ELVIS CRESPO FT. ILEGALES, “YO NO SOY UN MONSTRUO”

25th August, 2012

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When Elvis Crespo first appeared on this blog, I said he would only appear here once more; two weeks after I posted that, he notched his third Hot Latin #1, and I've been waiting over a decade to eat my words.

The pop world of 1998 was so thoroughly different from the pop world of 2012 that the slick, ladies'-man Crespo of those early appearances fit in with the Enrique Iglesiases, Ricky Martins, and Marc Anthonys of the flamboyant premillennial Latin pop wave. By contrast, in 2012 he is a corny elder making a goofy, whiny love song with the similarly aging merenhouse group Ilegales. The bouncing beat and "yo no soy un monstruo" (I am not a monster) refrain are hooky enough to spin it onto radio playlists, and Ilegales' rap breaks come near enough to reggaetón-era rapping to sound not entirely out of place in the 2010s, but the music video, set in a high school where the Crespo stand-in male model is the target of relentless bullying until a similarly outcast girl gives him a makeover, is so deeply embarrassing a way for a group of grown men to be representing their song that it very nearly made me write it off entirely.

Very little could sound more derivatively early 2010s. The chunky dancefloor synths, the faddish AutoTune that flattens Elvis Crespo's voice once-distinctive voice into a nasal whine, the hypey "oh, oh ohhhohhohh" backing vocals. And the unrelenting merenhouse beat sounds, like so much contemporary tropical pop that fell in between the two magisterial reggaetón eras, wan and old-fashioned, crying out for a dembow judder.

In fact, the repeated snippets of tight little melodies over an unvarying beat do sound a bit like an echo in prefigure of Dominican dembow, which was still more or less an underground phenomenon, not yet hooked up to the immense flattening power of the Internet to become the signature dance sound of the Dominican Republic (much to the horror of traditional merengue and bachata audiences). But when the most interesting thing about a song is how well it compares to something it isn't, there's not much left to say about the song itself.

ELVIS CRESPO, “TU SONRISA”

29th August, 1998

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Every specific form of music has an uneasy relationship with pop. In the most obvious sense, this tension is responsible for things like rockism, for authenticity arguments that always sound more or less the same whether the original purity in danger of being devoured by mass media's ruthless, flattening maw is five hundred years or two months old. But even in critical frameworks that reject the authority of the appeal to authenticity, the idea of something being more like itself the further it gets away from pop remains.

Case in point. (Obviously.) Crespo's first big hit, "Suavemente," was exactly the kind of easily-digestible crossover, with a pitiless hook and miles of melody, that seems engineered for widest possible appeal. Which doesn't mean that the followup is any less hooky or melodic — if you can get the "será tu sonrisa" (it will be your smile) chant out of your head within an hour of hearing the song, you've got far more willpower than I — but it also hews more closely to the traditional merengue form, with its call-and-response and tighter, more insular grooves.

On the one hand, dogmatic merengueros (for whom all non-Dominican merengue is false merengue) would say that it's still too diluted, too Americanized, too pop. On the other hand, a groove's a groove, and from my chart-outwards perspective the heavy increase in danceable music over the past several months of chart action is only a good thing.

ELVIS CRESPO, “SUAVEMENTE”

16th May, 1998

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Just as Marc Anthony was our first real taste of salsa, Elvis Crespo is our first real introduction to merengue. (The only other song to carry the tag so far is a bachata song, and I was hedging my uninformed bets.) Like salsa, merengue has a long and storied history that has remained mostly submerged throughout this travelogue, although if Billboard had started the chart earlier in the 80s, or even in the 70s, it would probably have made an impact earlier. But merengue's much older than salsa; it was first recognized as a distinctly Dominican style of music in the 1850s, and while its journey from a rural folk music of (probably) African and Taino origin to a mass-popular dance music in the late 20th century was long, involved and achieved through political revolution, generational immigration patterns, and outright class warfare, the basic güiro rhythm is immediately recognizable and irresistable.

"Suavemente" (smoothly) is a song you know even if you think you don't, with a chorus so immediate and recognizable that Pitbull (of course) tried to hop on it for a failed hit last year; while it didn't actually cross over to Anglophone radio, it's so streamlined and punchy that I can't help thinking of it as a precursor to the "Vida Loca"/"Bailamos" mini-Latin Invasion that was more hyped than actual in 1999. (But we'll get to that.)

The lyrics, as is fit and proper to an uptempo dance song peaking just as summer begins to peer around the the corner, are mostly standard fluff about wanting to feel your lips kissing him again — but if the words are empty-headed, the music's turbo-hipped, and there's more genuine eroticism in the complications of the rhythm, the horn charts punctuating the conversation in swing patterns, and the delicious call and response in the second half, than in most of the dramatically "romantic" lyrics we've seen so far.

In 1998, there is no way of knowing that Elvis Crespo would not be another Marc Anthony, Ricky Martin, or Enrique Iglesias; on a purely pop basis, "Suavemente" is at least as accomplished as anything any of them have sent to the #1 spot so far. But we'll only be hearing from him once more before we catch up to the present (at least up through 2012; for the future, anything's possible). Which is probably unfair, but that's the case for most few-hit-wonders. Pop is decidedly unfair.