MANÁ FT. SHAKIRA, “MI VERDAD”

28th Feb, 2015

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A pair of Nineties veteran acts joining up for a laid-back swayalong feels like the kind of thing that the streaming-era chart had no room for anymore; and the fact that it only went to #1 for a week in February 2015, one of a series of one-week wonders in late winter sandwiched in between monumental chart runs, seems more a product of chance (or perhaps of Billboard tinkering with its chart calculus) than of true blanket popularity. (On the airplay chart, it managed a whole two weeks at #1.)

Not that I'm complaining! While I've been largely cool on Maná in these pages, I've consistently adored Shakira, and maybe predictably, I find that her sweet-and-sour voice is exactly the ingredient needed to pull Maná out of their latter-day doldrums and sound vividly, achingly sincere, like a sharp, high clarinet cutting through thickets of droning strings.

The lyric is constructed on a dialectic of "mentiras" (lies) and "verdad" (truth) -- the verses list all the falsity and betrayal that exists in the world, from cheating lovers to lying politicians, while the chorus calls the eternal romantic "you" the singer's truth, a refuge from the painful deceptiveness at large in the rest of existence. Although in the video, Shakira caresses a visibly pregnant belly (she gave birth to her second child the month before the single's release), transforming the "you" from romantic to parental love. And in the comments on the video, that seems to be the favorite reading: many family relationships and losses are related there.

The bolero rhythm underlying the verses, and the foursquare rock rhythm of the choruses, have their own implications (the tricksy, scheming Afro-Latin tradition versus the open, honest, white-coded sound?), although Maná are a rock band and believe in rock dynamics above everything. But this is their farewell (as of this writing) to this travelogue, so I can't be sorry that they brought on my favorite Colombian ringer to leave a better taste in my mouth than they might have otherwise.

Airplay Watch:

• Maná ft. Shakira, "Mi Verdad"
• Discussed above.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS FT. MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “EL PERDEDOR”

8th February, 2014

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My farewell to Marco Antonio Solís back in 2007 (chart time) and 2019 (blog time) was premature: I'd neglected to look up features. And he's appeared as a songwriter twice since then anyway. But here he is purely a singer, playing the same role that Juan Luis Guerra did on "Cuando Me Enamoro" -- the elder pop statesman lending Enrique Iglesias a patina of grizzled accomplishment and emotional authenticity, outsinging him effortlesly even though he's doing his best not to upstage the marquee star: but Iglesias' overreliance on vocal fry for emotional resonance makes this performance a particularly unattractive one.

The song was written by Iglesias (eight years earlier than it was recorded, he claims) with an additional composition credit to Descember Bueno, a Cuban jazz fusion artist whose work with Yerba Buena was popular among mid-2000s "world music" connoisseurs. But there's no Cuba, jazz or fusion audible here: it's an old-fashioned rock ballad of a kind that Bon Jovi might have sung, and although Iglesias claimed to have written it with the hope of getting Solís to sing it with him, there's nothing particularly Solisian about it either, unless a slow pace, romantic focus, and self-pitying lyrics can be claimed as his exclusive property.

The one concession to the early 2010s is the fact that there was a bachata version released as well, which at least adds some rhythmic liveliness, but is otherwise the same song. Presumably that added market (as well as the success of the telenovela that used it as a theme) helped it go the distance for a single week in February 2014, the first new #1 after four months of the previous four (Marc Anthony, Prince Royce, Romeo Santos, and Enrique Iglesias ft. Santos) playing keep away back and forth with one another.

But there are only two more #1s left in 2014. Let's see if they get any more interesting.

Airplay Watch:

• Daddy Yankee, "La Nueva y la Ex"
• The first proper reggaetón song to appear here since Chino y Nacho back in 2010, a big, confident blare of a song about a guy trying to move on with his new, true love while his crazy ex tries to sabotage them online. It's funny, it's sexy, it's mean, it's stupid: it's great pop.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS FT. ROMEO SANTOS, “LOCO”

19th October, 2013

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It's been a litle while since we had to consider Enrique Iglesias, a one-time constant feature of this travelogue. He hasn't had a solo #1 since 2008 -- two Wisin y Yandel collabs and one with Juan Luis Guerra are his only appearances since -- and his first post-streaming appearance being a duet with the second-biggest solo hitmaker of the year (behind only Marc Anthony) is perhaps indicative of the kinds of high-budget cross-promotional synergies that are now necessary to drive big hits even from the most famous, reliably high-performing, and enormously beloved names in the Latin music industry.

It's also been a while since I've mentioned how I felt about a song at the time. Largely that's because starting in 2013 I was disconnected from Latin radio, having given up my car and with it the hours a day I spent jacked into the airwaves; podcasts and à-la-carte streaming now accompanied me on public transit instead. But I heard "Loco," and I loved "Loco." I hadn't actually remembered "Loco" until it started playing (although I recognized the single art from my 2013 year-end list) -- but those opening lines struck me with the familiar force of a Proustian madeleine. "Te pido de rodillas" (I beg you on my knees) -- and I found myself shocked that this was 2013 instead of two or three years earlier, when I was much more deeply immersed in Latin radio. I guess my tapering-off was more gradual than I remembered.

The songwriting is credited to Iglesias, his frequent collaborator in these years Descemer Bueno (stay tuned for more), and Dominican producer Lenny Medina, which makes sense: Romeo's literate, vivid lyrics are nowhere to be found. But Romeo is credited with co-production of this bachata version of the song (theres's also a banda version with Roberto Tapia for the Mexican market and a pop version with India Martínez for Spain), and his shrewd understanding of the ways that bachata can be applied to a standard pop structure make this a much more successful adoption of bachata on Iglesias' part than his previous effort.

Not that he's not again outclassed vocally -- Romeo can sing rings around him, and the contrast between Iglesis' hangdog huskiness and Santos' angelic fluidity makes for a slightly uneven listening experience. (In the other versions, Roberto Tapia's stentorian belt produces an even more schizoid effect, while India Martínez is the only singer on Enrique's unenthusiastic level, and the result is pure mush.) But the melodic structure is solid, the lyrics -- a standard admiration/complaint about loving a woman to the point of madness -- are good, and the overall effect is that of a minor classic. Would I think this if I hadn't loved it deeply in 2013 and I was just judging it as I've judged the other songs I have no associations with? Possibly.

But all we can play with are the hands we're dealt.  

Airplay Watch:

• Enrique Iglesias ft. Romeo Santos, "Loco"
• Discussed above.

ALEJANDRO SANZ FT. SHAKIRA, “TE LO AGRADEZCO, PERO NO”

10th March, 2007

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The third in a trilogy of songs that have been winding through the #1 chart for almost two years, at least in terms of how I've received them. The Shakira/Alejandro Sanz duet "La Tortura", in the summer of 2005, was the longest-reigning #1 song on the Hot Latin chart at the time that I began this blog in 2010, a crowning glory of mid-2000s Latin pop. Then Sanz's solo hit "A La Primera Persona" was only on top for a week in November 2006,  a compact illustration of the difference between pop thrillpower and tasteful male auteurism. Now "Te Lo Agradezco, Pero No," its video a direct sequel to that of "A La Primera Persona," only reigns for only one week: Sanz is still very much the auteur here, Shakira playing a duet partner rather than expressing her own thoughts in her own vivid language. But her very presence lends more color and drama to the song: the music moves to a danceable rhythm (and Sanz himself enters into some choreography in the video, a first for him, apparently at Shakira's insistence), and uses a sturdy Afro-Latin chassis even though the body is auteurist European pop.

And if "La Tortura" was about a woman's rejecting a man's take-me-back whinging, and "A La Primera Persona" was about a man pitying himself over lost love, "Te Lo Agradezco, Pero No" forms a sort of resolution: both man and woman reject the other's overtures at reconciliation, because they are adults and can recognize the toxicity of their past entanglements: they've both hurt the other, and they're setting each other free. Sure, there's still feelings, sure, they will probably return in the future, but they don't belong to each other. All of this, however, is inference and implication: Sanz' lyrics are typically telegraphic and a bit gnomic, and rhythm and sound matter more than laying out a coherent narrative. Multiple readings can reside in any good pop song, and this is a very good pop song.

It begins as a maundering bolero, with acoustic guitar and swaying conga rhythms giving propulsion to Sanz's throaty murmurs, but as the song builds, more and more elements are introduced, including subtle electronic percussion, so that by the time Shakira enters, whispering in unison with Sanz, it's developed into a catalan rumba, the combination of flamenco passion and Afro-Cuban rhythm that served as a particularly Spanish response to the modernism of Anglophone folkies like Bob Dylan. (Sanz works very much in the lineage of Dylan; and of Gato Pérez). And then, after the second chorus, a Memphis soul horn chart breaks out, turning the song into full-out Latin jazz, which Sanz's phrasing and harmonic leaps have been anticipating all along. The chorus is pure 70s r&b, and as more and more voices get added to it it takes the pull of gospel; and when Sanz breaks out into a half-rapped improvised montuno it's a gesture toward both salsa and r&b traditions.

It's notable that none of the traditions Sanz is folding in are particularly new: genre as a capacious grab-bag of historical authenticities is a familiar mode to many postmodern artists of his generation, among whom I'd include people as different as Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, Juan Luis Guerra, or Manu Chao. The gestalt is the point, much more than recreating any one tradition in particular. Shakira, too, has worked in this synthesizing manner (see "Suerte"), and if the traditions she's engaging with here feel more particular to Sanz than to her (her vocal timbre is much more muezzin than gitano), that seems to be exactly what she wanted when she approached Sanz with the desire to be on the other side of the "ft." this time.

SHAKIRA FT. ALEJANDRO SANZ, “LA TORTURA”

4th June, 2005

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Although I love it, I ended my summary of "La Camisa Negra" last week by admitting that it is, after all, only a minor classic. That is the limit to which guitar-led rock music can ever aspire in the twenty-first century: major classics require more of an electronic kick.

And so we arrive here, to the single that set the pattern which so much of the Hot Latin chart would live up to over the next decade and more. It is the first reggaetón #1 proper -- which is to say, the first song to hit #1 which uses the beat universally recognized in its moment as belonging to reggaetón -- which also makes it one in a long list of colonial trend-jackers to be more commercially successful, and earlier, than the originators of the music. Like the Original Dixieland Jass Band, Pat Boone, and Vanilla Ice before them, Shakira and Alejandro Sanz are coded white (Sanz isn't even Latin American, but straight-up Spanish) and so able to break barriers that the musicians of color -- usually descended from African slaves -- who created their various genres could not.

So it's a testament to Shakira's (and to a lesser extent Sanz's) ability to synthesize a wide range of musical material in order to articulate a genuine artistic vision that the song is actually good -- much better, indeed, than "Tiger Rag," Boone's version of "Ain't That a Shame," or "Ice Ice Baby."

The narrative impetus of the song is one we've heard hundreds of times over the course of this travelogue: Sanz plays a man who comes crawling back to his former lover, begging her to take him back; "Yo sé que no he sido un santo/Pero lo puedo arreglar amor" (I know I haven't been a saint/But I can make it right, love), while she acknowledges the pain he has caused in the classicist ranchera-inflected chorus: "Ay, amor me duele tanto" (Oh, love hurts me so). But if it the song were a ranchera ballad being buoyed by swooping strings or an oompah rhythm, it would end in a reconciliation: his self-description as a bird who must fly (consciously evoking classic Southern Rock imagery) returning to its nest would be the final word. But it's not a ranchera, it's a reggaetón, and the democratic bump and grind of the music allows her to give as good as she gets: "Not by bread alone does man live/And I can't live on excuses." The song closes with a striking reversal, as she acknowledges that yes, it was torture to lose him, but he can go on crying for pardon, she will cry for him no more.

This is a turning point in more than one way, not only for this blog, but for all of Latin pop. I've repeatedly expressed, sometimes at wearying length, how gross and artificial I find so much of the romantic machismo that has has recurred in the lyrics of song after song over the twenty years since the chart began in 1986. Exceptions to stifling gender conventions have not necessarily been hard to find -- Juan Gabriel, Ana Gabriel, Juan Luis Guerra, Ricky Martin, and Shakira's early work stand out -- but they have been just that, exceptions to a pervasive cultural narrative that it is the man's prerogative to act, and then beg forgiveness, while it is the woman's lot to feel pain, but ultimately to believe in love and forgive. I don't want to suggest that this is a narrative unique to Latin music. Of course you can find a lot of the same attitudes throughout rock, soul, country, and hip-hop; but Latin machismo, perhaps because it has been so thoroughly analyzed by Latin feminists, is particularly easy to identify. Shakira is thoroughly aware of that  analysis -- the titles of her 2005 and 2006 albums, Fijación Oral and Oral Fixation, are even a pun on male sexual inadequacy -- and as a declared feminist herself, her refusal to let the man off the hook draws a line in the sand.

Of course it would be too much to claim that from here on out there will be no more machismo in Hot Latin #1s -- the coming wave of reggaetón will certainly have its regressive elements, and there will be rock and banda and more besides -- but the sheer scale of "La Tortura"'s success means that it had an inevitably outsized influence on the culture, and that it will be harder for any male singer to play the regretful cheater without Sanz's deliciously weaselly performance ringing in his head. Because the twenty-five weeks it spent at the top of the chart accounts for nearly half of 2005, and even with its sales split between physical and digital it still ranks as one of the top-selling singles of all time. It was the first-ever entirely Spanish-language video to be aired by the flagship MTV channel (and I haven't even mentioned the video, which goes into greater detail about the narrative between Shakira and Sanz, including a remarkable choreography which draws parallels between the convulsions of sobbing and of orgasm), and it still sounds thoroughly modern when much else that hit #1 in 2005 sounds increasingly trapped in the amber of the past.

There will be much more space to discuss reggaetón in the future, including the first authentic Puerto Rican reggaetón #1 coming up soon; but for now the fact that it is the soundtrack to even a qualified example of feminist liberation should be noted. Reggaetón, like all other genres, will have generations; and it will be useful, once enough time has passed, to remember its popular roots.

JUANES FT. NELLY FURTADO, “FOTOGRAFÍA”

19th July, 2003

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Summer, 2003 was fairly late in the millennial-pop era which had first crested in the late 90s: in the Anglosphere, *NSYNC had parted ways, Beyoncé had gone solo, and even Eminem had started taking himself seriously with 8 Mile. The Latin boomlet of 1999 was experiencing its own growing pains, as the next generation of Latin pop stars were coming into their own; mainstays like Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, and Shakira would have to adapt to new climates.

This song introduces two voices we'll meet again (one more frequently than the other), and whose highest moments of pop imperiality are still some years off. But their careers, intersecting here for the first time, have run in odd parallel. Their debut albums debuted within a week of each other in October 2000, and their first hits, "I'm Like a Bird" and "Nada," though quite different thematically, showed off a shared melodic flair and deceptive lightness of touch (and thinness of voice) that meant they would both be perpetually underrated for years.

"Fotografía," as the title suggests, is in a long string of pop songs about mooning over a lost loved one's recorded image: the Pretenders/Selena, Def Leppard, and a bit later Nickelback have all bettered it in terms of staying power, but for sheer charm, the Colombian Juanes and Portuguese-Canadian Furtado are hard to beat. The thin, shuffling beat, the carefully but not intricately picked guitar, an electronic whine, and eventually an electric buzz, make up nearly the whole of the production: the focus is on their voices, both nasal and unadventurous, sticking closely to the sing-song pseudo-reggae template. Which sounds like a formula for dullness, but Juanes' melodic gifts and Furtado's surprisingly excellent Spanish make the song one of the best Hot Latin #1s of 2003, behind only Shakira and India.

They would collaborate again, reversing the ft. credit on Nelly Furtado's 2006 single "Te Busqué", but since it only hit #1 in Spain, we won't cover it here. But we'll have plenty of time to get to know Juanes: he's only getting started.

JENNIFER LOPEZ & MARC ANTHONY, “NO ME AMES”

26th June, 1999

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

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

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

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

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.

JUAN GABRIEL &; ROCÍO DÚRCAL, “EL DESTINO”

14th June, 1997

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The title of their album, one of the best-selling of the year (it went gold in Mexico, but double platinum in the United States — which should tell you something about the Latin-music market in the 1990s), was Juntos Otra Vez (together again), and even I, who know very little about either Dúrcal or Gabriel, can't help but feel sentimental about their reunion. The beginning of this journey may have been entirely arbitrary, but it began with her singing a song written by him, and this final pairing, just before she developed the lung cancer that would eventually kill her, is very much a fitting swan song, sweeping, majestic, and sumptuously reveling in the fine details of their voices, both separately and together.

Juntos Otra Vez was written and performed as a stage show — performed in a sumptuous opera house in Jalisco, the heart of the nineteenth-century son ranchera movement that Gabriel is evoking with his compositions and orchestrations — and released both as a studio album and a live video. You can see the video of "El Destino" above; its artificial staging and odd light show feel very 90s, but the music is timeless, echoing both nineteenth-century Mexican romanticism and Gabriel's old orchestrations from the 80s (those puffs of trumpets are very like the synthesized horns decorating "La Guirnalda").

The song is equally timeless, a love song — "¿me quieres?" (do you love me), she begins, and he echoes "te quiero" (I love you) — built on an epic scale, meant to soundtrack an epic romance. True to Gabriel's form, however, it's surprisingly bloodless — there's no carnality to the lyrics, no passion (though you could say that he and Dúrcal provide all that's necessary). "Soy tu amigo y tambien tu hermano" (I am your friend and also your brother), he sings at one point, as though brotherly friendship is the stuff of epic romance.

All of which perhaps makes the point that it's a true portrait of the relationship between Juan Gabriel and Rocío Dúrcal. They clearly held each other in great regard and affection — and indeed neither of them was ever as great separately as they were together — but it was a platonic, professional love. Platonic love, however, doesn't pay the pop radio bills. This song was only number one for a week, a tribute to the affection in which both singers were held by the wide Latin audience; but it also marks the end of an era. Newer, younger voices are coming up from behind.

JOSÉ LUIS RODRÍGUEZ & JULIO IGLESIAS, “TORERO”

13th June, 1992

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Here in the summer of 1992, the charts have at long last entered something of a groove, with song after song that interest and enthuse me, whether I actually like them or not. The opening bars to "Torero" are the kind of thing that will always put a smile on my face, flamenco flourishes over bolero rhythms, and José Luis Rodríguez being pushed by proximity to living legend Julio Iglesias to deliver a performance infused with the kind of graceful, assured masculinity that I'd bottle and spray on myself before going out if 'twere possible.

Masculinity, particularly the myths of masculinity which are very likely all there is to say about it, is very much the subject of this song, and it's worth spending some time thinking about the myths and figures of Latin masculinity in particular. It's no accident that the most extremely, even parodically, masculine figure at large in pop culture today, the guy in the Dos Equis commercials, speaks with a faint Spanish accent; even beyond the "Latin lover" stereotype (which can as easily encompass the gigolo as the bandito), there's a sort of subconscious sense in which Anglo-Americans believe that Latin men, with their machismo and fiery passions and earthy romanticism — I told you we would trade in myths — are naturally better at being men than Anglos, who are left to console themselves only with superior follicle density.

A torero, of course, is a bullfighter, the most masculine of professions according to that most masculinity-obsessed writer, Ernest Hemingway. Rodríguez and Iglesias use the image of the torero as a symbol of masculinity, one that's in danger of being lost and has to be reinforced. But since it's a pop song, sentiment comes first: like a bullfighter, a man must measure the distance to her heart, be brave and unguarded when he goes to steal a kiss, beware of the danger from her black eyes . . . . The metaphor is intrinsically sexist, of course — women aren't animals in need of tricking and taming — but it's a comfortably familiar one, and they sing it so well, that it's easy (at least for male-gendered me) for the space of the song to believe the myths and aspire to the tender, lordly masculinity their magical thinking creates.

ÁLVARO TORRES & SELENA, “BUENOS AMIGOS”

6th June, 1992

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As I keep saying, I'm learning to hear this stuff as I go along, which means that most of my writeups are more and more inadequate the further away from them I get. I'm bound to miss small, subtle social and cultural cues; but there are big obvious ones that drift past me unnoticed as well. The obvious word missing from the blocks of text when we last had Álvaro Torres before the board (only three hits ago, for crying out loud) was tejano.

Torres was born in El Salvador, and began his career in Guatemala, but by the time he was reaching the top of the Hot Latin charts he was based in the US, participating in Southern Florida's omnivorous Latin Pop machine. He'd had some success duetting with Mexican pop stars like Marisela and Tatiana, so while recording the album that would become his biggest-selling hit, he was paired with another young up-and-coming girl singer out of Texas, who had been doing the local pop circuit since she was thirteen, and was poised to be a breakout star in the Latin Pop community. How big a star, of course, and how quickly snuffed out, no one as yet had any idea.

She sounds, on this first encounter with the uppermost reaches of this chart — her home chart, as it were, the pinnacle of which she will claim a half-dozen more times before all is done — like a young woman who very much wants to be Ana Gabriel. Like Gabriel, she sounds instinctively at home with the woozy ranchera rhythm, with the triumphantly goofy (or goofily triumphant) synth-horn fanfare that introduces and punctuates the duet, with expressing emotion while holding back a steely unreachable self (shades also of Luis Miguel). And like Ana Gabriel, she comfortably and without showboating blows her duet partner out of the water. This is to be Álvaro Torres' last appearance in our travelogue; it's perhaps not his fault that he's so unmemorable in it.

ROBERTO CARLOS & ROCÍO DÚRCAL, “SI PIENSAS, SI QUIERES”

29th February, 1992

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I haven't been doing this long enough to really experience the sensation of two titans of the field returning for a joint victory lap, but of course Latin Pop didn't begin in 1986 — the Billboard Latin chart did. Roberto Carlos and Rocío Dúrcal both had much more storied careers than the glimpses we've had, giant unknown (to us) icebergs of careers much greater and deeper than the few measly juts above the waterline we know. But since I haven't (yet) considered it a part of my duty to immerse myself in the full discographies of the artists who attain to the number one spot, all we have to go on is what's broken through that surface.

In comparison to Roberto Carlos' two previous entries, "Si El Amor Se Va" and "Abre Las Ventanas Al Amor," this is a significant improvement (especially on the latter). Where those sounded rather like dusty, plastic-instrumented hymns, this is a living ballad, with a rhythm less stately and more oceanic. It reminds me most, in fact, of Rocío Dúrcal's first appearance (and our inaugural entry), "La Guirnalda," which rode a similar seaside-mariachi rhythm to lovely effect. And while it doesn't rise to the level of her last solo entry, "Como Tu Mujer," which managed to combine mariachi and stateliness to thrilling effect, this is a solid duet, a pair of beautiful performances with an effective if somewhat conventional production.

"Si piensas, si quieres" means "if you think ... if you want," the opening phrases of arguments made by each singer. The occasion of the duet is a possible reunion of separated lovers; each of them is cautious about the idea for different reasons, she because he's broken her heart before, and he because he doesn't want to be tied down. Conventional again; but she's forthright about him having to change his ways, and he weasels around about being a bohemian dreamer in love with life. (Direct translation!) When the song is over, the reunion remains theoretical, conditional, everything hinging on those looming, unbridgeable Ifs.

VIKKI CARR & ANA GABRIEL, “COSAS DEL AMOR”

31st August, 1991

Wiki | Video

Over the past forty years, Vikki Carr has had two almost entirely separate careers singing popular music. By which I don't mean that she had one, then she had another: she's maintained both of them side-by-side, and fans of one often know nothing of the other. Fans of traditional pop, especially the brassy 60s variety, know her as the pair of iron lungs behind "It Must Be Him," a 1967 ballad that grandly ignored all pop change since about 1953. She's maintained one foot in the trad-pop and easy listening tradition ever since, collaborating with jazz musicians, playing cabarets, and even dabbling in pop-country the way so many easy-listeners did in the 70s. But she was born Florencia Bisenta de Casillas Martinez Cardona in El Paso, Texas, and beginning in 1971 with "Que Sea Él" (the Spanish-language version of "It Must Be Him"), she maintained a Latin Pop career on the side. In the 1980s, her smooth vocals and penchant for ornate arrangements became hugely successful among the Spanish-language market, and she's cultivated that side of her career so well that she's one of the Dueñas Grandes of Latin Pop.

Here she duets with Ana Gabriel (and much as we may adore Vikki Carr, let's not kid ourselves that it was anything but Ana Gabriel's magnificent hot streak that kept this at #1 for two months) on a song where she plays the wiser older woman to Gabriel's passionately distraught young blood. Just in terms of construction, it's a solid duet, each woman getting a chance to shine, with call-and-response sections that highlight the textural differences between their voices and give the song tremendous forward momentum.

But with all that, it's still a ballad, a tremendously soppy one, and horrific in terms of its sexual politics (Carr more or less advises Gabriel to strip herself of personality in order to be whatever the man she's afraid of losing wants her to be). Love, as seemingly always in Latin Pop, is presented as tragedy, an arbitrary grand passion that will inevitably betray and leave desolate. It's just easier for me to take when it's a man complaining about it.