CONJUNTO PRIMAVERA, “¡BASTA YA!”

25th August, 2007

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The third entry on this blog was a double entry, because two singers had recorded the same song and traded each other the #1 spot with it for several weeks. That this, more than twenty years into the chart's existence, is only our second encounter with two artists going to #1 with the same song isn't something I would have predicted all the way back in 2010, when it seemed like the Hot Latin chart might be much more of a wild west than it turned out to be.

But I'm glad for yet another opportunity to revisit Olga Tañón's rendition of Marco Antonio Solís' "¡Basta Ya!", because I was very unfair to it when it came around in 1996. I was comparing her to Selena and finding her wanting, when I should have been hearing her as her own person (which I think I did achieve in her later entries). And hearing the glassy keyboards and pulsing strings of 1996 adult-contemporary translated to the crisp accordion and and saxophone of 2007 conjunto (itself hardly unchanged since the 1970s) only reinforces how immortal that melody is: very few of the gloopy mid-90s ballads I protested against at the time could have been translated as successfully to such a fast-paced two-step as this is.

I believe this is our last encounter with Conjunto Primavera; why they were awarded the nod to be essentially the only Mexican regional act of the 2000s to appear at #1 still escapes me (they're good, but are they noticeably better than their norteño peers?), but their chihuahuense sound, accordion and sax peeling off licks in unison at harmonic intervals (a bit like Thin Lizzy's twin guitars), has been a welcome reprieve from the more globally-oriented modern pop that has been dominating the chart more and more.

I often like the globally-oriented modern pop too; but one of the reasons I wanted to do this project in the first place was because I love how heterogenous Latin music (maybe especially in the U.S.) is: regional Mexican, tropical Caribbean, and urban South American musical traditions all have their own specific pleasures that even the most exciting pop futurism can never replicate. So a salute to Conjunto Primavera: we first heard them covering Juan Gabriel, and that we bid them farewell covering Marco Antonio Solís feels fitting. ¡Viva México!

CONJUNTO PRIMAVERA, “ESE”

17th March, 2007

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Why Conjunto Primavera has been the only Mexican regional act to have reliably punctuated the #1 spot in the mid-2000s is a question I don't think I'm at all qualified to answer. The portion of this travelogue that has been taken up by regional Mexican music has dwindled since the 1990s, and Primavera, who were here all along but whose first #1 wasn't until 2003, are just about the only holdouts. That will shift in the coming years, as banda gathers pop strength, but regional Mexican music will remain only a minor strain among all the Hot Latin #1s, although of course a much richer part of the full tapestry of the chart.

This song once more strikes me as the kind of thing they could have recorded at any time between 1988, when the band's current lineup was settled, and the present: the usual questions that a music critic tries to ask about a #1 song -- why this song? why now? -- can only be answered with an elaborate shrug. Presumably, the chart being now well into the download era, "Ese" was assisted by digital sales, like many of its contemporaries have been. But also presumably it was huge on the Regional Mexican format, although I would consider it an unlikely candidate for crossover to the broader Latin Pop format.

It's a now familiar sound: norteño-sax, with keyboards imitating a churchy organ, a guitar keeping time, and Juan Dominguez' airy saxophone supporting Tony Melendez' starchy, wounded vocals. delivering an old-fashioned lyric in a strictly conventional tableau: the singer begs the object of the song not to weep over the one who broke her heart, because he's here and has loved her all along. The lyric is full of Nice Guy Energy, although because it isn't formalized into an ideology it's not more than averagely toxic.

CONJUNTO PRIMAVERA, “HOY COMO AYER”

25th February, 2005

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From the opening notes, it's clear that Juan Dominguez and his men have no interest in playing the pop game of keeping up with trends and changing with the times: they're keeping on keeping on, sounding almost exactly like they would have in 1988, with perhaps fuller production and a little more grain in Tony Melendez's voice, but otherwise unchanged.

The previous time we heard them, Félix Contreras was playing an accordion, and this time he's playing a Casio keyboard, which means that "Hoy Como Ayer" (today like yesterday) isn't technically conjunto chihuahuense, but a regional ballad. It's a very good regional ballad, possibly the best we've heard since the 1990s, but it's a rapidly-vanishing tradition, at least at the #1 spot.

The song's melody is as sturdy and repetitive as a hymn's, and there's a churchy stateliness to the entire proceedings, punctuated only by Dominguez' sensual saxophone solos. Whether Conjunto Primavera knew they had a hit and invested it with all the dramatic tension at their disposal or whether the high drama of the production was what made it a hit is an open question; either way, it's a late classic in a style that dominated the early and mid 1990s in this travelogue, the likes of which it's doubtful we'll run across again.

CONJUNTO PRIMAVERA, “UNA VEZ MÁS”

22nd March, 2003

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Juan Gabriel has made his swan song as a performer on the chart, but his songs remain. "Una Vez Más" (Once more) was a song on his 1982 album Cosas de Enamorados (Lovers' things), and its swoony romanticism, a fragile soft-rock ballad in the original, is an unusual if ultimately congruent fit for a sound which we have only met once before on this travelogue: conjunto chihuahuense.

Mexican conjunto is a style of norteño focused on relatively small combos of musicians with formalized instrumental setups. The style of conjunto played in the state of Chihuahua is almost unique in that a saxophone is typically added to the accordion as the primary carrier of melody in the conjunto, which is otherwise almost all rhythm: electric bass, drums, and the plucking bajo sexto.

As if to underscore the importance of the saxophonist to the Chihuahua sound, the only member of Conjunto Primavera to have remained constant since the band was founded in 1978 to the present day is saxophonist and leader Juan Domínguez. Singer Tony Melendez, whose buttery, reverb-drenched pipes place "Una Vez Más" in the classic midcentury pop tradition, was Primavera's second lead singer starting in 1988, and under his voice the band became more than just a local success, slowly gaining ground over the 90s until they scored an unlikely #1 in the midst of the world-straddling pop stars of 2003.

Compare them to the rowdier Rieleros del Norte, the only previous chihuahuense combo to appear here, three whole years ago, and there's a mellowness and classiness to Primavera's sound that isn't wholly due to the cover. Juan Gabriel was writing in a self-consciously classicist pop mode, but the intense intimacy of his vocals is smoothed out in a much more self-possessed cover: even though the lyric is a drama of longing and renunciation, Melendez' voice only shows any strain on the middle eight, where the key shifts into the stratosphere. 

LOS RIELEROS DEL NORTE, “TE QUIERO MUCHO”

15th January, 2000

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For a gringo (like me, not long ago) who thinks all Mexican regional music sounds the same, it would be tempting to assume that this is the first flowering of banda, which will, if not dominate, at least punctuate the Hot Latin #1s in the coming decade. But Pemo González' saxophone is, while unusual in a norteño conjunto (at least outside of Chihuahua), not definitive: the real giveaway that this isn't banda is that the bass is electric, not a tuba. "Te Quiero Mucho" is instead one of the periodic appearances of norteño, and Los Rieleros are only slightly less venerable than Los Tigres in 2000. Formed in Chihuahua in the 80s by men who used to work on railroads (thus the name), they've primarily operated out of Texas since hitting the big time in the 90s.

González' saxophone and Daniel Esquivel's accordion are as unified in the melodic thrust of the song as Thin Lizzy's dual guitars, and the pulsing bass and skittish drums set up a granite-steady beat against which Esquivel's rather fruity voice, alternately simpering and soaring, can deliver a simple declaration: the title means "I love you very much," and with that as a starting place, there are no surprises to be found in the lyrics. But while sobbing passion is a standard device in classic Mexican regional music (think of Juan Gabriel's florid rancheras), norteño singers tend to play their emotions closer to the vest, as befits a desert music.

But why did this song hit #1, two decades into their career, smack in the midst of all these younger, internationally-oriented, pop-native singers? No idea. One of the happy accidents of a heterogenous pop market -- and a pop statistical model that allows for subtle shifts in taste and disparate listening bases to make their presences felt. There's a decade and more of that to come, before the end of all things.

LOS REHENES, “NI EL PRIMERO NI EL ÚLTIMO”

19th November, 1994

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Already Selena has begun changing the landscape of Latin Pop. Los Rehenes, a zacatecano band (from the central Mexican state of Zacatecas) which had had some local popularity on an independent label, suddenly zooms to the top of the charts not because they're anything special, necessarily — lots of local regional dance-and-corrido bands could have done as well — but because they're working the cumbia beat with modern electronic flourishes: those drum-machine fills are almost identical to the ones on "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom."

Which isn't entirely fair to Javier and Roberto Torres and their bandmates. Their sound, both classic and modern, was what the moment demanded as Selena opened up an appetite for tejano and related music in the U.S. Latin market, and they could write. "Ni El Primero, Ni El Último" means "neither the first nor the last," and the shrugging fatalism and class-consciousness of the lyric — he's not the first to strike out in love, he's not alone in being despised for his poverty, he doesn't offer the sun and the moon because they're not his to give — is charming and refreshing after the steady diet of extravagant emotionalism which the past eight years of baladas románticas have fed us, punctuated occasionally by silly dance songs.

This is in fact the closest we have come yet to the Mexican version of what country music has traditionally been in the United States: the place where showmanship meets heartbreak, where lower-class solidarity meets pop tunefulness, and wry grins and cowboy hats go hand in hand. It's not quite puro regional, it's slickly produced and major-label poppy, with that pumped-out keyboard hook and those juddering post-industrial fills, but we can see regional from here. We'll see more of it.