ROMEO SANTOS FT. DRAKE, “ODIO”

15th February, 2014

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I can't be sorry that I dragged my heels on this blog so long that I didn't get to this song until after the Summer of 2024 affixed a permanent asterisk to the featured artist here. Even before then, I still would not have been fulsome about his contribution -- the graceful skittering of bachata, particularly Romeo Santos' bachata, just doesn't work with the plodding whinery of Toronto's favorite son -- but in a post-"tryna strike a chord" landscape, greeting this entry in the Hot Latin #1s list with anything but resigned contempt would feel not just immoral but disloyal.

In a pre-streaming world, being #1 for 13 weeks would have been a notable achievement; in 2014, it just feels like a measure of Drake's overwhelming popularity that a song primarily in a language not spoken by most of his audience outperformed everything else in its category while he was between album cycles. Not that the headliner here doesn't matter: a perfectly adequate Romeo Santos solo song could be carved out with some judicious editing, and sold the song to the Latin audience in a way that Drake's vaguely passable Spanish verse could not have, let alone his more typically self-absorbed rap (in which he spits some of the worst game a self-declared lover boy ever has) in English.

But even with Drake excised, it's by some margin the worst song Romeo has had his name on to reach #1 -- the core thrust at the center of his lyric, "I hate the man who makes you happy," may be a relatable (though ignoble) sentiment, but everything else is just going through the motions, a generic canvas that can accommodate his guest's lazy brushstrokes.

I think I've said on this blog, a long time ago, that I was looking forward to the end of machismo and misogyny on this chart. I was a fool to think it would ever go away. 

Airplay Watch:

• Romeo Santos ft. Drake, "Odio"
• Discussed above.
• Yandel, "Hasta Abajo"
• More "Danza Kuduro"-core from the pretty one of the iconic reggaetón duo, this one notable for actually featuring a jacked-up reggaetón riddim underneath the synthesized accordion and soaring AutoTune.
• Juanes, "La Luz"
• The Colombian rocker goes pop, adding synths to his acoustic guitar strumming and fast-paced mapalé dance rhythms for a kiss-me-at-the-festival song that burns bright and fades as quickly.
• Carlos Vives ft. ChocQuibTown, "El Mar de Sus Ojos"
• Shout out to the avuncular Vives for featuring my favorite Afro-Colombian hip-hop trio on this vallenato/champeta rave-up, even if Slow doesn't get a verse. 
• Wisin ft. Jennifer Lopez & Ricky Martin, "Adrenalina"
• The shouty one of the iconic reggaetón duo plays generous host two famously pretty guests for another uptempo reggaetón-inflected, empty-calorie dance banger.
• Enrique Iglesias ft. Marco Antonio Solís, "El Perdedor"
• Discussed in the previous entry.
• Prince Royce, "Te Robaré"
• Another pretty-boy bachata-cum-R&B song, although this one is the best-arranged and most sincerely-delivered I've heard from Royce since his debut. 

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

20th October, 2012

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned, I guess.

Airplay Watch:

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

MICHEL TELÓ , “AI SE EU TE PEGO!”

14th April, 2012

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I have partly been looking forward to and partly dreading this song as it came nearer in the timeline. Looking forward because I so rarely get to discuss Brazilian music in these pages, dreading because I had very little to say about this song in particular. And it's barely a song, just a horny chant, an accordion riff, and a couple dozen words of putative context, all repeated over a bed of delighted cheering because it was recorded live, like about 90% of Brazil's most populist music genre in the 21st century, sertanejo. Like many sertanejo stars, Teló is a handsome cipher; and that's about all I had off the top of my head.

But then I did my due diligence and looked into the background of the song, and the story is fascinating. According to not just internet gossip but the Brazilian courts, the song's hook was composed in 2006 by a group of five Brazilian teenage girls in their shared hotel room on a vacation to Disney World in Orlando, in reference to their shared crush on the tour guide. In an evening of youthful high spirits, they developed a little dance along with the chant of "Nossa, nossa, assim você me mata, ai se eu te pego" (rough translation: omg, omg, you're killing me, oh if I get you). Two years later, after returning home -- which was the northeastern Brazilian state of Paraíba -- two of them went with another friend to Porto Seguro in nearby Bahía to celebrate graduation, where local singer Sharon Acioly saw them doing the dance and chant in the crowd and invited them on stage to teach it to the audience.

After which Sharon began incorporating the verses into her performances: this 2009 video shows her dropping the chant into a funk set as a means of hyping up the crowd. She eventually set it to a rudimentary melody, and another Bahían music promoter, Antônio Dyggs, saw her performing that, and worked it up (while drunk, he would later claim) into a song for the forró (rural northeastern Brazilian music) market, calling it "Ai Se Eu Te Pego," crediting Acioly and himself as the songwriters. Dyggs managed a forró group called Os Meninos de Seu Zeh, and they were the first to record his worked-out version. It became something of a local hit, and other nordestino groups jumped on the tune, the biggest of which was Cangaia de Jegue in 2010, whose slowly-paced forró version might have been meant to evoke reverie but just sounds dragging now. Electronic forró band Garota Safada (featuring future solo star Wesley Safadão) brought up the tempo significantly, but apparently Michel Teló, on tour in the northeast, heard Cangaia de Jegue's version first.

Teló is from the southern (and whitest) region of Brazil, and was involved in the music scene from an early age, first performing as an elementary school child and getting his first accordion at the age of ten. He was sixteen when he joined the gaucha band Grupo Tradição, and sang with them for 11 years, finally quitting in 2008 to go solo. (Gaucha music is a more traditional kind of country than sertanejo has become, possibly analogous to western in country-and-western.) He had already been very successful with Grupo Tradição, and that success only continued in his solo career, with a gold record and a number-one song before recording "Ai Se Eu Te Pego" in 2011.

The immediate cause of "Ai Se Eu Te Pego" becoming an international hit was a viral YouTube video of the twenty-year-old soccar star Neymar dancing to it in the locker room to the bemusement of his teammates, which sparked a trend of soccer players dancing to the song on the field throughout Latin America and the European League, boosting digital sales of the song on all continents. The United States was late to taking notice of the song, but its attention was still significant enough that Teló felt it necessary to record a redundant English-language version; compare its impressive 46 million views to the 1.1 billion of the original.

Ultimately the song came and went, an evanescent summer hit even more evanescent than most, since it had very little meaning beyond the dance and an innocently horny sentiment, a "Macarena" for the 2010s but without the staying power of the original because there's nothing confounding about it: it's exactly what it appears to be, and nothing more.

The three girls who originally taught the chant and dance to Sharon Acioly have apparently been compensated from her portion of the song's earnings, but the other three who were involved in the Disney World trip were still tied up in a legal authorship dispute as of the last reporting on the case in 2013; I haven't been able to find anything on the case since.

As if to make up for the variety of one-week hits we've had, "Ai Se Eu Te Pego" was at the top of the Hot Latin charts for ten weeks in the summer of 2012, interrupted only by one week of another live song. I've resented it for years for taking up so much real estate that could have been devoted to even more variety; and although learning the song's backstory has reconciled me to it a little, it's still barely a song, and I still have very little to say about it.

PITBULL FT. MARC ANTHONY, “RAIN OVER ME”

15th October, 2011

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On Mr. Worldwide's last visit to these shores, I noted that the meatheaded dumbness of the English-language lyrics stood in contrast to the many floridly poetic Spanish lyrics that preceded his over the past quarter century. Well, he raps half a verse in Spanish here, and it's just as dumb. I recall reading an Argentinean blogger around this time who sniffed at the Latin rappers and Mexican regional musicians who were having such great success in the United States, suggesting that the low education level of immigrant populations meant that even when Spanish was their native language it was still a rudimentary, ignorant peasant Spanish untouched by the language's centuries-old literary tradition. Which may well be true; but to quote Mark Sinker it's good not bad. People making the same arguments about English-language rappers would be self-evidently classist and racist; but a lot of intra-Hispanic prejudice is invisible to English speakers because of their automatic association of "Hispanic" with "subaltern."

Against which this song flails mightily. Pitbull and Marc Anthony are two immensely wealthy white-coded men singing and rapping about generic love using liquid imagery (which also happens to plug the vodka brand one of them owns) over a very expensive trance-pop production, itself courtesy of white-coded immigrants. The list of writers and producers on "Rain Over Me" is extensive, but Swedish producer and co-writer RedOne, whose signature heat-blast synth sound is all over early-2010s pop, was born in Morocco, and his collaborators Bilal "The Chef" Hajji, Rachid "Rush" Aziz, and Achraf "AJ" Janussi have similar SWANA backgrounds. We're very far from the Dirty South rap and Nuyorican salsa scenes where the headliners first made their names: the carefully generic adrenaline fuel behind their voices is very intentionally crafted to sound from nowhere in particular, a global (or worldwide) noise that flattens genre as much as nationality or race.

But this is also a victory lap for Pitbull; after the studied genericism of his lyrics for "Give Me Everything," he lets his triumphalist instincts take over in the second verse here, crowing about Latins being on track to be the "new majority" in the US and giving a chat-up line in working-class Spanish. Marc Anthony's chorus, which could have been sung by anyone and makes little use of his gifts, ends up being primarily another flex, a highly expensive guest appearance singing the kind of English-as-a-second-language pabulum that is Swedish pop's specialty. Let what rain over him? There is no idiom in English that this line gestures toward; but it was too obviously anodyne a song for there to even have been a notable rumor that it was really about golden showers.

PITBULL FT. NE-YO, AFROJACK & NAYER, “GIVE ME EVERYTHING”

30th July, 2011

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There are a bunch of different ways to take the fact that this song, sung and rapped entirely in English save for the inevitable "dale," went to #1 on the Hot Latin chart in the summer of 2011. The most obvious is that it was inescapable regardless of location or native language: #1 on the Hot 100, Mainstream Top 4, and US Ryhthmic, in addition to hitting #1 in eleven different countries including Mexico; in the US, only Adele, LMFAO, and Katy Perry (twice) outperformed it over the course of the year. A spiritual descendent of the Black Eyed Peas' gloriously meatheaded 2009 "Boom Boom Pow"/"I Got a Feeling" duology, as well as extending the apocalyptic mood that Ke$ha expressed, both in her own songs as well as in writing Britney Spears' "Till the World Ends," "Give Me Everything" was Pitbull's apotheosis moment, the peak from which all subsequent material would, with perhaps one exception, be an inevitable descent.

But another way to take it is as a corruption of the Spanish-language ideals of the Latin radio market. Of course the vast bulk of the Latin radio audience in the United States would speak some or even primarily English; but the dumb corniness of Mr. Armando Pérez's rhymes and sentiment here are an affront to the many poetic, moving, profound Spanish lyricists who have occupied this space in weeks and years past. Of course, the irony is that when Pitbull was rapping partly in Spanish, he never had a hope of hitting #1. His output over the previous couple of years had included some of my favorite pop of the era, including "I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)", "Watagatapitusberry", "Armada Latina", and an album cut that got radio play in my region, "Orgullo", a celebration of Latin immigrantion to the US; but it took a global hit, expressed in as generic terms as possible, to cross the finish line.

A third way to take it is as a premonition of things to come. In 2011, the Hot Latin chart was still radio-only, which meant that it was drawn from airplay on radio stations in a Latin Pop format; but the streaming era, which dumps anything tagged "Latin" in the metadata onto the chart and sorts it by most played, is fast approaching. I don't have reporting to back this up, but my suspicion is that a lot of "Give Me Everything's" Latin Pop radio airplay was similarly algorithmically determined on (for example) Clear Channel stations that didn't employ a DJ, just played whatever was popular and could be considered Latin. Pitbull (and hook singer Nayer Regalado) being very loudly Cuban-American, this fit the bill.

But a fourth way is to simply engage with it as a song, a collaboration between four major musicians (well, three and Armando's frequent hook singer). Its broad popularity across formats was undeniable; and while a lot of that is no doubt due to Pitbull's cheerful, approachable rapping, Dutch producer Afrojack's hustling, trance-derived sonic landscape and perpetual R&B underdog Ne-Yo's creamy chorus deserve the bulk of the song's architectural credit: if (like so much pop of the era) it's essentially an advertisement for spending time and money at the club, it's a polished, even elegant ad. And I won't pretend that my heart wasn't caught every time the radio didn't cut off the disarmingly tender descending piano figure that closes the single.

RICKY MARTIN FT. NATALIA JIMÉNEZ, “LO MEJOR DE MI VIDA ERES TÚ”

12th February, 2011

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I didn't mean to wait to write about this song until June, but it's an appropriate way to mark Pride: Ricky Martin's first (and to date only) #1 Hot Latin song since coming out as gay in 2010. a shot of feel-good pop-reggae that Martin suggested to producer Desmond Child as his own version of "Don't Worry, Be Happy."

Which as a symbol for how gay liberation was codified and marketed in the early 2010s could hardly be bettered: a wealthy white hunk singing a domestic love song generic enough to be pitched as much to one's child (Martin's interviews at the time were filled with happiness over his twin sons, then three years old) as to a lover of any gender. The excision of his featured guest in the video version of the track (Martin takes her verse instead, and she's relegated to background hums and harmonies) might be read as ambiguating the song's referent, since otherwise it would be too easy to read as a man and woman singing heterosexually to each other, but instead it ends up seeming a touch narcissistic, something which not all the United Colors of Benetton imagery in the video can assuage.

The English-language version of the song, "The Best Thing About Me Is You", featured British blue-eyed soul yowler Joss Stone, and her replacement in the Spanish-language version by Natalia Jiménez, who had recently gone solo from Madrid (soon relocated to Mexico) pop-rock band La Quinta Estación, was part of a push by Sony to make Jiménez a global star which never really happened. As this is Jiménez' only appearance here, it's worth remarking a bit on her career: an expressive, powerful singer in a very Spanish tradition of full-bore dramatics, she's struggled to find material that matches her instrument since the breakup of 5a. Estación. Their 2009 dramatic rock single "Que Te Quería" (Who loved you) was my introduction to her singing on Phoenix-area Spanish-language radio, and it was the highest they ever charted in the U.S., although they had been regular hitmakers in Spain and Mexico for the past half-decade. Since then, however the most notable highlights of her career have been a tribute album to ranchera singer Jenni River and a stint as a judge on Mexico's version of The Voice. 

This is our farewell to Ricky Martin as well, as he aged out of the pop market (in addition to, perhaps, taking himself off the board for the projected dreams of heterosexual teenage girls) and into a role as a senior statesman and conscience of pop; he will spend the next decade exterting his influence to advocate for gay rights and for justice for Puerto Ricans. It's nice to leave him sounding so relaxed and happy after an imperial decade performing hetero horniness and emotional tribulation; even if "Lo Mejor de Mi Vida Eres Tú" isn't any great shakes as a song, it remains a considerable vibe. At its worst, it's an instance of pop as Live Laugh Love wall art, a cliché that can nevertheless resonate, because people are not as complicated as we like to pretend we are.

DON OMAR & LUCENZO, “DANZA KUDURO”

13th November, 2010

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The biggest, splashiest, most omnipresent international dance hit of the early 2010s following directly on the heels of "Loca" only underlines the point I was making in my last paragraph. There's a thrilling urgency to this song, a fast-paced recklessness imparted not just by the (sort of) Angolan kuduro beat but by the electronic accordion patterns borrowed from Cape Verdean funaná; but there's also a dead-eyed hollowness to it, a desperate, muleheaded sense of dancing while the ship sinks, of fiddling while the city burns. The unimaginative displays of opulence in the video are in line with global hip-hop-derived culture, an ostentation designed to showcase the heights to which making the music has delivered the artist, but there's no hint of struggle or come-up in Don Omar's glib carnival barker shouting and Lucenzo's AutoTuned wheedling: this is music from the mountaintop, purely aspirational, as fantastical, escapist, and irrelevant as superhero movies or big-budget pornography.

Which isn't to say there's not still a lot to love here. Don Omar's ear for a hook has never served him better, and the velocity, tunefulness and rhythmic insistence on display here is world-class. At that, it's still essentially a Spanish-language remake of Lucenzo's own "Vem Dançar Kuduro" with American rapper Big Ali, released in January of 2010. Omar's cheerfully growled dance instructions are patterned directly on Big Ali's -- among other things this is a rare appearance in 21st century pop of that staple of 1960s pop, the dance record that tells you how to dance it -- and the original video, filmed on the streets of Havana with a multiracial crowd of dancers, is much more of a democratic invitation to party than the exclusive, champagne-and-bikini-babes-on-a-boat production of the song's final form.

As this is likely to be the only place where Angolan kuduro is likely to intersect with this travelogue, a brief discussion of what it is, and why this isn't really kuduro, is in order. Kuduro begins in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as techno and house from the US and Europe made their way into civil-war-torn Angola at the same time that French Antillean zouk and Trinidadian soca did; young producers in Luanda began sampling Caribbean rhythms and layering them over the 4/4 structures of post-disco electronic music, developing a very fast, hard-hitting, herky-jerky sound, to which stiff-limbed dances developed that reflected the high numbers of disabled people in a country strewn with landmines. (Angola was a late proxy in the Cold War, as a US-backed apartheid South Africa funded a protracted campaign against the Cuba-backed Communists who had won power after independence from Portugal.) By the early 2000s, Angolan diasporic populations in Portugal were producing "progressive kuduro" that played well with the global dance fusions of the European market, with Lisbon-based Buraka Som Sistema as the breakout act; meanwhile, Luandan kuduro was drifting ever more favelawards, as it became the hard-edged street music of the sometimes violent shanty towns that were the direct result of Angola's oil-driven spike in wealth inequality. By the 2010s, Angolan kuduro was almost exclusively an aggressive, frequently shouted barebones rap form, closer in some ways to drill or crunk than to the rave-friendly kuduro of Europe.

Lucenzo, born in France to Portuguese parents, was exactly the kind of unthreatening white face to make (European) kuduro a globally popular phenomenon. Still, a Portuguese-forward song, even with Big Ali's English-language interjections, would never blanket the world the way a Spanish-language song could. Enter reggaetón legend Don Omar, whose sole previous appearance here has been the bathetic AIDS ballad "Angelito", but who knows his way around tropical riddims and big-budget marketing. "Danza Kuduro" was released in August 2010; almost exactly three months later, it was the #1 Hot Latin song, a position it would hold for 15 weeks. The rhythms that drive it are not kuduro rhythms as understood in Angola (compare the contemporary "Kuduro" by Agre G), but they're not quite reggaetón either: if anything, they're closest to soca, a crowdpleasing cross-Caribbean fusion that functions as much as a Carnival march as a northern-hemisphere dancefloor filler.

SHAKIRA FT. El CATA, “LOCA”

6th November, 2010

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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.

SHAKIRA, “LOBA”

8th August, 2009

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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."

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “DÍMELO”

19th May, 2007

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When Iglesias fils first burst onto this travelogue in 1995 with back-to-back-to-back number ones, I was at a loss to understand how the Enrique Iglesias I knew (and had a certain affection for) from popwatching in the early 2010s had emerged from that very unprepossessing whiner. Even when I liked some of his later material over the years (nearly all of which we've gotten to sample, as no one has ever hit number one as regularly as him), I rarely recognized him. So this single, parenthetically declared (The Ping Pong Song) in its English-language release, is notable for me as being the first time I recognized him as the same man I knew from later hits.

It's been four years since his last number one, the longest he's ever gone without an appearance here, and he seems to have figured out exactly what his lane would be for the next decade. (It's not far from what I predicted in my discussion of the 1999 hit "Ritmo Total".) R&B producer Sean Garrett (best known for Usher & co.'s immortal "Yeah!") gives him a thoroughly modern, high-tech track with a memorable, even novelty-esque rhythm sample, compresses and pitch-corrects his voice so that his limitations are invisible, and layers digital textures around him to keep the track exciting even during the maundering verses. (Apparently every sound on the track apart from Enrique's voice is from a single well-known loops package, which if not a first on this travelogue is at least indicative of where we are in terms of production history.) The synthesized blasts of sound in particular indicate the direction chart pop would be taking in the near future, as four-on-the-floor dance music took over from more varied R&B-based beatmaking.

The result is my favorite Enrique Iglesias song since "Ritmo Total," although like that song I prefer the Spanish-language version to the more well-known English-language one -- Iglesias is no Shakira in terms of ability to creatively shift between languages. "Dímelo" is less incoherent than "Do You Know," although neither of them are deathless lyrics. It's a typically self-involved love song with a strong central image: "¿Dímelo por qué estas fuera de mí / y al mismo tiempo estás muy dentro?" (Tell me why you're outside of me / while at the same time you're deep inside?) It doesn't quite make sense in Spanish either, which is one way to make excellent pop: arresting, unidiomatic phrases that make the listener pause over them is a great way to keep them in the air, as Swedish songwriters have found for some time.

LAS KETCHUP, “ASEREJÉ”

9th November, 2002

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All right, settle in.

One of the reasons I wanted to start this blog, way back in 2009, was that I saw British people talking about "Aserejé" as a glorious piece of ephemera that came from nowhere and led to nothing, and I suspected that there was more to it than that, that there was a history there invisible to Anglophone eyes. As it happens, I had never heard the song: I lived in the only major market (the United States with the English-language overlay switched on) where the song was not a massive hit, and had not happened to be interested in both pop and the broader world in 2002 -- my interest in the UK's experience of music at the time was entirely NME-led, to my regret.

It took me this long to get to it, and I can't be sorry it did, because my knowledge of Spanish girl group and novelty pop history would have been incomplete without the researches into 1977 I did in 2012 and 2014 or the deep dive into 80s Iberian pop I did in 2015. But even this blog contains hints of what would come: Mexican girl group Pandora a decade ago, Mexican pop group Onda Vaselina four years ago, Nuyorican hip-hop group Barrio Boyzz, novelty dances from Banda Blanca to Azul Azul, pseudo-flamenco from Gipsy Kings to Enrique Iglesias and most prominently, Ricky Martin's own novelty crossover.

It's the surf guitar from "Vida Loca," mixed down and looped throughout the chorus as a constant drone (and in so doing, getting back to the Eastern origins of the surf twang) that is Las Ketchup's most prominent association with current Latin pop trends, but there are others: the affection for, but cultural distance from, hip-hop (the nonsense refrain is a Hispanicization of the opening bars of "Rapper's Delight"), the acoustic dance-pop instrumentation (throw in accordion and it could be a Carlos Vives song), and even the vague Orientalism (a constant feature of Iberian roots music) is consonant with Shakira's contemporary gestures towards her Lebanese heritage.

But all of that is incidental, and possibly coincidental. What Las Ketchup are really in dialogue with is in their own country's history of novelty girl-group songs, from the unison-sung flamenco-rock of Las Grecas, whose Franco-era "Te Estoy Amando Locamente" was as heavy as Zeppelin, to the electro-pop of Objectivo Birmania, whose "Los Amigos de Mis Amigas Son Mis Amigos" was a hookup anthem for the movida madrileña, to the flamenco-house of Azúcar Moreno, whose "Bandido" lasted better than the songs that beat it at the 1990 Eurovision.

Although Las Ketchup were from Andalusia, "Aserejé" doesn't include any traditional flamenco signifiers, unless the lyrics' coding of their hip-hop-loving protagonist as Roma counts, but rather gestures towards Western European urban music. The rootsy shuffle-and-guitar of the backing track represents an early-2000s pop assimilation of 90s worldbeat pioneers like Manu Chao and Rachid Taha, in which Spanish, French, American (often via-Britain), and Arabic musical traditions were blended: if the result sometimes sounded painfully generic, that's one of the hazards of attempting to boil a continent's worth of musical diversity down to its common denominators.

But part of that global mish-mash is Catalan rumba, the urban Barcelonan variation on the Cuban-influenced "rumba" palo of flamenco, as popularized in the 70s by Peret and continued in the 90s by Spanish-pop heiress Rosario Flores (among many others). A greater emphasis on rhythm (as befits its Afro-Cuban origins) and less on florid emotional virtuosity made Catalan rumba one of the default roots musics of post-Franco Spain: "Aserejé" just barely qualifies, as its rhythm aims for dance-pop consistency rather than "gitana" funkiness, but the great joy of millennial-era dance pop was its ability to assimilate any cultural tradition and return it to the world: 2010s dance-pop flattens everything into the build-and-drop patterns of EDM, leaving textural differences as the only distinguishing characteristics between songs.

But, background aside, what do I think of the song? It's a pleasurable enough way to pass the time; its four-week run at the top of the Hot Latin chart is about right. I always appreciate novelty songs more than I actually enjoy listening to them, and my generalized American chauvinism includes the entire hemisphere: despite the length of this post, the most exciting and interesting Latin Pop in the millennial era was not coming out of Spain. "Aserejé"'s most noteworthy quality is its global success, which (like that of Psy and OMI a decade later) was less dependent on the specific qualities of the track itself and more on the popular appetite for a particular kind of nonsense in a given moment. 

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “HÉROE”

1st December, 2001

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In September of 2001, I was glued to NPR, trying to understand the suddenly-changed world by organizing information in my head while my fingers clacked at my data-entry job. I avoided demonstrations of unity or communal emotion; I would not consciously hear "Hero" for another decade. (The songs I did hear intercut with 9/11 audio on the radio throughout that fall and winter were U2's "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of" and, bizarrely, Bad Company's "Seagull".) I'm not sure I even knew that Enrique Iglesias had a hit around this time: the early 2000s was the nadir of my engagement with current pop. My attention had drifted to the past, enabled by Napster and a succession of similar services.

But though I missed the most obvious and schlockiest expression of the sudden pop-cultural boom of pseudo-admiration for "heroism" -- focusing first on the responders of that Tuesday, police and firefighters and EMTs, and before long the soldiers making the hard lives of Afghan villagers even harder -- the narrative itself was impossible to miss. Brightly-colored spandex-spangled figures leapt into movie screens in order to both metaphorize and overliteralize the story America told itself about the "bad guys" who had hurt us and who therefore justified the use of extraordinary force in defense of a lost innocence, a sluggish economy, a burst bubble. It seemed that everything I had loved as a nerdy teen was pressed into the service of stories about 9/11, and I backed away from superheroes, hard rock, and Lord of the Rings as they were transformed, willingly or not, into metaphors for the West standing against an unreasoning evil, when more and more they all seemed to tell a single story about a bully taking a single stray hit as a pretext for pummeling the offender into pulp.

When, during the false comfort of the Obama years, I started trying to catch up on a bunch of what I'd missed, I finally heard (and watched) "Hero", it struck me how slender and unlikely a reed it was to hang a clash-of-civilizations narrative from. Iglesias' thin whine of a voice, the anonymous wallpaper of the production, the narcissistic lyrics promising comfort while acting out a bottomless well of neediness: if this was what America chose to portray its state-sanctioned heroes as saying to America, it was no flattering portrait on either side. Joseph Kahn's music video is clearer-eyed: Mickey Rourke's (and the state's) readiness to commit violence is true power, not Iglesias' lip-quivering emotional appeals, and Iglesias dying in the rain while Jennifer Love Hewitt wails is a bleakly sardonic comment on the song's own promises.

There's not much daylight between the Spanish-language version of the song and the one familiar to the English-language pop audience: if anything, it's more narcissistic (and slightly hornier). But the delicate wimpiness of the production and Iglesias' spoilt hangdog performance are the same: a form of masculinity no less toxic for its all its extravagant performance of sensitivity.

SHAKIRA, “SUERTE”

6th October, 2001

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"Suerte que mis pechos sean pequeños / y no los confundas con montañas."

Long before scattering verbal seeds so that a thousand Twitter memes might blossom had become one of the necessary attributes of a successful pop star, Shakira's verbal flights very nearly memed her into oblivion: everyone who addressed her new English-language makeover brought up the "breasts are small and humble" line as an example of her weirdness or perhaps of her limited facility with English. (And everyone else replied that the line was the same, and just as unexpected, in the Spanish version. This conversation will never stop happening, until the end of time.) But look at her grin in the video during the line: she knows exactly what she's doing.

The fact that Shakira Mebarak Ripoll knew exactly what she was doing when she dyed her hair blonde, began writing in English, and contracted with the Estefans to produce her next album has long been a sticking point for those who had admired her '90s shaggy brown mane, her wild Spanish-language creativity, her proud Latinidad. It felt like a betrayal: no longer Latin America's signature alt-rock act, a Southern Hemispherical riposte to frozen-north icons like Björk or Radiohead, she was now just another bottle-blonde global pop star, joining the Britneys and Beyoncés in Anglophone hegemony.

While this is a valuable and necessary take, I think it overrates the importance of alt-rock and underrates the importance of pop -- Shakira may be differently beloved than she was in the 90s, but she is undeniably more, and more widely, beloved. And she has never gone fully Anglophone: her English-language songs nearly always have (often much better) Spanish-language counterparts -- "Whenever, Wherever" is only okay compared to "Suerte," one of her greatest pop songs in a career stuffed with them.

"Suerte" is very early-2000s, in that there's not a particular tradition of music it is set in. Rather, it's a mash-up of many different influences, incorporating Andean huayno and panpipes, Middle Eastern arabesque, and global dance music, including a prominent funk bassline, tribal drumming, and surf guitar: worldbeat, to use a popular if meaningless catchphrase of the era, but with a strong pop sheen. It was the era of Missy Elliott, the Neptunes, and Richard X, in which imperial pop raided global sounds, an analog globe converging into a united digital future until George W. Bush and Diplo ruined it for everyone. But it was also characteristic of the way Shakira had always worked: of Colombian and Lebanese heritage, she mixed East and West, North and South, as a matter of course, and her dancing, which seamlessly blends Afro-Latin and Eastern Mediterranean traditions, is one of the great pop marvels of the millennial era.

But while she's one of her generations's great dancers and great musical synthesists, she's also one of its greatest lyricists: "Suerte" is a fantastic love song in a style that owes as much to modern poetry -- it's romantic, and funny, and quotidian, and heavily imagistic -- as to modern pop. (Modern poetry listens to pop, of course, Frank O'Hara just as much as Warsan Shire.) "Lo que me queda de vida / quiero vivir contigo" (What is left to me of life / I want to live with you) is such a clearer and more heartfelt sentiment than "I'll be there and you'll be near / and that's the deal my dear" that -- although the latter is striking too -- it's easy to see why some observers thought English was a misstep for her. Luckily, we don't have to bother about her English here: which won't always be the case.

This is only the third time we've met Shakira on this travelogue, which feels wrong: she was and is a much bigger star than that, and some of the songs that happened not to make it to #1 include some of the best songs not only of her career but of pop music entirely. In some ways "Suerte" is a lesser rewrite of "Ojos Así", and "Objection (Tango)" is the best tango song the twenty-first century has produced. But although her presence here will continue to be infuriatingly intermittent (especially as compared to figures like the one who recorded the song that replaced this at #1), she has not yet tapped out. We are still living in the Shakira era, and that in itself is reason for hope.

RICKY MARTIN, “SÓLO QUIERO AMARTE”

7th April, 2001

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As if to seal away Juan Gabriel's old-fashioned but singular emotionalism forever, the next number one is all sleek hypermodernism, generic sentiments and vacant emoting. Ricky Martin has mostly operated in a forward motion in these pages, but this is his comfort zone: using the tropes of soulful singing to do little more than smolder at the camera, or the audio equivalent.

The song came out in two different versions simultaneously: the English-language version is a duet with Christina Aguilera, and is dancier and more florid, with orchestra hits and an 808 rhythmic bed. Without Christina's fluttering extemporizing vocals -- which function as essentially another instrument in the mix -- Ricky doesn't have enough force of personality to hold it together. But the dullness of the Spanish-language version isn't entirely his fault: a more power-ballady production and generic "Latin" guitar runs make it run-of-the-millennium Latin Pop.

He still had enough charisma and goodwill that it spent a month at #1 at a time when the chart moved far more quickly than it does today, but although we aren't saying goodbye to him yet by a long ways, it's a slip down from the his peak of the two previous years. From here on out, the music will take a backseat to the much more important work of remaining Ricky Martin.

SON BY FOUR, “CUANDO SEAS MÍA (MISS ME SO MUCH)”

30th December, 2000

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I haven't tracked it in this blog, but the entire back half of 2000 has been punctuated by Son by Four's "A Puro Dolor" -- nearly every song we've looked at since has had its chart reign interrupted by the return of the millennium's silkiest salsa band. Now, here at the end of the year, Son by Four are back with their second, and final (as of press time), number one.

As a piece of popcraft from songwriting to production to performance, it's far superior to "A Puro Dolor," with a tense, dramatic arrangement, gorgeous tropical instrumentation, and Ángel López singing to save his life. Despite the title ("When you are mine") setting the emotion in the future, it's a grownup song about adult relationships (the physical very much included), where "A Puro Dolor" is sheer adolescent bathos. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call "Cuando Seas Mía" an undiscovered gem, but if I were assigning these songs numbers out of ten it would easily clear the 6.

But it only topped the chart for a week at the slowest point of the year, and that was it, from our vantage point, for Son by Four. Ángel López left the group several years later for a solo career which has so far only fizzled (he campaigned for Bush in 2004), and the rest now produce Christian music for the evangelical Latin market. Gentle as doves they may have been, but in the cutthroat music business serpent's wisdom is preferable.

RICKY MARTIN, “SHE BANGS”

4th November, 2000

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

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

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

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.

CHRISTINA AGUILERA, “VEN CONMIGO (SOLAMENTE TÚ)”

14th October, 2000

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Although in low-resolution hindsight it's easy to mistake Christina Aguilera for being part of the wave of young Latinos renovating Latin pop around the turn of the century -- a peer to Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, at least -- this is her sole appearance (as of mid-2017) on this travelogue, and after the comparatively middling sales of Mi Reflejo would rarely record in Spanish again, and then only in duet with an established Latin star.

While she did hire hitmaking Cuban-American songwriter and producer Rudy Pérez (we last saw him assisting Luis Fonsi) to translate "Come on Over Baby (All I Want Is You)" into vernacular Spanish, the production remains pure Stockholm, Johan Åberg's piano, string stabs, and fake scratching ported over wholesale from the English-language original.

So ultimately, despite Aguilera's half-Ecuadorian heritage, "Ven Conmigo" is exactly as much an opportunistic cash-in on the newfound brand-expansion possibilities of the Latin market as any Anglo star might have done: indeed, acts like N'Sync were recording versions of their hits in Spanish, as would Beyoncé years later. That it worked, to the extent that she is one of the exclusive club to have both Hot 100 and Hot Latin #1 hits with the same song, is a tribute to the breezy, galvanic joy of Åberg's production, Pérez' solid work finding rhythmic equivalence in Spanish, and her slightly mechanical but always impressive performance.

It's one of those songs (common early in her career, much rarer later on) when her overdriven vocals sync up with an overdriven emotional state (the excitement of young, sexually curious love), so that her endless elaboration feels like a spontaneous expression of excitement rather than mere showboating. If we're not going to see here again here, at least she left her mark.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “BAILAMOS”

10th July, 1999

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And here we have the second and final entry in the "wave" of Latin Pop that was supposedly taking America by storm in the summer of 1999, that wave that constantly threatens to come ashore but never actually does. The years ahead will be littered with names who will be hyped as the crossover Latin star who will finally make the US pop machine pay attention to Latin music instead of ghettoizing it; I'll let you know when I see it happen.

Enrique is, of course, a familiar name to those who have accompanied me this far on this travelogue, and he'll grow more familiar still in the years ahead; but given the refracted vision of this blog, the blog of a gringo trying to explain Latin Pop as much to himself as to anyone else, it feels noteworthy that this song, his eleventh number-one Hot Latin hit, was his introduction to the English-language audience that would cement his legacy as a multiplatform hitmaker for decades to come. "Bailamos" is, to date, his only number-one hit on the Hot 100, and the degree to which it was aimed at English-language success can be gauged not just from the bilingual chorus, or even its placement in a high-profile Hollywood schlockbuster (Wild Wild West did no one's career any favors), but from the fact that it was at number one for two weeks on the Hot 100 and only one week on Hot Latin. Which feels almost perfunctory: Enrique releases a song, of course it goes number one; but he will never again be as assured of that top spot as he was for the first four years of his career.

And the song? You know it, even if you think you don't. Generic Latin-lover phrases like "let the rhythm take you over" and Intro to Spanish phrases like "te quiero, amor mío" populate a sweeping, faux-flamenco production that has about as much to do with any traditional Spanish music as Wild Wild West does with nineteenth century technology. It's with a nod of recognition that you read that the song was written and produced by the team behind Cher's "Believe" -- it may not be as haphazardly futuristic, but it's fully as cheesy and orgiastic: both "Believe" and "Bailamos" are big, powerful mecha suits designed to throw the established personas of the stars at their center into giant, cartoonish relief; and if Cher's camp den-mother persona is more to your (or my) taste than Enrique's sulky Latin-lech, there's a lot of people with the opposite preference.

RICKY MARTIN, “LIVIN' LA VIDA LOCA”

24th April, 1999

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"Give a little more vibe on the track, please..."

I probably crow too often about new realities, new beginnings, new usherings-in of the present era. Reality is manifold; newness begins over every wave. Yet it feels more accurate than ever to say that the millennium begins here -- at least the millennium seen through the specific lens around which this blog is oriented.

It's not the first Hot Latin #1 to also hit #1 on the Hot 100, not by a wide margin (Los Lobos was twelve years ago), but it does introduce a new sense of intimacy between the two charts. Crossover between them will still be rare, but not quite so rare; even if specific songs aren't familiar to both audiences, a good many artists will be. There was a deal of hype the summer of 1999 about a Latin Invasion (which consisted of about three songs), but apart from Tony Concepción's Irakere-imitating trumpet towards the end, there's little that's particularly Latin about "Livin' la Vida Loca."

Indeed, with its whirlwind velocity, rubbery surf guitar, and energetic horn charts, it actually has more in common with that other cod-tropical vogue of the late 90s, third-wave ska, than with anything specifically Puerto Rican. Which is part of the point, both of Martin's crossover pop and of this whole travelogue: Latin identity is not -- cannot be -- tied to some travel-brochure stereotype of UNESCO World Heritage frozen-in-amber cultural practice. Latin people live in the present tense, and Latin pop is modern pop; whatever and whenever that is.

Desmond Child, the producer of "Vida Loca," made his name with the shiny gloss of Bon Jovi and Aerosmith's late-80s hair metal, and that sense of compressed power gives the track its grab-you-by-the-shirt-front immediacy; an important stage in the loudness wars, it was the first all-ProTools hit, electronic even in its Dick Dale gibber, the punchy horns and skittering drum as influenced by the noisy, jungly end of drum 'n' bass as by Child's rock background.

And the lyrics position it directly in Anglophone rock history, the woman who is living the vida loca one with all the brown sugars and witchy women and maneaters that thirty years of guitar-driven misogyny have chronicled. But Martin's performance has none of the spitefulness of a Jagger; he rather admires her rapaciousness than otherwise, and why not? With this production behind him, he's easily able to keep up with her. (And besides, he's not her target. But that's later history bleeding into earlier.) Once more, it's the beginning of the modern era: hedonism presented not as warning temptation or as knowing deviance, but as the basic premise of pop music. EDM, at least in the popular imagination, starts here too.