DON OMAR, “HASTA QUE SALGA EL SOL”

21st July, 2012

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Don Omar's history in these pages has been checkered: other than his initial 2006 appearance with a rare reggaetón tearjerker, he has primarily been the face of glib international megahits based on already-familiar tunes and propelled by rather generic tropical party rhythms. "Danza Kuduro" was more soca than kuduro, "Taboo" was a trance-pop update of the "Lambada" tune, and "Dutty Love" was a midtempo love horny song that borrowed Jamaican vocabulary. This is his final appearance on this travelogue (as of this writing), and is entirely in keeping with the latter-day bombastic-but-hollow party anthems that he is known for.

"Hasta Que Salga el Sol" (until the sun comes up) has left perhaps the smallest footprint of any of his 2010s #1s, but it might be the best of them. Or maybe just hearing a batucada in a pop song is an effective way to bypass my critical faculties. Lyrically it's extremely simple, just a celebration of partying all night delivered in Omar's signature half-growl, half-holler, cycling through the same few stanza patterns again and again. Musically, though, it's fascinating, a hard dance song with drums borrowed from Brazilian Carnaval sambas, an extremely funky bassline, and chiming guitar accents that make me think of contemporary indie rock. Credit to Ray "El Ingeniero" Casillas, a New York-based producer who seems to specialize in big-tent Zumba-friendly productions for the boldface names in Latin music.

The only official video is a lyric video, about which the only interesting observation I can make is that the ecstatic, oh-ee-oh-oh choruses are spelled in a way that follows English conventions, not Spanish ones, giving away the market the song was meant for. And indeed, unlike the vast majority of the other songs covered here, it only appeared on three non-US charts. In the US, its most notable appearances have been as the theme song for Miss America 2012 and in a dance event at Disney World; corporate cuddliness may well be Don Omar's most salient legacy. 

DON OMAR FT. NATTI NATASHA, “DUTTY LOVE”

7th April, 2012

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Reggaetón proper is still bubbling just under the surface of urban tropical pop. Although this is formally mostly just Latin dancehall, gesturing towards Jamaica with the title (which never appears in the lyrics) and towards Trinidad with occasional steel-drum accents, the dembow riddim is audible almost in negative, a clipped pulse embedded beneath a sugary haze of pleasant beachy instrumentation that could, quite intentionally, come from anywhere.

Don Omar, who we've heard from several times before, is Puerto Rican, and Natti Natasha, who we will hear from again, is Dominican, but they met and collaborated in New York, and the polish proveded by producers A&X, Link-On, and DJ Robin ends up neither Puerto Rican nor Dominican, but a generic "island sound" calculated to please the widest possible audience by sanding off any cultural specificity that hasn't already been assimilated into the global pop consensus.

Which makes it sound as if I despise this song, and I don't: but there's very little to latch onto. It excels at capturing a vibe, but no more than that: Omar and Natti Nat are, despite the repetition of their names, virtually anonymous chroniclers of a generic romantic encounter in which he initiates, she's unsure because of bad past experiences, and ultimately they lose themselves in a dance which functions as a perfect synechdoche for other physical pleasures.

It's another 2012 number one that only lasted a week at the top (although the year's 400-pound gorilla, which will take up residency at #1 and refuse to leave for months on end, draws near), but for once it feels like it. No video was filmed to prolong the hype cycle, and although it won a Billboard award in the Latin Airplay category, it has not particularly become a classic. Don Omar's biggest hits all came before and Natti Natasha's biggest hits will all come after: "Dutty Love" is our introduction to one of the handful of women who are ever allowed to be massive urbano stars at a time, and little else.

DON OMAR, “TABOO”

16th July, 2011

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When I wrote this blog's entry on the 1990 #1 "Lambada", I was still in many ways blindly groping in the dark when it came to hearing and describing music from a non-rock tradtition. But I'm grateful to the younger version of myself for not getting into the song's background (was I too rushed to look at Wikipedia that week?), because it gives me a chance to do it for this revival.

"Taboo" follows directly in the pattern of Don Omar's enormous crossover success with "Danza Kuduro", another turbo-slick rewrite of a big splashy hook from the Lusophone world that was itself raiding from another, slightly older tradition. This time he's pilfering from French producers Kaoma's bandwagon-jumping "Lambada," a reinterpretation of the Brazilian Maria Ferreira's 1986 lambada hit "Chorando Se Foi" which was itself based on Bolivian folkloric group Los Kjarkas' "Llorando Se Fue", first recorded in 1981.

Each subsequent version keeps the swooning melody, but ups the party-anthem quality, and Don Omar's "Taboo," coming twenty-two years after Kaoma had their moment in the sun, has none of Los Kjarkas' quality of lamentation, even as he keeps several of their original lyrics intact; but he switches from Spanish to Portuguese from verse to verse, as the music video switches locations from Puerto Rico to Rio de Janeiro -- and also inserts shots from the then-current fifth movie in the Fast & the Furious franchise, which happened to also include setpieces in those locations, and in which Omar himself appeared.

Music as an extruded byproduct of international corporate entertainment synergy is more or less representative of where things stood in the early 2010s. The recording won "Urban Song of the Year" at the ASCAP awards, a traditional recognition of revenue generated; but despite drawing from a rich history, it was a terminus, a dead end that led to nothing more; even the later return to reggaetón that raided Latin music history left it alone.

And why is it called "Taboo"? Because of the "forbidden dance" press legend around the lambada, presumably. Everything else about it is shiny and ersatz; of course you print the legend.

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.

DON OMAR, “ANGELITO”

22nd July, 2006

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No sooner has reggaetón been grudgingly accepted within the exclusive club of the Hot Latin #1s than it turns maudlin and literary. Don Omar was Daddy Yankee's principal challenger to the title of supremacy within reggaetón's first explosion in popularity; his 2006 album King of Kings was the first reggaetón album to debut at #1 on the Latin Albums chart, but "Angelito" was only at the top for a week compared to "Rompe"'s three-month reign. Don Omar's true imperial era is yet to come; in the meantime, there's this.

I don't know enough about the history of reggaetón to say for certain whether this was notable as being an early ballad in the style, but it's certainly true that it was the first balladic reggaetón to achieve such widespread success, crossing over to listeners who weren't invested in reggaetón but knew a good weepie when they heard it. In that way it's comparable to something like 2Pac's "Dear Mama," a moment of vulnerability all the more notable for the self-aggrandizing celebrations of violence and excess that surround it.

But Omar's not giving away anything about himself: the voice in which he speaks for most of the song is that of AIDS, the death sentence of a woman who loved a stranger incautiously one night and whose soul is the "angelito, vuela" (little angel, fly away) of the chorus. Pop-song PSAs have rarely been more lavish: the funereal opening and sawing strings before the the dembow riddim finally kicks in on the second chorus are time-tested signifiers of Gravitas, while the spoken-word outro, which in a club-aimed track would be reserved for the shoutouts to producer and label (DJ Eliel does get namechecked in the intro) is a lapel-shaking DO YOU SEE giving the song an Aesopian moral: "Vive la vida minuto a minuto y encontrarás en cada uno de ellos un motivo por el cual conducirte en la forma correcta. Te lo aseguro." (Live your life from moment to moment and you will find in each of them a reason to conduct yourself in the proper manner. I promise.)

But while it can be inferred that Don Omar is advocating safe sex, he's cagey enough to allow the moralist-friendly interpretation that he's advocating abstinence. The background to all of this was government repression and censorship, as the rich white upperclass of Puerto Rico used morality laws to raid nightclubs and record stores where reggaetón, born of the largely Black underclass in San Juan, was being disseminated (many thanks to Eduardo Cepeda's hugely informative column on the history of reggaetón), and Omar, an international star working with a major budget (the video, shot on location in Rome, was not cheap) and already dealing with charges of drug and arms possession, was smart enough to walk the line that would keep his work free from the censor's marker.

Ultimately I find "Angelito" more interesting than gripping: the discourse on safe sex has moved so far past its banal sentimentalities that it's more of a period piece than many of its contemporaries. But Eliel's widescreen production is still pretty great, even in the HD era.