RUDY LA SCALA, “POR QUÉ SERÁ”

9th November, 1991

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As 1991 winds into its final innings — one of the shorter Latin Pop years so far, thanks to the massive "Todo, Todo, Todo" and two Ana Gabriel songs — Rudy La Scala returns for a second at-bat in as many years. I'm not sure if I've changed or he has, but I find this much outing much more enticing than the last; his overemotional quaver and androgynous voice read less like baffling stylization and more like a function of the overdramatized passions of what turn out, on inspection, to be standard Latin Pop lyrics about "amores prohibidos" (forbidden loves; remember that phrase) and generalized longing.

The title translates as "why must it be," and La Scala's litany of foreordained dooms and inevitable anguishes visited upon those unlucky enough to fall into amores prohibidos is nearly as hyperbolic as his overwrought vocal style. I'll no doubt expand on the theme in later entries, but for now remember that "forbidden love" didn't (and doesn't?) necessarily have the "love that dare not speak its name" connotations of LGBT convention for a Latin audience; for an overwhelmingly conservative Catholic culture, any non-marital amor is prohibido. Which might be why it's so much sung about.

CHAYANNE, “COMPLETAMENTE ENAMORADOS”

20th October, 1990

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If you were wondering where the faintly chugging guitar in the intro to "Peligroso Amor" went, don't worry: it went here. Sure, the first sound we hear is the delicate tinkling of plastic ballad keyboards, but this ends up being more like the sort of gently rhythmic ballad that was popular in the 80s; probably the most obvious example of the form is "Every Breath You Take," but I always think of it as the "Missing You" template. (Uh, by which I mean John Waite, not Puff Daddy.)

Chayanne's matured as a vocalist from his last time round; he's even taken on some Waitean cod-soulfulness; and, more importantly, learned to sing from somewhere besides his head. Last time, of course, he was lamenting a love who would not love him back; this time he's celebrating mutual love. The title translates as "Completely In Love," but since the adjectival phrase is plural, means more precisely "[two people] completely in love."

This also marks the smuggled return of Italy into our pop narrative; the song was originally written by a brace of Italians including the legendary Eros Ramazzotti, who is as much a Latin Pop star as an Italian one, and who we will only meet in such glancing ways throughout this travelogue (so far). And once that scrap of information falls into place, the production choice sounds perfectly reasonable: of course this is an Italian ballad converted into Spanish. How could it ever have sounded like anything else?

RUDY LA SCALA, “EL CARIÑO ES COMO UNA FLOR”

23rd June, 1990

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One of the things about Latin Pop that doesn't strike the new listener as particularly reasonable on first delve is how many Italians there are all up in there. Italian isn't Spanish, as I learned the hard way inside a Roman electronics shop in 2000, and the influence of Italian culture in the Western hemisphere has mostly been limited, in the pop understanding of things, to the Eastern seaboard of the United States. But when you think about it from the point of view of an ambitious Italian pop star, it makes more sense; unless you're on the opera circuit, there's only so far you can go singing exclusively in Italian. The Spanish-language market is secondary only to the English-language market in terms of global reach, and it's the rare Italian pop act that doesn't try cutting amore down to amor at least once.

Not all of which totally applies to Rudy La Scala; he was born in Italy (and spent time in a progressive rock act there), but he's spent the bulk of his career operating out of Venezuela, where he worked on telenovelas, acted as svengali/producer for a number of up-and-coming pop stars (including Maria Conchita Alonso's Donna Summer period), and had a string of Latin-Pop hits on his own starting in 1990.

Starting here, in fact; which is as unlikely a pop hit as I've hard in some time. La Scala's unsteady, overwrought voice louder than anything else in the mix, lyrics which are lugubrious even by the standards of Latin Pop ballads*, and a production which seems to be aiming for the title of Dullest In Show all combine to create a car-wreck of a single which not only do I not like, I can't even begin to organize my thoughts around how anyone would like it. The best I can do is that he undoubtedly sounds like a guy who sang in a prog-rock band in the 70s; but not even Phil Collins fell this low.

*The title translates to "affection is like a flower," than which there could be no more idiotically trite sentiment.

GIPSY KINGS, “VOLARÉ”

21st April, 1990

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

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

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

FRANCO, “TODA LA VIDA” and EMMANUEL, “TODA LA VIDA”

11th October, 1986

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18th October, 1986

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It would feel ridiculous to give each of these gentlemen his own post with the same song — and virtually the same arrangement of the same song — so I've combined them.

The song in question is a Spanish-language rewrite of the 1984 Italian hit "Tutta la vita" by Lucio Dalla. Both Franco and Emmanuel have claimed to be the first to record and release it; the verdict of history has generally been on Emmanuel's side, as he's had the longer and more successful career. But Franco beat him to the number-one spot by a week, and they would spend four more weeks swapping back and forth; my guess is that the people who bought the single or requested it to be played on the air weren't too concerned with which version they got. (If I'm wrong, and there were organized phone-in campaigns and packs of girls whose hair was crisp with product bought as many copies of their favorite as they could find to keep the drama of who would be on top the next week alive, please correct me.)

Franco was a Cuban-born entertainer based in Miami attempting to orchestrate a pop career for himself. Emmanuel had been a Mexican child star in the 70s and made a significant name for himself in the 80s with big, weepy ballads; here, you can hear how his talent for emotionalism helps him to sell the song more passionately — feel the soul-like grit in his voice — than the slicker, more anonymous Franco.

It's a song that demands a certain amount of passion; the repeating musical figure that runs throughout is an echo of the insistence of the singer on getting his own way, on not being tied down, on the usual litany that men sing in songs like this. And this bird you'll never chain, etc. But the tension and release only end in crazed repetition: "TODA LA VIDA" ("all my life"). This song, too, is about a man who protests too much, as the closing lines admit. He has to keep telling himself that he values his freedom "coleccionando mil amores" (collecting a thousand loves) and "descubriendo puertas escondindas" (discovering hidden doors) because "tú [eres] al final la mas querida" (you are after all the one he loves).

It is, in fact, a better song than either Franco or Emmanuel are able to make it; and though I'd give Emmanuel a slight edge, with his Rod-Stewart-fronting-Roxy-Music performance, I can see why there was never a clear winner in the chart; it was al final pretty much the same record.