ENRIQUE IGLESIAS FT. DESCEMER BUENO & GENTE DE ZONA, “BAILANDO”

17th May, 2014

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Forty-one weeks at number one. Only one other behemoth, lurking ahead in the shadows of 2017, will (as of this writing) beat its record. But that's with streaming; on the old airplay-calculation chart, "Bailando" only notched a respectable twenty, still several weeks behind "La Tortura" in 2005. Radio, which perforce must please both the fans of a record and those who have grown tired of it, has to be higher-churn, while streaming numbers reflect only the fans; skip rates are (to my knowledge) not factored. This naturally feeds the line-go-up appetite of the record labels, but to the detriment of listeners, who may have more options than ever to actively hunt down, but whose passive listening gets trapped in narrowcasted halls of mirrors, in which the active choices of millions of others get reflected back to them in a burning point, and the winner takes it all.

And there has not been a winninger winner in the history of the Hot Latin chart than Enrique Iglesias: this is his twenty-fifth entry at #1 (but not his last), while his nearest competition (Luis Miguel and a certain malevolent lagomorph (cf. the "bunnied" entry at the Popular FAQ)) currently languish at 16. The success of this song must seem to some degree a foregone conclusion: its spring single release is an obvious bid for song-of-the-summer status, and its uptempo, gladsome vibes make it an ideal party soundtrack for old and young alike; the elders can enjoy the flamenco clapping and guitar, while the youngsters can dig the electronic rhythm (it's yet another descendant of "Danza Kuduro") and hip-hop shouting by guests Gente de Zona, who never overpower Enrique and in fact make him sound fresher and more hip than he has in years.

It was the song at #1 when President Obama announced his intent to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba; both of the featured artists were from Cuba (Gente de Zona being the first successful Cuban hip-hop and reggaetón act to circumvent the cultural embargo), and the feeling of optimism that Cuba, which had been the most fecund and innovative center of musical ferment in Latin America in the century before the Revolution, would at last be allowed to join the modern era of pan-Latin collaboration and interchange, was high in the mid-2010s.

All that optimism feels naive and even cruel now, when it appears that the United States government is intent on making the rest of Latin America join Cuba as a pariah state if they refuse to be be a client one. And of course, any dialectical analysis could have told you that capitalist investment by way of record-label promotion is no substitute for genuine political solidarity.

In 2025, Gente de Zona are latecomers jumping on the reparto bandwagon in Cuba -- reparto being a street-level electronic dance music related to Puerto Rican reggaetón and Dominican dembow, with busier percussion and a wholly homegrown sense of build-and-release dynamics born in the Havana repartos (neighborhoods) by impoverished MCs and DJS the mid-2000s. In the 2020s, it's become a fashionable sound in pan-Latin urbano, always hungry for new fresh sounds it can chew up and recycle into gleaming hypercapitalized pop. Nigerian afrobeats, Brazilian funk, Colombian ritomo exótico, and Guadeloupean bouyon are being similarly cannibalized at the moment; while Barcelonan rumba flamenca has only recently fallen out of fashion again.

But back in 2014, flamenco was the fresh sound being chewed up and recycled, as it has periodically been over the course of this travelogue, including by Iglesias himself fifteen years prior. The flamenco-pop boom centered around Rosalía is still some years off, so this song can sound oddly prescient as well as old-fashioned at the same time.

There was an English-language version that featured Sean Paul's motormouthed toasting, as well as two Portuguese-language versions aimed at the Brazilian and Portuguese markets respectively; none of them are as interesting to me as the original, and even that is more in a what-could-have-been sense than in itself.

Airplay Watch:

• Ricardo Arjona, "Apnea"
• A big dramatic piano-strings-and-rock ballad about drowning in his feelings for a departed lover, with an extremely well-written poetic throughline that leaves me utterly cold.
• J Balvin ft. Farruko, "6:00 AM"
• Colombian reggaetón-pop, incorporating more dancehall and tropipop elements, shows its face for the first time on this travelogue. The song is pretty minor, but shows promise.
• Enrique Iglesias ft. Descemer Bueno & Gente de Zona, "Bailando"
• Discussed above.
• Romeo Santos, "Eres Mía"
• Formula is right. This slinky bachata is about seducing a woman engaged to someone else.
• Carlos Vives ft. Marc Anthony, "Cuando Nos Volvamos a Encontrar"
• Two middle-aged masters of their domains deliver a starry-eyed romantic duet starting in Vives' usual rock n' vallenato style and building to Anthony's usual big-band salsa style.
• Juan Luis Guerra & 4.40, "Tus Besos"
• An adorable bachata with Fifties slow-dance doo-wop aesthetics. Guerra remains the master of genre.
• Romeo Santos ft. Marc Anthony, "Yo También"
• Another summit of big names; this time Romeo bends to Anthony's salsa stylings, and naturally gets himself outsung.
• Víctor Manuelle, "Que Suenen los Tambores"
• A much better salsa song, perhaps because it doesn't have to support two massive music-industry egos, and is about the joy of music instead of some cooked-up romantic drama.
• Gerardo Ortíz, "Eres una Niña"
• Mexican regional assimilates bachata, with brass and woodwinds instead of guitar. Gerardo still sings foursquare, though (complimentary).
• Don Omar, "Soledad"
• Dramatic, po-faced reggaetón with merengue típico accents that just ends up sounding like he's trying to make the "Danza Kuduro" template work as a ballad.
• Voz de Mando, "Levantando Polvadera"
• Good old-fashioned norteño with tuba basslines, accordion fingerwork, and inventive drumming whose rhythmic switch-ups make for an exciting storytelling device.

JUAN MAGÁN FT. PITBULL & EL CATA, “BAILANDO POR EL MUNDO”

31st March, 2012

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"Inténtalo" was the first new #1 of 2012 to get a second week at the top, although they weren't consecutive. The one-week wonder that followed its second reign was this, an echo of the airwave-blanketing #1s of 2011, when party anthems by Pitbull and Don Omar sprawled over months. But the post-subprime blip is already shifting into other gears: this cheery club-ready celebration of women going out and partying will be replaced by another one-week wonder with a stronger dancehall orientation.

Like "Hips Don't Lie", "Loca", and Don Omar's 2010s appearances here, "Bailando por el Mundo" is a reworking of a less successful version of the song. Barcelonan DJ Juan Magán had released "Bailando por Ahí" early in 2011, and it was a local hit, and something of a culmination of a decade-long career. Magán had been making the specfically Spanish genre of hardcore techno known as "mákina" since 1999 with a series of collaborators, and was part of the first Spansih reggaetón act, Guajiros del Puerto, in 2004. (They drop the n-word like it's generic rap slang in the first seconds of their biggest hit, "Veo Veo", in case you wondered how appropriative they were.) He moved on to club music with the act Magán & Rodríguez in 2007, where he started calling his music "electro latino," which primarily seems to have meant raiding Latin American music for sounds and ryhthms to give texture to otherwise very generic house and trance beats: their biggest hit "Bora Bora" borrowed vallenato accordion as a signature sound. When he went solo in 2009, Magán aimed even more squarely at broad pop success.

"Bailando por Ahí" went to #1 on the Spanish charts in October 2011, the same month that "Bailando por el Mundo" was released, with Cuban-American rapper and empresario Pitbull and Dominican rapper El Cata taking Magán's verses and making them both more vivid and more generic: the original song gestures towards wistfulness (preserved in the chorus-ending line "fueron los días más felices para mí" (they were the happiest days for me)), but Pitbull and El Cata are more interested in boasting about their own importance and success than in Magán's loose character study about a woman going out with her friends to party in Madrid. Not that the original is some great achievement in aesthetic sensitivity: the thumping merengue-house and zig-zagging accordion are winningly schlocky but little else.

My memory of this song in 2012 is primarily of ignoring it. I was exhausted by Pitbull at this point (although it's worth noting that this is by far his best showing as a rapper on this travelogue), and Magán's party-happy music wasn't interesting enough to overcome my generic contempt for Spanish DJs compared to the far more more fascinating electronic pop coming from Latin America itself, particularly the amazing Santiago scene that I was deep into at this time. But Javiera Mena, Alex Anwandter, and the rest are in no danger of showing up here; so the limited pleasures of "Bailando por el Mundo" sound better in retrospect.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “HOTEL NACIONAL”

14th January, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

GLORIA ESTEFAN FT. CARLOS SANTANA, JOSÉ FELICIANO & SHEILA E., “NO LLORES”

1st September, 2007

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Gloria Estefan's first album in four years means Gloria Estefan's first #1 in four years, which is roughly an illustration of her fortunes since 1989 -- she is easily the woman with the most #1 singles on the Hot Latin chart, and if she's dominated the 2000s less than she dominated the 1990s, it's because she has more of an empire to maintain; music is only one of her revenue streams, and possibly the least lucrative.

But she's still a brilliant musical mind, and a masterful synthesist; so the big single from 90 Millas, a reference to the distance between Miami and Havana, brings three (four, if legendary Cuban trumpeter Arturo Sandoval is counted) of the most iconic Latin musicians of the later twentieth century onto her celebratory, very Cuban rave-up. Mexican-American fusion guitarist Santana, Puerto Rican Latin jazz guitarist and singer Feliciano, and Mexican-American/Creole R&B percussionist and singer Sheila E(scovedo) are among the only Latin artists to have come close to matching Gloria Estefan's success in the broader US pop market, and Santana's and Feliciano's dueling guitars, one smokily electric and the other tautly acoustic, and Escovedo's erupting timbales bring life and color to what is already a pretty fantastic circular danzón encouraging the listener not to weep, to embrace life and reject fear or regret.

Formally, this is yet another of Estefan's nostalgic tours of pre-Castro Cuban music, but thanks the fire brought by her guests it's closer to everything-and-the-kitchen-sink salsa -- born in hustling immigrant New York -- than to the classicist Havana forms she's often defaulted to.

And that engagement with something like the present tense doesn't stop with her similarly middle-aged peers -- the song was issued with two official remixes, one a celebratory reggaetón featuring the all-conquering duo Wisin y Yandel, and the other a Miami hip-hop jam featuring a still little-known Cuban-American Dirty South rapper calling himself Pitbull. Both the remixes cut out Santana's guitar, which is a bit too bluesy to play nice with contemporary hip-hop, but Gloria and her "no llores, no llores, no llores" chanting singers are intact.

Pitbull even thanks her for the opportunity at the end of his remix -- in two years, "I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)" would make him a household name, though he won't appear on this travelogue for several years more. He and Gloria share a reverential attitude toward Cuba (and an all-American loathing of Castro), along with a canny pop ear and willingness to raid from anywhere to sustain their global pop empires.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “TU FOTOGRAFÍA”

8th May, 2004

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In the spring of 2004, Gloria Estefan was 46: the perfect age, you might say, for a stock-taking ballad about the emotional gap left by elders who had passed on, leaving nothing behind but old black-and-white photographs. On the cover of the single, she clutches a photo of her in-laws, Emilio's parents, taken on their wedding day in Havana in the 1940s.

The fact that this obviously very personal, even intimate song still went to #1 perhaps owes less to the undeniable universality of its themes (everyone but the very young has experienced loss and grown sentimental over an old picture) than Gloria Estefan's stature as an icon of Latin pop twenty years in to her hitmaking career. 2003's Unwrapped spawned four singles, but the third, "Te Amaré," was only issued in Spain, where it was a substantial hit, and the second, "I Wish You," was only pushed to English-language radio, where it was a modest adult-contemporary hit; but the two Spanish-language singles released in the U.S. hit #1 on the Hot Latin chart as if duty-bound.

The song itself is perfectly lovely, also co-written by Peruvian songwriter Gian Carlo, with an intelligent, unpredictable chord structure and marvelous, emotionally literate work from drummer Manu Katché and percussionist Archie Peña. Gloria's performance is understated but resonant, reminding me not for the first time of the warmth and yearning in Amy Grant's 1980s records, which is a higher compliment than you may suspect.

It was only #1 for a week, but it only needed to be. In some ways it's the tail end of Gloria's imperial period: we will see her again, but not with the frequency we have since 1989. She's moving towards brand management rather than pop stardom, and as her and Emilo's portfolios diversify, the charts take a back seat. Never mind; the kids are always coming up from behind.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “HOY”

4th October, 2003

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The charting of Gloria Estefan's musical career only by her Hot Latin #1s has told a necessarily incomplete story (for a fuller but still incomplete version, my One Week One Band on her remains available), but one thing it's actually been quite good at has been tracking her shifts into exploring many different flavors of traditional Latin American music from Cuban son to Cuban/Mexican bolero to Colombian vallenato to Dominican bachata to, here, Peruvian huayno.

Best known among English-speaking audiences as the musical genre of "El Condor Pasa" thanks to the Simon & Garfunkel rewrite, and immediately recognizable for its use of Andean panpines, huayno is perhaps the most Amerindian-inflected popular music genre of the Americas, although its dotted rhythms speak to the hemisphere-wide influence of enslaved African musicians over the centuries. We've only heard it here before as one element in wide-ranging mixtures from Colombians Shakira and Carlos Vives (huayno is a pan-Andean music, and so is common to Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina), and it's not entirely uncut here, only the predominant element in what is otherwise merely a sturdy pop song.

It was simultaneously released in an English-language version as "Wrapped", which didn't make the Hot 100 at all and only scraped the upper 20s on the Adult Contemporary chart. In both languages the song seems to be a vaguely spiritual love song to a loved one, although it could as easily be directed to a parent (or even the Virgin Mary) as to a romantic partner. The video, the same for both versions, is set among the ruins of Machu Picchu, which only adds to the spiritual (and neocolonial) overtones. It isn't the last we'll see of Gloria, by a long ways, but it's not as sharp or smart as we've come to expect from her, either. Whenever she tries to get vaguely spiritual (remember "Más Allá"?) her usual excellent taste seems to fail her.

MDO, “TE QUISE OLVIDAR”

13th January, 2001

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Son by Four had ridden the crest of a larger boy-band moment in global pop, but they were far from the first. MDO, now without a single Puerto Rican left (the 2000 lineup was Dominican, Cuban, Mexican, Tejano, and Italian-American), were back with a... well, decidedly not a brand-new invention. A sturdy old invention, lustily sung and expensively produced. written by Venezuelan singer-songwriter Carlos Baute: "Te Quise Olvidar" (I wanted to forget you) is a we-broke-up-but-you-haunt-my-memory song, steroided up to a power ballad, and even the middle-eight tribal harmonies are (though great) too little, too late.

But the lyrics are surprisingly frank for a boy band: the chorus is about how the singer has sought forgetfulness by having sex with another woman, but to no avail. Which fits well with Baute's womanizing persona, but sounds refreshingly adult in the mouths of young men whose uniform white dress, outstretched hands, and cupid's-bow lips are presumably targeted at a rather less adult demographic. (I confess I have never studied the lyrics of the millennial boy bands very closely; maybe I'm wrong and they were all about sophisticated adult sexual triangles.) But that's the most interesting thing about the song.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “COMO ME DUELE PERDERTE”

23rd Septmeber, 2000

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I had trouble believing that this was really the first proper bachata song we've encountered in these pages -- the importance of bachata to the last ten years of Latin Pop has given it a larger place in my internal estimate of Latin pop history -- but that's what the tags say. Of course, I could easily have tagged stuff wrong; but there's no more bachata to the only other song that's used the tag, Juan Luis Guerra's "Costo de la Vida" than there is South African mbube, which is to say that it's used as one flavor among many in his postmodern, intentionally culture-clashing gumbo. La Gloria's bachata is, by contrast, not only traditional but positively reverent, which however musically luscious it is can't help feeling a little politically queasy among the pre-revolutionary Cuban pageantry of the parent album: is she really expressing nostalgia for the Trujillo dictatorship?

But of course she too is a postmodernist, intentionally culture-clashing and remixing the past to project an ideal image of today. (Everyone is, these postcolonial days.) The close-miked violin which decorates the second half of this song isn't particularly bachata (which for most of its history was a low-rent, few-frills music, despised by the Dominican elite as drunkards' laments), and structurally it owes more to Mexico-born songwriter Marco Flores' early training in romántica and pop than to bachata traditions of meter and rhythm. It's still undeniably gorgeous, a swooning love song that would work with any underlying rhythm or instrumental filigree.

Still, as a starting point for pop-bachata history (at least within the context of Hot Latin #1s) it's a pretty great foot forward. Gloria Estefan, entirely without meaning to, has now served as our introduction to two major Latin genres, vallenato and bachata, and if (say) Carlos Vives' pop-vallenato has already turned up to show us how it's "really" done, the future of bachata in this travelogue is brighter still.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “NO ME DEJES DE QUERER”

10th June, 2000

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A victory lap to close out the millennium, a slice of content for the brand-new Latin Grammys (where Emilio was on the board) to award her over, a breezy slab of nostalgia to prove to the younger generation whose party it is that they're crashing -- various cynical readings of this song are possible, but they all melt away in the face of those bright horns, that clave rhythm, and the call-and-response montuno at the end. It's been seven years since Gloria Estefan reinvented her adult-contemporary self (which was itself a reinvention from the Latin party den mother of the mid-80s) as an avatar of nostalgic Cuban identity, and while she has kept up well, not to say brilliantly, with shifting trends in Latin pop, there's a paroxysmic joy to a song like this one that there wasn't to the more high-tech (if still brilliant) "¡Oye!" -- she's aging into a patriot.

An incurious listen would suggest that this is more of the salsa revival, perhaps fueled by the runaway success of "A Puro Dolor," but it's not Nuyorican salsa but Cuban mambo, which is what salsa always was (ask Tito Puente, who refused to call his music salsa), with added Puerto Rican and rhythm & blues overlays. The Havana-nostalgic video (for which she won an inaugural Latin Grammy) makes it clear: this is a celebration not of the horny, sweaty music of the immigrant 70s, but of the faultless, romantic entertainment of the pre-revolutionary 50s.

As a song, it's primarily an exercise in genre: the lyric is a demand that her lover not stop loving her, performed with the confidence of someone who doesn't feel particularly anxious about the result. (Whether that's because she has absolute trust in her partner's fidelity or doesn't really care about it is left as an exercise to the reader.) Compared to the high-energy, recklessly psychologizing music of youngsters like Ricky Martin or Marc Anthony, it's perhaps a little hermetic, a little too classy; but then maybe it's not as overdetermined, not as noisy for the sake of noise. But as a relief from the unchanging reign of "A Puro Dolor," it's a breath of the freshest air.

(Note: this is the first Gloria Estefan song I've had occasion to write about here since I wrote about Gloria Estefan for a week straight three years ago at One Week One Band. A bunch of the YouTube embeds no longer work, but if you like me on Latin Pop, here's a bunch of it.)

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “¡OYE!”

5th September, 1998

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

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

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

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

ALEJANDRO FERNÁNDEZ & GLORIA ESTEFAN, “EN EL JARDÍN”

27th December, 1997

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Our last duet was between aging superstars Juan Gabriel and Rocío Dúrcal, who were reviving the great 19th-century tradition of the son ranchero. Alejandro Fernández is quite literally of the next generation (his father was Dúrcal's exact contemporary), and Gloria Estefan, though more than ten years his senior, still plays young in the right light; the throwback tradition preserved here is the bolero of the 40s and 50s -- and Cuban bolero rather than the more noir-y Mexican version. Fernández had relied on the Estefan machine to get hits, and they came as a package; songwriter Kike Santander, producer Emilio Estefan, and La Gloria, now on her eighth appearance in these pages. (This, incidentally, now makes her the female Latin artist with the most number ones as of 1997, beating Ana Gabriel's record of seven.)

"En El Jardín" (in the garden) is a sweet song, with lovely string-ensemble decoration, and tasteful accordion and trumpet solos punctuating the proceedings. It's a love song, of course, and for once an uncomplicated one without recriminations or self-aggrandizement: things were bad, nothing gave me lasting pleasure, everything was a disappointment... and then there was You.

The transformative power of love is a perfectly ordinary subject for song, and Santander's lyrics are only notable for keeping a pretty tight leash on the central metaphor of the "jardín de mis amores" (the garden of my love), which had withered, but flourishes now under the new regime. Fernández and Estefan sell it well, particularly Fernández, whose fine voice and an excellent command of phrasing would be a pleasure in any context, but it does drag a bit, particularly when they restate the second verse and full chorus after the trumpet solo; a smart program director would no doubt have long since faded it out.

Where Gabriel and Dúrcal were presenting (even if unwittingly) something of a swan song, Fernández is just declaring his arrival, and Estefan establishing herself as the dominant female voice in the field. They respect the conventions -- but with this song, 1997 is over, and things are going to start to change rapidly.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “NO PRETENDO”

2nd August, 1997

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Probably the most telling indication of my taste-slash-white-boy-assumptions-about-"real"-Latin-music is the reaction I'm having to this run of songs compared to the run that immediately preceded it. Enrique Iglesias and Marco Antonio Solís, much as I've liked individual songs of theirs, are wearying in romántico ballad after romántico ballad slicked up with mid-90s adult-contemporary pop production. The ranchero classicism of Juan Gabriel/Rocío Dúrcal and the countryfied corridos of Los Tigres del Norte, leaning as they did on traditional Mexican sounds, the Latin American version of "roots" music like the blues, country and gospel, were much more agreeable to my classicist's ears. Which may be indication of an "authenticity"-driven double standard applied to Latin music — after all, in Anglophone music of the period, I like the Cardigans way more than, say, Keb' Mo' — or maybe it's just a numbers game. If it were one or two Enriques to every six or seven Tigres, I might be feeling the exact opposite.

I bring all this up because this is the third Latin-traditionalist song in a row that I'm really loving; though the traditionalism here isn't Mexican but Cuban, even Spanish (the flowing flamenco-like guitar lines), and I think I even hear Peruvian huayño (cf. "El Condor Pasa") in the shuffling rhythm. But I'm no expert, as the musicologists falling over themselves laughing at my disorderly tags can attest. And faithful traditionalism would surely be pointless without Estefan's effortless melodicism and Kike Santander's classic songwriting.

"No Pretendo" can be translated several different ways, from the obvious "I don't pretend" to "I'm not trying" to "I don't mean" — either way, the phrase ends most frequently with "ser tu dueña" (be your lady, in the aristocratic as well as the lover sense) and "hacerte mío" (make you mine), and the repeated disclaimers have the effect of enforcing humility: after saying at great length what she doesn't mean to be, when she says what she does want to be it's "el mano que se llene de quebranto, ser un poco el remanso donde muere el desengaño" (the hand filled with broken dreams, a bit of an oasis where disappointments die).

This is practically Victorian — the "ministering angel thou" version of womanhood, rejecting any stronger moral or emotional hold on her man — but the complexity and the sheer poetry of the full lyric make it go down easier, as does Estefan's eternally warm voice, pitched at just the right level of desperation to make the sentiment believable. And listen to the guitars: they're letting us know it's tragic, all right.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “MÁS ALLÁ”

6th January, 1996

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After a magnificent hot streak, Estefan finally deals herself a bum hand. This is, of course, up to interpretation; clearly enough people liked it to send the song to #1; but it's her worst song, qua song, that we've yet encountered in this travelogue.

The production remains as polished and detailed as ever, with gorgeous flamenco guitar runs and swaying Afro-Cuban percussion; but the melody refers to no Latin tradition, instead rising and falling in the safe, predictable, even cozy patterns of inspirational pabulum. It does not surprise me to learn, when I check Wikipedia, that she sang this for the Pope. I and my immediate circle have been present for people singing things to the Pope on a number of different occasions, and this fits right in, banal Chicken Soup for the Soul-level platitudes married to a melody strenuously wiped free of all secular interest. You can't dance to it, you can't fall in love to it, you can't weep to it, you can't get pumped to it, you can't even — and this is where it fails as an inspirational song as well as a pop song — feel any great interest in changing the world to it.

The song is about stasis: the title, "Más Allá" means "Beyond," and is a metonymy for heaven; and all the sweetly-sung little Christian sacrifices in the verses are promised their eternal reward in the stubbornly not-soaring chorus. It's a vision of heaven as a gated community, "más allá del rencor, de las lágrimas y el dolor" ("beyond rancor, beyond tears and pain"), without any hint that rancor, tears and pain are not the disease we need to escape, but its symptoms; injustice, as even the Pope has acknowledged from time to time, needs to be confronted and beat back. As an anthem for such effort, however, this kind of thing is too heavenly minded to be any earthly good.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “ABRIENDO PUERTAS”

21st October, 1995

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This song begins what, scanning the horizon, looks like becoming a semi-annual tradition: another Gloria Estefan album, another Gloria Estefan number-one single. After having thoroughly ingratiated herself to the Latin Pop audience with Mi Tierra (the album that produced three chart-topping songs), she'll never again go without that audience's appreciation for her work — at least as of press time. And she repays that appreciation with some of the most joyful and glorious music we've yet encountered in this travelogue.

"Abriendo Puertas," as even a Sesame Street-level Spanish education should tell you, means "opening doors," and the light, scattered-tempo vallenato rhythm of the song reiterates the dance-yrself-free message of the lyrics, which on the chorus run something like "And we're opening doors, and we're closing wounds/Because in the new year we're going to live life/And we're opening doors, and we're closing wounds/Step by step down the path we're going to find our way." It's the sort of pleasingly universalist message that could, frankly, be a hit at any time, but in the fall of 1995 it perhaps inevitably recalled the great grief of that year (at least as far as US Latin Pop fans were concerned), and its call to get up and dance anyway, to tear down barriers and dismiss failure as a lie, sounds both thrilling and, well, healing.

That vallenato rhythm is worth remarking on: it's a close cousin of the cumbia rhythm that Selena exposed us to, with similar origins in the mixed-race cauldron of coastal Colombia, and the guitar/accordion combination (unrelated to the similar combination in Mexican norteño) is one of the genre's trademarks. Perhaps unusually for the highly-vertically-integrated Estefans, the song was written and arranged by Colombian songwriter/producer Kike Santander, who will be a name to remember in the years to come, as the late 90s fade into the 00s.

Still, Gloria and producer husband Emilio, ever the ambassadorial multiculturalists, make a point of letting the opening guitar sound not only tropical but African — a hint, perhaps, of Congolese rumba echoing back to her own native Cuban rhythms? — and mix the rest with salsa horn charts, funky urban bass, Afro-Cuban percussion, and a call-and-response chorus that could have grown out of any of the above, but which in this travelogue is a Gloria Estefan hallmark. They don't call themselves the Miami Sound Machine anymore — they're bigger than Miami, and far more eclectic than any Sound Machine — but she's had the same band her whole career, and they've kept up with her every swerve and wild goose chases. If she sounds now content — like she could just make variations on this record for the rest of her career and not miss a thing — she has perhaps earned it. How many other openers to fifteenth albums sound so irrepressibly joyful?

JON SECADA, “SI TE VAS”

13th August, 1994

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Two years ago, he burst onto this list like a breath of fresh, modernizing air, his soulful voice pirouetting with the sheer joy of self; now, he slogs his way through a dispirited power ballad, leaning on crutches that have long since gone out of favor, a shell of his former self.

It's worth noting, of course, that neither of those things are entirely true: "Otro Día Más Sin Verte" wasn't nearly as revolutionary as it seemed at the time, particularly now that world has Selena in it, and "Si Te Vas" is neither his low-point nor the end of the road for him, though it is the end of our association with him. Like many former and to-be-former number-one stars, he's dug a comfortable niche for himself as an overtanned, permagrinning fixture on the Latin nostalgia circuit, releasing an album every so often — the most recent is Clásicos/Classics, a trip through American-Latin standards that begins with "Oye Como Va" and ends with "La Bamba" — without bothering a chart that is increasingly focused on what the kids are listening to these days.

So perhaps the inevitable comparison here is to Billy Joel's "River Of Dreams," a similarly bland, soulless song that makes similar use of the gospel-choir crutch, which similarly marked the end of a career as a pop hitmaker, and which similarly exposed melodic and vocal weaknesses that were not previously so noticeable. Secada's voice actually sounds patchy here, like he might be sick or like he's laying down a demo vocal which they'll nail on the second pass. (Or, if it were several years later, which the producer forgot to pitch-correct before the track went to master.) The track starts promisingly, with a twinkly piano line that recalls house music, but any interesting production ideas are soon thrown out the window so that Secada can emote (poorly) all over the place.

"Si Te Vas" means "if you go," and it's as standard a lament/vow of love as the title promises. Unfortunately for him, Secada hasn't learned another trick; he's still pushing his once-fascinating combination of vaguely funky beats, soul-style singing, and dreary romanticism, and he's being left behind.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “MI BUEN AMOR”

12th March, 1994

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The second number one in a row to begin with lush, cinematic strings; but where Ana Gabriel's strings are opulent but generic, evoking the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema without straying from her melodic template, Gloria Estefan is going for something more specific, letting the chords arrange themselves into contrapuntal patterns like something half-classical, and recording them closely, intimately. It's the difference between shared nostalgia, Ana inviting a stadium to get caught up in her voluptuous passion, and personal nostalgia, Gloria dreaming aloud in a café, or rather in a highly polished and superbly set-dressed simulacra of one.

Four years from now, English-speaking audiences will fall in brief but highly lucrative love with traditional Cuban music because Ry Cooder told them to. Mi Tierra barely registered with that audience; but it's not spoiling anything to note that the rootsy, rock-approved Buena Vista Social Club will not be making an appearance in these pages. They were taken up by NPR, Rolling Stone, and the rest of the rockcrit establishment because their music sounded raw, authentic, and effortless; but the Latin Pop audience preferred what pop audiences always have: romantic music, aspirational music, constructed music. Glamour is an essential element of pop, and the photo-negative glamour of gritty poverty is generally only attractive to people who aren't in danger of slipping into it.

"Mi Buen Amor" ("my true love") is about as romantic as it gets: the swoony strings, the careful guitar and bass figures, even the Afro-Cuban percussion striking at a dreamy pace, while Gloria at her most coolly glamorous sings a carefully-constructed son about deathless and unforgettable love. This is her farewell bow from the Mi Tierra album (at least as far as this travelogue is concerned), and it's a lovely tableau, frozen in sepia-toned pre-revolutionary time, by which to remember her.

At least until she returns, in other clothes.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “CON LOS AÑOS QUE ME QUEDAN”

13th November, 1993

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So "Mi Tierra" was an uptempo dance song. More in line with traditional American pop practices than with Latin ones, La Gloria's second single off the album is a ballad — or at least it's taken at a slow tempo, which isn't quite the same thing. It's still unmistakably tropical, with a back-and-forth beat that seems to fall halfway between Cuban son and Dominican bachata, with gorgeous guitar filigrees by legendary Mexican guitarist Chamin Correa that draw together two continents' worth of guitar tradition, bossa nova and tejano and trova and blues and flamenco and milonga all blinking out of the spaces between the notes.

Her performance is almost as supple and fully as tender. No virtuoso in terms of technique, for most of her career she's been notable as a vocalist mostly for her enthusiasm and brio rather than the elegant carefulness of her phrasing. But here she tackles a song whose melody is structured like traditional pop, the sort of song a jazz singer would take up, and draws the emotion out of it by sheer force of personality. I've taken to reading along with the lyrics while listening to the song, and I was tearing up by the second chorus, both the sentiment and her performance were so pitch-perfect. That shouldn't be a surprise; nothing gets to me like nostalgia.

And this is a very nostalgic record; arranged by the great Cuban jazz bassist Cachao, it uses great swaths of Hollywood strings like Max Steiner, arranging emotions in cubist friezes while Estefan's plaintive voice runs through a lyric not all that far away from the Luis Miguel entry it replaced at the top of the chart. "Con Los Años Que Me Quedan" means "with the years I have left," and the phrase is the first half of a vow, the second half of which is "demostraré cuánto te quiero" ("I will prove how much I love you"). The impulse to exaggerated displays and promises of affection is a familiar one to us from previous ballads, but the implicit acknowledgement of mortality is a new note, which is to say, of course, a very old note. Very little of this travelogue has ever concerned itself with looking backwards; as is proper to all pop, Latin Pop is concerned with the present and the future, and it takes someone of Estefan's stature and confidence to make what is essentially a 1950s torch song set in a Havana café still resonate with enough people long enough to take up residency at the top of the Latin chart for several weeks.

She wrote it with her husband, as she has most of her hits since 1984, and as with "Si Voy A Perderte," it's an entirely different song in the English-language version, which is less intimate in its emotions and more of a conventional "someday-we'll-be-together" study in deferred romance. Same melody, same backing track, different songs — this sort of two-for-the-price-of-one song will become increasingly common the closer we get to the present, as the Latin market increases in clout and visibility in the US, and as more Latin stars try to cross over in the other direction. Gloria Estefan, who's been playing both markets off each other since 1977, just had a head start on everyone else.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “MI TIERRA”

7th August, 1993

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Unlikely as it sounds, this is only Gloria Estefan's second appearance in these chronicles. She was far and away the most popular Latin act in the Anglophone market, having racked up a string of hits comparable to Madonna's or Janet Jackson's, at least for consistency if not longevity. I was barely paying attention at the time, and even I remember "Mi Tierra" as a sort of back-to-her-roots move after the campy strut of "Go Away."

But the Latin market was more astringent, demanding songs in Spanish, and Mi Tierra, at long last, complied. Her first all-Spanish-language album, it was less sleek and modern than much of the music she had been making, with or without the Sound Machine. Not that she had ever been particularly cutting-edge or critically acclaimed, rock purists recoiling from her dance-pop diva roots and diva fans skeptical of her sometimes corny sense of humor and often-weak material. Mi Tierra was that particularly rockist move, the back-to-roots record, and let her diva tear into some meaty emotions with mature sensibilities and precise control, and she was rewarded for it in Grammies, sales, and the loving embrace of Latin Pop radio. For the rest of the 90s, Gloria Estefan will be a much more recurrent figure here — just as she begins to fade from sight in English-language pop.

The first single off the album, "Mi Tierra" ("my land") is practically a textbook in Cuban dance styles, beginning with a folk-African drumbeat and shimmying into a guajira, a son, a rumba, and finally, when the horns come in, puro salsa. The lyrics are perhaps the best set of lyrics we've seen to date on this journey, an impressionistic, fragmented, and emotionally charged immigrant's monologue. Estefan herself was born in Cuba but her family escaped to the US when Castro took power; she has not returned. The song is as much an exile's song as an immigrant's, full of longing for the beloved homeland and musical reverie, but as she works her way up to the climax of the song (just before the horns come in), she grows more and more passionate: "sufro eso dolor que hay en su alma, aunque estoy lejos yo lo siento, y ¿un día regreso?" ("I suffer that pain born in [my country's] heart, though I am far away I feel it, and will I return one day?") The question hangs in the air for the briefest of seconds, before the answer is pounded out in three sharp hits: "Yo no sé." ("I don't know.")

Even the music dies away with the anguish of the unresolved, impossible-to-resolve question, before rushing back in harder and fiercer than ever, the horns blare in reckless joy, and even soothing disco strings flutter in. But the flutes still shriek unquietly, and the drums as frantic as ever: the call-and-response returns, as she cries out that she will remember, she will bear witness, her blood runs hot, she carries her tierra within her, and the voices ring back in response "mi tierra ... mi tierra ... mi tierra" in nasal unison after the fashion of traditional Latin American backing singers. The music rises again, the horns implacable, the disquiet overwhelming, and ends on the highest pitch of emotion possible, leaving the listener exhilarated but (if they have understood the words) emotionally drained.

It's a hell of a song, and I hear more in it every time I return to it. It was even a minor hit on various English-language charts, including in the UK and Australia; and I have to wonder why it's not talked about more. Is the Spanish language too daunting? The Cubanismo too specific? Estefan herself too easily dismissed as a pop lightweight? (I've done it myself, based mostly on the fact that everyone I knew who liked her in the 90s were women in their forties.) Consider this a call for Gloria Estefan Reappraisal Month. Or at the very least, point me to the places I've missed where people have given her her due.