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.

ROMEO SANTOS FT. DRAKE, “ODIO”

15th February, 2014

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I can't be sorry that I dragged my heels on this blog so long that I didn't get to this song until after the Summer of 2024 affixed a permanent asterisk to the featured artist here. Even before then, I still would not have been fulsome about his contribution -- the graceful skittering of bachata, particularly Romeo Santos' bachata, just doesn't work with the plodding whinery of Toronto's favorite son -- but in a post-"tryna strike a chord" landscape, greeting this entry in the Hot Latin #1s list with anything but resigned contempt would feel not just immoral but disloyal.

In a pre-streaming world, being #1 for 13 weeks would have been a notable achievement; in 2014, it just feels like a measure of Drake's overwhelming popularity that a song primarily in a language not spoken by most of his audience outperformed everything else in its category while he was between album cycles. Not that the headliner here doesn't matter: a perfectly adequate Romeo Santos solo song could be carved out with some judicious editing, and sold the song to the Latin audience in a way that Drake's vaguely passable Spanish verse could not have, let alone his more typically self-absorbed rap (in which he spits some of the worst game a self-declared lover boy ever has) in English.

But even with Drake excised, it's by some margin the worst song Romeo has had his name on to reach #1 -- the core thrust at the center of his lyric, "I hate the man who makes you happy," may be a relatable (though ignoble) sentiment, but everything else is just going through the motions, a generic canvas that can accommodate his guest's lazy brushstrokes.

I think I've said on this blog, a long time ago, that I was looking forward to the end of machismo and misogyny on this chart. I was a fool to think it would ever go away. 

Airplay Watch:

• Romeo Santos ft. Drake, "Odio"
• Discussed above.
• Yandel, "Hasta Abajo"
• More "Danza Kuduro"-core from the pretty one of the iconic reggaetón duo, this one notable for actually featuring a jacked-up reggaetón riddim underneath the synthesized accordion and soaring AutoTune.
• Juanes, "La Luz"
• The Colombian rocker goes pop, adding synths to his acoustic guitar strumming and fast-paced mapalé dance rhythms for a kiss-me-at-the-festival song that burns bright and fades as quickly.
• Carlos Vives ft. ChocQuibTown, "El Mar de Sus Ojos"
• Shout out to the avuncular Vives for featuring my favorite Afro-Colombian hip-hop trio on this vallenato/champeta rave-up, even if Slow doesn't get a verse. 
• Wisin ft. Jennifer Lopez & Ricky Martin, "Adrenalina"
• The shouty one of the iconic reggaetón duo plays generous host to two famously pretty guests for another uptempo reggaetón-inflected, empty-calorie dance banger.
• Enrique Iglesias ft. Marco Antonio Solís, "El Perdedor"
• Discussed in the previous entry.
• Prince Royce, "Te Robaré"
• Another pretty-boy bachata-cum-R&B song, although this one is the best-arranged and most sincerely-delivered I've heard from Royce since his debut. 

WISIN Y YANDEL FT. CHRIS BROWN & T-PAIN, “ALGO ME GUSTA DE TI”

20th October, 2012

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The first #1 of the streaming era is almost a caricature of the immediate effect that replacing the carefully-calibrated audiences of radio with the undifferentiated firehose of streaming had on the chart. Puerto Rican reggatoneros-turned-dancepop-bros Wisin y Yandel are familiar faces to the #1 spot, but their guests on this track, the uncancellable Virginia R&B bad boy Chris Brown and the cuddly Atlanta electro-soul king T-Pain, provide the crossover juice that made this not just the last Hot Latin #1 of 2012 but the first of 2013, with an unbroken thirteen-week reign that had only been exceeded four times in the history of the chart: 1986, 1988, 2005, 2007. (It had been matched two additional times, by "Rompe" and "Danza Kuduro".) But long unbroken (or briefly punctuated) reigns are now the new norm: the rest of 2013 will only feature seven different songs at the top of Billboard's principal Latin pop chart.

So in an attempt to reconcile this new chart with the history I've traced heretofore, each new entry on this travelogue will end with an Airplay Watch: a list of songs that were at #1 on the Latin Airplay chart (a new chart calculated using the old Hot Latin metric) during the reign of the Hot Latin #1 under discussion, with brief capsule reviews, excluding only songs that will become future Hot Latin #1s.

But for the body of this post, we'll still have to wrestle with this thing, a jocular party anthem in a vein that was feeling pretty exhausted by this point. Puerto Rican producers Luis O'Neill and Chris Jedi do their best thumpa-thump, sine-synth imitation of megasuccessful Swedish maestros like Dr. Luke and RedOne, but it's not 2008 anymore for anybody, and the Chris Brown and T-Pain bits just make me want to put on "Forever" or "Can't Believe It" instead. Even Wisin and Yandel sound pretty checked-out themselves, running through standard come-ons and exhortatons to party as though their stock portfolios will dip if they don't. Even the big-budget crossover reggaetón of "Sexy Movimiento" feels like it was ages ago, never mind the hungry, horny, beat-forward "Rakata", their first single (which still hit #2 back in 2005; they've always been a creature of the charts.)

If the first song of the streaming era was a better or more distinctive effort rather than just about the most generic party crossover thing the era could produce, I still wouldn't have been thrilled about the change; but watching this thing stick in the craw of the chart for months on end just as I was attempting the most foolhardy and ultimately destructive change of my life didn't help my feeling that everything was going to shit, that the idiots and the algorithms that catered to them were winning, that nothing interesting or beautiful or meaningful would ever happen again.

Stay tuned, I guess.

Airplay Watch:

• Wisin & Yandel ft. Chris Brown & T-Pain "Algo Me Gusta de Ti"
• Discussed above.
• Leslie Grace, "Will U Still Love Me Tomorrow"
• One of my favorite minor hits of the period, from a Dominican New Yorker bachatera attempting to replicate Prince Royce's playbook by leading off with a classic US pop song in Spanish and English. Grace would go on to have a middling pop career of often very fine Latin pop and little notice before being cast in the film adaptation of In the Heights, and is now primarily known as an actor.
• Arcángel, Zion & Lennox, Lobo, RKM & Ken-Y, "Diosa de los Corazónes"
• The "Danza Kuduro" beat gets another workout on this posse cut/pretty-boy summit from two Puerto Rican duos and two Puerto Rican solo singers (although Arcángel had been in a duo with De La Ghetto). A lot of energy and tremulous vocalizing to very little effect.
• Gerardo Ortíz, "Solo Vine a Despedirme"
• One of the tragedies of the streaming makeover of the chart is that great Mexican regional hits like this are now relegated to footnotes like this one. Ortiz takes this heartbroken farewell song at such a breakneck clip that it's practically punk rock.
• Prince Royce, "Incondicional"
• A bachata cover of the 1989 Luis Miguel hit, dispensing with Miguel's dramatics for Royce's smooth airiness.
• Gusttavo Lima, "Balada (Tchê Tcherere Tchê Tchê)"
• A pop-sertanejo singalong, the spiritual successor to "Ai Se Eu Te Pego", a year later. I probably like it better, because it's more rhythmically interesting, but it's just as vacant of meaning.
• Enrique Iglesias ft. Sammy Adams, "Finally Found You"
• A late and unimpressive entry from Iglesias' Swedish-produced club-pop phase. Guest Sammy Adams is a terrible rapper, but Daddy Yankee doesn't do much better on the Latin-market version.
• Carlos Vives, "Volví a Nacer"
• Discussed in the previous entry.
• Gocho ft. Yandel & Wayne Wonder, "Amor Real"
• Producer Gocho takes another crack at an above-the-line hit, with Yandel along for moral support. The reggaeton riddim haunts the song like a ghost, intangible even as the actual beat echoes it in absentia.

JUAN MAGÁN FT. PITBULL & EL CATA, “BAILANDO POR EL MUNDO”

31st March, 2012

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"Inténtalo" was the first new #1 of 2012 to get a second week at the top, although they weren't consecutive. The one-week wonder that followed its second reign was this, an echo of the airwave-blanketing #1s of 2011, when party anthems by Pitbull and Don Omar sprawled over months. But the post-subprime blip is already shifting into other gears: this cheery club-ready celebration of women going out and partying will be replaced by another one-week wonder with a stronger dancehall orientation.

Like "Hips Don't Lie", "Loca", and Don Omar's 2010s appearances here, "Bailando por el Mundo" is a reworking of a less successful version of the song. Barcelonan DJ Juan Magán had released "Bailando por Ahí" early in 2011, and it was a local hit, and something of a culmination of a decade-long career. Magán had been making the specfically Spanish genre of hardcore techno known as "mákina" since 1999 with a series of collaborators, and was part of the first Spansih reggaetón act, Guajiros del Puerto, in 2004. (They drop the n-word like it's generic rap slang in the first seconds of their biggest hit, "Veo Veo", in case you wondered how appropriative they were.) He moved on to club music with the act Magán & Rodríguez in 2007, where he started calling his music "electro latino," which primarily seems to have meant raiding Latin American music for sounds and ryhthms to give texture to otherwise very generic house and trance beats: their biggest hit "Bora Bora" borrowed vallenato accordion as a signature sound. When he went solo in 2009, Magán aimed even more squarely at broad pop success.

"Bailando por Ahí" went to #1 on the Spanish charts in October 2011, the same month that "Bailando por el Mundo" was released, with Cuban-American rapper and empresario Pitbull and Dominican rapper El Cata taking Magán's verses and making them both more vivid and more generic: the original song gestures towards wistfulness (preserved in the chorus-ending line "fueron los días más felices para mí" (they were the happiest days for me)), but Pitbull and El Cata are more interested in boasting about their own importance and success than in Magán's loose character study about a woman going out with her friends to party in Madrid. Not that the original is some great achievement in aesthetic sensitivity: the thumping merengue-house and zig-zagging accordion are winningly schlocky but little else.

My memory of this song in 2012 is primarily of ignoring it. I was exhausted by Pitbull at this point (although it's worth noting that this is by far his best showing as a rapper on this travelogue), and Magán's party-happy music wasn't interesting enough to overcome my generic contempt for Spanish DJs compared to the far more more fascinating electronic pop coming from Latin America itself, particularly the amazing Santiago scene that I was deep into at this time. But Javiera Mena, Alex Anwandter, and the rest are in no danger of showing up here; so the limited pleasures of "Bailando por el Mundo" sound better in retrospect.

DADDY YANKEE, “LOVUMBA”

25th February, 2012

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The fact that this is only Daddy Yankee's second appearance at the top of the Hot Latin chart really underlines the ways in which the reggaetón to which he remained steadfastly devoted had slipped out of the zeitgeist. Three whole album cycles have gone by since his previous #1, all of which topped the Latin Albums chart, but unlike his compatriots Wisin y Yandel he has not shifted towards a more generic urbano sound, sticking closely to the dancehall origins of reggaetón and maintaining a Caribbean-forward sound rather than chasing the hip-hop currents of the mainland US.

Even this, his crowning return to the top, was only for a week (2012's fleeting attention strikes again), and while the reggaetón riddim is gestured to, in strict generic terms the beat is soca, the dancehall-derived music of Trinidad and Tobago. In the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, tempos this rapid are usually associated with Dominican merengue, itself a twist on Cuban mambo, which has its roots in the son music marketed as rumba in English. The song's title, a portmanteau of "love" and "rumba," is meant to be big, generic, and crowdpleasing; to that same end, witness the remix of the song featuring Don Omar, which appeared on both the parent album and the single in both physical and digital formats.

But even if the song isn't strictly reggaetón -- which tends to flourish at midtempo -- it's a welcome reminder of the cacophonous energy, bragadocious attitude, and overt sexuality which reggaetón brought to Latin pop. Even though the lyrics are relatively mild for Daddy Yankee -- a clue as to why might be in the middle eight, where he shouts out the Zumba fitness program, which was starting to commission high-energy Latin music around this time -- the ambient horniness of the premise (Daddy Yankee is using dance to seduce you) keeps the song vivid and dynamic despite the chintzy synthesized merengue horns.

Ultimately "Lovumba" may belong more in the line of Don Omar's big-tent party songs than in Daddy Yankee's own canon of self-assured reggaetón statements. The Billboard entry doesn't include the Don Omar remix, but I don't doubt that it helped get the song to #1; Daddy Yankee's return to the top spot in a more characteristic vein is still yet to come.

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.

WISIN Y YANDEL, “TU OLOR”

8th October, 2011

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Wisin y Yandel's seventh top-lining #1 (ninth if we count features and remixes) in five years sees them still acting as a bellweather for urban Latin pop. Nesty and El Nasi's slick, turbo-charged production is in line with the trancey synths and urgent dance-pop that have been the signature sound of the summer of 2011, and the syncopated rhythm once more recalls the reggaetón beat without actually using the dembow riddim.

"Tu Olor" was the second single off the duo's seventh album, and comparing it to the lead single "Zun Zun Rompiendo Cadenas", which did not reach #1, is a little instructive. "Zun Zun" was much more firmly an electro song aimed at crossover dancefloor success, with Yandel's voice flanged all to hell by AutoTune; "Tu Olor" is grittier and even more romantic, in the surly masculine way that hip-hop-derived forms tend to be.

The title means "your scent," and Yandel's chorus, "Se me quedó tu olor en mi ropa / la fragancia de tu piel, tu rico sabor a miel / que probé yo de tu boca / Vamo' a repetirlo mami una y otra y otra y otra vez" is a minor masterpiece of erotic pop poetry: "Your scent is still in my clothes / the fragrance of your skin, the sweet honey flavor / that I tasted from your mouth / Let's do it again mami again and again and again." Meanwhile, Wisin's verses expand the narrative from pure nostalgic eroticism: it's much more indirect, but essentially the same premise as T-Pain's 2005 classic "I'm 'n Luv (Wit a Stripper)." And the video turns it into a high-octane action movie with a lot of expensive shots and very little meaning, except of course to communicate how successful and important the performers at its center are.

It was only #1 for a week, though: in a chart where Don Omar's "Taboo" and Pitbull's "Give Me Everything" were still hanging around, it was a relatively small blip that spoke to the dedication of the W&Y fanbase rather than the duo's global dominance in 2011. We'll see them again, in a stronger position.

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.

CHINO Y NACHO, “MI NIÑA BONITA”

 20th March, 2010

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Theoretically, pop music from a decade ago is the uncanny valley in pop nostalgia: far enough away to sound uncool and irrelevant compared to current work, but not far enough away to have accrued the patina of age, to sound enough unlike contemporary trends that it has its own, entirely separate charm.

And indeed the version of reggaetón that Chino y Nacho, former boy-band members from Venezuela, perpetrate here is very unlike any kind of reggaetón currently keeping pace on the global pop charts: the bright, cheery merengue horns and piano, the uncomplicated puppy-love sentiments supported by charming doo-wop vocalisms, Nacho's motormouthed rapping, are all relics of a more manic, less depressive pop scene.

But they also point toward the current landscape in less obvious ways: the way non-Black South Americans have come to dominate the reggaetón landscape at the levels of highest popularity, the remove of reggaetón from the concrete urban concerns of Puerto Ricans (and before that Panamanians) into a generalized pop language. If it's too simplistic to say that Chino y Nacho ran so that the likes of J Balvin and Karol G could fly, it's also not entirely wrong. A few years ago I drew an invidious comparison between Wisin y Yandel and Andy & Lucas, praising the Puerto Rican reggaetoneros for being more forthright and grown-up than the Spanish prettyboys; part of the story of reggaetón since 2006 is the way in which the Andy & Lucases of the pop world have been assimilated into the tropical riddim.

It's worth pointing out that the first words shouted in the song are the name of its producer Richy Peña, a Dominican-American who had been put onto the international reggaetón radar by Nely "El Arma Secreta" and Don Omar. Peña won a Latin Grammy for "Mi Niña Bonita" -- well-deserved, according to my ears, for the sheer ebullience of the tune -- and a good half of what I love about the song is his work rather than that of Chino y Nacho.

Because I really do love it: I am old enough that a decade ago is no longer distant enough to have fallen into the uncanny valley of pop nostalgia, and the glee and joy I still clearly remember experiencing when hearing it on the radio during my commute in 2010 and 2011 are undimmed by any concerns about coolness or relevance. Merengue and doo-wop were just as uncool in 2010 as they are in 2021, but their deployment here remains as heart-stirring as it was then. If the doofy, lovestruck lyrics were even the slightest bit more cynical or knowing they would ruin the song: its virginal naïveté is part of what makes it great.

A minor classic, compared to the long history of this chart, but a classic nevertheless.

WISIN Y YANDEL, “ABUSADORA”

1st August, 2009

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The third Wisin y Yandel #1 in a row without the distinctive reggaetón riddim, although the hip-house beat keeps the same staggered rhythm: the market seemed to be pushing away from puro reggaetón in the usual way that Black music gets coopted and watered down by white practitioners. Still, "Abusadora" was produced by Tainy with W&Y's usual collaborator Víctor El Nasi, so it's not like they were trying to abandon the formula that gave them their success by working with pop producers; if anything, they were demonstrating that reggaetón was a bigger tent than a blinkered focus on the riddim would suggest.

"Abusadora" is, like so many of Wisin y Yandel's songs, a worshipfully horny celebration of a sexually assertive woman at the club. The title literally translates to "abusive woman," but what or who she's abusing is never clear: maybe it's the singers (although Yandel repeats "Bendita sea la hora en que te encontré" -- blessed be the hour in which I met you), maybe it's substances, maybe it's simply her own pretty privilege. But if they're suffering, they don't complain: Wisin brags about his ability to keep up with her, and Yandel croons in silvered fragements of AutoTune about how little control he has over himself.

The sawtoothed synths and AutoTune are more than anything else a time capsule: this is post-subprime mortgage pop, big and splashy and dance-friendly, the cheap blare of foreclosed futures. The long, embittering crisis of the 2010s will temper the noise and energy on display here, but for the next couple of years at least, we'll keep on partying like it's the end of the world.

FLEX, “DIME SI TE VAS CON ÉL”

4th April, 2009

Wiki | Video

The largely forgotten follow-up to a fluke hit that prevents a marginal artist from being immortalized as a one-hit wonder is a common enough pop phenomenon that we've already seen several examples in this travelogue -- perhaps most notably Barrio Boyzz and Son by Four. But few have been as delightful as this working-class reggaetón that leans harder into its author's Panamanian roots than "Te Quiero" did.

Because it's as much a vallenato song as it is a reggaetón song, and although vallenato is usually described as a Colombian music, it's easy for Anglos to forget that Panama retains close cultural ties with Colombia, only having been separated from the larger country in 1903 at the behest of U.S. shipping interests for whom an independent Panama was easier to strongarm into conceding their canal than resource-richer Colombia would have been. The combination of the reggaetón riddim and vallenato accordion and guitar figures gives Predikador's production an oddly rustic feeling, with synthesized panpipe sounds further evoking South American rather than Caribbean musical textures.

In Panama, Flex was still using (and still does today) the rap name Nigga, and one of his mentors, Mr. Saik (an adaptation of his original MC name, Psycho), appears on the song, usually bellowing in unison with Flex. Because as aw-shucks vulnerable as the song is -- and lyrically it's a cuckold's plea for his beloved to admit that she's seeing another man -- it's still a macho bellow-along, because first-generation reggaetón. The glorious bounce of the music also keeps it from being very self-pitying; it's practically impossible for vallenato to not sound cheerful.

But like the previous entry, this song too only interrupted Banda El Recodo's #1 reign for a week. The several competing Latin audiences (regional Mexican, tropical, urbano, Latin rock, and more) were in productive tension with each other, a tension which will only increase as the next few years unfold.

DJ NESTY FT. WISIN Y YANDEL, “ME ESTÁS TENTANDO”

21st March, 2009

Wiki | Video

Reggaetón's evolution out of underground dancehall versioning and hip-hop mixtapes in the 1990s has meant that even as it became the most dominant commercial force in the Latin world, its discographies remained untidy, sprawling across all kinds of release formats on a variety of label-sanctioned (or not) modes.

So this song, which is only found under Wisin y Yandel on today's streaming services (the video link above has it hosted on their official YouTube account), was initially released as the first single from DJ Nesty's 2008 compilation album Wisin y Yandel Presentan: La Mente Maestra (Wisin y Yandel present: the mastermind), a mixtape of previously unreleased tracks featuring a host of more underground Puerto Rican reggaetoneros and producers. The song was later included on the deluxe edition of Wisin y Yandel's 2009 album La Revolución as a bonus track, but Billboard listing it as DJ Nesty ft. Wisin y Yandel at the time (they now list it as "Wisin & Yandel Featuring Nesty") was only following the original parent album.

And to an extent putting the producer first makes sense, because while this is definitely a Wisin y Yandel song, it's not technically a reggaetón song: the dembow riddim never appears, only a stuttering loop during Wisin's verses. Wikipedia lists it as EDM, which whether accurate or not would be the first appearance of that particular tag on the Hot Latin #1s. There's definitely a sawtoothed synth rather reminiscent of the "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These)" riff that cycles throughout, and the percussion is more or less disco: the detailed production by Nesty, Víctor "El Nasi" and Marioso could slot this directly into a turn-of-the-decade synthpop mix, no questions asked.

But Wisin and Yandel are still Wisin and Yandel: you can take the boys out of the reggaetón riddim, but you can't take the reggaetón out of the boys. Yandel's electro croon, Wisin's punchy rapping, and their constant shouted interruptions make even this moodily sparkling track as rowdy and cheerful as the rest of their #1 hits. The lyrics are their usual declarations of horniness and machismo: "Me Estás Tentando" means "you're tempting me" and Yandel's portrait of a dancing woman getting him excited is punctured by Wisin's more free-associative hype, calling himself "el tiburón a comerse la sirena" (the shark to eat up the mermaid). The video is all late-00s electro classiness (I swear I've seen dozens of rap, R&B, and dance acts on that set or ones very like it), the boys and some models striking poses against austere black-and-white light grids.

Wisin y Yandel (and their management) could be excused for believing that pure reggaetón would not be sustainable for a long-term pop career, some three years after it broke into #1 here, and so moving in a broader pop direction would only be canny. And this song was only #1 for a week in between Banda El Recodo reigns -- maybe the market was shifting away from urban tropical music entirely. Maybe. Stay tuned.

FLEX, “TE QUIERO”

5th April, 2008

Wiki | Video

Oh. This is where I came in.

In the spring of 2008, I accidentally dropped the iPod which had been my constant companion for several years into a bathtub at almost exactly the same time I started a job which meant a two-hour commute each way. For the first time since the late 90s, I started listening to the radio in my car, and not just sticking to the classic rock, oldies, or public-radio stations that had been my comfort food and music education as a young ignoramus. I forced myself to listen to contemporary pop past the kneejerk revulsion that a certain rockcrit-bred devotion to 1960s models of rock, soul and pop had inculcated, and discovered that the chrome electronic textures and hyperhuman vocal melismas could communicate real emotion, different certainly than the man-with-a-guitar model I had trained myself to expect, but true nonetheless. Even after the job allowed me to get a new mp3 player, I kept listening to pop radio, entranced by the churn of sameness and novelty.

And late in 2008, looking for more stations to add to my regular rotation that I could switch over to during ad breaks (never subject yourself to advertising if it's possible to avoid it has been perhaps the most consistently followed principle of my entire life), I started listening to the local Latin Pop station. That was the year of "Te Quiero" that, flipping between pop, hip-hop, and Latin stations on Phoenix highways, I heard as consonant with "Love in This Club" by Usher and Young Jeezy, "Can't Believe It" by T-Pain and Lil Wayne, and "Sexy Can I" by Ray Jay and Yung Berg; a thumping beat with twinkly accents over which a smooth-voiced singer pitched uncomplicated woo, with rap verses offering rhythmic but not emotional variation.

With distance I understand "Te Quiero" as a reggaetón romántica, a combination of modes it certainly did not pioneer, but the success of which was undoubtedly influential on the trajectory of reggaetón over the following decade. It was number one for twenty weeks all told, and was tied with "A Puro Dolor" and "Me Enamora" for second-longest #1 reign (after "La Tortura") until the streaming era changed all chart calculations. That rarified company holds a clue to its success: like "La Tortura," it's a reggaetón song; like "A Puro Dolor" it's by a cute, sweet-voiced young man; like "Me Enamora" it's an uncomplicated love song. Virtually all of the streaming-era songs which will surpass their records will be all three.

Félix Danilo Gómez Bosquez was born in Panama City, where, like many young Afro-Panamanians, he grew up in love with the reggaetón sound that had first been developed by Panamanian dancehall toasters in the late 80s and early 90s before being adopted and consolidated in urban Puerto Rico. His imitations of Jamaican dancehall toasters starting in the late 90s earned him the questionable MC name of Nigga among Panamanian reggaetoneros, but when he was signed by EMI, he was advised to use a shortened version of his first name, Flex, for international releases.

He wasn't quite a one-trick pony: he'll appear here again. But compared to the Puerto Rican reggaetoneros who are his contemporaries, people like Wisin y Yandel, Don Omar, or Daddy Yankee, he didn't change with the times: all of his first three records included the English words Romantic Style. "Te Quiero" is certainly romantic, in a puppy-love kind of way that there will always be a market for as long as there are young people who need pop to express their feelings. I can't tell whether it's really great, or whether just hearing "baby te quiero-wo-wo" and "na-na-na-nai-nai-nai" again after more than a decade is nice.

WISIN & YANDEL, “SEXY MOVIMIENTO”

19th January, 2008

Wiki | Video

Reggaetón enters its decadent phase. The banging rhythm is buried below layers of whooshing electronics, the wordplay and intertextuality of its hip-hop and dancehall origins is streamlined into bone-simple repetition, each of Wisin's verses choosing a single rhyme and hitting it over and over again without regard for sounding cool or making sense. The economic bubble of the mid 2000s was in full effect: it was the era of "My Humps," of Soulja Boy Tell 'Em, of Two and a Half Men -- the week before "Sexy Movimiento," another superb single that closely resembles its ethos of stupidly horny excess was released: "Low" by Flo Rida featuring T-Pain.

The heist-driven music video closely apes the style of the Fast and Furious movies, and it's not a coincidence that the stylized W and Y on the single cover resemble a high-end automobile logo. The aesthetics of the automobile industry, especially the testosterone-marketed muscle-car sector, are those adopted by the trio of name producers -- Nesty, Victor "El Nasi" and Marioso -- necessary to give the song its gleaming finish: a powerful engine, velvety shock absorbers, chrome detailing, the sense that it could run forever without getting tired. Even Yandel's voice, not yet treated with the flanged AutoTune that will overrun the genre within a year, is filtered and doubled as if in imitation of thrumming pistons.

It's extremely macho music, but like the aforementioned film franchise its hypermasculinity is not overtly toxic: to the extent that there's a coherent thought in the lyrics, it's appreciation of feminine beauty, fascination, and self-possession. Although even the video spends as little time as possible on the curves of the female models, preferring to showcase Wisin and Yandel's exquisitely-tailored good looks: they are firmly aware of their audience, and at least in their big pop singles are not above catering to it.

JUAN LUIS GUERRA Y 440, “LA LLAVE DE MI CORAZÓN”

31st March, 2007

Wiki | Video

The moment has perhaps never been riper for one of Juan Luis Guerra's hyperliterate, musically inventive, and shrewdly contemporary songs to make a return to this travelogue. Alejandro Sanz (like Shakira, from an entirely different direction) is one of his few peers in terms of intellectual sophistication, and the rise of reggaetón, the first post-hip-hop Latin music form, means that neither his Caribbeanness nor his engagement with the contemporary has to be watered down for mass appeal.

It doesn't hurt that this song presses down on two nostalgia buttons at once: its merengue foundation bears 1950s mambo horn charts, while Guerra's dense, motormouthed lyrics are undeniably post-hip-hop, though for a rather more old-fashioned value of hip-hop than the younger reggaetoneros might recognize; it's much more patter song than boom-bap. But Guerra isn't just mixing Dominican merengue and Cuban mambo (which would develop, in Puerto Rican New York, into salsa), he's also delivering half the lyrics in English, and particularly a formalized pop-song kind of English which listeners to old rock & roll, doo-wop, or British Invasion records would recognize. The effect is kind of a mashup of all the different kinds of music he might have heard on the radio as a young child, energetic as hell and supporting a typically screwball lyric about a guy calling into a radio psychologist who gives love advice to talk about the girl he met online.

Because it's 2007, online dating is going mainstream (although Guerra was broaching the topic here a decade ago), and even though the video casts the caller as an overweight dude (and a young Zoe Saldaña as the out-of-his-league object of his affections), it's not mean-spirited: once he enters the black-and-white nightclub space where Guerra y 440 are playing, he's as dapper and smooth as anyone else, which is part of the point of the throwback music: elegance isn't an inherent virtue but a stylistic choice, and the contemporary is capacious enough to contain whatever of the past we still find useful.

HÉCTOR EL FATHER, “SOLA”

3rd February, 2007

Wiki | Video

2007 opens with another moody, minor-key reggaetón from a long-serving pioneer in the genre. Héctor El Father and Tito El Bambino had been performing as Héctor y Tito since 1996, making a name for themselves in Latin rap and reggaetón circles until they split up in 2004. Héctor's solo career exploded; he signed up with Jay-Z under the imprint Roc-La-Familia, which no doubt played a role in this song getting to #1: these were the peak Roc-A-Fella years.

But after only two more years in the limelight, Héctor would step away from reggaetón, turning his MC name literal by becoming an evangelical minister. He is still a significant presence in Puerto Rico's Christian media, preaching over the radio.

There's nothing particularly sacred about this song, but it is, perhaps inevitably, sanctimonious. As a message song primarily in the second person, addressing a woman in an abusive relationship from the point of view of the man who "loves" her and is miserable watching her suffer, there's an undercurrent of victim-blaming (of the "just leave him" variety) and a heavy focus on his own feelings rather than any actual support for her. But no doubt it was still originally heard as a socially conscious song -- acknowledging the damage that men do to women wasn't exactly high on original-recipe reggaetón's priorities -- and I'm sure people in situations I've never been in have used it for solace or courage.

The fragments of repeated melody, bellowed in Héctor's doleful baritone, turn the dembow pulse into a persistent knocking rather than an invitation to dance. Every subaltern genre begins as sex-and-violence dance music and is turned into emotionally cathartic music over time. If I'm not particularly impressed by this entry in the transition reggaetón was making into expressing the full range of human emotions, it was still part of a necessary movement. Crudely-expressed sentimentalism is part of every genre too.

SHAKIRA FT. WYCLEF JEAN, “HIPS DON'T LIE”

27th May, 2006

Wiki | Video

"Refugees run the seas cause we own our own boats."

Well, Jesus Christ.

Of course I'm thinking about all the stories, all the photos, all the statistics I've seen about Syrian and Libyan and Sudanese and Colombian and Honduran and Burmese and Tibetan refugees since 2006. Of course I'm thinking about the parallels that are being inexorably drawn between rising anti-refugee sentiment in the US and Europe and the doors which were slammed in the faces of German Jews during the lead-up to the Holocaust. Of course I'm aching with a bone-deep misery over the gap between the triumphant utopianism of pop and the squalid murderousness of the actual world.

I understand that, faced with that gap, one reasonable response is to reject pop as a hollow illusion, an opiate of the masses, Huxley's soma drip-fed into our veins to keep us pacified and unprotesting while Orwell's Big Brother raids our pockets for its unending wars. The squalid murderousness is the fact: triumphant utopianism is a useless and possibly dangerous fiction that obscures our view of reality, reassuring us that everything turns out for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Well, maybe. But Huxley and Orwell aren't the only midcentury British writers to engage with the effects of totalitarianism on the human spirit. In The Silver Chair, one of his books for children, C. S. Lewis includes a sequence in which the adventuring heroes are lulled into a trance by the Queen of the Underworld, who induces them to believe that their memories of the Overland, including vegetation and the cosmos, are entirely made up, a story they've been telling each other, and that no world but hers, hewn from rock and glimmering fragilely in the endless darkness within the earth, exists. The spell is only broken when the gloomy, sensible, semi-amphibious character Puddleglum stamps out her fire, and makes the following speech:

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

Philosophically it's unconvincing -- the argument that because humans can imagine a better world than this one, one must exist, is a very debased theodicy -- but poetically it's magnificent. That, I think, is why I will always return to pop: because it can, and almost necessarily does, imagine radically better ways of living and relating to one another than exist today. But they can; four babies dreaming can't make Narnia exist, but millions of Black, brown, and poor folk working together can reshape the world. It's not going to be easy: all extant power structures and our long inheritance of human inequality are arrayed against us. But we have resources they don't: beauty, and joy, and community, and an equally long inheritance of human resilience and creativity.

That inheritance is on magnificent display in this song, one of the most purely perfect pop songs of the decade. Of course when I say pure I don't mean that it's not complex: a vast array of musical traditions, technological interpolations, and yes, capitalist funding went into it. Supposedly beginning life as a sketch of a song called "Lips Don't Lie" with which Wyclef unsuccessfully tried to tempt Lauryn Hill into a Fugees reunion, it was eventually included on the 2004 soundtrack to Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights as "Dance Like This", a duet with Puerto Rican singer Claudette Ortiz. Listen to that, and you can hear the basic framework of the song, including the unmistakable sample of the trumpet flourish from Jerry Rivera's "Amores Como el Nuestro", but it just circles around itself over and over again, a mime of mutual seduction in which Ortiz sounds utterly anonymous and the song itself sounds bored, trailing off without ever having landed.

So when Shakira's label reached out to him for a remix to extend the life of "La Tortura", Wyclef said he had a better song that she would be perfect for. She rewrote the female duet partner's lyrics in her inimitably unidiomatic English and beefed up the production with Wyclef's producer Jerry Duplessis. Recording was done in Miami, Nassau, London, New York, Bogotá, and Vancouver; samples were cleared; and the single was released in February of 2006, three months after Oral Fixation, Vol. 2 was released to middling sales, a major disappointment after the way that "La Tortura" had boosted Fijación Oral, Vol. 1. But if you remember the summer of 2006 at all, you know that "Hips Don't Lie" was inescapable no matter where you were in the world (a Spanish version was also released, but I've never met anyone who heard it). 2006 was the absolute nadir of my engagement with contemporary pop music, and even I loved it.

I love it more now, twelve years later, as the world has grown crueller and more hateful toward the refugees Wyclef keeps repping in the song, as outright hatred (rather than ignorance) of Hispanic and Caribbean culture has grown more vocal and regularized in the Trump era even while Spanish-language and Spanish-English hybrids have become the lingua franca of international pop. The boiling insanity of xenophobia, isolationism, and apocalypse-mongering in the Anglosphere feeds back on itself until it becomes a white hunger for Black and brown death that can't be shocked back into sensible morality by reading stories of boats sinking in the Mediterranean or seeing images of dead babies on beaches.

As counterpoint to which a recitation of seduction between a Lebanese-Colombian and a Hatian-American, both millionaires, as formalized and mannered as a Noh play with its symmetrical verses and inevitable rap-verse peroration, might seem less than effective.

But the heraldic fanfare which opens and punctuates the song seems to announce more than a mere two-person exchange of intimacies: it is the opening of a tournament, a call to arms, a reveille, but most immediately of all it is a summons to the dancefloor. And "baile en la calle de noche, baile en la calle de día" is a utopian ideal, quoting Fernando Villalona's classic 1985 merengue "Carnaval" but in spirit stretching back to at least the liberatory utopianism of "Dancing in the Street" and perhaps even the celebratory 1902 ragtime song "On Emancipation Day" by Will Marion Cook and Paul Laurence Dunbar. (En Barranquilla se baila así, of course, and the soundtrack to liberation has never been exclusively in English; but I still know the Anglophone canon best.)

Of course it can go either way: the organization of culture purely by the logic of capital means that oppressor as well as oppressed can draw cheer, comfort, and hope from subaltern popular music. Which is why the ground is always shifting, why yesterday's utopian promise is today's banal muzak, why every triumph is also on some level a surrender. Like Carnival itself, a Dionysian space carved out of the Church calendar which only reinforces its control over all the rest of the year, pop has been assigned its quarter, and the eschatological promise it makes of dancing in the streets day and night, when the shackles of labor and the promise of state violence have finally been smashed, can only be an endlessly deferred IOU. Until it isn't. Lord haste the day.

No fighting.

WISIN & YANDEL, “LLAMÉ PA' VERTE (BAILANDO SEXY)”

1st April, 2006

Wiki | Video

One of the reasons for doing this project is to tease out unexpected resonances. So rather than comparing "Llamé Pa' Verte" to "Rompe," its immediate predecessor in reggaetón chart-crashing, I'm reminded instead of the last male duo to appear at #1, all the way back in 2004: Andy & Lucas, two Spanish pretty boys peddling Idol-approved sentimental nostrums. It's not just "real," "raw" music as opposed to "manufactured," "telegenic" pop: Juan Luis "Wisin" Morera Luna and Llandell "Yandel" Veguilla Malavé, rough-voiced rapper and smooth-voiced singer respectively, are if anything better-looking than the rather callow teen pin-ups Andy and Lucas; Yandel in particular serves such excellent smolder that he very nearly outclasses the hip-thrusting bikini-clad models in the video.

It's not even a forthright representation of adult sexuality as opposed to fanciful youthful ideas about romance: dance music is certainly a stylized representation of sexual activity, but the stylization is just as important as the sex. Yes, Wisin and Yandel play booty-calling ("Llamé pa' verte" means "I called t' see you") horndogs, Yandel's chorus extremely unambiguous about the sexual metaphor of the dembow rhythm ("a ella le encanta como lo hago y le doy" -- "she loves how I do it and give it") while Wisin's verses are only slightly more clever in their entendres ("yo tengo la crema pa' tu piquiña" -- "I have the cream for your itch"). In its way, it's just as hyperbolic and idealistic as Andy & Lucas, only making grandiose, exaggerated claims about sexual competence rather than the similarly grandiose claims about emotional competence and eternal devotion that romantic balladry promises.

Perhaps it's simply more realistic: love cannot be guaranteed, but sex can, so reggaetón (especially early, up-from-the-streets reggaetón) concentrates on the latter: not just because of its inherent attractions, but primarily because of its fungibility. Every reggaetonero, like every rapper and dancehall toaster before them, is, before anything else, a capitalist. Which is what makes this, even more than "Rompe," the first street-level reggaetón #1, with no concessions given to the pop market. With nearly a third of the track left to go, Wisin begins to shout out the track's producers and brag about how many records they've sold, the kind of coda designed for a DJ to fade into the next song.

If your primary conception of music consumption revolves (like mine) around songs as discrete units, every mp3 or stream functioning like an imaginary 45-r.p.m. record, this kind of extra-musical information, an essential element of brand maintenance in a musical world ruled by mixes and soundsystems, takes some getting used to; but pop music doesn't belongs to the bedroom listener carefully placing the stylus on "Surfer Girl" any more (and probably much less) than it belongs to the basement raver screaming to be heard over the bass of a song they'd never know the name of if its performers didn't shout it at them repeatedly. Buckle up; the new world is only starting.

DADDY YANKEE, “ROMPE”

10th December, 2005

Wiki | Video

Are. You. Reeeaaadddy?

The reggaetón rhythm has appeared twice before on this travelogue: once as novelty and once as auteurist pop. But here, the final barrier falls, and its true, "género urbano," form shows through.

Ramón Luis Ayala Rodríguez, born in the dense urban jungle of San Juan and a participant in Puerto Rico's nascent hip-hop scene since his adolescence in the early 90s, adopted the nom de mic "Yankee" early on, a reference to the authoritativeness he sought to claim for his own as a young colonized subject. He was probably the first person to use the word "reggaetón" (a slang formation which just means "big reggae") while improvising on a 1994 mixtape. He was already a seasoned veteran of the streets, having seen his baseball coach shot in front of him at six years old, and having caught a stray bullet himself while taking a break from rapping for DJ Playero. That injury prevented him from pursuing his dream of baseball stardom, so he doubled down on music, soaking up influences from hip-hop to the north and dancehall to the south as well as the quick, violent vernacular of the mean streets of San Juan. His first solo record was released in 1995, when he was nineteen: he continued to churn out independent albums and mixtapes at a high rate, coalescing specifically around the reggaetón sound around the turn of the century.

His breakthrough was 2004's Barrio Fino -- signed to a major label, with distribution guaranteed beyond the Caribbean and Miami, he called in every favor, loading it with recognizable names from Puerto Rico's urban music scene and relying heavily on the thumping, inventive sonics of producers like Luny Tunes and Monserrate & DJ Urba. It worked. It became the first reggaetón record to hit #1 at the Latin Albums chart, and in fact it charted worldwide, making a dent even in Europe thanks to the undeniable urgency and fire of "Gasolina", a chest-thumping anthem big and bold enough to make a career; but despite having enough traction to break into the Top 40 on the Hot 100 and scoring #10 on Hot Rap Songs, it only went to #17 on the Hot Latin chart. Blame the inherent conservatism of the multiethnic, country-wide coalition represented by Latin radio play: although reggaetón was undeniably the sound of the young Caribbean, Mexican-Americans in the Southwest and the older, entrenched generation in the urban Northeast still regarded it with suspicion.

It would take two things for Daddy Yankee to make his bow here: first, the widely-admired and deeply-respected Shakira would have to bestow her imprimature on the reggaetón beat, making it a respectable music for romantic storytelling rather than a crude noise from the illiterate slums; and second, Yankee himself would have to go rather broader with his appeal. In practice, this meant first commissioning a colorful, cartoonish Monserrate & DJ Urba beat that seemed to take cues from the goofy, ear-sticking beats Dr. Dre had produced for Eminem's pop breakthroughs over the past half-decade. Then DY switches up his flow to incorporate not just chest-thumping boasts and horny chat-ups but nagging pop hooks and crowdpleasing pop-culture references, namechecking "My Boo," Scarface, and brand names from eBay to Frito-Lay to Listerine.

"Rompe" is probably nobody's favorite Daddy Yankee song: it's very 2005 in the way that means that nostalgia has not yet had quite enough time to reclaim it, and it works overtime to entertain and ingratiate in a way that keeps it at a distance where a more vulnerable or single-minded record could sink down deep into a listener's affections. But it is the song that marks reggaetón's first real appearance at #1, not as a novelty dance or as a pop accent but as the music that reggaetón actually was: a ground-up fusion of hip-hop aesthetics and urban Caribbean culture, compulsively danceable, hyperbolically aggro, and textually dense in a way that pop before or apart from hip-hop almost never is. The oversized jerseys and bling in the video -- I believe this is the first time living hip-hop culture has shown up in a #1 video -- makes it clear that a new generation is taking over Latin music, and that they're not interested in the continuity of musical or cultural traditions which have accompanied this travelogue over the the last nineteen years.

But it still sounds great turned up loud, and insofar as it represents the triumph of reggaetón in a chart dominated by ballads, midtempo rock, salsa, regional Mexican music, and dancepop, we are still living today in the world that it made.

LAS KETCHUP, “ASEREJÉ”

9th November, 2002

Wiki | Video

All right, settle in.

One of the reasons I wanted to start this blog, way back in 2009, was that I saw British people talking about "Aserejé" as a glorious piece of ephemera that came from nowhere and led to nothing, and I suspected that there was more to it than that, that there was a history there invisible to Anglophone eyes. As it happens, I had never heard the song: I lived in the only major market (the United States with the English-language overlay switched on) where the song was not a massive hit, and had not happened to be interested in both pop and the broader world in 2002 -- my interest in the UK's experience of music at the time was entirely NME-led, to my regret.

It took me this long to get to it, and I can't be sorry it did, because my knowledge of Spanish girl group and novelty pop history would have been incomplete without the researches into 1977 I did in 2012 and 2014 or the deep dive into 80s Iberian pop I did in 2015. But even this blog contains hints of what would come: Mexican girl group Pandora a decade ago, Mexican pop group Onda Vaselina four years ago, Nuyorican hip-hop group Barrio Boyzz, novelty dances from Banda Blanca to Azul Azul, pseudo-flamenco from Gipsy Kings to Enrique Iglesias and most prominently, Ricky Martin's own novelty crossover.

It's the surf guitar from "Vida Loca," mixed down and looped throughout the chorus as a constant drone (and in so doing, getting back to the Eastern origins of the surf twang) that is Las Ketchup's most prominent association with current Latin pop trends, but there are others: the affection for, but cultural distance from, hip-hop (the nonsense refrain is a Hispanicization of the opening bars of "Rapper's Delight"), the acoustic dance-pop instrumentation (throw in accordion and it could be a Carlos Vives song), and even the vague Orientalism (a constant feature of Iberian roots music) is consonant with Shakira's contemporary gestures towards her Lebanese heritage.

But all of that is incidental, and possibly coincidental. What Las Ketchup are really in dialogue with is in their own country's history of novelty girl-group songs, from the unison-sung flamenco-rock of Las Grecas, whose Franco-era "Te Estoy Amando Locamente" was as heavy as Zeppelin, to the electro-pop of Objectivo Birmania, whose "Los Amigos de Mis Amigas Son Mis Amigos" was a hookup anthem for the movida madrileña, to the flamenco-house of Azúcar Moreno, whose "Bandido" lasted better than the songs that beat it at the 1990 Eurovision.

Although Las Ketchup were from Andalusia, "Aserejé" doesn't include any traditional flamenco signifiers, unless the lyrics' coding of their hip-hop-loving protagonist as Roma counts, but rather gestures towards Western European urban music. The rootsy shuffle-and-guitar of the backing track represents an early-2000s pop assimilation of 90s worldbeat pioneers like Manu Chao and Rachid Taha, in which Spanish, French, American (often via-Britain), and Arabic musical traditions were blended: if the result sometimes sounded painfully generic, that's one of the hazards of attempting to boil a continent's worth of musical diversity down to its common denominators.

But part of that global mish-mash is Catalan rumba, the urban Barcelonan variation on the Cuban-influenced "rumba" palo of flamenco, as popularized in the 70s by Peret and continued in the 90s by Spanish-pop heiress Rosario Flores (among many others). A greater emphasis on rhythm (as befits its Afro-Cuban origins) and less on florid emotional virtuosity made Catalan rumba one of the default roots musics of post-Franco Spain: "Aserejé" just barely qualifies, as its rhythm aims for dance-pop consistency rather than "gitana" funkiness, but the great joy of millennial-era dance pop was its ability to assimilate any cultural tradition and return it to the world: 2010s dance-pop flattens everything into the build-and-drop patterns of EDM, leaving textural differences as the only distinguishing characteristics between songs.

But, background aside, what do I think of the song? It's a pleasurable enough way to pass the time; its four-week run at the top of the Hot Latin chart is about right. I always appreciate novelty songs more than I actually enjoy listening to them, and my generalized American chauvinism includes the entire hemisphere: despite the length of this post, the most exciting and interesting Latin Pop in the millennial era was not coming out of Spain. "Aserejé"'s most noteworthy quality is its global success, which (like that of Psy and OMI a decade later) was less dependent on the specific qualities of the track itself and more on the popular appetite for a particular kind of nonsense in a given moment.