FANNY LÚ, “TÚ NO ERES PARA MÍ”

25th April, 2009

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When Fanny Lu first appeared here a little under two years ago, I talked about how her debut, "No Te Pido Flores," was the stronger and more iconic song than the song with which she first went to #1 on the Hot Latin chart. But this one leaves "No Te Pido Flores" in the dust.

In fact, I'm hard-pressed to think of the last time we had such a hard-hitting, compressed, machine-tooled POP song at #1. "Ni Una Sola Palabra"? "Suerte"? "Livin' La Vida Loca"? And it's still fully tropipop, that faintly embarrassing middle-class Colombian combination of vallenatio, cumbia, merengue, and pure pop; but taken at such a driving pace that it's practically pop-punk. There's even a pop-punk guitar solo rising up out of the accordion/drums/guacharaca stew late in the song.

And like a good pop-punk song, it's focused with sneering intensity on a cutting dismissal of a would-be lover. "Tú No Eres Para Mí" means "you are not for me," and the verses' detailing of it's object's fantasies of himself as a romantic lover are gleefully smacked upside the head by the chanted, headlong chorus in which she wants him to understand that he isn't for her, she isn't for him, and she won't stand any more failures. The contrast between the verses' adherence to romantic Spanish poetic conventions and the choruses' modern, self-respecting feminist rejection of all those tropes is a brilliant lyrical device that in some ways feels like a culmination of so many of the foregoing #1 hits in which men offered their hearts at lugubrious length to unreal, fantastic women who had no existence except in their imagination.

Fanny Lu is very much her own woman here: despite the Shakira-esque vocal phrasing, which can be understood as Colombian rockera convention by now, she's pushing tropipop into new realms of emotional certainty and musical intensity. The middle eight even introduces the unnaturally flanged vocals of AutoTune to this travelogue for the first time, a sound which will dominate much of the decade to come. Of course, its use marks this song indelibly as belonging to 2009, and the fact that i'm writing this in 2020 means that it's just reached the sweet spot where changes in musical fashion have made it sound embarrassing, but the period hasn't been historicized enough for it to sound nostalgic yet. Let me say, to the future, that I'm betting this will sound even more amazing then.

FANNY LÚ, “Y SI TE DIGO”

18th August, 2007

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Another case of a delayed number one (tip of the hat once more to chart analyst Chris Molanphy's AC/DC Rule, though he's discussing albums), where the single after the breakthrough hit is the one that goes to #1 on the Hot Latin Chart. We've seen it most notably before with Daddy Yankee, whose worldwide hit "Gasolina" primed the pump for "Rompe" to become the first reggaetón #1; and now Fanny Lú, already well-known in Colombia as a television presenter, hits #1 with the single after "No Te Pido Flores", the song that made her famous throughout Latin America.

A word I haven't used before on this travelogue, even though it's occasionally applied, is unavoidable here: "tropipop," a specifically Colombian mixture of traditional genres like vallenato and cumbia with Caribbean genres like merengue, salsa, and bachata, plus international pop. It was coined to describe Carlos Vives' collaborations with Emilio Estefan, and it's generally been quite commercially successful, if not very respected by practitioners of either traditional Colombian or Caribbean genres -- surface-level pop stars taking sounds without respecting the history, is what the charge boils down to -- and there hadn't been a female tropipop star before. Until producer José Gaviria decided that Fanny Lú, who had been trying to get a music career going since the mid-90s but kept having to give her television career higher priority, should be the female face of the genre.

And so that's what this is: if it sounds like bachata timbales, vallenato accordion, merengue bounce, and generalized international pop singalong melodies, that's tropipop. Not that bets weren't hedged: there was also a bachata version in which she duetted with Toby Love, and a merengue version with Eddy Herrera; but neither of them is quite as solid as the original; and the original isn't quite as solid as "No Te Pido Flores." She seems to be imitating Shakira's phrasing a bit here, but expresses none of her wit: it's a straightforward love song, subcategory "I don't have the courage to tell you how much I love you." It's perfectly pleasant, if rather anonymous and a touch overproduced -- those massed background vocals, for example, are highly unnecessary; she's not such a weak singer as to need the support.

But this isn't the last time we'll see Fanny Lú, and when we do again it will be with one of the signature songs of the era, so this isn't just the valley after a peak; there's a higher peak coming.