MARC ANTHONY, “VIVIR MI VIDA”

18th May, 2013

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A Nuyorican cover of a song in Arabic and French song by a singer born in Algeria and resident in Luxembourg, produced by a Swedish team: the anodyne feel-good façade of Obama-era globalization reaches something of a crescendo here, with a string of decisions made by individuals who may be nothing but sincere in their motivations but who end up producing a symbol of a global consensus rapidly fading into the rearview in 2025.

Let's start back in 1992, when thirty-two-year-old Algerian raï singer Khaled, having recently moved to France and dropped the prefix "Cheb" (young) from his stage name, released the single "Didi", produced by American quirkmaster Don Was, whose addition of a new jack swing beat, a celebratory horn chart, and funk pop bass to Khaled's lovestruck performance turned him into a global star with a musical footprint across continental Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. He maintained that position for the next decade-plus with a series of raï hits intermingled with Western dance sounds, one of the ambassadors of the 90s vision of "world music" -- and in 2012, at the age of fifty-two, he staged a comeback with "C'est la Vie", produced by Swedish-Moroccan superproducer RedOne, a canny admixture of raï and post-subprime dancepop, with RedOne's signature airy synth blasts and thumping beats overlaying Algerian hand percussion and syncopated keyboard patterns not a million miles away from the montuno figures of Afro-Cuban mambo. It's a big-tent singalong in Arabic and French, and the video, with its photogenic cast of ethnically diverse dancers and models expressing a genericized, unthreatening joy, is virtually a pro-immigration ad campaign aimed at the European petty bourgeoisie, sentimental but vacuous.

"C'est la Vie" was Khaled's biggest hit since "Didi," soaring up a lot of European charts and setting hugely across the Middle East; and like "Didi" it inspired a bunch of covers, foremost of which was the salsa reimagining by Marc Anthony and Sergio George which is our actual topic today. But let's go back to the early 90s again.

We first met Marc Anthony on this travelogue in 1997, but he'd been making music since 1988, initially as an English-language singer on Latin freestyle and underground house tracks produced by the likes of Little Louie Vega and Todd Terry. But in 1993, after being bowled over by Juan Gabriel's "Hasta Que Te Conocí," he devoted himself to singing in Spanish, and specifically to salsa: his cover was where the real Marc Anthony was born. He's eight years younger than Khaled, but their careers still moved in an odd parallel: both were singers of a specific postcolonial ethnic music closely identified with immigrant enclaves in the imperial core; both also reached out to the broader western pop landscape and were celebrities -- rockstars, even -- beyond their minority identities; both had high-profile marriages whose troubles were splashed over the tablod press.

Marc Anthony's divorce from Jennifer Lopez was fresh news in early 2013, and the song was widely understood at the time as being a man's declaration of happiness over his newfound independence from an allegedly difficult to please woman. The Spanish lyrics are credited exclusively to Anthony, although the chorus at least is not too far of from the original. Compre the Spanish "Voy a reír, voy a gozar, vivir mi vida, la la la la la" (I'm going to laugh, I'm going to enjoy myself, live my life, la la la la la) with the French "On va s'aimer, on va danser, oui, c'est la vie, la la la la la" (We're going to love, we're going to dance, yes, that's life la la la la la). The video very highmindedly casts the song as a tribute to his fans, particularly in his hometown of New York, but the fact that the fans in the video are mostly very young women is its own indication of the kind of rockstar imagery that was being invoked.

Ultimately I enjoy "Vivir Mi Vida" a lot more than "C'est la Vie," if only because the salsa instrumentation doesn't insist on itself as much as RedOne's bombastic thumping; the sparse Latin percussion, with its generous empty spaces, leaves room for a subtler kind of dancing than slamming trance, and Sergio George's arrangement is full of the kind of detail and narrative that the club-oriented repetition of the original has no room for. Both are still pretty cheesy singalongs, even chantalongs aimed as much at soccer terraces as dancefloors, so maybe it's just my greater familiarity with salsa than with raï that makes Marc Anthony's feal realer to me.

Airplay Watch:

• Don Omar, "Zumba"
• Discussed in the previous entry.
• Intocable, "Te Amo (Para Siempre)"
• A beautiful middle-aged tejano ballad that I'm even more annoyed than usual that the streaming-era chart didn't give me the chance to dig more deeply into. 
• Marc Anthony, "Vivir Mi Vida"
• Discussed above.
• Katherine Alexander, "Put It in a Kiss"
• A forgotten electroswing novelty produced by Dominican producer Maffio adapting the rhythms and melody of Irving Berlin's "Puttin' on the Ritz" to cheerful Zumba-friendly ends. Stuck around for three weeks in January 2014 while "Vivir Mi Vida" and its two late-2013 successors swapped  back and forth before being replaced by the first new Hot Latin #1 of 2014.

MANÁ, “HASTA QUE TE CONOCÍ”

15th September, 2012

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One of the few upsides of having taken forever to get through this blog is that songs that had yet to be released when I began it are able to force me to revisit and revise some of the ill-informed, unconsidered, and shallow takes I gave in the first few years of its existence.

Juan Gabriel, first as a songwriter and then a week later as a singer, was the auteur who more than any other defined the first five years of Hot Latin #1s, and I never really appreciated what made him great when I was writing about those years. It was not until his final #1 as a singer in 2001 -- which I only got to after his death in 2016, when I was finally capable of understanding the full breadth of his achievement -- that I really gave him his due in these pages.

But it wasn't in these pages, but in the waning years of the music-writing community on Tumblr, that I really revised my understanding of Juan Gabriel: my somewhat bellicose and overheated in memoriam included twinned valuations of "Debo Hacerlo," a #1 which I had done less than justice to back in 2010, and its immediate predecessor, the epic-length power ballad "Hasta Que Te Conocí," which peaked at #2 and so which I had been ignorant of until his death, when I dove into his discography and learned, to my mortification, that "Debo Hacerlo" had always been a kind of Frankensteined remix of "Conocí," the kind of obvious context that any Spanish-language listener in the eighties would have known immediately and which this blog would theoretically exist to elucidate for English-only readers. I've mentioned before how embarrassed I am by the first two decades covered by this blog, but that entry might be the one of which I'm most ashamed.

I'll go ahead and reproduce my post-mortem Tumblr blurb for "Hasta Que Te Conocí" here, in order to give a starting point for considering Maná's 2012 cover:

In 1986, he had no worlds left to conquer. (The savage wilderness to the north had never counted; it would have been beneath his dignity to mouth their crude, unliterary tongue.) The supreme center of Mexican music, he moved with ease between the internationalist pop of the capital, the classicist ranchera of the provinces, and the party-hearty rock of the border. His songs were sung by Spanish divas and juvenile sensations, he was the face and voice of the television age. With no horizontal territory left to claim, he could only build up: to pierce the sky with monuments to his own emotional torment and eccentric but undeniable musicianship.

“Hasta Que Te Conocí” is an sprawling pop edifice built from ranchera materials, but on a plan only Juan Gabriel could have conceived. An extended ambient ballad built on folkloric repetition and declarations of prelapsarian innocence serves as introduction, his perfectly-timed phrasing the only element of rhythm. When he finally pivots to the title phrase, tight mariachi strums and doomy horns build tension as he lays out his accusation of heartbreak and betrayal. It winds tighter and tighter, until the whole arrangement rises into an extended march-cum-tango-cum-montuno, horns pealing dolorously as Gabriel’s voice raises at last in emotional refusal, the tightly-constructed argument thrown out the window for a repeated, sobbing “no te quiero verte más.” The original studio version is stunning enough, but for the full, extravagantly emotional, experience see his epochal 1990 concert version or even his rendition from earlier this year, arranged and conducted by his longtime champion, composer Eduardo Magallanes.

(I will leave my reevaluation of "Debo Hacerlo" for the clickthrough; I may even have more to say later this year thanks to assorted music nerd challenges on Bluesky.)

Despite my insistence that only Juan Gabriel could have conceived of or pulled off the weird, ungainly, intensely personal structure of "Hasta Que Te Conocí" (tr. "Until I met you"), it's been a frequent target for cover versions in the years since 1986, much in the way that similarly extravagant slabs of high camp in the Anglophone canon like "Bohemian Rhapsody" or "Total Eclipse of the Heart" have been. Merengue, rock, and hip-hop versions all reached the lower reaches of the Hot Latin chart between 1987 and 2009, but the most successful covers would by Marc Anthony's faithful 1991 salsa cover (which reached #13) and, of course, this 2012 rendition by veteran rockers Maná.

I've been very hard on Maná in these pages, especially their latter-day resurgence as a mainstay of the #1 spot -- and it's a little comical that I implied they were in some way antithetical to Juan Gabriel in their first appearance here, given the fact that this cover was waiting for me -- but I have to admit that this is a sensitive, well-delivered cover, primarily in gentle bolero time until they go all Santana on a montuno coda, with Fher keeping his dudely rock bellowing to a minimum. But I can only come to that conclusion after spending weeks away from Juan Gabriel's original: when I listen to them back to back, Maná's limited emotional landscape and unimaginative rock instrumentation stand out in stark relief.

I have no memory of hearing this on the radio at the time, but like so many entries this year, it was only at #1 for a week: the last grains of sand of the airplay-only Hot Latin chart are running out fast.

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!

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “OJALÁ”

30th June, 2007

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This is most likely the last time we will see Marco Antonio Solís on this travelogue; he's been a regular presence here since 1988 (and he's been having Mexican hits since 1975), but the chart is drifting away from the kind of traditional Mexican pop he does very well, and younger and flashier sounds are gaining prominence. In the present tense of when I'm writing this, 2019, he hasn't released an album of new material for six years, the longest he's ever gone before; if he does stage a comeback in the age of urbano (he's not quite sixty yet), I'll be pleasantly surprised.

The 2006 album Trozos de Mi Alma 2 (Pieces of My Soul 2) was an album of new recordings, but it wasn't new material; like its predecessor in 1999, it was Solís covering songs he'd written but given to other singers. I didn't note it at the time, but his 1999 #1 "Si Te Pudiera Mentir" (If I Could Lie to You) was originally recorded by Rocío Dúrcal in 1990. And his version of "Ojalá" sounds like classic Rocío Dúrcal: carefully-produced mariachi-inflected pop, with studio orchestration that replicates the soft-rock sound of 70s pop where Dúrcal had her heyday and Solís got his start.

So who sang the original? Well... Paulina Rubio, in 2004. And if you click on that link you'll get a lesson in what production can do to a song. It was only an album track (her big singles from Pau-Latina, "Te Quise Tanto" and "Dame Otro Tequila" appeared here), but it's still as dense with mid-2000s genre-mashup technofuturism as everything else on the album, mariachi horns snaking across a glitchy, twitchy soundscape which she actually takes at a slightly slower pace than Solís would two years later, purring lyrics which he delivers in his traditional trumpet-like belt. Of the two performances, I'm aesthetically constituted so as to prefer Rubio's, but that doesn't mean I dislike Solís's in the slightest: I enjoy both his soft-focus traditionalism and her lively personality-driven pop. Her hissed ad-lib at the start, "quiero que te arrastres, güey" -- I want you to crawl, dude -- is sublime.

Because the song is, in both versions, a kiss-off, with the title "Ojalá" (literally derived from the Arabic for "God willing" but generally used as an informal expression of hope) in the chorus introducing a series of wishes that the betraying lover will meet with similar terrible fates. It's a wallow in hatred and revenge fantasies, and it's even kind of funny (Solís's first line, roughly "I don't know what name to call you, I looked in the dictionary and couldn't find it," is some classic country songwriting). A terrific song, regardless of version, and perhaps the best farewell to this blog that Marco Antonio Solís could have devised. Three weeks at #1 (interrupting Enrique Iglesias' much longer reign to either side), a victory lap for a long-serving craftsman before ceding the floor to the youth coming up, as always, from behind.

ANAÍS, “LO QUE SON LAS COSAS”

15th April, 2006

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Any examination of pop in the 2000s is going to have to encounter singing-competition reality shows sooner or later, and I can only be grateful that this song, more than halfway into the decade, is the first time a song by the winner of a singing competition has appeared here.

The Puerto Rican show Objetivo Fama was on its second season: a combination of Big Brother and X-Factor, it featured hopeful pop stars rooming together in a house/studio while competing to win the favor of judges and the viewing public via performances. The first season had only been open to Puerto Ricans, but the second loosened those rules, and Anaís Martínez, from the Dominican Republic, went all the way. Her prize was a recording contract with Univision, and her debut single was a cover of Puerto Rican star Ednita Nazario's 1991 adult-contemporary classic "Lo Que Son Las Cosas" (the way things are, written by her ex-husband, Argentine pop star Luis Ángel Márquez), which only missed appearing here then thanks to Los Bukis.

Of course I like Ednita's version better than Anaís' -- it's straight-down-the-line early 90s adult contemporary in exactly the vein I'm nostalgic for because that was the first period in which I listened to pop music, where the later cover is overproduced and oversung. It's not bad particularly, but it's missing the context of the original: Nazario had been an Olivia Newton John-esque pop starlet since the late 70s, and was entering middle age singing her husband's song expressing fatalistic regret about relationships ending while in the midst of a very public divorce from him. Anaís' cover performs the emotions with convincing correctness, but she's too young and too obviously well-funded (the kitchen sink is thrown at this very reality-show holleralong) for any but the most generalized emotions to come through.

LOS TEMERARIOS, “QUÉ DE RARO TIENE”

24th July, 2004

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We first encountered Los Temerarios in 1997, singing a 1977 Vicente Fernández ballad. Now, seven years later, we meet them again, singing a 1990 Vicente Fernández ballad. That's not all they ever do, of course (we met them again in 1998 with an original), but it's apparently what the most people wanted out of them during the few particular weeks when nothing else was grabbing as many people's fancy.

Their 2004 album, Veintisiete, was as the title suggests their twenty-seventh album, and the image of the two bandleaders, brothers Adolfo and Gustavo Ángel Alba (Gustavo sings, Adolfo is the musical director) in sepiatone on the cover is an indication that it's an album of covers: not only Vicente Fernández but Juan Gabriel, Pedro Infante, and Cornelio Reyna are among the mariachi and ranchera classics the Ángel Alba boys tackle.

As with their 1997 cover, it's a perfectly adequate reading of a song that, not being Vicente, Gustavo doesn't have the lungpower to make his own. It's a classic barroom tearjerker, the complaint of a man who has lost everything, including the respect of society, because he can't keep away from women. "Qué de raro tiene?" he asks: "what's strange about it?" -- that's just how men (weak) and women (temptresses) are. Which is of course profoundly misogynist, and Los Temerarios try to palliate that a bit by making the video about a love triangle in which the woman dies, breaking both men's hearts.

But misogynist or not, classic mariachi will not have a place much longer on this travelogue. I'm inclined to enjoy it, despite its political limitations, while it's here.

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. 

PILAR MONTENEGRO, “QUÍTAME ESE HOMBRE”

30th March, 2002

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In the years immediately predating the reign of reggatón (a reign which has mutated and transformed enough that it's now possible to talk of reggaetón generations, but that's for the future), Puerto Rican music made itself more and more central to the Hot Latin #1 spot. It had always shown up there -- Puerto Rico was the third most frequently represented nation in US-oriented Hispanophone pop behind Mexico and the mainland US -- but in the 90s whole years went by without PR representation. The gravitational well around Ricky Martin surely had something to do with it, but improving economic conditions on the island around the turn of the century also helped: the generation of Puerto Ricans who had helped create salsa in the 50s, 60s and 70s were giving way to a new generation less geographically bound to either New York or San Juan, more internationalist in both outlook and reception.

Which may be an odd way to start off a song from a Mexican singer. But "Quítame Ese Hombre" (Take That Man Away from Me), a cover of a 1988 single by Puerto Rican pop singer Yolandita Monge, written by the great Cuban songwriter José Luis Piloto, a rather stately and high-toned request that the singer's new lover erase all traces of the old, unsatisfactory one. For Pilar Montenegro, no doubt, the song's non-Mexican provenance mattered not at all: she wanted a good, familiar tune which her throaty delivery and skimpy video outfits could adorn. Her primary career has been as an actress, primarily in telenovelas, and this is her sole appearance on the travelogue.

With all due respect to her vocal and self-promotion talents, that appearance is probably due more than anything else to the production of Cuban-American Rudy Pérez, whose production work has regularly appeared here (he ran in Estefan circles during the 80s), sometimes noticed and sometimes not. Listening to Yolandita Monge's and Pilar Montenegro's versions of the song back to back is an education in production shifts from the late 80s to the early 00s: if the 80s sounds better today, that has more to do with fashion trends than with the skill or acumen of the producer.

CHARLIE ZAA, “FLOR SIN RETOÑO”

23rd February, 2002

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Two years into the new millennium, Latin music is less regionally-oriented than ever. Charlie Zaa, born Carlos Alberto Sánchez, is Colombian, and grew up singing in his father's local orchestra, which played cosmopolitan Latin dance music for hotel crowds: which meant, in the 70s and 80s, salsa and merengue and big-band cumbia. When Zaa began his own career in 1990, it was with a series of salsa bands: he went solo in 1996, with a smash album covering midcentury Mexican (and pan-Latin) boleros and waltzes. Following the money, he continued the formula for the next half-decade, hitching his wagon to the Estefans in 2001, and scored his first (and to date only) number one hit with the standard "Flor Sin Retoño" (Flower Without Bloom), written by the great Mexican composer Rubén Fuentes and made famous by legendary crooner Pedro Infante in 1954.

It's one of the classic boleros, an extended floral metaphor for the damage men do to women (legible as either the traditional concern over "deflowering" or a more modern understanding of abuse), which sticks so tightly to the metaphor that it becomes a fable. One that (of course) prioritizes the man's feelings; but in the closed systems of patriarchy, truth often has to be smuggled in through metaphor.

In 2002, Zaa was not yet thirty, and his youthful good looks are made much of in the video, which does its best to corrupt the song's central metaphor by turning the woman/flower a sorceress who has bewitched him -- but the lame CGI visuals are nothing compared to the sexy, detailed shake and sway of the music. Infante's production in '54 was no slouch, but Zaa's transcontinental production adds Cuban montuno punchiness to the bolero rhythm, as well as muted mariachi horns, romantic strings, and his own honeyed, close-miked voice to create a bigger-than-life sound, not unlike Gloria Estefan's excursions in to Cuban musical history, that I want to call nostalgic immediacy.

Like Luis Miguel, he's plowing a limited furrow; but unlike him (and like Alejandro Fernández or Carlos Vives), he lets the dynamism and attitude of the postmodern present inhabit the spirit of the classicist past. If we're not to see him again, I'm glad to have met him here.

OSCAR DE LA HOYA, “VEN A MÍ”

28th October, 2000

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Yep, the boxer. And if you've clicked through to the video, yep, that's the Bee Gees' "Run to Me." The turn-of-the-century Latin wave had unsettled things so much that an athlete's vanity album could be one of the year's biggest sellers. On the other hand, it was produced by Rudy Pérez, with writing contributions from Diane Warren, so it was very much part of the Latin pop of the era (it was recorded when he was wooing Millie Corretejer, who we met briefly last year; they remain married). So a vanity album, but  a well-funded and properly marketed one: the English-language version of the song got a bit of Anglo adult-contemporary play, while this Spanish-language one did so well that it turns up here.

De La Hoya's voice wasn't particularly strong, but neither are lots of pop stars'. The production is, charitably, generic adult-contemporary of the period. The lyric is a one-to-one translation of the original, and just as sappy and generic, and the harmonies, produced by session singers, are ported directly over from the Brothers Gibb's.

And that's about all I have to say about it. This will, unsurprisingly, be the last we see of the Golden Boy.

JENNIFER LOPEZ & MARC ANTHONY, “NO ME AMES”

26th June, 1999

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And the millennial era in Latin Pop is truly underway. From an Anglophone perspective, this means that it's the first number one from one of the biggest stars of the era; but from the perspective of the Latin audience, the really important thing is that it's Marc Anthony's second chart-topper. Jennifer Lopez, while indeed a major star in both the English-language and Spanish-language markets of the US -- this was only her second single, and she's at the top spot already -- never dominated the Latin charts the way the woman she broke into stardom by playing had. In a way it's fitting that Marc Anthony would be her chaperone into the Latin charts; not only will he (at press time) earn more than twice as many #1 hits than she will, but the marriage of convenience that is this duet would over time turn into probably the biggest celebrity marriage (with the eventual celebrity divorce) in US Latin pop culture.

The story goes that Ms. Lopez was recording her debut album in the same studio where Mr. Anthony was going over the sessions for his sixth; he, presumably more impressed by her background as a Fly Girl than in her musical aspirations, asked her to appear as a dancer in an upcoming video; she, a shrewder bargainer than perhaps he expected, said only if he would record a duet with her. He chose and rewrote an Italian ballad, "Non amarmi," with which Aleandro Baldi and Francesca Alotta had won a festival prize in 1992; she insisted on recording an uptempo version too. It was the ballad version that ended up blanketing Latin radio and being nominated for a Grammy, but J. Lo proving herself on a salsa right next to the reigning king of salsa was nevertheless a minor triumph in addition to the major one.

As with any meaty pop song embedded so deeply in a personal relationship, history has provided a lot of ways to hear "No Me Ames" ("don't love me"). There's the ironic resonance it has now, as a duet sung by a divorced couple who (if their post-breakup singles are anything to go by; we'll get to his, but not hers) are quite happy to be unlinked; there's the fulsome resonance it would have had between their wedding in 2004 and their separation in 2011, when they sang it often at joint appearances, when the emphasis was placed not on the repeated title phrase but on the way the verses give the lie to it; and then there's the simple resonance it had before they became a power couple, when they were just two pop stars who happened to run into each other and recorded a song that could be applied much more easily and straightforwardly to the listener's personal life than to the singers'. I prefer that version, because I'm more interested in the everyday uses of pop than in celebrity culture, and the pleasurable tug between "no me ames" and "siempre te amaré" (I will always love you) means more to my interior state than any far-off fairy tale of rich people can.

It's a sturdy song, well-constructed and built to dig into the memory and lodge there. Marc Anthony knew what he was doing when he picked it; even if the ballad version sounds like Pop from Nowhere (an Italian specialty in the 90s), with few traditionally Latin flourishes, that only helps it spread more widely.

CRISTIAN CASTRO, “LO MEJOR DE MÍ”

22nd November, 1997

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As regular readers of this travelogue are aware, I'm fairly skeptical of ballads, demanding to be impressed by great writing, great singing, or great arranging before letting any low-bpm romanticism past my rock-reared defences. So I was already listening to this with one eyebrow raised, as it were, from the very first notes.

And?

It's not bad! Castro's found his own rather fine voice -- no longer shamelessly aping Luis Miguel, he's found his own tricks of intimacy -- and it's tastefully-arranged, with lovely acoustic guitar runs and actual piano instead of electric approximations, and a slow saunter of a bolero rhythm underpinning the whole thing. If it's not lyrically a knockout, well, it's a conventional romántico ballad. "Lo Mejor de Mí" means "the best of me," and the chorus is a complaint that he's given her his best, but it's not enough, she keeps hurting him and he doesn't deserve it.

But then I clicked over to Wikipedia to check up on any facts I needed to know, and saw that it was a cover of Rey Ruiz's 1991 original. And, well, I'm sorry, Cristian, but a danceable salsa ballad is always going to kick a self-important dirgey ballad all to hell. I know I'm something of a hypocrite here, because I love nothing more than a good wallow when I'm romantically rejected, but Ruiz's version, in which it can never get that bad as long as there's dancing and buddies you can do a call-and-response with, is infinitely more attractive to listen to.

LOS TEMERARIOS, “YA ME VOY PARA SIEMPRE”

26th April, 1997

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The first song to break the Iglesias/Solís streak is also the third live norteño song in three years, and the ninth time I've had occasion to break out the "cover" tag. The cover here is of Vicente Fernández' late-70s hit "Ya Me Voy Para Siempre" (you can, and should, see him lipsync to it in the 1980 movie Picardia Mexicana II here), and Los Temerarios, who were a romántico band, not a norteño one, make only a decent fist of it, studio instrumentation filling in the weak spots in their live act.

The Fernández original is a grimly comic song of lost love: "Si sigue este dolor, no le sorprenda que mi hogar sea una cantina," runs the repeated bridge. ("If this pain continues, don't be surprised that my home is a tavern.") Which fit perfectly with Fernández' working-class hero image — in the movie, he ends the song by vowing future loyalty only to the comic proletariat of the supporting cast — but among the moneyed classiness of the mid-90s Latin chart (or that portion of it we're hearing) is something of a shock.

Gustavo Ángel, the singing Ángel brother of Los Temerarios (their name means "the reckless ones") goes for a more dramatic reading than Fernández' classically balanced blue-collar mariachi version (the difference is maybe not dissimilar to Alan Jackson covering George Jones), and he gets off a fantastic grito and shout out to the Temerarios' home state of Zacatecas, but the bulk of the energy here comes from the crowd singing lustily along with the "porque el amor de mi vida solito me dejó" refrain. ("Because the love of my life left me all alone.") Still, I can't be mad at anything that breaks up the pop-establishment ballad monotony.

SELENA, “FOTOS Y RECUERDOS”

15th April, 1995

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And like that, she's gone.

On March 31st, after an argument with a former employee and president of her fan club, Selena turned to leave the Days Inn room where they had agreed to meet and was shot deep in the right shoulder. She died of blood loss just over an hour later in a Corpus Christi hospital.

The immense and immediate public grief that followed was the occasion of most Anglophone music fans' first hearing of her. Tom Brokaw called her "the Madonna of Mexico" on the evening news, but he was wrong. She was the Madonna of America — of that portion of America which, just as free and proud and God-fearing as any other, has worked harder, lived on less, and built more (at least west of the Mississippi). Mexico? Please. Selena was from Texas.

(Which isn't to say she wasn't proud of her Mexican heritage, same as anyone can be of their Irish or Italian or whatever. Just noting acts of erasure where I see them.)

And by now hopefully you'll have clicked play and wondered why I haven't yet mentioned the song. It's a great song even if you don't know Spanish, and you recognized that guitar line right away. But although it was her first number one after her death, it was the fourth single from Amor Prohibido, and so even if the imagery was kind of apt (see below), there was always going to be a feeling of exhaustion to whatever song took this place.

But the fact that it's a rewrite of perhaps the most buoyant, sparkling song of ache and loss ever written (even if Chrissy Hynde's new-wave Kinksisms have little in common with Selena's skanking cumbia) very nearly lifts it above mere fourth-single roteness and into something grander, more eloquent: a self-eulogy. The Spanish lyric, written by Ricky Vela, takes its lead from the opening line of the original — "I found a picture of you" — and sticks to the image. Selena sings "tengo fotos y recuerdos" ("I [only] have photos and memories") over the title melody, and while her background singers gamely imitate the "ooh ahh" chants which Hynde had borrowed from Sam Cooke, the chain-gang metaphor is lost in translation. Still, the rising "oh-oh-a-oh-ohhh" and the descending, patient guitar figures of the original remain, and in any language it's a beautiful song.

We will see Selena from this deck only once more; we barely got to know her, and already she's slipping out of sight. It would probably be too much to say she changed everything. But she changed enough; the rest of this travelogue will be that much better for all the ways she pushed Latin Pop forward.

LUIS MIGUEL, “LA MEDIA VUELTA”

26th November, 1994

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Again, before listening to Luis Miguel's version, I highly recommend that you hear the original, recorded by its composer José Alfredo Jiménez in 1963. Jiménez was one of the great ranchera composers and performers in the 50s and 60s, a self-taught songwriter of proletariat origins who contributed immensely to the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, producing a body of work that few songwriters anywhere have equaled in scope and quality.

This particular song takes a bolero form (the punctuated guitar rhythm is what gives it away), making it even dreamier and more classically-minded than usual for ranchera, and ranchera is usually one of the more dreamy and traditional Latin genres. Luis Miguel plays up the classicism, holding the power of his voice mostly in check throughout. As I've had occasion to point out again and again, he's a singer of consummate skill: here, the quality of power held in reserve mirrors the lyric.

"La Media Vuelta" translates literally as "The Half-Turn," and it's a term borrowed from the art of bullfighting; the media vuelta is a method of sticking the bull that requires perfect agility and timing — like a dance, which is the other use of the stock phrase. The singer of "La Media Vuelta" is renouncing his love for her own good; all the power in the relationship lies on his side, as he admits when he says "yo soy tu dueño" (a tricky phrase which translates as "I am your lord and master," but connotes something like "you're so in love with me that you'll do whatever I say"). The sentiments are horrific from a feminist point of view — dude's just dictating to her regardless of her own wishes, can't they sit down and talk this out? — but as a representation of a certain floridly Romantic scenario (it's all a bit Mr. Rochester), it's an effective character portrait. He's aware of the damage he's doing, but power is its own reward.

LUIS MIGUEL, “EL DÍA QUE ME QUIERAS”

17th September, 1994

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Before you do anything else, you're going to want to click here. That's a link to the original version of this song, recorded in 1935 by tango pioneer, pop singer, and first Latin superstar of the twentieth century, Carlos Gardel. To get the full effect you may wish to read along with the lyrics, which I've translated (very roughly) at the bottom of this post.

Are you back? Okay.

Gardel's song, a self-consciously pastoral fantasia, a movie song (it was written by Gardel and lyricist Alfredo Le Pera for the Argentinean movie of the same name, starring Gardel), and a ballad very much in the international Thirties tradition of sumptuous sentiment married to coolly unemotional performances (compare to Bing Crosby or Dick Powell), is one of the great songs in the Latin Pop tradition, the definitive ballad of the Golden Age of Tango (ca. 1915-1955), the sudden flowering of modernism in Latin American popular culture comparable to the mixture of jazz and Art Deco in America. The tango rhythm here is almost subterranean due to the ballad tempo; only the entrance of the bandoneón in the last few choruses ties it to the traditional tango sound.

By covering this song, and by releasing it as the initial single off his new album Segundo Romance (Second Romance), Luis Miguel is explicitly placing himself as the successor to Gardel's fusion of modernism, sentiment, and iconicity -- Gardel died in a plane crash not long after recording this song, cementing his legendary status. Imagine Michael Jackson topping the charts with an Astaire cover (say "They Can't Take That Away from Me") in 1989, and you might get something of the interplay of reverence, ambition, and sheer inertial popularity at work here.

As the title of the album indicates, this is Miguel's second time laying claim to the tradition of classic Latin Pop (you may recall that the first Romance, a more strictly bolero album, produced "Inolvidable" and "No Sé Tú"), but it was far and away his most successful -- in fact it holds the record for highest-selling Latin album by a male singer of the 1990s. This probably has less to do with his fidelity to tradition than to his own magnetic self; his version of "El Día Que Me Quieras" isn't particularly faithful to Gardel's original in either chord voicing or phrasing (though he does keep the bandoneón, the instrument that sounds like a higher, thinner accordion). He converts it, essentially, into a Luis Miguel song of the 1990s, and if (like me) you have a hopeless passion for the thin crackle and low-frequency orchestras of old 78s, the blown-up keyboards and polished, glistening soup of a production is wince-inducing in comparison to the original.

But the polish and temper of Miguel's own voice cannot be denied; and if he is a worthy successor to Gardel, it is in the impeccability of his phrasing. He too paints on a sweepingly sentimental canvas, but his brushes are dry, and the song, which could easily be a wreck of overemoting in other throats, is instead a monumental sculpture, a nostalgia-free tribute to the Art Deco era in modern materials and to a modern scale. Of course, nothing ages so quickly as modernity.

Those lyrics:

BARRIO BOYZZ, "CERCA DE TÍ"

18th December, 1993

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

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

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

CRISTIAN CASTRO, “NUNCA VOY A OLVIDARTE”

18th September, 1993

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And another young varón thinks he has a shot at the Luis Miguel throne. You get the impression he's studied Miguel closely: not just the histrionic vocals, but the bolero rhythms, the expansive production, and even the record sleeves, where he stares off into the distance with smoldering sexuality in his eyes, shout that this is a teen idol who wants to be taken seriously as a romantic pop star.

He comes of good show-business stock, this young Castro: his mother was a noted singer and actress, and his father was a comedian and actor, one of the Valdés clan who popularized pachuco comedy with Tin-Tan in the 1940s and 50s. A child actor in the eighties, he released his first album when he was eighteen. A year later, he released Un Segundo En El Tiempo, from which this song was the first single.

It's a strong song, originally performed by the norteño outfit Grupo Bronco in their pop-friendly Mexican-country style. Castro adds such modern (i.e. "rock") signifiers as an alto sax and turns it from a two-step into a power ballad, emoting his guts all over the place. Luis Miguel has nothing to worry about; the kid has none of his sense of restraint or timing, and oversings it rather badly. The music holds up its end, and he doesn't manage to embarrass himself too much — it was after all a significant hit, and will become one of his signature songs — but in terms of 90s Latin pop idols, he along with everyone else, dwells very much in one man's shadow.

PANDORA, “DESDE EL DÍA QUE TE FUISTE”

27th June, 1992

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Even the opening synth chord is familiar, and as the first voice takes up the stately melody we all know exactly where this is headed. They do nothing surprising with it, unless those Big Guitars on the chorus count.

But on the other hand — hey, there was a Spanish-language cover of "Without You" that hit the top of the Latin Pop chart in 1992! And it's pretty good! Not as good as the Harry Nilsson version, of course, or the Badfinger original, but better than the Mariah Carey version which would define overwrought balladry for a generation two years later. Then again, it was never the best of Nilsson's or Badfinger's songs either, says the man who's still grumpy about all those ballads in a row in 1990 and 1991. (The Spanish-language lyrics are only slightly changed from the English original to fit scansion; the sentiment of death being preferable to romantic loss is very much the same.)

Pandora marks our first encounter with that evergreen pop configuration, the girl group, which will never be entirely as common in Latin Pop as it is in Anglophone pop, particularly r&b. But the early 90s was a fertile moment in girl groups, if overshadowed by the Spice Girls and Destiny's Childs of the late 90s: En Vogue, SWV, Jade, and the early TLC had made the airwaves safe for harmonies that ranged from sweet to powerful. Pandora was mostly the later, a full-frontal attack of harmony on the chorus that makes me think of Wilson Phillips (speaking of girl groups) and the gospel group First Call. A quick glance at the list suggests that neither girl groups nor boy bands will have much part in the story this particular chart journey will tell; if Latin Pop is one of the more conservative pop genres, it may be because the traditional focus on a single singer is one of its traditional strengths.

LUIS MIGUEL, “INOLVIDABLE”

25th January, 1992

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The more Luis Miguel I hear, the more I appreciate the technical purity of his singing, the immaculate phrasing and, as he grows older, the sense of powerful emotions in reserve, which he shares with the mature Sinatra. In some ways it feels as if he's been building to this moment, the gorgeous young man who first appeared in these pages as a teen hunk singing a retrofitted 60s pop song growing into the suavely elegant man who rides a light-jazzy rhythm effortlessly and croons as sweetly as Bryan Ferry, as assuredly as Tony Bennett.

I'm told (by the usual source) that this was his biggest-selling album, the final transition into adulthood and traditional pop. That tradition is bolero, the eighteenth-century Spanish slow dance that was the first popular song form in Cuba and Mexico. I had to listen to a few more traditional bolero songs myself before I could hear the bolero rhythm under the funk-guitar flecks, but even if the instrumentation is as plastic and 1992 as possible — between the glossy keys, the rubbery guitar, and the tweeting soprano sax, it's like a crystallized memory of the first smooth jazz station I ever listened to — Miguel's precise, restrained performance rescues it from easy-listening purgatory and places it in the canon of liquid-smooth pop that all my references so far have conjured up.

While most latter-day reminiscence has focused on youth movements like alt-rock and electronic dance, at the time there was some reason to believe that traditional pop was a signal way forward as the nineties gathered steam: Tony Bennett was hip again, Harry Connick, Jr. was on the rise, and Natalie Cole had her biggest, if least defensible, hit duetting with her late father. While this isn't that "Unforgettable" (which is what "inolvidable" means), it's at least as easy to slip into its dreamy tug.