ENRIQUE IGLESIAS FT. DESCEMER BUENO & GENTE DE ZONA, “BAILANDO”

17th May, 2014

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Forty-one weeks at number one. Only one other behemoth, lurking ahead in the shadows of 2017, will (as of this writing) beat its record. But that's with streaming; on the old airplay-calculation chart, "Bailando" only notched a respectable twenty, still several weeks behind "La Tortura" in 2005. Radio, which perforce must please both the fans of a record and those who have grown tired of it, has to be higher-churn, while streaming numbers reflect only the fans; skip rates are (to my knowledge) not factored. This naturally feeds the line-go-up appetite of the record labels, but to the detriment of listeners, who may have more options than ever to actively hunt down, but whose passive listening gets trapped in narrowcasted halls of mirrors, in which the active choices of millions of others get reflected back to them in a burning point, and the winner takes it all.

And there has not been a winninger winner in the history of the Hot Latin chart than Enrique Iglesias: this is his twenty-fifth entry at #1 (but not his last), while his nearest competition (Luis Miguel and a certain malevolent lagomorph (cf. the "bunnied" entry at the Popular FAQ)) currently languish at 16. The success of this song must seem to some degree a foregone conclusion: its spring single release is an obvious bid for song-of-the-summer status, and its uptempo, gladsome vibes make it an ideal party soundtrack for old and young alike; the elders can enjoy the flamenco clapping and guitar, while the youngsters can dig the electronic rhythm (it's yet another descendant of "Danza Kuduro") and hip-hop shouting by guests Gente de Zona, who never overpower Enrique and in fact make him sound fresher and more hip than he has in years.

It was the song at #1 when President Obama announced his intent to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba; both of the featured artists were from Cuba (Gente de Zona being the first successful Cuban hip-hop and reggaetón act to circumvent the cultural embargo), and the feeling of optimism that Cuba, which had been the most fecund and innovative center of musical ferment in Latin America in the century before the Revolution, would at last be allowed to join the modern era of pan-Latin collaboration and interchange, was high in the mid-2010s.

All that optimism feels naive and even cruel now, when it appears that the United States government is intent on making the rest of Latin America join Cuba as a pariah state if they refuse to be be a client one. And of course, any dialectical analysis could have told you that capitalist investment by way of record-label promotion is no substitute for genuine political solidarity.

In 2025, Gente de Zona are latecomers jumping on the reparto bandwagon in Cuba -- reparto being a street-level electronic dance music related to Puerto Rican reggaetón and Dominican dembow, with busier percussion and a wholly homegrown sense of build-and-release dynamics born in the Havana repartos (neighborhoods) by impoverished MCs and DJs in the mid-2000s. In the 2020s, it's become a fashionable sound in pan-Latin urbano, always hungry for new fresh sounds it can chew up and recycle into gleaming hypercapitalized pop. Nigerian afrobeats, Brazilian funk, Colombian ritomo exótico, and Guadeloupean bouyon are being similarly cannibalized at the moment; while Barcelonan rumba flamenca has only recently fallen out of fashion again.

But back in 2014, flamenco was the fresh sound being chewed up and recycled, as it has periodically been over the course of this travelogue, including by Iglesias himself fifteen years prior. The flamenco-pop boom centered around Rosalía is still some years off, so this song can sound oddly prescient as well as old-fashioned at the same time.

There was an English-language version that featured Sean Paul's motormouthed toasting, as well as two Portuguese-language versions aimed at the Brazilian and Portuguese markets respectively; none of them are as interesting to me as the original, and even that is more in a what-could-have-been sense than in itself.

Airplay Watch:

• Ricardo Arjona, "Apnea"
• A big dramatic piano-strings-and-rock ballad about drowning in his feelings for a departed lover, with an extremely well-written poetic throughline that leaves me utterly cold.
• J Balvin ft. Farruko, "6:00 AM"
• Colombian reggaetón-pop, incorporating more dancehall and tropipop elements, shows its face for the first time on this travelogue. The song is pretty minor, but shows promise.
• Enrique Iglesias ft. Descemer Bueno & Gente de Zona, "Bailando"
• Discussed above.
• Romeo Santos, "Eres Mía"
• Formula is right. This slinky bachata is about seducing a woman engaged to someone else.
• Carlos Vives ft. Marc Anthony, "Cuando Nos Volvamos a Encontrar"
• Two middle-aged masters of their domains deliver a starry-eyed romantic duet starting in Vives' usual rock n' vallenato style and building to Anthony's usual big-band salsa style.
• Juan Luis Guerra & 4.40, "Tus Besos"
• An adorable bachata with Fifties slow-dance doo-wop aesthetics. Guerra remains the master of genre.
• Romeo Santos ft. Marc Anthony, "Yo También"
• Another summit of big names; this time Romeo bends to Anthony's salsa stylings, and naturally gets himself outsung.
• Víctor Manuelle, "Que Suenen los Tambores"
• A much better salsa song, perhaps because it doesn't have to support two massive music-industry egos, and is about the joy of music instead of some cooked-up romantic drama.
• Gerardo Ortíz, "Eres una Niña"
• Mexican regional assimilates bachata, with brass and woodwinds instead of guitar. Gerardo still sings foursquare, though (complimentary).
• Don Omar, "Soledad"
• Dramatic, po-faced reggaetón with merengue típico accents that just ends up sounding like he's trying to make the "Danza Kuduro" template work as a ballad.
• Voz de Mando, "Levantando Polvadera"
• Good old-fashioned norteño with tuba basslines, accordion fingerwork, and inventive drumming whose rhythmic switch-ups make for an exciting storytelling device.

ALEJANDRO SAENZ, “NO ME COMPARES”

8th September, 2012

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Including this song, there are four Hot Latin #1s left until Billboard changes its source for chart calculation from radio airplay to streaming data. This will have a flattening effect on the top of the chart, with a decade to come of months-long reigns of whatever song with the "Latin" medatata tag is most popular at parties and in clubs, occasionally interrupted for a week at a time by some viral meme or another. My entries for the entirety of 2012 have been functioning as a kind of valedictory for what the chart used to be: diverse, disunified, serving widely different audiences and admitting women at its upper reaches far more frequently than  it ever will once streaming rules. But these last four songs before I start engaging almost exclusively with thumping male bravado have been looming almost as ominously as the Return of Reggaetón has, and it's because they too are thumping male bravado, just in a different mode than is suited for clubs.

I've enjoyed, or at worst been pleasantly surprised by, Alejandro Sanz' previous entries here, both as a duet partner for Shakira and on his own, but this impassioned ballad betrays little of his literate musical eclecticism, drawing musically from early-2000s electro-acoustic adult contmporary and lyrically from the exhausted tradition of men bellowing after a lost love. True, the lyrics are far more poetic, with evocative and even provocative imagery in a deeply Spanish tradition, than is typical in pop, but they remain a mere collection of phrases tracking a conventional sentiment and have no surprises to give. Sanz is in fine voice, using his flamenco-descended "gitano" rasp to undeniable effect, but the one-note moodiness of the song means that his performance is also unsurprising, just builds along with the music's conventional swell from mopey intro to self-justifying chorus.

Still, I will miss hearing from Spain on this travelogue. I have mostly merely tolerated the contributions of the Iberian peninsula as compared to the hungrier, more vibrant Latin American scenes, but just as the Anglophone U.S. charts have frequently been at their most interesting when there was a lot of cross-pollination from the UK (the mid-60s, the early 80s), European insularity and self-regard can apply a pseudo-sophistication to the fundamentally Western-hemispherical forms whose absence will be felt once the top of the chart gets turned over almost entirely to tropical bangers.

ROMEO SANTOS FT. TOMATITO, “MI SANTA”

3rd March, 2012

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Romeo's solo conquest of the Hot Latin chart, and his (temporary) expansion of the language of bachata to a broader pop metier, continue apace. "Mi Santa" was, once more, only #1 for a week, but its lush romanticism, hard on the heels of Daddy Yankee's hyper socatón, Víctor Manuelle's genial salsa, Paulina Rubio's cooing dance-pop, and Gloria Estefan's brash electroswing, point to a chart moment that could be considered either vibrantly, capaciously pluralistic or bored, easily distracted and indecisive, depending on how you wanted to characterize it. I am always on the side of musical diversity, so Romeo inviting a flamenco master to share the spotlight in the same way he had R&B mogul Usher works for me: what a purist might see as a cynical appeal to exogenous markets I prefer to see as a big-tent approach to music-making in which nothing is off the table as long as it works.

And it does work: Romeo, at least in this first album, is a master of synthesis, and his bachata harmonizes as well with Tomatito's fluid fingerpicking dramatics as it had with Usher's fluid vocal dramatics. José Fernández Torres, the third member of an Andalusian Roma musical dynasty to be called by some variation of the "El Tomate" nickname (his son is the fourth), first came to fame backing the brilliant and eccentric cantaor Camarón de la Isla in the 1970s; filling the shoes of the equally brilliant and eccentric Paco de Lucía was no easy feat, but Tomatito's jazz and Afro-Cuban influences did just as much to expand the palette of modern flamenco towards the end of the 20th century. His playing here hardly brings that whole history to bear, of course: some basic runs underneath Romeo's verses, and a passionate, harmonics-leaping solo between choruses are about the limit that a contemporary pop-bachata song can take, and he provides it.

It's Romeo's lyrics that give this song its most potent frisson: "My Saint" is a simple translation of the title, but the cultural connotations would require a whole graduate seminar on Latin Catholic thought. Its deeply considered heresy, referring constantly to the lover as an object of religious veneration and his own devotion to her as a specifically Catholic practice, is in line with the conventions of nineteenth-century French (and Spanish and Italian, etc.) Romanticism, and even, in inverse, with older traditions like Teresa of Ávila; by contrast, the earthy, sensual, and deeply human guitar of Tomatito prevents it all from sounding too saccharine or even ascetic.

The video for "Mi Santa," released in January of 2012, mashed two songs from Formula, Vol. 1 together, so for younger listeners "Mi Santa" is perhaps nowadays thought of as the second half of "La Diabla." But I'll have to wait to discuss that; Romeo isn't done with his album cycle.

JENNIFER LOPEZ, “QUÉ HICISTE”

5th May, 2007

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This is only Ms. Lopez' second appearance on this travelogue, and her first appearance by herself -- her debut was eight years ago, in a duet with Marc Anthony, who (as of this #1) she has been married to for three years. And although he doesn't sing on this song, his fingerprints are all over it: the principal melody was, the story goes, given to him in a dream by Rocío Dúrcal (who had only recently died), insisting that it was "for Jennifer." So Anthony, along with a Colombian songwriting husband/wife team he regularly collaborated with, has the writing credit for the song. Which (of course, since I'm writing about it) paid out: a #1 Latin hit, respectable placement throughout the European charts, even Lopez' Spanish-language debut on the Hot 100.

But Lopez is no Dúrcal: she has a dancer's, even an actor's voice, and her singing here is more dramatic (aided of course by tense, massive production) than technically polished. There's nothing wrong with that: in fact it gives her songs something of an everywoman quality, easy to belt along with in the car or in a late-night rage over the fucker who ruined your life. Because it's a kiss-off song, and a really good one, full of righteous fury and reclaimed self-respect, a woman leaving behind a man who destroyed their happiness with uncontrolled anger and words he couldn't take back.

But the lyrics, poetic and specific as they are, are secondary to the production, alternating between quiet, tension-building verses under which plucked guitars and scraping strings burble, and explosive choruses where power chords, rock drums, and swirling strings lend force to Lopez' full-throated denunciations. It's not surprising that the production was handled by Anthony's long-time salsa collaborator Sergio George (or that a salsa remix was made) -- the punchiness and drama of contemporary tropical music underlies the whole thing, even if the tense, sawing rhythms are much more old-world than the liberatory dancefloor beats of salsa.

It's a really good song, one of J. Lo's career highlights, even if its mixture of rock instrumentation and high drama don't quite seem to fit together at a decade's remove. Writing about the mid-to-late 2000s in the late 2010s has been an exercise in trying to see truthfully: it's just far enough away that it feels fundamentally different from the present, but not far enough away for a coherent nostalgia to have accrued around it. Everything still feels awkward and unfinished, like prologue to now; remembering that it felt then like the culmination of history (as is habitual for me with earlier periods) is still work.

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.

RICKY MARTIN FT. LA MARI & TOMMY TORRES, “TU RECUERDO”

23rd December, 2006

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We close out the raucous, pulsating, hotly contested 2006 (a.k.a. the Year Reggaetón Broke) with an older, perhaps more calcified, Puerto Rican sound.

The inevitable music video has four people on stools before the audience. Only the primary singer, a former boy band member and global hitmaker, is pushed a little forward, which makes him look taller than the rest. To his right on guitar and harmonies is the song's writer and producer, who got his start writing and producing for a later iteration of the singer's old boy band. On his right, eventually making the song a duet, a Spanish singer who pushed flamenco vibes into chillout worldbeat music to comparatively limited success, whose close-cropped haircut is a visible reminder of the cancer she had spent the previous year in treatment for. And on the far side of the line, perhaps the world's foremost traditional cuarto player, picking out delicate emotional lines on the traditional Puerto Rican instrument.

The credit line should really read "Ricky Martin ft. La Mari (of Chambao), Tommy Torres, and Christian Nieves," but of course the instrumentalist gets left off: pop has its caste system. Still, of the four spotlit players (there's a full orchestra behind them, because this is a ballad), Torres is the one whose performance is most anonymous: his sweet pop-derived melodies do little but set up volleys for Martin, Mari, and Nieves to spike. La Mari earns applause in the middle of the song for injecting a little cante gitano into her verse, which is the first time I teared up while listening to it; the second was during the dispassionate fluidity of Nieves' cuatro solo. After which Martin gently improvising as though over a salsa montuno rides out the song on a high note.

It's a gorgeous performance, and if the song itself doesn't quite live up to it, that may be because it's a stitched-together pop recreation of traditional jíbaro music rather than a song emerging naturally from that tradition. Not that a traditional jíbaro would ever float within a million miles of #1; but this, with the r&b-inflected rhythms in Martin's voice, the flamenco hints in La Mari's voice, and the pura romántica in Torres, is even more gloriously miscegenated than most pop.

It's the kind of thing that used to be able to go to #1 in the closing weeks of the year, traditionally slow for music buying or radio adds, giving older or less dominant audiences a time of year to hear themselves represented at #1. There's nothing necessarily festive about it (it's a song about still feeling conflicted about an old flame), but in the year of reggaetón it still feels like sentimental throwback to a classicist never-never land, and so it's holiday music regardless.

ALEJANDRO SANZ, “A LA PRIMERA PERSONA”

25th November, 2006

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When we first ran across Sr. Sanz, as the male foil to Shakira in "La Tortura", I was pretty dismissive of his contribution, approving of his weaselly performance of masculinity without attributing much of the song's punch or heft to him, a European interloper on decidedly American (in the hemispherical sense) turf. But this song has me reconsidering my stance.

Alejandro Sanz was born in Madrid to Andalusian parents, and his earliest musical efforts were entries in a postmodern flamenco revival that was briefly fashionable in late-80s Spain. Even when he made the shift into more commercial adult-contemporary ballad material in the early 90s, his phrasing retained echoes of the throaty "gitano" singing style of flamenco tradition. His 1997 worldbeat album Más remains the all-time best-selling record in Spain, and he responded to that ongoing success by becoming a demonstratively "thoughtful" pop star in the mode of a Sting or a Bono, recording increasingly political material and lecturing at Harvard on Hispanic culture.

His global exposure following "La Tortura" meant that his 2006 album was practically guaranteed to be a hit, which makes this one of the strangest #1s we've ever had, as emotionally florid, hyperverbal and structurally anti-pop as some of Juan Gabriel's most lavish excesses. The flowing, pattery verses recall Bob Dylan at his most motormouthed, though Sanz' soulful, gritted-teeth delivery is in both a flamenco and a rock tradition. The drums beat martially, or funereally, and the trumpet which bursts through the moody, atmospheric instrumentation like a grateful sunbeam could equally be a clarion charge or a variation on "Taps."

Because the point of all Sanz' motormouthed excoriation is the old story: love lost, ego bruised, a man on the hunt for his next source of succor. But there's no confidence that he will get it: the chords perversely refuse to resolve, no chorus ever explodes into certainty, there is only another cycle through the same obsessive refrain. It's a strange art-rock curiosity sitting atop the Hot Latin chart for a week, presumably the beneficiary of early digital download metrics sandwiched in between far more conventional radio pop.

DAVID BISBAL, “¿QUIÉN ME IBA A DECIR?”

28th October, 2006

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We interrupt your regular Latinoamericano programming for a three-week interpolation of furrowed-brow idol pop from Spain. David Bisbal first gained attention on the peninsula as the runner-up of the first season of Operación Triunfo (the Spanish edition of Star Academy) in 2002. He kicked around for a while, failing to win the opportunity to represent his country at Eurovision, before embarking on the kind of pop career that everyone in those early days of reality singing competitions was allowed. Smartly, he hooked up with producer and songwriter Kike Santander, who had helped shepherd the solo Gloria Estefan and Alejandro Fernández to glory, and used that production savvy and his own imitation-soul singing to become Spain's biggest pop star, for a time.

We've not been troubled by him here, but not for lack of effort: his second single went to #3 on the Hot Latin chart in 2002. It would take his third album, Premonición, and its debut single, an ungainly and outdated mix of rock muscle, flamenco noodling, Bisbal's impassioned yowl, and electronic scratching, before he landed at #1 stateside.

The single's cover art makes all too obvious what early-2000s careers he's trying to emulate: Justin Timberlake's Justified fedora, Ricky Martin's Almas de Silencio tight t-shirt and Pietà pose. Unfortunately he doesn't have either man's charisma or lightness of touch, and the result is a self-aggrandizing plod that slides off the memory almost as soon as it touches it. The lyrics are a bombastic, hyperbolic description of doomed love, exactly in line with Hispanist tradition and with nothing whatever new to say.

Not to worry, we'll hear from Bisbal again: the Latin market loves nothing more than a handsome, self-consciously brooding man. Maybe the second time's the charm.

ANDY & LUCAS, “SON DE AMORES”

18th September, 2004

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One of the beauties of Billboard's old method of determining chart placements for various musical subcultures -- like R&B, hip-hop, country, alternative rock, or Latin -- being primarily about what was popular on the playlists of radio stations which served those audiences is that one-week miracles like this were still possible. Another Andy & Lucas will never happen in the streaming age, which is set up to reward the broadest-audience music possible as long as it's given the appropriate genre tag, regardless of whether the music's core audience cares about it, with endless reigns only occasionally broken up by viral sensations.

There was nothing particularly viral about Andy & Lucas, aside from the age-old sensation of cute boys singing sensitive love songs. The flamenco-inspired guitar runs which open and interrupt the song are more an indication of their Spanish nationality, as if their lisping accents hadn't given it away, than an indication of musical virtuosity. There hasn't been as simplistic, or even simple-minded, a song as this on this travelogue for quite some time -- maybe not since "Aserejé," which at least had the virtue of being fun.

But the comparison points to Spain's odd-man-out place in this travelogue. Enrique Iglesias aside (and a argument can be made that he really belongs more to Miami than to the mother country), Spanish artists can only really be novelties on the Hot Latin chart after the millennium. Which would have surprised me back in the 80s, when Rocío Dúrcal and Julio Iglesias were a regular presence; but one consequence of the increased Latinx population in the US over the last thirty years is that it's more and more Central American and Caribbean, so that the white, Iberophilic Latinos who once made up a much more significant portion of the Latin music audience are less significant, and Spain now plays an even more diminished role in Latin pop than the UK does in US English-speaking pop.

All of which is by way of skirting the fact that while Andy & Lucas are certainly cute and give good puppy-dog eyes, there is almost nothing to say about the song: its pseudo-profundities are nostrums that were old when the book of Proverbs was written, and its one lyrical stroke of inspiration, the three-syllable rhyme of "calor y frío" (heat and cold) with "escalofrío" (shiver) is still pretty goofy. Everything else is super generic, from the electronic shuffle of the rhythm to the rise and fall of verse and chorus. I hope the young people who made it #1 for a week in 2004 remember it fondly; that's probably the best use it could have.

RICKY MARTIN, “JALEO”

9th August, 2003

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Since 1999, Ricky Martin's uptempo #1s have been notable for their everything-but-the-kitchen-sink aesthetic, in which elements from all over the pop diaspora are jammed together with less concern for coherence than for energy. "Jaleo" is the next step in that process, still as loud and kinetic as anything produced by Desmond Child, but with more unity of aesthetic: it manages to predict certain elements of global 2010s pop even while representing millennial-era mash-up culture at its lavish height.

The change in producers is one reason. Child had moved on to reality-show fodder like Clay Aiken by 2003, and Martin tapped up-and-coming Puerto Rican producer and songwriter Tommy Torres. We've actually met his handiwork already: MDO and Jaci Velásquez had put Torres's compositions on the map back in 1999, but Martin's 2003 album Almas de Silencio was his highest-profile outing. I didn't think much of the brooding ballad rock on "Tal Vez",  but "Jaleo" is straight fire: electronic pulses keep the rhythm while timbales, arabesque strings, and guitars both flamenco and metal provide flourishes. But it's Martin's voice, thick with performed passion, that is the highlight here: no matter how cartoonishly horny "Vida Loca" or "She Bangs" playacted at being, "Jaleo" feels like the sweat and churn of actual desire.

Or maybe that's my cultural tourism showing, in which the exotic is conflated with the erotic through the gaze of colonialism: this is after all the most capital-L Latin track we've heard from Ricky Martin. "Jaleo" is a term of art from the flamenco tradition, and means the handclap-and-shout breakdowns in a flamenco performance: the song uses it as a synonym for passionate physical activity, which could be simply dancing or much more intimate. In the lyric, Martin plays an ageless lothario who has seduced countless lovers but is obsessed (of course) with only "tu" -- a desire which is consuming him. There's a strong theatrical element to the song's structure, with the verses strethching out in tantalizingly delayed gratification, and heartstopping crescendos on the line "Atrapado! Moribundo!" (Trapped! Wasting away!), while the chorus spins into (a musically stereotyped representation of) a whirling dervish, babbling "jaleoleoleoleoleoleoleola" to infinity.

The faux-Middle Eastern elements in "Jaleo" are of a piece with its faux-flamenco texture: the video, as if to generalize all Latinidad into a single indistinguishable mass, was shot in Brazil, with capoeira dancers showing up halfway through. But that generically thrilling quality also means that it's not far from actual post-millennial Middle Eastern pop, which has taken inspiration from the dynamism and showmanship of Martin and Torres (as well as from a host of other influences, Western and Eastern) and applied it to local styles, with the result that uptempo dance music from Morocco to Iran is among the world's most consistently exciting.

Even so, "Jaleo" is a relatively goofy and silly song, like most of Ricky Martin's uptempo numbers. He is above all else an entertainer, but one still operating at a very high level. That can't be said for all his contemporaries.

OLGA TAÑÓN, “ASÍ ES LA VIDA”

1st February, 2003

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The miniaturized and necessarily distorted picture of entire careers that this blog, scraping only along the top level of a single ancillary chart, presents is rarely given such a finished narrative as Olga Tañón's three appearances. (This was the third; as of this writing, fourteen years later, it's unlikely but not impossible that she will return.)

In her first appearance, she had partnered with the great Mexican songwriter Marco Antonio Solís to create an elaborate diva ballad on a very traditional Spanish-language pattern with poky, amber-frozen production; in her second, five years later, she had moved on to millennial-era adult-contemporary, all glistening production and sublimated R&B. Here, she finally sounds like the merengue star she always was, even if the pop production is more generic kitchen-sink Latin Pop than actual merengue -- the merengue version of "Así Es la Vida" (Such is life), all rhythm and horns, is an object lesson in the way that Peak Music Industry of the millennial era understood regional Latin music as essentially subtractive.

But having the third act of a #1s career being a celebratory uptempo song is in itself not particularly noteworthy, although as a rule I'm all for celebratory uptempo songs. What really makes it narratively satisfying is the lyrics. In "¡Basta Ya!" (Enough!) Tañón was ending a relationship, fed up with deception and aloofness; in "Cómo Olvidar," (How to forget) she was mourning the loss of physical love, the body remembering what the mind doesn't want to; and in "Así Es la Vida," she responds to the overtures of a past lover with a lightly philosophical chorus (my rather free translation): "Isn't that like life, your luck changes day to day, I gave my life to have you, and now you want me back / Isn't that like life, you win some you lose some, I lost when I loved you, and now you're losing so much more."

It's practically an Elizabethan kiss-off, and paired with the dramatic flamenco guitars, drumline percussion, and merengue horns and delivered in Tañón's deep, resonant voice (she was 33, which in traditional pop terms meant she was due for divadom), it's one of the strongest songs we've had in what has been a pretty good couple of years. 

ALEJANDRO FERNÁNDEZ, “TANTITA PENA”

10th November, 2001

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The periodic interruptions of Alejandro Fernández into this travelogue have quietly become one of my favorite features of the journey since the late 90s: he is so rarely chasing new trends or crossover success, and his taste in production and songs tends to be so exquisite, that he can come as something of a relief from the more bombastic or kitschy elements that regularly wander into #1.

"Tantita Pena" (so little pity) revives another classic sound: but where Fernández had largely explored the intersection of ranchera and slow-moving, moody bolero before, at least as far as the #1 spot was concerned, he now combines mariachi structure and flamenco rhythms, with a montuno breakdown toward the end, combining Mexican, Andalusian, and Cuban traditions into a thrilling, explosive dance song too rhythmically complex for most gringos to bop to.

The lyrics are as old-fashioned but modernized as the music: the theme is the ancient one of the belle dame sans merci, but Fernández is no blameless, suffering victim: if she abandoned him and left him to die "sin tantita pena" (without a bit of pity), now he hopes to see her weep over the same sorrow, when he too will be sin tantita pena. The video almost lives up to the song: a surreal, Felliniesque celebration of traditional ranchera fashion, telenovela aesthetics, transatlantic Hispanic dance, and Mexican folklore, it's a monument to Fernández' ability to synthesize past and present, tradition and novelty, his intelligent singing, and his glamorous beauty.

Enrique Iglesias will continue to get the glory, but Alejandro Fernández will remain the thinking pop fan's second-generation Hispanophone star.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “RITMO TOTAL”

11th December, 1999

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Although he'd been a frequent (perhaps too-frequent) visitor to the Hot Latin #1 spot since 1996, it was not until "Bailamos" that Enrique Iglesias finally landed on the magic formula that would sustain one of the most consistently successful careers in modern popular music: he became, despite all his rock-derived masculine vocal strain, essentially a disco diva, a passionate if limited voice around which his collaborators can wrap high-octane, intricate productions. Which isn't to say that he won't have ballads in the future, and sometimes very successful ones -- but they will be the ballads of a dance singer, not the rock/romántica singer he originally positioned himself as.

His voice is thin and nasal, and he cannot project the authority that his father or Luis Miguel could, and even the easy competence of Ricky Martin is beyond his power. What his voice does have that they all lack is a certain vulnerability, traditionally identified in popular music with women's voices. (Soul music is the great exception, and the great innovation, in Black US music, and all rock singing is descended from it.) So he can be a dance singer, and it doesn't matter that his voice can't necessarily keep up with the thrust of the music, not just because it can be beefed up by modern production methods, but because its very fragility is what gives the music its emotional power.

All of which is to say that "Ritmo Total" (simultaneously released in English as "Rhythm Divine", as which it was more of an international hit than a US one) is not just an imitation of the formula that made "Bailamos" his first crossover hit, but an elaboration and, in some ways, an improvement on it. The clunky bilingual lyric is gone, replaced by either an all-English or all-Spanish lyric (and in the future he will sing in either one language or the other, rarely if ever both), both with parallel meanings if different details. The flamenco guitars return, but there's a rapid flamenco (or Catalan rumba) rhythm too, and indeed the whole production flutters where "Bailamos" was a more staid 4/4. He even breaks into a tremulous falsetto here, escaping his usual heartfelt whine for a non-verbal soar, and it's the most blissful sound we've heard in an Enrique Iglesias song yet.

CARLOS PONCE, “ESCÚCHAME”

4th December, 1999

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Three number-one hits in two years: why have I not been including Carlos Ponce along with Iglesias, Martin, Anthony, Fernández, Lopez, and Shakira as the new generation shaking up Latin pop in the late 90s? Well, because he hasn't been anywhere near as good as any of them, for one -- his gruff-voiced power ballads are well below the standard of their sleek pop variety. And for two, this is his last appearance; barring unforeseen comebacks, he will not trouble us again.

So it's something of a pity that his last outing is his best yet. His second album, Todo Lo Que Soy, was produced by Emilio Estefan, for whom it was a banner year: he was involved in nearly all of the 1999 songs I've loved. And "Escúchame" is no power ballad, but an airy folk-pop song, the first pop-flamenco (and not just flamenco-inspired guitar runs) we've heard since Gipsy Kings all the way back in 1990. Ponce is by no means a traditional cantaor, but his husky tones can manage a pop approximation of gitano singing, and he plays off against the handclap rhythms in the last chorus like a pro.

But even though it's a sweet song, and I appreciate the tonal variety of the flamenco sound, it's still not on the level that the new generation is, more like (to reach for contemporary Anglophone comparisons) Everlast's pop-blues-hop than what Britney Spears or Destiny's Child were doing the same year: nice enough, but they're building the future.

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.

SHAKIRA, “CIEGA, SORDOMUDA”

21st November, 1998

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And the last piece of millennial-era Latin Pop falls into place. Here we enter the modern world.

Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll had been a child prodigy, writing songs at eight years old and releasing her first album at thirteen; but it wasn't until her third album, Pies Descalzos, that she came into her own: a combination of rock energy, dance rhythms, and pan-global sonics unified by her unmistakable, sweet-and-sour voice and a real brilliance in lyric writing that pushed past conventional expressions of love or self to incorporate bizarre imagery, extravagant hyperbole and unusually rhythmic uses of language. The gospel-tinged "Estoy Aquí", her first mature hit, and the first to do business outside of Colombia, turns the chorus into a breathless rush of syllables imitating the intense everything-at-once emotional whirlwind of the adolescence she was still emerging from.

But that was three years ago, in 1995. And because this travelogue only skims along the surface of the Latin Chart, we have been unable to track her progress. Very few (non-Iglesias) performers begin their careers at the top of any chart; the slow and patient building of a coalition of fanbases, of proving that you make solid work and that listeners can trust you with their ears, hips, and heart, of inculcating enough of an image that it's a surprise and a scandal when you subvert or expand it, is a longer, more arduous, and perhaps more honest task. Shakira in the 90s was not unlike Madonna in the 80s: a bolt of lightning, as ambitious as she was talented, and hard-working enough to compensate for any deficiencies either way. Although I'd say that Shakira was more purely talented than Madonna ever was  as a singer, songwriter, and dancer, and on more or less the same level as an applied theorist of popular music; "Estoy Aquí," in that comparison, would be her early, "Holiday"-era light dance material. "Ojos Así" would be her imperial-era, "Like A Prayer"/"Express Yourself" material. And "Ciega, Sordomuda" would be, oh, say "Into the Groove."

Comparisons can only carry you so far, however: real understanding requires the thing itself. And "Ciega, Sordomuda" is very much a product of the late 90s: the light house beat touches on Swedish pop of the era (the Cardigans, Yaki-Da, Robyn), the mariachi trumpet and guitar were accenting everything from No Doubt to Cake, and even her voice could be similar enough to Alanis Morissette's pained yowl that comparisons litter many of the early English-language introductions to the new Colombian pop/rock starlet. But the sonics of the song, however pleasurable, are only part of what makes it so masterful a piece of pop music: the lyrics, the structure, and Shakira's performance do the rest.

"Ciega, Sordomuda" means "blind, deaf and mute," and are part of an extensive catalog of adjectives she applies to herself as the result of her lover's proximity. (The full list: bruta, ciega, sordomuda, torpe, traste, y testaruda; ojerosa, flaca, fea, desgreñada, torpe, tonta, lenta, nécia, desquiciada, completamente descontrolada. Or: crude, blind, deaf, mute, awkward, clumsy and mulish; haggard, skinny, ugly, unkempt, awkward, foolish, slow, stupid, unhinged, completely out of control ― all of them, naturally, cast in the feminine.) This kind of self-abasement would be unthinkable in English-language pop, especially from such an extremely attractive and self-possessed woman, but it's undoubtedly a faithful report of the kinds of things many of us have felt in the presence of someone who pushes our buttons.

Even her ability with hooks serves the emotional content of the song: apart from the chanting chorus, the swooning "ai, yai yai, yai yai"s that follow the chorus and make space for emotion entirely separate from words are beautiful, sentimental, silly, and sad. Then there's the middle eight, with angry guitars and the bulk of the adjective assault, in which she spits "y no me eschuchas lo que te digo" (and you don't listen to what I'm telling you), admitting that not only is it an incapacitating love, but a hopeless one as well. Shakira's privileging of the contrary and grandly silly vacillations of the human heart over being cool or even making sense has been one of her greatest and most consistent features as a writer over the years.

We'll have plenty of further opportunities to see this in practice: now that she's finally here, Shakira will be a frequent return visitor to the top spot, and indeed the next decade-plus in Latin Pop might well be considered the Shakira Era. Although the chart is getting too busy and diverse for it to be dominated by any one voice, if any voice deserved to dominate, it would be hers.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “NO PRETENDO”

2nd August, 1997

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Probably the most telling indication of my taste-slash-white-boy-assumptions-about-"real"-Latin-music is the reaction I'm having to this run of songs compared to the run that immediately preceded it. Enrique Iglesias and Marco Antonio Solís, much as I've liked individual songs of theirs, are wearying in romántico ballad after romántico ballad slicked up with mid-90s adult-contemporary pop production. The ranchero classicism of Juan Gabriel/Rocío Dúrcal and the countryfied corridos of Los Tigres del Norte, leaning as they did on traditional Mexican sounds, the Latin American version of "roots" music like the blues, country and gospel, were much more agreeable to my classicist's ears. Which may be indication of an "authenticity"-driven double standard applied to Latin music — after all, in Anglophone music of the period, I like the Cardigans way more than, say, Keb' Mo' — or maybe it's just a numbers game. If it were one or two Enriques to every six or seven Tigres, I might be feeling the exact opposite.

I bring all this up because this is the third Latin-traditionalist song in a row that I'm really loving; though the traditionalism here isn't Mexican but Cuban, even Spanish (the flowing flamenco-like guitar lines), and I think I even hear Peruvian huayño (cf. "El Condor Pasa") in the shuffling rhythm. But I'm no expert, as the musicologists falling over themselves laughing at my disorderly tags can attest. And faithful traditionalism would surely be pointless without Estefan's effortless melodicism and Kike Santander's classic songwriting.

"No Pretendo" can be translated several different ways, from the obvious "I don't pretend" to "I'm not trying" to "I don't mean" — either way, the phrase ends most frequently with "ser tu dueña" (be your lady, in the aristocratic as well as the lover sense) and "hacerte mío" (make you mine), and the repeated disclaimers have the effect of enforcing humility: after saying at great length what she doesn't mean to be, when she says what she does want to be it's "el mano que se llene de quebranto, ser un poco el remanso donde muere el desengaño" (the hand filled with broken dreams, a bit of an oasis where disappointments die).

This is practically Victorian — the "ministering angel thou" version of womanhood, rejecting any stronger moral or emotional hold on her man — but the complexity and the sheer poetry of the full lyric make it go down easier, as does Estefan's eternally warm voice, pitched at just the right level of desperation to make the sentiment believable. And listen to the guitars: they're letting us know it's tragic, all right.

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.

JOSÉ FELICIANO, “¿POR QUÉ TE TENGO QUE OLVIDAR?”

15th September, 1990

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If you're an American, you know at least one José Feliciano song by heart, even if you hate it. His appearance here — sadly, his only appearance here (to date, anyway; believe it or not, there's an upcoming single I have hopes for) — is a welcome reminder that the success of Latin Pop in America has roots going back well before Billboard thought to assign it its own chart. I still think his version of "Light My Fire" is the definitive one, and his version of airy, flamenco-tinged Latin pop is one of the sounds of 60s and 70s AM pop that is easiest to lose myself dreamily in.

Of course, this isn't that; it's another ponderous early-90s ballad, with rubato keyboards and big gated drums, but you can hear a beautiful-if-slight song underneath it all, with Feliciano's trademark acoustic guitar adding a tasteful, witty running commentary throughout. I've seen the title given as both "¿Por Qué Te Tengo Que Olvidar?" and "Porque Te Tengo Que Olvidar" (reading from left to right, "why do I have to forget you?" and "because I have to forget you"), but the grammar's less important than the broken-hearted sentiment. Feliciano sounds his age here, a pop survivor who retains his professionally cheerful demeanor, and it's rather a relief from the series of overemoting blowhards (I like Luis Miguel, but really) that we've had recently.

Still, it's hard to get past that one-size-fits-all overproduction. Feliciano's at his best when there's more space to the arrangement; here he comes dangerously close to sounding like just another faded pop star trading on past glories for a valedictory lap.

GIPSY KINGS, “VOLARÉ”

21st April, 1990

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Strange things were happening in the Latin chart as the first year of the 1990s got underway, at least at the top. First "Lambada," a Brazilian dance song as filtered through a French dance outfit, then this, an old Italian pop song as played by a French flamenco outfit. Where have all the Latin Americans gone?

Gipsy Kings have more in common with Los Lobos than with anyone else we've seen so far in this journey; as a Serious Muso Band with a specific ethnic identity that didn't get in the way of big-time crossover success (the tasteful-liberal kind we'd associate with NPR today), their success on the Hot Latin chart is another entry in the logbook of my suspicions that Billboard was maybe counting sales and airplay of anything in Spanish regardless of whether actual Latin stations were playing it. But enough with the meta, how's the song?

It's good, as no one will be surprised to hear: an acoustic uptempo jam that sticks fairly closely to the classic Domenico Modugno and Dean Martin versions of the song (a.k.a. "Nel blu dipinto di blu") which sat like twin huge roosting birds on the Billboard pop charts of 1958 and refused to budge. It's maybe lighter on its feet than Modugno was (Martin was always pretty light), but it's still very much the same kind of ethnic cheese: entirely enjoyable if you're not hung up on questions of identity politics, hipness, and "authenticity," somewhat less so if you are. Regardless, it's a pretty undeniable chorus, which far more than some theoretical midcentury cult of Italian masculinity was surely what gave it legs in the 50s, as well as what did the same, to somewhat lesser effect, three decades later.