WISIN Y YANDEL FT. JENNIFER LÓPEZ, “FOLLOW THE LEADER”

7th July, 2012

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The rolling timeline of this blog's updates means that the cultural meanings of the songs I'm writing about, even filtered through as limited a lens as my generally out-of-touch sensibility, have drastically shifted by the time I get to them. In 2012, I thought this song was great: it was exactly what I wanted out of modern pop, blending English and Spanish without making a big deal out of it or trying hard to cater to one market or the other, merely confident in its ability to appeal to both. Jennifer López's authoritative diva choruses gave Yandel's burly raps and Wisin's AutoTuned wheedling something to focus around; and they lent her a structural range that some of her solo work lacked.

Eleven years on, however, "Follow the Leader" no longer sounds modern, but very much a product of its time. Latin pop production (at least of the kind that interests me most) has shifted in the past decade toward grittier, more syncopated rhythms and away from the Eurodance maximalism provided by the Swedish production house Cave Music. In hindsight it's a late, and not a particularly distinguished, example of post-subprime pop, the gleefully vulgar, party-centric but apocalyptically-minded genre embodied by Ke$ha and occasionally referenced in these pages: but López's steely self-assuredness doesn't let the apocalypse creep in.

Wisin y Yandel are credited as the principal performers, with López as a guest, because its parent album was the duo's 2012 Líderes; but as a single, it acts much more like a Jennifer López song with the boys along for the ride. Notably, it was performed during the finale of the eleventh season of American Idol, where López had been a judge for two years (and would be for another three) -- and it has the generic feel-good sentiments of a singing-competition reality-show number. Wisin and Yandel's horndog personas are sanded down, and Jennifer López as "the leader" sounds more like a Zumba instructor than anyone who wields a more complicated or interesting form of power. The video, in which the three of them engage in parkour chases across the rooftops of Acapulco, is sufficiently high-energy but even less narratively coherent.

In another few years I could reverse on it and fall in love again; right now, it falls between the stools of being too far away to still feel keyed to the energy of the moment, but not yet far enough away to have gained a nostalgic glow. It's just faintly embarrassing, where some of its contemporaries have aged into either hardy perennials or underrated gems.

JENNIFER LOPEZ, “QUÉ HICISTE”

5th May, 2007

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This is only Ms. Lopez' second appearance on this travelogue, and her first appearance by herself -- her debut was eight years ago, in a duet with Marc Anthony, who (as of this #1) she has been married to for three years. And although he doesn't sing on this song, his fingerprints are all over it: the principal melody was, the story goes, given to him in a dream by Rocío Dúrcal (who had only recently died), insisting that it was "for Jennifer." So Anthony, along with a Colombian songwriting husband/wife team he regularly collaborated with, has the writing credit for the song. Which (of course, since I'm writing about it) paid out: a #1 Latin hit, respectable placement throughout the European charts, even Lopez' Spanish-language debut on the Hot 100.

But Lopez is no Dúrcal: she has a dancer's, even an actor's voice, and her singing here is more dramatic (aided of course by tense, massive production) than technically polished. There's nothing wrong with that: in fact it gives her songs something of an everywoman quality, easy to belt along with in the car or in a late-night rage over the fucker who ruined your life. Because it's a kiss-off song, and a really good one, full of righteous fury and reclaimed self-respect, a woman leaving behind a man who destroyed their happiness with uncontrolled anger and words he couldn't take back.

But the lyrics, poetic and specific as they are, are secondary to the production, alternating between quiet, tension-building verses under which plucked guitars and scraping strings burble, and explosive choruses where power chords, rock drums, and swirling strings lend force to Lopez' full-throated denunciations. It's not surprising that the production was handled by Anthony's long-time salsa collaborator Sergio George (or that a salsa remix was made) -- the punchiness and drama of contemporary tropical music underlies the whole thing, even if the tense, sawing rhythms are much more old-world than the liberatory dancefloor beats of salsa.

It's a really good song, one of J. Lo's career highlights, even if its mixture of rock instrumentation and high drama don't quite seem to fit together at a decade's remove. Writing about the mid-to-late 2000s in the late 2010s has been an exercise in trying to see truthfully: it's just far enough away that it feels fundamentally different from the present, but not far enough away for a coherent nostalgia to have accrued around it. Everything still feels awkward and unfinished, like prologue to now; remembering that it felt then like the culmination of history (as is habitual for me with earlier periods) is still work.

JENNIFER LOPEZ & MARC ANTHONY, “NO ME AMES”

26th June, 1999

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And the millennial era in Latin Pop is truly underway. From an Anglophone perspective, this means that it's the first number one from one of the biggest stars of the era; but from the perspective of the Latin audience, the really important thing is that it's Marc Anthony's second chart-topper. Jennifer Lopez, while indeed a major star in both the English-language and Spanish-language markets of the US -- this was only her second single, and she's at the top spot already -- never dominated the Latin charts the way the woman she broke into stardom by playing had. In a way it's fitting that Marc Anthony would be her chaperone into the Latin charts; not only will he (at press time) earn more than twice as many #1 hits than she will, but the marriage of convenience that is this duet would over time turn into probably the biggest celebrity marriage (with the eventual celebrity divorce) in US Latin pop culture.

The story goes that Ms. Lopez was recording her debut album in the same studio where Mr. Anthony was going over the sessions for his sixth; he, presumably more impressed by her background as a Fly Girl than in her musical aspirations, asked her to appear as a dancer in an upcoming video; she, a shrewder bargainer than perhaps he expected, said only if he would record a duet with her. He chose and rewrote an Italian ballad, "Non amarmi," with which Aleandro Baldi and Francesca Alotta had won a festival prize in 1992; she insisted on recording an uptempo version too. It was the ballad version that ended up blanketing Latin radio and being nominated for a Grammy, but J. Lo proving herself on a salsa right next to the reigning king of salsa was nevertheless a minor triumph in addition to the major one.

As with any meaty pop song embedded so deeply in a personal relationship, history has provided a lot of ways to hear "No Me Ames" ("don't love me"). There's the ironic resonance it has now, as a duet sung by a divorced couple who (if their post-breakup singles are anything to go by; we'll get to his, but not hers) are quite happy to be unlinked; there's the fulsome resonance it would have had between their wedding in 2004 and their separation in 2011, when they sang it often at joint appearances, when the emphasis was placed not on the repeated title phrase but on the way the verses give the lie to it; and then there's the simple resonance it had before they became a power couple, when they were just two pop stars who happened to run into each other and recorded a song that could be applied much more easily and straightforwardly to the listener's personal life than to the singers'. I prefer that version, because I'm more interested in the everyday uses of pop than in celebrity culture, and the pleasurable tug between "no me ames" and "siempre te amaré" (I will always love you) means more to my interior state than any far-off fairy tale of rich people can.

It's a sturdy song, well-constructed and built to dig into the memory and lodge there. Marc Anthony knew what he was doing when he picked it; even if the ballad version sounds like Pop from Nowhere (an Italian specialty in the 90s), with few traditionally Latin flourishes, that only helps it spread more widely.