THALÍA, “TÚ Y YO”

20th July, 2002

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It would no doubt be unfair to attribute the high-gloss sheen, uptempo rock attitude, and high-octane production on this single entirely to the example set by Shakira's English-language makeover, or even to the generational game change led by Ricky Martin now more than three years ago. My examination of the Hot Latin chart solely from the vantage point of its #1s has left me disgracefully ignorant as to the bulk of Thalía's career; but her previous appearance here almost exactly two years ago was less than a knockout.

It's not her fault that the luck of the charts has cast her as playing catch-up: certainly the production and even the instrumentation of "Tú y Yo" sounds exactly like a sequel to "Livin' La Vida Loca," or even to "She Bangs," but it can be understood more in terms of a trend-hopping victory lap than as trend-hopping desperation. The music industry was still feeling relatively imperial in 2002, so multiple renditions of the song were issued: the video version, as linked above, plus a cumbia version featuring the Corpus Christi genre-straddling band Kumbia Kings, founded by Selena's (Q.E.P.D.) brother A. B. Quintanilla; the album version, edited down from the video, and a year later, an English-language rewrite with lyrics by Kara DioGuardi.

The industry formula for "Latin crossover hit" had been perfected by this time, thanks to Desmond Child's Ricky Martin hits, hits by Enrique Iglesias and Marc Anthony, and (sigh) Santana's "Smooth" -- uptempo rock music featuring a montuno piano line, a rhythm section heavy on cowbell, and bright horns that emphasize dynamics rather than carry the melody. The production was handled by the song's co-writer, Colombian hitmaker Estéfano, who has appeared here primarily as the wizard behind Chayanne, and if the formula is predictable it's still effective: Thalía's emotionally-driven performance, snarling and whimpering as necessary, is all personality and no dull virtuosity. She's an excellent pop star still well in her prime -- this song went to #1 a few months before she turned 31 -- and if the song ends up being more about a generalized feeling of excitement than any specified emotion, with fill-in-the-blank lyrics, that's a long pop tradition too.

SHAKIRA, “SUERTE”

6th October, 2001

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"Suerte que mis pechos sean pequeños / y no los confundas con montañas."

Long before scattering verbal seeds so that a thousand Twitter memes might blossom had become one of the necessary attributes of a successful pop star, Shakira's verbal flights very nearly memed her into oblivion: everyone who addressed her new English-language makeover brought up the "breasts are small and humble" line as an example of her weirdness or perhaps of her limited facility with English. (And everyone else replied that the line was the same, and just as unexpected, in the Spanish version. This conversation will never stop happening, until the end of time.) But look at her grin in the video during the line: she knows exactly what she's doing.

The fact that Shakira Mebarak Ripoll knew exactly what she was doing when she dyed her hair blonde, began writing in English, and contracted with the Estefans to produce her next album has long been a sticking point for those who had admired her '90s shaggy brown mane, her wild Spanish-language creativity, her proud Latinidad. It felt like a betrayal: no longer Latin America's signature alt-rock act, a Southern Hemispherical riposte to frozen-north icons like Björk or Radiohead, she was now just another bottle-blonde global pop star, joining the Britneys and Beyoncés in Anglophone hegemony.

While this is a valuable and necessary take, I think it overrates the importance of alt-rock and underrates the importance of pop -- Shakira may be differently beloved than she was in the 90s, but she is undeniably more, and more widely, beloved. And she has never gone fully Anglophone: her English-language songs nearly always have (often much better) Spanish-language counterparts -- "Whenever, Wherever" is only okay compared to "Suerte," one of her greatest pop songs in a career stuffed with them.

"Suerte" is very early-2000s, in that there's not a particular tradition of music it is set in. Rather, it's a mash-up of many different influences, incorporating Andean huayno and panpipes, Middle Eastern arabesque, and global dance music, including a prominent funk bassline, tribal drumming, and surf guitar: worldbeat, to use a popular if meaningless catchphrase of the era, but with a strong pop sheen. It was the era of Missy Elliott, the Neptunes, and Richard X, in which imperial pop raided global sounds, an analog globe converging into a united digital future until George W. Bush and Diplo ruined it for everyone. But it was also characteristic of the way Shakira had always worked: of Colombian and Lebanese heritage, she mixed East and West, North and South, as a matter of course, and her dancing, which seamlessly blends Afro-Latin and Eastern Mediterranean traditions, is one of the great pop marvels of the millennial era.

But while she's one of her generations's great dancers and great musical synthesists, she's also one of its greatest lyricists: "Suerte" is a fantastic love song in a style that owes as much to modern poetry -- it's romantic, and funny, and quotidian, and heavily imagistic -- as to modern pop. (Modern poetry listens to pop, of course, Frank O'Hara just as much as Warsan Shire.) "Lo que me queda de vida / quiero vivir contigo" (What is left to me of life / I want to live with you) is such a clearer and more heartfelt sentiment than "I'll be there and you'll be near / and that's the deal my dear" that -- although the latter is striking too -- it's easy to see why some observers thought English was a misstep for her. Luckily, we don't have to bother about her English here: which won't always be the case.

This is only the third time we've met Shakira on this travelogue, which feels wrong: she was and is a much bigger star than that, and some of the songs that happened not to make it to #1 include some of the best songs not only of her career but of pop music entirely. In some ways "Suerte" is a lesser rewrite of "Ojos Así", and "Objection (Tango)" is the best tango song the twenty-first century has produced. But although her presence here will continue to be infuriatingly intermittent (especially as compared to figures like the one who recorded the song that replaced this at #1), she has not yet tapped out. We are still living in the Shakira era, and that in itself is reason for hope.

BARRIO BOYZZ & SELENA, "DONDEQUIERA QUE ESTÉS"

26th March, 1994

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World, she's arrived. Prepare to be changed.

We've encountered Selena before, but while she was notable, the song wasn't: a perfunctory saunter through a traditional romántico duet that almost anyone we've seen in these pages to date could have done just as well, to just as little effect. And she's back duetting with another flash-in-the-pan; for the second time, she's just about the only reason to pay attention to her partners' second (of two) appearances at the top.

But Barrio Boyzz, while they may not graze our notice again, have this much over Álvaro Torres: they sound like Now. The snapping new jack swing beat, the house piano, and the alternately lush and silky harmonies are all precisely where urban candyfloss pop was at in 1994, and Selena has outgrown her Ana Gabriel imitation, instead channeling an r&b diva that not only keeps up with but far outpaces the Boyzz. Their name was on the hit — she was officially a guest on their album, which was named for the song — but nobody buys Barrio Boyzz compilations for the song: by all reckonings, it's her first major hit, the place where Srta. Quintanilla-Pérez, quinceañera performer, talent-show winner, and jobbing local-circuit singer, became Selena, global pop star.

The song (as opposed to the production) is still not quite worthy of her talents. The translated title would be "Wherever You Are," and the chorus continues, just as tritely in Spanish as it comes out in English: "remember, I will be there at your side ... I think of you and feel for you ... I will always be your first love." But she has a sharper sense of rhythm than her duet partners and is in full command of her impressive vocal faculties, and once the dovey lyrics die down and she can just play with the beat, she scats circles around all of them. Not even Mariah was showboating like this; Mary J. Blige is about the only English-language equivalent, and she hadn't yet come fully into her own either.

But enjoy the breezy New York funk while it lasts; when she returns, it will be as a full-throated Texan, and the world will be, ever so briefly, hers.

LUIS MIGUEL, “INOLVIDABLE”

25th January, 1992

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The more Luis Miguel I hear, the more I appreciate the technical purity of his singing, the immaculate phrasing and, as he grows older, the sense of powerful emotions in reserve, which he shares with the mature Sinatra. In some ways it feels as if he's been building to this moment, the gorgeous young man who first appeared in these pages as a teen hunk singing a retrofitted 60s pop song growing into the suavely elegant man who rides a light-jazzy rhythm effortlessly and croons as sweetly as Bryan Ferry, as assuredly as Tony Bennett.

I'm told (by the usual source) that this was his biggest-selling album, the final transition into adulthood and traditional pop. That tradition is bolero, the eighteenth-century Spanish slow dance that was the first popular song form in Cuba and Mexico. I had to listen to a few more traditional bolero songs myself before I could hear the bolero rhythm under the funk-guitar flecks, but even if the instrumentation is as plastic and 1992 as possible — between the glossy keys, the rubbery guitar, and the tweeting soprano sax, it's like a crystallized memory of the first smooth jazz station I ever listened to — Miguel's precise, restrained performance rescues it from easy-listening purgatory and places it in the canon of liquid-smooth pop that all my references so far have conjured up.

While most latter-day reminiscence has focused on youth movements like alt-rock and electronic dance, at the time there was some reason to believe that traditional pop was a signal way forward as the nineties gathered steam: Tony Bennett was hip again, Harry Connick, Jr. was on the rise, and Natalie Cole had her biggest, if least defensible, hit duetting with her late father. While this isn't that "Unforgettable" (which is what "inolvidable" means), it's at least as easy to slip into its dreamy tug.