an ethos, a tent at least as big as salsa or merengue was before it, as generational a dividing line as hip-hop or house was in the 1980s and 90s, as normal for young musicians to latch onto and build an identity around as rock had been in the 1960s.

José Álvaro Osorio Balvin had been born into an upper-middle-class family in Medellín in 1985, but after his father's business went under, the family was forced to move into a rougher neighborhood, where Balvin learned how to code-switch between the rich and working class. In the late 90s and early 2000s, he spent time in the United States, first as a privileged exchange student and then as an illegal visa-overstayer doing construction work. He began rapping in bald imitation of Daddy Yankee at the same time he was studying business at a prestigous universtity back home in Medellín, putting out his first underground record in 2004.

That tension between upperclass origins and underclass coding has remained in his music -- not unlike the Torontonian I compared him to above -- and has also made him more appealling to the Latin American middle class who always kept the original reggaetón generation at the kind of arm's length that white suburban US did with hip-hop. Puerto Rico -- a small, impoverished, racialized appendage of the United States -- is one thing; Colombia -- a large, relatively wealthy nation and one of the five epicenters of 21st-century pan-Latin media -- another. J Balvin, with his European features, economics degree and Nirvana tattoos, was safe for 2015, within the constantly-shifting meaning of safe within the global urban-capitalist socioeconomic imaginary, in ways that Daddy Yankee was not safe for 2005.

All of which is a lot of weight to put on the back of "Ay Vamos" (Hey, let's go), a midtempo electronic reggae song with a nagging "ahhhh, ahhhh" hook and mumble-rap lyrics about talking a girlfriend out of fighting with him. The dembow riddim is foregrounded in a way it hasn't been at #1 since at least Chino y Nacho in 2010, which means that Balvin gets to ride a loping beat contrasted agains the one-drop organ skank, sounding laid-back and cool where the Yankees, Wisins, Yandels, and Omars of the world have all been big, bombastic, and hyper in recent years, trying to impress with the scale of their achievements. Balvin sees that the future is more fugitive than all that busyness: intimacy has its own attraction.

Airplay Watch:

• Maná ft. Shakira, "Mi Verdad"
• Discussed in the previous entry.

MANÁ FT. SHAKIRA, “MI VERDAD”

28th Feb, 2015

Wiki | Video

A pair of Nineties veteran acts joining up for a laid-back swayalong feels like the kind of thing that the streaming-era chart had no room for anymore; and the fact that it only went to #1 for a week in February 2015, one of a series of one-week wonders in late winter sandwiched in between monumental chart runs, seems more a product of chance (or perhaps of Billboard tinkering with its chart calculus) than of true blanket popularity. (On the airplay chart, it managed a whole two weeks at #1.)

Not that I'm complaining! While I've been largely cool on Maná in these pages, I've consistently adored Shakira, and maybe predictably, I find that her sweet-and-sour voice is exactly the ingredient needed to pull Maná out of their latter-day  doldrums and sound vividly, achingly sincere, like a sharp, high clarinet cutting through thickets of droning strings.

The lyric is constructed on a dialectic of "mentiras" (lies) and "verdad" (truth) -- the verses list all the falsity and betrayal that exists in the world, from cheating lovers to lying politicians, while the chorus calls the eternal romantic "you" the singer's truth, a refuge from the painful deceptiveness at large in the rest of existence. Although in the video, Shakira caresses a visibly pregnant belly (she gave birth to her second child the month before the single's release), transforming the "you" from romantic to parental love. And in the comments on the video, that seems to be the favorite reading: many family relationships and losses are related there.

The bolero rhythm underlying the verses, and the foursquare rock rhythm of the choruses, have their own implications (the tricksy, scheming Afro-Latin tradition versus the open, honest, white-coded sound?), although Maná are a rock band and believe in rock dynamics above everything. But this is their farewell (as of this writing) to this travelogue, so I can't be sorry that they brought on my favorite Colombian ringer to leave a better taste in my mouth than they might have otherwise.

Airplay Watch:

• Maná ft. Shakira, "Mi Verdad"
• Discussed above.

CARLOS VIVES, “VOLVÍ A NACER”

13th October, 2012

Wiki | Video

This is it: the final #1 of the Hot Latin chart as it had been calculated since its beginning in 1986. Despite my ignorant speculation in early entries on this blog, it had always been an airplay chart; commercial singles of Spanish-language pop were uncommon in the U.S. after the 1960s, as label consolidation created pressure to direct consumers toward higher-ticket albums. Where the charts were concerned, radio formats were a rough but workable approximation of audience: if a song was popular in the Black or Latin communities, regardless of actual genre, it showing up on the R&B or Hot Latin charts meant something.

So Billboard shifting, in October 2012, to a streaming-heavy calculation for its flagship genre charts meant that audiences no longer counted. As an infamous illustration, the streaming switchover meant that Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" would hold the #1 spot on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart for months in early 2013, whereas on the R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart, which used the old calculation, it peaked at #34. But it had the "hip-hop" tag on streaming services, so that's the bucket it went into, even though the core audience for the music wasn't much embracing it. (And in fact it had more play on rock stations than R&B ones, peaking at #13 on Rock Airplay.)

But the Latin audience, being both more diffuse (Texas, California, New York and Florida all have very different Latin-music histories and cultures, as different as the countries they saw the most immigration from) and coming with a significant language barrier, would be affected differently. I'll be discussing some of those effects in future installments, but the most immediate and obvious would be the virtual disappearance for many years of genre variety from the top of the chart: pending the unexpected, this is the last we will see of accordion-led Colombian vallenato. Urbano -- the useful catch-all term for Latin music derived from hip-hop, dancehall, and electronic dance -- will rule the top of the chart for the rest of the decade, with glacial turnover as whatever song with "Latin" in its metadata is being played most at parties sticks around for months at a time.

Don't get me wrong, that will include a lot of great music. The chart as calculated by airplay gave kind of a false impression: because it combined inputs from widely different audiences (Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York, Cubans in Miami, Tejanos in Texas, Chicanos in Los Angeles, not to mention all the rest of the Hispanic diaspora across the country), it actually delivered more genre diversity than individual listeners were likely to experience from their preferred radio stations. Which of course made it ideally suited for my purposes, as a genre-agnostic magpie wanting to get my arms around as much Latin music as possible. But we've already seen how the airplay chart had diminished reggaetón and other forms of urbano ("Gasolina" getting stuck at #17 while a Juanes rock  anthem reigned at #1 is the canonical example) -- urbano is going to be some of the most exciting and interesting music of the 2010s and 2020s, so getting to look at it in all its explosions and contradictions is going to be fascinating.

But before that, a farewell to Carlos Vives, who will not, as of this writing, be gracing this travelogue again (the closest he will come is a duet with fellow Colombian Shakira in 2014, which will stall at #2 behind a third Colombian; but that's a ways off yet). The chart that started with the Spanish Rocío Dúrcal and the Mexican Juan Gabriel has seen many shifts in taste and fashion over the course of its young life, and if we had to have a valedictory for the past twenty-six years from someone who has been a regular presence for the past thirteen, you could hardly ask for a better selection. Always pleasant to hear from, with one foot firmly planted in the soil of local tradition but one eye always cocked to the horizon for the freshness and modernity of international pop success, he's a Latin Grammy favorite who has aged gracefully into an upbeat, avuncular sound that challenges no boundaries and invites everyone into the jolly, communal celebration.

"Volví a Nacer" (I was born again) is a love song said to be inspired by Vives' second wife, Claudia Elena Vásquez, who married him in 2008. Like so many of the love songs we've looked at over the years, it's replete in hyperbolic expressions of devotion and achievement for the sake of the beloved, the kind of vows a medieval knight-errant would recognize as proper to his lady love. Of course the religious symbolism of the title is present (that too is very medieval, which is another way of saying Catholic, which is another way of saying Latin), but it's submerged in the more human anxiety of whether the lover will remain with him.

The music, swelling from piano ballad to vallenato jig to rock & roll guitar heroics, is similarly a wide tent, with massed voices in the chorus just begging for a singalong. If it doesn't quite convince me to sing along here in the fall of 2024, that may not be its fault: the more muted, paranoid atmostphere of the 2020s can't help being a little skeptical of populist bonhomie. While I don't doubt Vives' sincerity, it's not just the sturdy, gospelly uplifting chords that end up sounding a little naïve.

JUANES, “LA SEÑAL”

5th May, 2012

Wiki | Video

The reign of "Ai Se Eu Te Pego" at the top of the chart in the spring and early summer of 2012 was interrupted for only a week by a familiar face in a new context.

The old 1990s MTV Unplugged series, which had run its course in the US by the turn of the millennium, was kept alive mostly in international markets, where live music still had some youth-culture cachet; Juanes' edition, recorded February 1st 2012 in Miami Beach, isn't even listed on the series' English-language Wikipedia entry. The resulting album was his third live album overall, and the catalog of hits he played that night was deep, and frequently documented here. But "La Señal" was new, and as a single it struck enough of a chord with the Spanish-language radio audience that it nudged past Michel Teló's bland come-ons with its own bland platitudes.

We've seen a lot of men with guitars ruminating on life over the years here, and Juanes is no Alejandro Sanz, Ricardo Arjona, or Juan Luis Guerra (he's closer to Maná's Fher or Luis Fonsi). "La Señal" (the sign or the signal, but it could also mean the omen, portent, or signpost) attempts to reach for Greater Meaning, but all it has to do it with is the stripped-down language of rock, and ultimately Juanes' rhythnic capabilities are greater than his poetic ones.

But those rhythmic capabilities shouldn't be counted out. "La Señal" is clearly the product of a post-Jason Mraz world, and the unusual arrangement (a violin takes a solo as though this were the Dave Matthews Band) makes the song more sprightly and energetic than the bathetic lyrics would suggest. It's still ultimately a confused, inarticulate song stringing together longstanding rock tropes (freedom, desire, love, the road) into a mishmash of wants and demands, but it sounds great while it lasts.

Apparently Juan Luis Guerra was the producer for the live set and album, which may be part of why it sounds so great; but I'm petty enough to wish he'd taken a pass at the lyrics, too.

SHAKIRA FT. El CATA, “LOCA”

6th November, 2010

Wiki | Video

A year ago, she was on top with "Loba" -- and with the change of a single letter, she is back. But as always with Shakira, there's more going on underneath the surface.

The song is a faithful rewrite of Dominican rapper El Cata's slangy merenguetón "Loca con Su Tiguere" (crazy with her streetwise man), from 2008, with a beefed-up, slicker, and quicker production as befits Shakira's international pop-star profile. She changes the refrain to "soy loca con mi tigre," (i'm crazy with my tiger), a rewrite for global Spanish, since "tiguere" is specifically urban Dominican slang. But the third name in the songwriting credits, after hers and El Cata's, is the real key to understanding not just this song but an entire era of Latin pop: Armando Pérez, a Miami-born Cuban-American songwriter, producer and hook scavenger better known by his stage name, Pitbull. It's the second time he's made a sideways appearance on this travelogue, but his knack for repurposing big crowd-pleasing hooks for even more omnipresent international hits gets its first real showcase here.

Although reggaetón riddims can be detected underneath the merengue horns, the early 2010s were the low point between reggaetón's tentpoles of dominance over Latin pop: it's characteristic of the period that good old-fashioned merengue, rather than urbano, got the credit for the splashy, bouncy joy of "Loca," which was a sizeable hit across all kinds of international markets, thanks to canny marketing pairing Shakira with a different rapper in different languages.

The English-language version trading out El Cata for UK grime emcee Dizzee Rascal is also an extremely 2010 move: he sounds pleased to be there but needs the rhythms rearranged to fit his chewy, off-kilter flow. Shakira's lyrics are roughly the same, generalizing the sentiments even more for the bigger audience while still keeping it subcultural enough to spark curiosity. (I.e. the Dominican slang "yo ni un kiki" (I don't even have a dime) becomes "I got my kiki" (I'm laughing).)

But her introductory line in both versions, the breathy English "Dance... or die" is the most 2010 sentiment of all: the apocalyptic mood in post-subprime pop, from Ke$ha's nothing-to-lose class warfare to Britney's doompartying "Till the World Ends," is enough of a truism among pop-watchers that Shakira adding to the cacophony in praise of madness was hardly even noticed at the time. But the extended hangover from that reckless party mood has outlasted the Obama era: not even dance can palliate the eternal bummer these days.

JUANES, “YERBATERO”

 4th September, 2010

Wiki | Video

We haven't heard from Juanes in two years, and given the blandified, soothingly jangly direction that so many rock-inflected male singers have had success with since his last rock romántica #1, it would be easy to assume he would fall in line. But from the opening notes, with a crisply distorted blues guitar riff, sharp handclaps, and cumbia scrape, it's apparent that Juanes is here to actually rock.

He's still in love with 70s rock signifiers, but the tropical percussion keeps him light on his feet, and his choice of lyric -- "Yerbatero" literally means "Herbalist," and the song is sung in the voice of a traditional plant-based healer from Latin American indigenous traditions, whose "medicines" soothe the heartache of romantic disappointment by inducing euphoria and altering consciousness -- breaks more sharply with the traditional love-song lyric than he ever has before.

It's easy enough to read "Yerbatero" as being exclusively about marijuana, and the Spanish-speaking stoner audience alone was probably enough to send it to #1, but the byproducts of other indigenously-cultivated plants, from agave to psilocybin to coca to ayahuasca, fit the lyrics just as well, and the lightly psychedelic music video, as well as the guitar tone's imitation of psych-era UK rock, suggest a more generalized valorization of expanded consciousness. But even for the non-indulgers, the sharpness of the rhythm, melody, and song structure are enough to make this the best rock 'n' roll song to have hit #1 in years, probably since Juanes' own "La Camisa Negra", possibly since "Ciega, Sordomuda", and maybe even, depending on the strictness of your definition, ever. 

It reigned for only a week before ceding the floor to "Cuando Me Enamoro" again. Which is appropriate: in the broader scope of Latin Pop history, it's a footnote, a glib, self-indulgent appropriation of indigenous culture by a white singer in a very rock tradition; but as rock fades from not just playlists but memory itself, an old white rock-bred listener like myself can't help appreciating its energy and sheer joyful noise.

SHAKIRA, “LOBA”

8th August, 2009

Wiki | Video

For eleven years, Shakira's #1 songs have served as a bellwether for Latin pop: rock auteurism in the late 90s, big-tent pop universalism in the early 2000s, collaborative reggaetón formalism in the mid-2000s. Now she once more has her eyes on the future, and if her rubbery disco doesn't exactly predict the trance-heavy sounds of the next few years, that's because it took Anglophone pop until "Get Lucky," "Blurred Lines" and "Happy" to catch up to it. But perhaps the most important relative of "She-Wolf"/"Loba" in the Anglosphere was "Call Me Maybe," another fizzy throwback pop song sung and written by a woman but produced by a pop-rock veteran, in this case Jim Hill of Apples in Stereo, who gives the song modern rock dynamics without neglecting the groove.

But the echoes in English are of less import to this blog than the song's effect on Latin pop, which was immediate and in some ways profound. Not that there was an explosion of disco necessarily, but that Shakira's formal eccentricity, as always, gave implicit permission to those who considered her a peer or a model to move in unexpected and unintuitive directions. Although her musical models are fairly obvious (Daft Punk and Kylie Minogue had had recent electro hits with similar patterns, not to mention the Chic sample that gives the song its transcendent moment), her lyrical embrace of a grown woman's sexuality, unable to be confined to a single marital bed, was as bold an intervention in the habitual language around feminine desire in Latin pop as there has ever been. To dip into unworthy gossip-rag territory, it's perhaps unsurprising that her unmarried but committed relationship with her Argentine lawyer-manager ended the following year, after ten years together.

On a personal level, this song was probably the clearest impetus for beginning this blog that I heard in 2009. I've talked before about what Shakira had meant to me earlier in the decade, but being startled by "Loba"'s beautiful, horny weirdness while driving in the purple twilight of a Phoenix evening (the southbound Camelback exit of SR 51, forever) was the kind of aesthetic experience that this blog, as shallow and intermittent as it has been over the years, was built to chase.

Shakira's commitment to following her own muse, and making her pop audience follow her, rather than chasing the most current sound, has never been stronger than it was in this moment, and the fact that that commitment will end, or at least diminish, in years to come is one of the greatest shames this blog will chart. But more about that when it happens. For now, the softest, demurest "a-wooo."

FANNY LÚ, “TÚ NO ERES PARA MÍ”

25th April, 2009

Wiki | Video

When Fanny Lu first appeared here a little under two years ago, I talked about how her debut, "No Te Pido Flores," was the stronger and more iconic song than the song with which she first went to #1 on the Hot Latin chart. But this one leaves "No Te Pido Flores" in the dust.

In fact, I'm hard-pressed to think of the last time we had such a hard-hitting, compressed, machine-tooled POP song at #1. "Ni Una Sola Palabra"? "Suerte"? "Livin' La Vida Loca"? And it's still fully tropipop, that faintly embarrassing middle-class Colombian combination of vallenatio, cumbia, merengue, and pure pop; but taken at such a driving pace that it's practically pop-punk. There's even a pop-punk guitar solo rising up out of the accordion/drums/guacharaca stew late in the song.

And like a good pop-punk song, it's focused with sneering intensity on a cutting dismissal of a would-be lover. "Tú No Eres Para Mí" means "you are not for me," and the verses' detailing of it's object's fantasies of himself as a romantic lover are gleefully smacked upside the head by the chanted, headlong chorus in which she wants him to understand that he isn't for her, she isn't for him, and she won't stand any more failures. The contrast between the verses' adherence to romantic Spanish poetic conventions and the choruses' modern, self-respecting feminist rejection of all those tropes is a brilliant lyrical device that in some ways feels like a culmination of so many of the foregoing #1 hits in which men offered their hearts at lugubrious length to unreal, fantastic women who had no existence except in their imagination.

Fanny Lu is very much her own woman here: despite the Shakira-esque vocal phrasing, which can be understood as Colombian rockera convention by now, she's pushing tropipop into new realms of emotional certainty and musical intensity. The middle eight even introduces the unnaturally flanged vocals of AutoTune to this travelogue for the first time, a sound which will dominate much of the decade to come. Of course, its use marks this song indelibly as belonging to 2009, and the fact that i'm writing this in 2020 means that it's just reached the sweet spot where changes in musical fashion have made it sound embarrassing, but the period hasn't been historicized enough for it to sound nostalgic yet. Let me say, to the future, that I'm betting this will sound even more amazing then.

JUANES, “GOTAS DE AGUA DULCE”

23rd February, 2008

Wiki | Video

Perhaps the most notable thing about this song is that it ushered Juanes into the exclusive club of those who have replaced themselves at #1 in any chart. He is actually the first to achieve that milestone on the Hot Latin chart (or the second if Alejandro Fernández replacing his own duet with Gloria Estefan counts with a sixth week of "Si Tu Supieras" in 1997 counts) -- and of course he wouldn't have done it if the Hot Latin chart, determined as much by airplay as by digital sales at this point, wasn't so friendly to bringing songs back to the #1 spot: although on this travelogue Wisin & Yandel's "Sexy Movimiento" has come between "Me Enamora" and "Gotas de Agua Dulce," on the chart it was a week sandwiched between month-long reigns of "Me Enamora."

But the first clause of the above paragraph isn't necessarily fair: it's a fine pop song regardless of stats-nerd chartspotting. Juanes' reggae-inflected rock and roll is slightly modified by more local Colombian rhythms (I think I hear cumbia, or maybe champeta, within the skank), and the falsetto crowing with which he introduces the song is delightfully high-spirited, a Peter Pan ebullience which is perfectly matched to the Never-Never Land of cheery bluff his music increasingly occupies.

The parent album is titled La Vida... Es un Ratico (Life...is a moment), which sounds like it might contain existentialist drama, but instead is full of cheerful tropical rock, comfortable as old shoes, taking the "eat, drink and be merry" view rather than the "memento mori" one. (Not that they're mutually exclusive.) "Gotas de Agua Dulce" means "drops of fresh water," one of a series of images he uses in the chorus to describe his love for the indispensable "you" of every love-song lyric: wishes that feed the heart, drugs that immunize him to pain, drops of fresh water, ray of sunlight. As ever, Latin Pop tends to be more poetic, even archaically so, than Anglophone pop with similar commercial ambitions: few North American lyricists this side of Leonard Cohen would care to pile up metaphor so recklessly. Maybe that's why "Hallelujah" is so overplayed, to make up for the poetry deficiency in English-language pop.

JUANES, “ME ENAMORA”

29th September, 2007

Wiki | Video

We haven't heard from Juanes since the triumph of "La Camisa Negra", and in the two years since he's beefed up his sound and gotten a haircut: the success of that application of guasca flavor to his tropical rock demands replication. So this taut boogie, with verses that sound like new wave-era stadium rock and a chorus with a cumbia shuffle buried beneath reggae bop, is an attempt to be even more crowdpleasing.

The lyrics are just as much full of dopey I'm-in-love cheer as the title "Me Enamora" (I'm in love with) would suggest: the clipped, staggered tension in the music on the verses is nowhere in the words. But the easy lope of the chorus, and particularly the ecstatic cock-crow of the guitar solo, is fully in line with the breezy sentiment.

He has found the furrow he will plow for years to come: cheerful, mostly uncomplicated music that provides a not-too-intrusive soundtrack to the listener's experience: the moodiness and ambition of some of his earlier appearances here are gone. It's a synechdoche for how rock has been assimilated into the larger pop world since the 1990s: acts like Maroon 5 or Imagine Dragons don't participate in the tradition of rock as carrier of musical or emotional authenticity, and just provide rock textures to the more easily-generalized emotions of pop.

FANNY LÚ, “Y SI TE DIGO”

18th August, 2007

Wiki | Video

Another case of a delayed number one (tip of the hat once more to chart analyst Chris Molanphy's AC/DC Rule, though he's discussing albums), where the single after the breakthrough hit is the one that goes to #1 on the Hot Latin Chart. We've seen it most notably before with Daddy Yankee, whose worldwide hit "Gasolina" primed the pump for "Rompe" to become the first reggaetón #1; and now Fanny Lú, already well-known in Colombia as a television presenter, hits #1 with the single after "No Te Pido Flores", the song that made her famous throughout Latin America.

A word I haven't used before on this travelogue, even though it's occasionally applied, is unavoidable here: "tropipop," a specifically Colombian mixture of traditional genres like vallenato and cumbia with Caribbean genres like merengue, salsa, and bachata, plus international pop. It was coined to describe Carlos Vives' collaborations with Emilio Estefan, and it's generally been quite commercially successful, if not very respected by practitioners of either traditional Colombian or Caribbean genres -- surface-level pop stars taking sounds without respecting the history, is what the charge boils down to -- and there hadn't been a female tropipop star before. Until producer José Gaviria decided that Fanny Lú, who had been trying to get a music career going since the mid-90s but kept having to give her television career higher priority, should be the female face of the genre.

And so that's what this is: if it sounds like bachata timbales, vallenato accordion, merengue bounce, and generalized international pop singalong melodies, that's tropipop. Not that bets weren't hedged: there was also a bachata version in which she duetted with Toby Love, and a merengue version with Eddy Herrera; but neither of them is quite as solid as the original; and the original isn't quite as solid as "No Te Pido Flores." She seems to be imitating Shakira's phrasing a bit here, but expresses none of her wit: it's a straightforward love song, subcategory "I don't have the courage to tell you how much I love you." It's perfectly pleasant, if rather anonymous and a touch overproduced -- those massed background vocals, for example, are highly unnecessary; she's not such a weak singer as to need the support.

But this isn't the last time we'll see Fanny Lú, and when we do again it will be with one of the signature songs of the era, so this isn't just the valley after a peak; there's a higher peak coming.

ALEJANDRO SANZ FT. SHAKIRA, “TE LO AGRADEZCO, PERO NO”

10th March, 2007

Wiki | Video

The third in a trilogy of songs that have been winding through the #1 chart for almost two years, at least in terms of how I've received them. The Shakira/Alejandro Sanz duet "La Tortura", in the summer of 2005, was the longest-reigning #1 song on the Hot Latin chart at the time that I began this blog in 2010, a crowning glory of mid-2000s Latin pop. Then Sanz's solo hit "A La Primera Persona" was only on top for a week in November 2006,  a compact illustration of the difference between pop thrillpower and tasteful male auteurism. Now "Te Lo Agradezco, Pero No," its video a direct sequel to that of "A La Primera Persona," only reigns for only one week: Sanz is still very much the auteur here, Shakira playing a duet partner rather than expressing her own thoughts in her own vivid language. But her very presence lends more color and drama to the song: the music moves to a danceable rhythm (and Sanz himself enters into some choreography in the video, a first for him, apparently at Shakira's insistence), and uses a sturdy Afro-Latin chassis even though the body is auteurist European pop.

And if "La Tortura" was about a woman's rejecting a man's take-me-back whinging, and "A La Primera Persona" was about a man pitying himself over lost love, "Te Lo Agradezco, Pero No" forms a sort of resolution: both man and woman reject the other's overtures at reconciliation, because they are adults and can recognize the toxicity of their past entanglements: they've both hurt the other, and they're setting each other free. Sure, there's still feelings, sure, they will probably return in the future, but they don't belong to each other. All of this, however, is inference and implication: Sanz' lyrics are typically telegraphic and a bit gnomic, and rhythm and sound matter more than laying out a coherent narrative. Multiple readings can reside in any good pop song, and this is a very good pop song.

It begins as a maundering bolero, with acoustic guitar and swaying conga rhythms giving propulsion to Sanz's throaty murmurs, but as the song builds, more and more elements are introduced, including subtle electronic percussion, so that by the time Shakira enters, whispering in unison with Sanz, it's developed into a catalan rumba, the combination of flamenco passion and Afro-Cuban rhythm that served as a particularly Spanish response to the modernism of Anglophone folkies like Bob Dylan. (Sanz works very much in the lineage of Dylan; and of Gato Pérez). And then, after the second chorus, a Memphis soul horn chart breaks out, turning the song into full-out Latin jazz, which Sanz's phrasing and harmonic leaps have been anticipating all along. The chorus is pure 70s r&b, and as more and more voices get added to it it takes the pull of gospel; and when Sanz breaks out into a half-rapped improvised montuno it's a gesture toward both salsa and r&b traditions.

It's notable that none of the traditions Sanz is folding in are particularly new: genre as a capacious grab-bag of historical authenticities is a familiar mode to many postmodern artists of his generation, among whom I'd include people as different as Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, Juan Luis Guerra, or Manu Chao. The gestalt is the point, much more than recreating any one tradition in particular. Shakira, too, has worked in this synthesizing manner (see "Suerte"), and if the traditions she's engaging with here feel more particular to Sanz than to her (her vocal timbre is much more muezzin than gitano), that seems to be exactly what she wanted when she approached Sanz with the desire to be on the other side of the "ft." this time.

SHAKIRA FT. WYCLEF JEAN, “HIPS DON'T LIE”

27th May, 2006

Wiki | Video

"Refugees run the seas cause we own our own boats."

Well, Jesus Christ.

Of course I'm thinking about all the stories, all the photos, all the statistics I've seen about Syrian and Libyan and Sudanese and Colombian and Honduran and Burmese and Tibetan refugees since 2006. Of course I'm thinking about the parallels that are being inexorably drawn between rising anti-refugee sentiment in the US and Europe and the doors which were slammed in the faces of German Jews during the lead-up to the Holocaust. Of course I'm aching with a bone-deep misery over the gap between the triumphant utopianism of pop and the squalid murderousness of the actual world.

I understand that, faced with that gap, one reasonable response is to reject pop as a hollow illusion, an opiate of the masses, Huxley's soma drip-fed into our veins to keep us pacified and unprotesting while Orwell's Big Brother raids our pockets for its unending wars. The squalid murderousness is the fact: triumphant utopianism is a useless and possibly dangerous fiction that obscures our view of reality, reassuring us that everything turns out for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Well, maybe. But Huxley and Orwell aren't the only midcentury British writers to engage with the effects of totalitarianism on the human spirit. In The Silver Chair, one of his books for children, C. S. Lewis includes a sequence in which the adventuring heroes are lulled into a trance by the Queen of the Underworld, who induces them to believe that their memories of the Overland, including vegetation and the cosmos, are entirely made up, a story they've been telling each other, and that no world but hers, hewn from rock and glimmering fragilely in the endless darkness within the earth, exists. The spell is only broken when the gloomy, sensible, semi-amphibious character Puddleglum stamps out her fire, and makes the following speech:

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

Philosophically it's unconvincing -- the argument that because humans can imagine a better world than this one, one must exist, is a very debased theodicy -- but poetically it's magnificent. That, I think, is why I will always return to pop: because it can, and almost necessarily does, imagine radically better ways of living and relating to one another than exist today. But they can; four babies dreaming can't make Narnia exist, but millions of Black, brown, and poor folk working together can reshape the world. It's not going to be easy: all extant power structures and our long inheritance of human inequality are arrayed against us. But we have resources they don't: beauty, and joy, and community, and an equally long inheritance of human resilience and creativity.

That inheritance is on magnificent display in this song, one of the most purely perfect pop songs of the decade. Of course when I say pure I don't mean that it's not complex: a vast array of musical traditions, technological interpolations, and yes, capitalist funding went into it. Supposedly beginning life as a sketch of a song called "Lips Don't Lie" with which Wyclef unsuccessfully tried to tempt Lauryn Hill into a Fugees reunion, it was eventually included on the 2004 soundtrack to Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights as "Dance Like This", a duet with Puerto Rican singer Claudette Ortiz. Listen to that, and you can hear the basic framework of the song, including the unmistakable sample of the trumpet flourish from Jerry Rivera's "Amores Como el Nuestro", but it just circles around itself over and over again, a mime of mutual seduction in which Ortiz sounds utterly anonymous and the song itself sounds bored, trailing off without ever having landed.

So when Shakira's label reached out to him for a remix to extend the life of "La Tortura", Wyclef said he had a better song that she would be perfect for. She rewrote the female duet partner's lyrics in her inimitably unidiomatic English and beefed up the production with Wyclef's producer Jerry Duplessis. Recording was done in Miami, Nassau, London, New York, Bogotá, and Vancouver; samples were cleared; and the single was released in February of 2006, three months after Oral Fixation, Vol. 2 was released to middling sales, a major disappointment after the way that "La Tortura" had boosted Fijación Oral, Vol. 1. But if you remember the summer of 2006 at all, you know that "Hips Don't Lie" was inescapable no matter where you were in the world (a Spanish version was also released, but I've never met anyone who heard it). 2006 was the absolute nadir of my engagement with contemporary pop music, and even I loved it.

I love it more now, twelve years later, as the world has grown crueller and more hateful toward the refugees Wyclef keeps repping in the song, as outright hatred (rather than ignorance) of Hispanic and Caribbean culture has grown more vocal and regularized in the Trump era even while Spanish-language and Spanish-English hybrids have become the lingua franca of international pop. The boiling insanity of xenophobia, isolationism, and apocalypse-mongering in the Anglosphere feeds back on itself until it becomes a white hunger for Black and brown death that can't be shocked back into sensible morality by reading stories of boats sinking in the Mediterranean or seeing images of dead babies on beaches.

As counterpoint to which a recitation of seduction between a Lebanese-Colombian and a Hatian-American, both millionaires, as formalized and mannered as a Noh play with its symmetrical verses and inevitable rap-verse peroration, might seem less than effective.

But the heraldic fanfare which opens and punctuates the song seems to announce more than a mere two-person exchange of intimacies: it is the opening of a tournament, a call to arms, a reveille, but most immediately of all it is a summons to the dancefloor. And "baile en la calle de noche, baile en la calle de día" is a utopian ideal, quoting Fernando Villalona's classic 1985 merengue "Carnaval" but in spirit stretching back to at least the liberatory utopianism of "Dancing in the Street" and perhaps even the celebratory 1902 ragtime song "On Emancipation Day" by Will Marion Cook and Paul Laurence Dunbar. (En Barranquilla se baila así, of course, and the soundtrack to liberation has never been exclusively in English; but I still know the Anglophone canon best.)

Of course it can go either way: the organization of culture purely by the logic of capital means that oppressor as well as oppressed can draw cheer, comfort, and hope from subaltern popular music. Which is why the ground is always shifting, why yesterday's utopian promise is today's banal muzak, why every triumph is also on some level a surrender. Like Carnival itself, a Dionysian space carved out of the Church calendar which only reinforces its control over all the rest of the year, pop has been assigned its quarter, and the eschatological promise it makes of dancing in the streets day and night, when the shackles of labor and the promise of state violence have finally been smashed, can only be an endlessly deferred IOU. Until it isn't. Lord haste the day.

No fighting.

SHAKIRA FT. ALEJANDRO SANZ, “LA TORTURA”

4th June, 2005

Wiki | Video

Although I love it, I ended my summary of "La Camisa Negra" last week by admitting that it is, after all, only a minor classic. That is the limit to which guitar-led rock music can ever aspire in the twenty-first century: major classics require more of an electronic kick.

And so we arrive here, to the single that set the pattern which so much of the Hot Latin chart would live up to over the next decade and more. It is the first reggaetón #1 proper -- which is to say, the first song to hit #1 which uses the beat universally recognized in its moment as belonging to reggaetón -- which also makes it one in a long list of colonial trend-jackers to be more commercially successful, and earlier, than the originators of the music. Like the Original Dixieland Jass Band, Pat Boone, and Vanilla Ice before them, Shakira and Alejandro Sanz are coded white (Sanz isn't even Latin American, but straight-up Spanish) and so able to break barriers that the musicians of color -- usually descended from African slaves -- who created their various genres could not.

So it's a testament to Shakira's (and to a lesser extent Sanz's) ability to synthesize a wide range of musical material in order to articulate a genuine artistic vision that the song is actually good -- much better, indeed, than "Tiger Rag," Boone's version of "Ain't That a Shame," or "Ice Ice Baby."

The narrative impetus of the song is one we've heard hundreds of times over the course of this travelogue: Sanz plays a man who comes crawling back to his former lover, begging her to take him back; "Yo sé que no he sido un santo/Pero lo puedo arreglar amor" (I know I haven't been a saint/But I can make it right, love), while she acknowledges the pain he has caused in the classicist ranchera-inflected chorus: "Ay, amor me duele tanto" (Oh, love hurts me so). But if it the song were a ranchera ballad being buoyed by swooping strings or an oompah rhythm, it would end in a reconciliation: his self-description as a bird who must fly (consciously evoking classic Southern Rock imagery) returning to its nest would be the final word. But it's not a ranchera, it's a reggaetón, and the democratic bump and grind of the music allows her to give as good as she gets: "Not by bread alone does man live/And I can't live on excuses." The song closes with a striking reversal, as she acknowledges that yes, it was torture to lose him, but he can go on crying for pardon, she will cry for him no more.

This is a turning point in more than one way, not only for this blog, but for all of Latin pop. I've repeatedly expressed, sometimes at wearying length, how gross and artificial I find so much of the romantic machismo that has has recurred in the lyrics of song after song over the twenty years since the chart began in 1986. Exceptions to stifling gender conventions have not necessarily been hard to find -- Juan Gabriel, Ana Gabriel, Juan Luis Guerra, Ricky Martin, and Shakira's early work stand out -- but they have been just that, exceptions to a pervasive cultural narrative that it is the man's prerogative to act, and then beg forgiveness, while it is the woman's lot to feel pain, but ultimately to believe in love and forgive. I don't want to suggest that this is a narrative unique to Latin music. Of course you can find a lot of the same attitudes throughout rock, soul, country, and hip-hop; but Latin machismo, perhaps because it has been so thoroughly analyzed by Latin feminists, is particularly easy to identify. Shakira is thoroughly aware of that  analysis -- the titles of her 2005 and 2006 albums, Fijación Oral and Oral Fixation, are even a pun on male sexual inadequacy -- and as a declared feminist herself, her refusal to let the man off the hook draws a line in the sand.

Of course it would be too much to claim that from here on out there will be no more machismo in Hot Latin #1s -- the coming wave of reggaetón will certainly have its regressive elements, and there will be rock and banda and more besides -- but the sheer scale of "La Tortura"'s success means that it had an inevitably outsized influence on the culture, and that it will be harder for any male singer to play the regretful cheater without Sanz's deliciously weaselly performance ringing in his head. Because the twenty-five weeks it spent at the top of the chart accounts for nearly half of 2005, and even with its sales split between physical and digital it still ranks as one of the top-selling singles of all time. It was the first-ever entirely Spanish-language video to be aired by the flagship MTV channel (and I haven't even mentioned the video, which goes into greater detail about the narrative between Shakira and Sanz, including a remarkable choreography which draws parallels between the convulsions of sobbing and of orgasm), and it still sounds thoroughly modern when much else that hit #1 in 2005 sounds increasingly trapped in the amber of the past.

There will be much more space to discuss reggaetón in the future, including the first authentic Puerto Rican reggaetón #1 coming up soon; but for now the fact that it is the soundtrack to even a qualified example of feminist liberation should be noted. Reggaetón, like all other genres, will have generations; and it will be useful, once enough time has passed, to remember its popular roots.

JUANES, “LA CAMISA NEGRA”

9th April, 2005

Wiki | Video

It's been a while since we last encountered a song that, if I gave each of these songs scores out of ten, I would have given a ten. (The last one would have been "Que Me Quedes Tú".) I'm not even entirely sure I would give "La Camisa Negra" a ten (it's no "Que Me Quedes Tú," for one thing), but the impulse is there, and that counts for a lot with me.

Like many people who didn't pay much attention to Latin pop in the 2000s, I first heard Juanes via this song -- and if you think you haven't heard it, try listening to it first, because you well may have without noticing. It was not only one of the biggest hits of 2005 (eclipsed only by the next stop on our travelogue), but a generational hit: it was still being spun regularly when I started listening to the Phoenix-area Latin pop stations in 2009, and I've heard it fairly frequently in Mexican restaurants and at cookouts in Chicago for the past five years.

It's a bit curious that it's become such a pan-Latin touchstone, because it was written as a very Colombian song, Juanes' tribute to the elder statesman of Colombian guasca (rural) music Octavio Mesa, whose cumbias and parrandas were as earthy and salty as any blues or roots reggae. Because Juanes is a polished pop composer, "La Camisa Negra" (the black shirt) is not actually filthy -- but his patter lyrics keep setting up potential filth before veering off to an innocent meaning, in the age-old tradition of double-entendre. It was still suggestive enough for its airplay to be banned in the Dominican Republic. Meanwhile, Italian leftists protested it for a different reason: the black shirt of mourning in Juanes' lyrics was reinterpreted by neo-Fascists as an approving reference to Mussolini.

None of the controversy hurt its popularity, of course, and the crisp, slick production, which blends blues smoke, reggae lilt, and parranda scrape with masterful skill, makes it one of the highlights of 2000s pop. Juanes' performance, the entire song sung on the edge of lascivious rasp, is also superb: with this song, so indebted to specifically Colombian traditions, he perfectly inhabits the global rocker persona he's been playacting all along. Still, it's the Big Pop Key Change into the soft-lens refrain "Por beber del veneno malevo de tu amor" (due to drinking the malevolent poison of your love), where his voice goes from rasping to yearning, that pushes this song out of rurally-bound tradition whether Colombian, North American or Jamaican, and into the sphere of glorious internationalist pop.

2005 was the beginning of the nadir for pop-music videos in the United States; cable TV had by and large gotten out of the music-video business, and the Internet had by and large not yet gotten into it. But the different broadcasting cultures of Latin pop, especially big-budget Latin pop, were still producing inventive and original videos: and this one, like the song that soundtracks it, is a minor classic.

JUANES, “VOLVERTE A VER”

5th February, 2005

Wiki | Video

I said not long ago that we'd hear Juanes do better than "Nada Valgo Sin Tu Amor." Peak Juanes is yet to come, but "Volverte a Ver" (see you again) isn't far off: a Nineties-style combination of rock grit and reggae flow, it's corny, but authentically corny: the emotions it communicates are sincerely communicated, if easily commoditized and hyper-consumable.

Juanes' performance at the center of the song is what really sells it, of course: his voice is as thin and strained as ever, but he knows how to use it to maximum effect to sell the song's heroic-faithfulness emotions without spinning into the kind of self-regarding bathos that (for example) Enrique Iglesias would. And the production backs him up with classic rock-band dynamics: Emmanuel Briceño's Fender Rhodes laying out a rootsy but polished bed for the opening verse and Juanes' guitar only crunching into stop-start bridge to the reggae chorus.

Juanes is undeniably a pop classicist, in love with the sounds and structures of the past, but the gloss and dynamism of his work means that he can sound just as contemporary and vital as his generational peers like Ricky Martin or Shakira. As of this #1, he hasn't yet achieved their heights with a perfectly iconic song; but one is on its way.

JUANES, “NADA VALGO SIN TU AMOR”

25th September, 2004

Wiki | Video

From the viewpoint of the #1 spot, the mid-2000s is the most rock & roll that Latin Pop has ever been or presumably will ever be again. It's still not very rock & roll -- pop serves its own needs -- but the signifiers at least of rock have been present on six out of the sixteen forgoing songs of 2004, which feels like a kind of wave. And then there's this, the most straightforward rock song since, gosh, maybe "Ciega, Sordomuda"? (Not that anything Shakira has done has ever been all that straightforward.)

Juanes' shoulder-length hair, tattoo sleeves, and Seventies guitar solo are all valorizing a particular historicized (and Anglo-American) vision of emotional authenticity in popular music, but the glockenspiel hits on the rousing chorus show that he's paying attention to contemporary (Anglo-American) indie rock as well. Since the last we saw of him was a cod-reggae duet with Nelly Furtado, this makeover might be kind of a surprise, but he's always been a rocker, or at least he's always enjoyed playing dress-up in rock clothing. And the shifts between the slow, power-ballady verses and the rousing Ramonesy chorus are a model of how to make rock interesting and engaging to a pop audience that doesn't have automatic affection for it.

It was a big hit, dominating the last half of 2004 on Latin radio and winning Best Rock Song at the Latin Grammys and the first-ever Rock/Alternative Song of the Year at Univision's Lo Nuestro awards. (Lo Nuestro had been awarding Latin cultural achievement since 1989; that they just now started recognizing rock speaks to the change I noted in my first sentence.) And yet... it's a bit soggy, a bit unwieldy. The title, translated as "I'm not worth anything without your love," is the kind of old-fashioned romantic hyperbole that the honesty and irony of Anglo-American rock had once been understood as puncturing. It's a very Latin sentiment, but because it's expressed in a blues-derived form without the traditional emotive flourishes of Latin music, there's a tension between the joyous bounce of the chorus and the plaintive feelings it's expressing.

Which doesn't mean it's bad, just a touch awkward. Juanes has done better. We'll get to hear some of it.

CARLOS VIVES, “COMO TÚ”

28th August, 2004

Wiki | Video

For eight years and more, I've had "Welcome to my beach party" as the first line of my About slug on the right side of this page, and today the prophecy is fulfilled in your hearing.

Which isn't to say that none of the foregoing eighteen years of number ones were beach party-suitable (that would be as foolish a claim as to say that all Latin music is). Vives himself, indeed, has provided several excellent jams that jibe with sea breeze and sunburn; but this hit marks a subtle turning point, or rather is a key instance in a turning continuum, of all music that enters the Latin #1 spot being transformed into party material.

There are two primary elements in this song: vallenato (or at least the pop-vallenato that was the closest 2000s international pop radio would get) and rock n' roll (or at least ditto). While the rock instrumentation may predominate, the vallenato shuffle sets the tempo, and the vallenato accordion duels with the electric guitar in discrete solos. Vives' hoarse, delighted singing, with patter verses indebted to hip-hop or perhaps to dancehall toasting (his dreadlocks in the video aren't the only island signifiers in the song), splits the difference between Black Crowes-ish bluesy boogie and souped-up millennial-era Latin pop.

Emilio Estefan was a producer, which explains why the music simply explodes out of the speakers the way it does, but it's Vives, hard-working but always genial, who makes it so deliriously joyful. This might be the best, most thrilling pop jam we've met on this travelogue since "Suerte", and the fact that both Vives and Shakira are Colombian isn't lost on me: its international pop scene may have gotten a late start (at least compared to Golden Age Latin pop nations like Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Cuba), but it's more than made up for it since.

SORAYA, “CASI”

2nd August, 2003

Wiki | Video

My careless lack of engagement with Latin pop (a few odds and ends excepted) until circa 2010 has been a drag on my analytic and appreciative capacity throughout this blog, but I don't know that I've ever felt it weigh so heavily as it does here. Soraya was entirely new to me: and she never should have been.

Like Shakira, she was a Colombian of Lebanese heritage; unlike her, she grew up in the United States in working-class circumstances. Her mother died of breast cancer in 1992; two years later, she landed a major-label recording contract on the strength of her singing and songwriting. Her first three albums, released between 1996 and 2000, were all released in both English- and Spanish-language editions, and had some success in both markets, gaining some Adult Contemporary play in English and some Latin Pop play in Spanish. Although she sang in Spanish, her music was very much in line with Anglophone singer-songwriter conventions: Carole King and Sheryl Crow seemed to be her lodestars.

But shortly after her 2000 album was released, she was diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer herself. She took three years off to fight it, and in 2003 released her fourth, self-titled album, also released in two different editions (although the English-language version was not entirely in English). The first single from the record, "Casi" (almost), was her first, and only, Hot Latin #1 hit.

It's a strong pop/rock song in the 90s post-alternative mold, guitar-led without being aggressive or leaving her excellent sense of rhythm behind. The lyrics are vague enough to be cast in a romantic situation -- "I almost gave up... until I thought of you" -- but are certainly applicable to her experience as a survivor. She had been a vocal proponent of breast cancer support and education before, thanks to her mother's death, but her activism increased since her remission. It would not be enough; in 2006, after a fifth and final album, she succumbed to cancer.

I can see -- or rather hear -- why she didn't leave much of a footprint on the wider Latin Pop landscape: her folky, harmony-heavy pop songs were rather old-fashioned and rarely particularly distinctive, and even before her diagnosis she had no interest in playing up her sex appeal. The Colombian-American community is too small for her to have become a Selena-like icon, and although she won a Latin Grammy for her self-titled comeback, she was neither ahead of trends like Shakira nor operating within a longstanding Latin tradition like India.

But I'm glad I got to hear "Casi." It's a good song.

JUANES FT. NELLY FURTADO, “FOTOGRAFÍA”

19th July, 2003

Wiki | Video

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.