LUIS MIGUEL, “TE NECESITO”

25th October, 2003

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And so Luis Miguel bows out of this travelogue. Shockingly, he does so with his best song and warmest performance since the mid-90s -- the airy, jazzy r&b of "Te Necesito" (I need you) is a throwback not only to his own pop youth, when he was a teenager covering soulful 1960s standards for his first #1, but to an entirely vanished era of music-making. Compared to the hard-bodied futurism of a Shakira or a Ricky Martin, it's irredeemably old-fashioned, a late-70s jazz-fusion dream of 50s doo-wop, all soft edges and pillowy sentiment.

Which doesn't make it bad, just out of place. Luis Miguel has never, since achieving adulthood, particularly cared about following the trend of the moment, and while that's frequently led him to artistic success (the first two Romances albums remain stunning tributes to midcentury bolero), it's just as often led to a solipsistic disregard for fashion that means he's the corniest thing in the world. In the video, he looks more like the handsome, tanned, lion-maned Julio Iglesias than Enrique ever has, and although he's a better singer than either of them, his pop instincts are just as schlocky.

Thank God he's not relying entirely on his own instincts here. "Te Necesito," as its hyperverbal patter lyrics might have suggested, was written by the great Dominican polymath Juan Luis Guerra, and the background vocals are by the peerless US gospel-jazz sextet Take 6; their lush rhythms and advanced harmonics push Luis Miguel to keep up, and he sings with more focus and verve than he has in a long time. The song itself is just pleasant, a clever love song married to a cheery tune; the arrangement makes it shine.

For the good times, Luis.

RICARDO ARJONA, “EL PROBLEMA”

7th December, 2002

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Ricardo Arjona's relatively complex and poetic singer-songwriter rock has been a necessary counterweight to the more demotic and direct millennial-era pop which had largely enveloped the top of the Hot Latin chart over the past few years; but this, his biggest-ever hit, is as direct and pounding as any dance song, even if the lyrics' simple structural conceit is still a highly poetic one.

The bulk of the song is made up of couplets whose lines begin "El problema no es que..." and "El problema es que..." (The problem is not that... / The problem is that...), in which the first line describes a difficulty about the beloved, and the second details how it impacts the lover. From the first, relatively benign line "The problem wasn't not finding you / The problem is forgetting you," it grows increasingly obsessive and even masochistic, until lines like "The problem isn't that you hurt me / The problem is that I like it" and "The problem isn't the wounds / The problem is the scars" signal, if the repetitive pounding rock of the music and Arjona's grainy shouting hadn't already, that we're in darker territory than usual.

The music, though, is more varied and even uplifting than just "pounding rock" -- a gospel choir gives its usual unearned gravitas to Arjona's distorted self-pity, and crisply funky piano and guitar runs recall the Rolling Stones at their decadent peak in the early 70s. Arjona's classic-rock instincts work for him on "El Problema," as his first-person character edges into the same kind of psychological unpleasantness that Jagger's protagonists plumbed regularly. None of which really explains why it was such a huge hit in 2002 and 2003: even Arjona, who made it the lead single off Santo Pecado (Holy Sin) was befuddled by the song's success, claiming he never expected it to be played on radio. Maybe it's as simple as that there's a greater hunger for emotional masochism in the pop audience than is generally assumed: I know I relate, strongly.

CARLOS PONCE, “REZO”

27th June, 1998

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Carlos Ponce was an actor, pinup, and singer, in that order; he'd been working in telenovelas since 1990, when he was eighteen, and the fact that it took until 1998 for him to release a debut album suggests that music was neither his first passion nor the most efficient use of his talents.

Or maybe I'm just letting the performance influence my reckoning. There's nothing about it which suggests a distinct musical personality: the dreamy-ballad-into-gospel-swayalong format is cribbed from Ricky Martin, the gruff, limited-range singing (until he finally lets off a single falsetto peal in the outro) is reminiscent of nonsinging actors forced to sing anyway from Richard Harris to Johnny Depp, and the indistinctly anonymous instrumentation that puts him front and center makes it clear that it's not music but showbiz that is really being celebrated here. The gospel choir makes up for his own improvisatory deficiencies and lack of mellifluousness; it's almost as if that was the idea.

The song itself is a glib declaration of love: "Rezo" means "I pray," though the connotation leans more towards the recitation of Catholic prayer than to the impulsive spirit of evangelical prayer. Which may be one way of explaining the poor match between song and style; the entirely secular subject of his prayer is that she love him back, "y que mi vida decores con tus gustos, tus colores" (and decorate my life with your tastes, your colors). It's the kind of thing that would be sweet if sung in a romantic comedy and creepily terrifying in real life. Which is true of most pop, probably; but Ponce's not a strong enough musical actor to sell the idea convincingly.

RICKY MARTIN, “VUELVE”

28th February, 1998

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And now, as if we were only waiting for Céline to put the capstone on the era, we are fully immersed in modern Latin Pop. Ricky Martin has been a professional singer and entertainer for more than a decade at this point, from his early days in the revolving-door Puerto Rican boy band Menudo to his increasing profile not just in Latin music but crossover dance as well, and he sounds like it, relaxed and professional, with a lively soul/rock delivery — everything Enrique Iglesias wants to be but isn't, not yet.

In fact we haven't heard anything this confident, or this indebted to Stateside R&B, in a long time; not since Selena, or even Jon Secada. Although this is R&B as filtered through Anglo-American pop/rock aesthetics, a loose soul vamp that sweeps up into a declamatory chorus, with broad key changes and plenty of room for a singer to show off, if that's the sort of thing he's inclined to do. Martin's not, for the most part, but that doesn't mean he hasn't got the tools to do it with.

The comparison that keeps urging itself to me is to George Michael, and while I don't want to make too much of it (gay dance-rock-soul men with brilliant smiles who came out later in their careers, after their hitmaking days were behind them), the ease and mastery with which Martin nagivates the funk-flecked power ballad form, swooping up into falsetto on the chorus and engaging gleefully with the gospel choir in the final third, is very Michaelian.

"Vuelve" ("return," both the noun and the imperative) was also the title of its parent album, Martin's fourth, on which he finally scaled the heights of the Latin chart. It was written by the Venezuelan Franco De Vita, who we last saw making a not-so-convincing effort at Anglo-American gospelly rock dynamics. Martin's boyband-bred sense of rhythm is one key improvement, but the big one is that "Vuelve" is not nearly so self-important a song as "No Basta" — while certainly pulling out a big gospel choir for the final chorus is a time-honored Seriousness Indicator, it's impossible to take the grinning sway of Martin's performance as seriously as the lyrics would like us to. Sure, he's begging for his lover's return — without him*, life has no meaning, even air has deserted his lungs — but Martin never sounds anything but totally confident that he* will return.



*I know it's not really kosher to make assumptions about the gender of non-gendered objects of song, especially since Martin was very much still in the closet in 1998, but I'm enough of an English traditionalist that I revolt at the prospect of "hir" or "s/he," and entirely feminine pronouns are equally problematic.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “EXPERIENCIA RELIGIOSA”

21st April, 1996

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Yes, again already. Get used to it. For the next fifteen years (and counting), nearly every single he releases will go #1. Not all of them, of course, are created equal.

Which makes it sound like I think this one is bad. I don't, quite: there are some quite good things about it, but it's a mismatch of singer, style and song. Iglesias is still singing like a rock singer here, belting grittily in a thin, static register, the audio equivalent of those Rob Liefeld comic books where everyone scowls grimly so much that it looks like they're constipated. He has not yet learned what his voice can do — and, more to the point, what it can't. If he were the singer he thinks he is, if he were Julio Iglesias or Luis Miguel or even Cristian Castro, he'd be able to overcome the repetitive up-and-down-the-scale of the song's melody (if the song's melody were plotted on a graph, it'd be as regular as a heartbeat, but not as warm), but as it is he doesn't even emote, he just groans.

Which is too bad; because the song, outside of the grinding melodic mechanics, is actually pretty good. I won't be so condescending as to translate the title (obvious Latinates are obvious), but the first line of the chorus makes the crucial distinction "casi" ("almost") -- settle down, priests and mothers, he's not saying sex is a religious experience, just that it's like one. Except that, three lines later, he says it straight: "es un experiencia religiosa" ("it is a" etc). But pay no attention to the flip-flopping semantics: the real highlight of the chorus is the sly rhyme "besar la boca tuya merece un aleluya" ("kissing your mouth deserves a hallelujah" — it's, sigh, better in Spanish), the kind of wordplay that died out in English-language pop with Ira Gershwin.

The requisite gospel choir comes in the for the last couple of choruses, which only further underscores how far this is from anything actually religious — Latin Pop audiences are so overwhelmingly Catholic that the gospel choir, a trope imported from American soul and rock music, is a signifier of generalized, and international, ambition rather than anything bone-deep to the culture. The hair-metal guitar solo that wails just after gives it away: this is (not very good) international pop, not particularly Latin in any way. (Enter Boyzone's 1997 cover "Mystical Experience," a pretty direct translation and even less bearable.)

Enrique will find his voice eventually, and material that's worthy of it. But it'll be a rocky road for a while. Buckle up.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “MÁS ALLÁ”

6th January, 1996

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After a magnificent hot streak, Estefan finally deals herself a bum hand. This is, of course, up to interpretation; clearly enough people liked it to send the song to #1; but it's her worst song, qua song, that we've yet encountered in this travelogue.

The production remains as polished and detailed as ever, with gorgeous flamenco guitar runs and swaying Afro-Cuban percussion; but the melody refers to no Latin tradition, instead rising and falling in the safe, predictable, even cozy patterns of inspirational pabulum. It does not surprise me to learn, when I check Wikipedia, that she sang this for the Pope. I and my immediate circle have been present for people singing things to the Pope on a number of different occasions, and this fits right in, banal Chicken Soup for the Soul-level platitudes married to a melody strenuously wiped free of all secular interest. You can't dance to it, you can't fall in love to it, you can't weep to it, you can't get pumped to it, you can't even — and this is where it fails as an inspirational song as well as a pop song — feel any great interest in changing the world to it.

The song is about stasis: the title, "Más Allá" means "Beyond," and is a metonymy for heaven; and all the sweetly-sung little Christian sacrifices in the verses are promised their eternal reward in the stubbornly not-soaring chorus. It's a vision of heaven as a gated community, "más allá del rencor, de las lágrimas y el dolor" ("beyond rancor, beyond tears and pain"), without any hint that rancor, tears and pain are not the disease we need to escape, but its symptoms; injustice, as even the Pope has acknowledged from time to time, needs to be confronted and beat back. As an anthem for such effort, however, this kind of thing is too heavenly minded to be any earthly good.

JON SECADA, “SI TE VAS”

13th August, 1994

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Two years ago, he burst onto this list like a breath of fresh, modernizing air, his soulful voice pirouetting with the sheer joy of self; now, he slogs his way through a dispirited power ballad, leaning on crutches that have long since gone out of favor, a shell of his former self.

It's worth noting, of course, that neither of those things are entirely true: "Otro Día Más Sin Verte" wasn't nearly as revolutionary as it seemed at the time, particularly now that world has Selena in it, and "Si Te Vas" is neither his low-point nor the end of the road for him, though it is the end of our association with him. Like many former and to-be-former number-one stars, he's dug a comfortable niche for himself as an overtanned, permagrinning fixture on the Latin nostalgia circuit, releasing an album every so often — the most recent is Clásicos/Classics, a trip through American-Latin standards that begins with "Oye Como Va" and ends with "La Bamba" — without bothering a chart that is increasingly focused on what the kids are listening to these days.

So perhaps the inevitable comparison here is to Billy Joel's "River Of Dreams," a similarly bland, soulless song that makes similar use of the gospel-choir crutch, which similarly marked the end of a career as a pop hitmaker, and which similarly exposed melodic and vocal weaknesses that were not previously so noticeable. Secada's voice actually sounds patchy here, like he might be sick or like he's laying down a demo vocal which they'll nail on the second pass. (Or, if it were several years later, which the producer forgot to pitch-correct before the track went to master.) The track starts promisingly, with a twinkly piano line that recalls house music, but any interesting production ideas are soon thrown out the window so that Secada can emote (poorly) all over the place.

"Si Te Vas" means "if you go," and it's as standard a lament/vow of love as the title promises. Unfortunately for him, Secada hasn't learned another trick; he's still pushing his once-fascinating combination of vaguely funky beats, soul-style singing, and dreary romanticism, and he's being left behind.

RICARDO MONTANER, “LA CIMA DEL CIELO”

27th January, 1990

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This sounds so perfectly 1990 to me — those slow-building, gospelly melodies were very much in vogue as the fabulous 1980s prepared for the earnest 90s — that I'm almost tempted to believe that its being The First Number One Of The 1990s is somehow significant. But it's just as much another entry in my theory of ballads belonging to the winter months.

It's also the first time an Argentinean singer has appeared at the top spot so far. (Montaner was born in Argentina but raised and achieved his first success in Venezuela.) Argentina is the richest and most powerful Spanish-speaking South American country, but partly because its cultural ties are closer to Spain than to the rest of Latin America, partly because of the lengthy Peron dictatorship, and partly because of a certain amount of cultural elitism, its pop culture hasn't necessarily been very popular throughout the rest of Latin America.

Montaner began, according to himself, as a black metal singer, but it was a series of baladas románticas that made him famous. You can, if you try very hard, hear a bit of rock vocal stylings here, but it's closer to the theatrical soul stylings of the post-Hair Broadway. Nevertheless it's an assured production, only a step or so removed from the Michael Bolton, Bryan Adams, and Richard Marx songs which were blanketing the English-speaking world at the same time.