CARLOS VIVES, “VOLVÍ A NACER”

13th October, 2012

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This is it: the final #1 of the Hot Latin chart as it had been calculated since its beginning in 1986. Despite my ignorant speculation in early entries on this blog, it had always been an airplay chart; commercial singles of Spanish-language pop were uncommon in the U.S. after the 1960s, as label consolidation created pressure to direct consumers toward higher-ticket albums. Where the charts were concerned, radio formats were a rough but workable approximation of audience: if a song was popular in the Black or Latin communities, regardless of actual genre, it showing up on the R&B or Hot Latin charts meant something.

So Billboard shifting, in October 2012, to a streaming-heavy calculation for its flagship genre charts meant that audiences no longer counted. As an infamous illustration, the streaming switchover meant that Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" would hold the #1 spot on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart for months in early 2013, whereas on the R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart, which used the old calculation, it peaked at #34. But it had the "hip-hop" tag on streaming services, so that's the bucket it went into, even though the core audience for the music wasn't much embracing it. (And in fact it had more play on rock stations than R&B ones, peaking at #13 on Rock Airplay.)

But the Latin audience, being both more diffuse (Texas, California, New York and Florida all have very different Latin-music histories and cultures, as different as the countries they saw the most immigration from) and coming with a significant language barrier, would be affected differently. I'll be discussing some of those effects in future installments, but the most immediate and obvious would be the virtual disappearance for many years of genre variety from the top of the chart: pending the unexpected, this is the last we will see of accordion-led Colombian vallenato. Urbano -- the useful catch-all term for Latin music derived from hip-hop, dancehall, and electronic dance -- will rule the top of the chart for the rest of the decade, with glacial turnover as whatever song with "Latin" in its metadata is being played most at parties sticks around for months at a time.

Don't get me wrong, that will include a lot of great music. The chart as calculated by airplay gave kind of a false impression: because it combined inputs from widely different audiences (Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York, Cubans in Miami, Tejanos in Texas, Chicanos in Los Angeles, not to mention all the rest of the Hispanic diaspora across the country), it actually delivered more genre diversity than individual listeners were likely to experience from their preferred radio stations. Which of course made it ideally suited for my purposes, as a genre-agnostic magpie wanting to get my arms around as much Latin music as possible. But we've already seen how the airplay chart had diminished reggaetón and other forms of urbano ("Gasolina" getting stuck at #17 while a Juanes rock  anthem reigned at #1 is the canonical example) -- urbano is going to be some of the most exciting and interesting music of the 2010s and 2020s, so getting to look at it in all its explosions and contradictions is going to be fascinating.

But before that, a farewell to Carlos Vives, who will not, as of this writing, be gracing this travelogue again (the closest he will come is a duet with fellow Colombian Shakira in 2014, which will stall at #2 behind a third Colombian; but that's a ways off yet). The chart that started with the Spanish Rocío Dúrcal and the Mexican Juan Gabriel has seen many shifts in taste and fashion over the course of its young life, and if we had to have a valedictory for the past twenty-six years from someone who has been a regular presence for the past thirteen, you could hardly ask for a better selection. Always pleasant to hear from, with one foot firmly planted in the soil of local tradition but one eye always cocked to the horizon for the freshness and modernity of international pop success, he's a Latin Grammy favorite who has aged gracefully into an upbeat, avuncular sound that challenges no boundaries and invites everyone into the jolly, communal celebration.

"Volví a Nacer" (I was born again) is a love song said to be inspired by Vives' second wife, Claudia Elena Vásquez, who married him in 2008. Like so many of the love songs we've looked at over the years, it's replete in hyperbolic expressions of devotion and achievement for the sake of the beloved, the kind of vows a medieval knight-errant would recognize as proper to his lady love. Of course the religious symbolism of the title is present (that too is very medieval, which is another way of saying Catholic, which is another way of saying Latin), but it's submerged in the more human anxiety of whether the lover will remain with him.

The music, swelling from piano ballad to vallenato jig to rock & roll guitar heroics, is similarly a wide tent, with massed voices in the chorus just begging for a singalong. If it doesn't quite convince me to sing along here in the fall of 2024, that may not be its fault: the more muted, paranoid atmostphere of the 2020s can't help being a little skeptical of populist bonhomie. While I don't doubt Vives' sincerity, it's not just the sturdy, gospelly uplifting chords that end up sounding a little naïve.

RICARDO ARJONA, “TE QUIERO”

22nd September, 2012

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I loved Arjona's first #1 from the Independiente album, which I called "a literary prank in pop-song clothing," the bracingly cynical "El Amor." But it's the rare pop craftsman who entirely refuses to acknowledge on which side his bread is buttered, and this, the fourth single from the album, is a straightforward love song, with less of the usual literary wordplay and more simple sentiment than he's ever deployed in this travelogue before. It's as if he knew it would be his last chance to spend a week at #1 before the chart changed over to streaming data, and so he gave his fans the big anthemic I-love-you song they wanted -- and the video underlines this with a live rendition in Buenos Aires, with thousands of beautiful young Argentines caught on camera singing along with tears in their eyes.

Sad to say, it leaves me almost entirely unmoved -- I've made my criticisms of Arjona's very standard rock-derived production and singing styles before, and this performance lives up to every one of them. As with all Arjona songs, the pleasures are in the abstract, intellectual construction of the songs and not in the bodily surge that carries me along with them.

Because there's not none of that literary wordplay: but because it all circles tightly around the very simple phrase "Te Quiero" (I want/love you), there's less to say about it. The ultimate effect is that of a Leonard Cohen song being performed by late-period U2: the mismatch between the intelligent self-composure of the lyrics and the generic overwroughtness of the performance is kind of interesting, but not so much that it bears repeated exposure.

Only one song left before streaming data takes over and pummels the relatively diversity of genre, nationality, generation and audience that the old Hot Latin chart once championed into an indistinguishable paste. Let's hope it's a good one.

MANÁ, “LLUVIA AL CORAZÓN”

2nd April, 2011

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I've had plenty of criticisms of Maná to make in these pages, and this song is far from making a convert of me: musically it's just as generic and earnest and toothless as all the rest of their #1s. And maybe it's just catching me in a particularly receptive mood; but the sentiment of the song for once matches the heroic-inspirational tone of the instrumentation, and also is actually a noble (if still inevitably limited and flat-footed) sentiment.

"Lluvia al Corazón" means "rain in the heart," and the thrust of the lyric, that a woman (possibly a lover, though she needn't be -- in interviews Fher said she could also be a sister, or a friend) is experiencing depression or worse and expressing suicidal thoughts, and the singer's response is to be with her, to help her through it, and to give her hope. As a therapeutic strategy it's insufficient and probably even harmful in parts (the line "si te vas así yo moriré" (if you go like this i'll die) is at best ill-considered), but I've been so down on Maná that even their hearts being the right place, however clumsy they are about it, is a pleasant surprise.

But then again, maybe that's just my own sentimentality about depression speaking. I was less forgiving of bathos at #1 when the subject was neglectful parenting or domestic abuse, after all. And Maná's generic rock is no better, theoretically, than Franco de Vita's generic pomp or Héctor el Father's generic moody reggaetón; but I have used self-important rock to feel better during depression, in ways I have not used other kinds of self-important music, so once more I spend a Maná entry talking about solipsism. But for a change, this time it's my own.

MANÁ FT. JUAN LUIS GUERRA, “BENDITA TU LUZ”

16th December, 2006

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Like Aerosmith or U2, Maná are more beloved by rock fans for their earlier, hungrier work than for the massive hits that blanketed the pop airwaves in middle age. But their collaboration here with Juan Luis Guerra, who is more of a Bowie figure in remaining perpetually relevant (although perhaps to a smaller coterie) throughout many shifts and phases, feels less like a quick muso-cred cash-in (like, say, U2 baptizing themselves in Muddy Waters) than the natural result of writing a very simple and straightforward song that requires some kind of folk-based arrangement in order to have emotional resonance: and hey, it's 2006, bachata is growing in popularity.

Because although Maná are the above-the-line credit, and wrote the song themselves internally (Guerra really is only a guest), it's a bachata song through and through. It's worth noting that in the whole history of the chart, the only people who have ever had a bachata #1 are Juan Luis Guerra himself and a rhythm-raiding Gloria Estefan. This will change in the near future, as the New York bachata scene coalesces into pop strength; but for now Maná are very much appropriating (not necessarily in a problematic sense) a particularly Dominican sound.

Of course when bachata first coalesced as a local version of Cuban boleros and sons in the hinterlands of the Dominican Republic, it was the furthest thing from a point of national pride for the Dominican elite, who despised its rusticity, its frankness, and its Blackness. (Listening to the earliest bachatas makes it hard to believe that such romantic music was once considered unfit for broadcast, but that's elites for you.) By the late 1980s, though, bachata's national popularity was too undeniable to continue being censored, and the switch to electric guitars and more danceable tempos kept it competitive with merengue, salsa, and the other tropical music burgeoning in the Caribbean. Still, it wasn't really a pan-Latin sound until Juan Luis Guerra became a pan-Latin star; and Guerra was never a bachatero so much as an eclectic musical genius who used bachata, among many other styles, because it was part of his Dominican heritage.

This is the second time Maná has appeared here with a swaying Caribbean rhythm instead of their usual rock-based flatfootedness; if "Bendita Tu Luz" is better than "Mariposa Traicionera", it's because of Juan Luis Guerra's rhythmic intricacy and the nimbleness of modern bachata over the somnolence of traditional bolero: but "Mariposa Traicionera" is more complex in its lyrics (even though, as the YouTube comments point out, it's rather slut-shaming), while "Bendita Tu Luz" is so devout in its declarations of love that it could quite possibly double as a Christian hymn. One more way in which Maná recalls U2, then.

DON OMAR, “ANGELITO”

22nd July, 2006

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No sooner has reggaetón been grudgingly accepted within the exclusive club of the Hot Latin #1s than it turns maudlin and literary. Don Omar was Daddy Yankee's principal challenger to the title of supremacy within reggaetón's first explosion in popularity; his 2006 album King of Kings was the first reggaetón album to debut at #1 on the Latin Albums chart, but "Angelito" was only at the top for a week compared to "Rompe"'s three-month reign. Don Omar's true imperial era is yet to come; in the meantime, there's this.

I don't know enough about the history of reggaetón to say for certain whether this was notable as being an early ballad in the style, but it's certainly true that it was the first balladic reggaetón to achieve such widespread success, crossing over to listeners who weren't invested in reggaetón but knew a good weepie when they heard it. In that way it's comparable to something like 2Pac's "Dear Mama," a moment of vulnerability all the more notable for the self-aggrandizing celebrations of violence and excess that surround it.

But Omar's not giving away anything about himself: the voice in which he speaks for most of the song is that of AIDS, the death sentence of a woman who loved a stranger incautiously one night and whose soul is the "angelito, vuela" (little angel, fly away) of the chorus. Pop-song PSAs have rarely been more lavish: the funereal opening and sawing strings before the the dembow riddim finally kicks in on the second chorus are time-tested signifiers of Gravitas, while the spoken-word outro, which in a club-aimed track would be reserved for the shoutouts to producer and label (DJ Eliel does get namechecked in the intro) is a lapel-shaking DO YOU SEE giving the song an Aesopian moral: "Vive la vida minuto a minuto y encontrarás en cada uno de ellos un motivo por el cual conducirte en la forma correcta. Te lo aseguro." (Live your life from moment to moment and you will find in each of them a reason to conduct yourself in the proper manner. I promise.)

But while it can be inferred that Don Omar is advocating safe sex, he's cagey enough to allow the moralist-friendly interpretation that he's advocating abstinence. The background to all of this was government repression and censorship, as the rich white upperclass of Puerto Rico used morality laws to raid nightclubs and record stores where reggaetón, born of the largely Black underclass in San Juan, was being disseminated (many thanks to Eduardo Cepeda's hugely informative column on the history of reggaetón), and Omar, an international star working with a major budget (the video, shot on location in Rome, was not cheap) and already dealing with charges of drug and arms possession, was smart enough to walk the line that would keep his work free from the censor's marker.

Ultimately I find "Angelito" more interesting than gripping: the discourse on safe sex has moved so far past its banal sentimentalities that it's more of a period piece than many of its contemporaries. But Eliel's widescreen production is still pretty great, even in the HD era.

CRISTIAN CASTRO, “AMOR ETERNO”

24th December, 2005

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A former teen idol negotiating his way into middle age has several models to choose from: on one side is Luis Miguel sinking into prematurely soporific nostalgia, and on the other is Ricky Martin remaining preternaturally youthful and au courant. Cristian's choice in 2005 was to change labels but keep on plowing his usual furrow. His previous appearances here have alternated between beautifully-sung ballads (Juan Gabriel at one point called him the most versatile voice in Mexico) and uptempo jangle-rock hits -- this is the latter, wholly in keeping with the twin themes of rock and reggaetón that have dominated 2005's Hot Latin #1s.

As the last #1 of 2005, it was really only a week-long interregnum amidst the 15-week reign of Daddy Yankee's "Rompe" (as though making up for the underperformance of "Gasolina"); it will be spring 2006 before there's a new #1. But it's also a beautiful way to close out this most pivotal of years in our travelogue, an evocation of the eternal truths of pop: love is what matters, a cool voice riding a hot, prettily-frenzied production will always have appeal, and syncopated rhythms make you want to dance.

But it's also a return to a subtle tradition in the Latin Pop chart that has few analogues in the Anglophone equivalents: it could easily, with only the listener's frame of reference changing, be a song about God rather than about an earthly lover. "Eternal love" is a deeply Romantic concept when applied to human pair bonding; depending on the philosophy of life you subscribe to, it may have more theological coherence than material. In any case, a chorus like "Your love changed me, it made me the man I am/You give me everything I want, you brought me peace/Heartache never again" has all-too-obvious significance to someone like me who grew up listening to pop simulacra directed exclusively toward Christ.

Of course, the glory of pop is that you don't have to choose. Obviously people feel that way about their earthly lovers too, and more power to them. Either way, Cristian's never been in better voice, and his angelic falsetto in the middle eight is a high point of a classy if never surprising record. This isn't the future of Latin Pop; but it's a delightful dead end.

JACI VELÁSQUEZ, “CÓMO SE CURA UNA HERIDA”

1st September, 2001

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Christian pop singer Jaci Velásquez makes her second appearance in this travelogue with a song that backs even further away from the only vaguely cool sound of her first: this is straight melodramatic balladry, with none of "Llegar a Tí"s light syncopation, crisp guitars, or silky MDO background vocals. There are strident drums, wispy guitars, and on the last chorus massed-choir background vocals -- but the affect is entirely different; where "Llegar" was an expression of (tasteful) joy, "Herida" is all about chest-beating pain.

Fan gossip is that the song is a pained-but-faithful response to her parents' divorce, and indeed the lyrics are full of wounded betrayal (the title means "How Is a Wound Healed") and, eventually, reconciliation through the sublimation of faith; but the song wasn't written by Velásquez, and it can easily be transposed onto a the failure of romantic or even sheerly platonic relationships.

It's full of the kind of banalities that aren't at all banal when you're in a position to express them, which means that despite the dull production and duller sentiments, her performance is genuinely moving, using both the high-octane belt required of any contemporary Christian singer and a lighter, more emotional register that owes a very slight (but real) debt to the emotional vocalizations of ranchera singers. It's not much, but it's something.

JACI VELÁSQUEZ, “LLEGAR A TÍ”

13th November, 1999

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We've seen how Latin music was crossing over to the mainstream US charts with some regularity in 1999; one other major byproduct of the music industry's peak years at the end of the 90s was Christian crossover music, a dream that had been alive ever since Amy Grant first troubled the secular charts in the 1980s, but towards the turn of the millennium was closer to becoming a reality than ever before. Bands widely perceived as Christian like Creed and bands that openly identified as Christian like P.O.D. were wildly successful, and the standardization of all aspects of the music industry that was a feature of the consolidating 1990s meant that there was virtually no difference in sound or professional quality between secular pop and Christian music (as there always had been in my youth, when I was allowed to listen to nothing else).

So the arrival of Jacqueline "Jaci" Velásquez, a Houston native of Puerto Rican descent with a strong voice, wholesome good looks, and a willingness to occasionally be ambiguous as to the divinity of her love songs' object, on the Christian-music circuit in the mid-90s, was a perfect realization of all marketing dreams: She could be sold to the Christian market, to the pop market, and to the Latin market all at once.

The Christian market took to her immediately, as I remember (these were the last years in which I paid any attention to that world before my ongoing attempts to digest All Music Ever took over my life); the secular pop market did not, particularly; but the Latin market, less unwilling to hear religious love as a metaphor for carnal love and vice versa, embraced her too. It helped that with this song, her first Spanish-language single, she put her best foot forward.

"Llegar a Tí" (to get to you) is a strong love ballad in any context, with crisp production that wouldn't have been out of place on any Lilith Fair-adjacent record, and with MDO providing angelically-smooth background vocals (that's them sighing "y volar... y soñar"). The lyric could easily be taken to refer to a human lover: its central image, of love being so powerful that it allows the lover to literally fly to her beloved, had been used by R. Kelly three years earlier in a song that owed much to church traditions. But prickly consciences could be soothed by the chastity and wide-eyed devotion of the lyric, which floats in such gauzy nonspecificity that the song is not just a marketer's idea of heaven, but many Christians' too.

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.