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.

ALEJANDRO SANZ FT. ALICIA KEYS, “LOOKING FOR PARADISE”

21st November, 2009

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First Shakira, then Nelly Furtado, now Alicia Keys popping up at the top spot on the Hot Latin chart -- I was not, in 2009, aware enough of trends or discourse to realize that this was not representative of a new flourishing in Latin pop, but rather the end of an era in mainstream US pop. All three women had broken through into Anglophone stardom in 2001, with "Whenever, Wherever," "I'm Like a Bird," and "Fallin'," respectively; but eight years later, none of them remained at the top of the Anglophone heap, and the more forgiving Latin charts provided a graceful descent from their 2000s-era peaks.

That's one way to look at it, anyway, and probably the one that the Anglocentric readership of this blog (such as it has), with their knowledge that Furtado and Keys have been irrelevant chartwise for the last decade, plus Shakira having mostly disappeared from Anglo airwaves, would probably naturally assume. The way I looked at it at the time was no doubt idealistic, and probably also condescending to the already rich history of Latin pop: I thought maybe it presaged more interconnection between the English- and Spanish-language sides of the industry, a world in which songs largely in Spanish could have as much chance with English-speaking audiences as songs with the amount of English as this one had had with Spanish-speaking ones.

I wasn't wrong, necessarily -- but it took longer than I expected, with a heavy swing towards masculine voices in both Spanish-language and English-language chart pop, to happen. A kind of masculinity that Alejandro Sanz, gruff and limited as his voice is compared to Keys' professionally liquid tones, could not represent. His name is before the "Ft.," and the single was taken from his album Paraíso Express, but Keys' is the first voice you hear in the duet and arguably makes the most impact in the song. Which fits in fine with Sanz' past performance here: he's a great collaborator who knows how to make his duet partner stand out. The jangly backing track was supposed to evoke the British Invasion of the Sixties, but it sounds to my ears more like the commercial jangle of post-R.E.M. Nineties bands like Gin Blossoms. Which is fine (I loved the Gin Blossoms when I was fifteen and they were all over the radio), but by belonging to neither world it only emphasizes the difference in tonality and tradition between Sanz, with his flamenco-derived rasp, and Keys, with her polite R&B dramatics.

Of course I've been excited in these pages before about songs that mash global musical traditions together, and there's a spark of that here, but it never fully catches into a full conflagration. Maybe Alicia Keys is too limited a singer, maybe Alejandro Sanz is too polite to push her, maybe they're both simply taking the easy route: but even the straightforward, literal English lyrics and the cerebal, conceptual Spanish-language ones seem like both of them are singing past each other rather than to each other, much less together. Whatever the future of Latin pop is, it's not this.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “BAILAMOS”

10th July, 1999

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

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

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

RICKY MARTIN, “LIVIN' LA VIDA LOCA”

24th April, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

CÉLINE DION, “MY HEART WILL GO ON (LOVE THEME FROM TITANIC)”

21st February, 1998

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It's only my decades-long head start that has enabled me to get to this ahead of Tom, Sally, or Marcello; anyone who surveys popular music of the twentieth century is going to have to contend with it sooner or later. In a decade characterized by staggeringly popular songs from staggeringly popular movies — "Everything I Do (I Do It for You)," "I Will Always Love You," "Kiss from a Rose," "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing," "I Believe I Can Fly," and on and on — "My Heart Will Go On" was the most staggeringly popular of them all, just as its parent film was, and it blanketed the earth so heavily in the years following the release of Titanic that people talk about it as having been metastatic, colonizing, inescapable; a very good book was even written about how impossible it is to say anything meaningful about such totalizing work.

Well, I haven't seen the movie. Nor had I consciously heard "My Heart Will Go On" before listening to it for this travelogue. Oh, it wasn't new to me; like anyone else alive, hearing, and capable of long-term memory fifteen years ago, I knew it. But I'd never listened to it. By chance I'd managed not to tune into commercial or contemporary radio during its seasons of dominance; I'd left the television turned off; I'd not been in the kinds of public spaces that pipe in the hits of the day at unignorable decibels. But of course it had seeped in anyway — the pennywhistle opening, the broad and sturdy chord changes, like vast steps leading up to some Brutalist cathedral, and of course Céline's painfully angelic voice sweeping through the pillowy orchestration like a tracking shot through a rote crowd scene: no time to pause for any enlivening bits of business or quirks of personality, we are Setting a Mood.

So of course when I do sit down and listen, it's a bit different than I had remembered, or imagined. The popular image of Céline Dion is that of a non-stop belter, tempestuous in her evocation of tin-pan melodrama, but on the opening verse her voice is as pure and ethereal as Sarah McLachlan's — or perhaps even Sarah Brightman's — and throughout she makes unusual choices, if minor ones. Nobody quite has her phrasing, and if the later choruses get histrionic they're still individual enough to give the pleasure of watching an entirely inimitable performer; the play may be the most frightful nonsense but by God there won't be a stick of scenery left on stage when she's done.

The lyrics are the most frightful nonsense, of course; a weak-minded declaration in the power of romantic love to transcend all limitations even unto death, given the solemn reading of a sacred hymn (those great gulping thwacks of syllables are straight out of praise-and-worship) and cloaked in a fuzzy and unmeaning spirituality, its catechism of willful self-belief and sentimental denial of all hard truths is one of the most overpowering and cringeworthy strains in late-90s pop. It'd be pretty (and awfully convenient to my tastes) to think that it was confined to that decade, that 9/11 killed it off  and that the public ever after has chosen either pure escapism or raw unvarnished Truth, but nothing dies that easily.

In a way, it feels like all the 135 songs I've written about for this blog were just a preparation for this: I had to come to terms with the 90s romántico ballad before I could hear this in its proper context, faux-Irishness, overbudgeted orchestra, climactic arrangement and all. It's perhaps worth pointing out that Céline Dion, a French-Canadian (which is to say, a member of a historically impoverished ethnic minority), is actually culturally closer to the Spaniards, Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and so forth on the Hot Latin chart than to the Hollywood Irishness of the song — and the modern big-voiced ballad, whether Anglophone, Hispanophone, or otherwise, is also Latinate, descended from the Italian bel canto tradition.

So it's fitting that Céline, who belongs to the entire world, not just the Anglophone (much less just the Francophone) parts of it, would usher in another of the momentous firsts in this travelogue: the first English-language song. There will be many more.