RICKY MARTIN, “BELLA”

4th September, 1999

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One of the effects of glancing through all the old entries in this blog while getting ready for this return was becoming very embarrassed about how dismissive I was of the many ballads that have made up the bulk of Hot Latin #1s in the twentieth century. Perhaps I'm growing mushy and sentimental in middle age, perhaps I understand Spanish lyricism better than I used to, or perhaps I'm belatedly getting the critical distance which allows me to hear past flimsy or generic production to the emotion, the performance, the song itself. (Particular apologies to Marco Antonio Solís, probably the most undeserved target of my splenetic boredom over the years.)

All this dawned on me while I was listening to "Bella" again and realized that I'm predisposed to rate it highly not because of Ricky Martin's sensitive performance, or because the soaring melody or elegant lyrics are anything out of the ordinary, but just because the production is modern and full-bodied and full of interesting textural accents. The sitar and tabla atmospherics that open it, the falsetto soars leading into the chorus, the fretless bass murmuring throughout, the gated drums, the swirling strings: this is the second most expensive-sounding song we've heard yet. The first, of course, is "Livin' la Vida Loca."

And it's really only within the shadow of that enormous cross-platform hit that "Bella" makes any sense, both as a chart hit at the time and as a pop memory today. As "She's All I Ever Had," it apparently went as high as #2 on the Hot 100, but I have no memory of it, and listening to it now I'm much less impressed with it in English, where the lyrics (and the rhymes) are more generic and the focus is more on the man singing the song than the woman he's singing about.

Not that it's a deathless love song in either language: Ricky Martin was never particularly convincing as a man tortured by love for a woman even before he left the closet, and his performance here is more remarkable for his burnished soulfulness (the song was co-written by Jon Secada, and you can hear hints of his R&B-derived melodicism, even while the tempo lumbers unfunkily) than for any emotional nakedness. Fair enough; lots of straight men have sung unconvincing love songs too. But there's a reason that "Livin' la Vida Loca" and another song still to come are the ones he's remembered for from the millennial era, rather than this.

JON SECADA, “SI TE VAS”

13th August, 1994

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

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

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

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

JON SECADA, “SENTIR”

3rd July, 1993

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Four singles off the debut album, four songs at the number one spot. Nobody else has had a hit rate like this in Latin Pop, at least not since the chart began; and nobody with comparable success disappeared as quickly. This isn't quite the end of Secada's reign — as with all earthquakes, there were followup tremors for some time afterwards — but it's the beginning of the end. What began sounding like a revolution turns out to be something of a dead end.

At least immediately. Secada did not lead the charge on Cuban-American r&b singers invading the Latin chart, but there are few recurrent figures on the chart today who don't owe at least something to his example. But we'll get to that when we get to them; in the meantime, "Sentir" is an impassioned ode to self-involvement, Secada emoting all about his emotions ("sentir" means "to feel," and boy does he ever) and how their intensity and urgency are all that matter. The you of the lyric (presumably a woman, though he could just as easily be singing into a mirror) exists only as an object of sentiment, the most important thing in the world because his feelings declare it so.

Of course plenty of love songs could be criticized on such grounds; the real grounds for dismissal is that this song retreads ground he's mined plenty of times already. Fourth singles have to introduce us to a new aspect of the performer, or they're just going to be watered-down retreads of what caught our attention in the first place, and "Sentir" only spent two weeks at the top before the chart, and the audience, moved on. Unless Secada could pull off another "Otro Día Más Sin Verte"/"Just Another Day Without You" hat trick, his days too were numbered.

JON SECADA, “CREE EN NUESTRO AMOR”

27th February, 1993

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This is Jon Secada's third single, and third appearance at the top of this chart; a skeptic might be forgiven for thinking that Latin Pop was so devoid of new ideas or talent that a single shirtless Cuban-American singing adult-contemporary fluff with a vaguely urban beat represents a tidal wave of the New and the Now, and a general dissatisfaction with what the rest of the Latin universe was offering up.

There are two responses to make to this: first, an acknowledgement that Jon Secada's charms are beginning to pale. We've seen him run through his paces, and there are no surprises here, unless you count the shift from muted, ballady piano chords to snapping not-quite-new-jack-swing beats which does for an intro here. Even the melody is familiar, and Secada's bag of tricks — oh, look, he's going into falsetto on the third chorus — is starting to sound like a cheap copy of himself. If "Otro Día Más Sin Verte" was a breath of fresh air, this is that same air after having been recycled a couple dozen times through the system, a photocopy of a photocopy that retains the outline but loses the distinctiveness and clarity of the original.

The other response is, of course, that the number one spot is a very narrow, and in a lot of ways unrepresentative, stripe on any chart. At this point in history, reggaetón was being popularized by El General, rock en Español was being popularized Stateside by Maná and Café Tacuba, and cumbia was beginning to make waves outside of South America and rural Mexico. Not to mention the first hits of a new generation of pop stars — Mexican, Puerto Rican, Colombian, estadounidense — who won't crest up to the number one spot for several more years, and who will profoundly transform Latin Pop into something modern and sleek and danceable, and change Anglophone pop too, in the process. That Jon Secada happened, during these weeks, to sell the most records, is no indication of the earth-and-sea-shaking shifts under way elsewhere on the charts.

But even Secada, in his way, was transformative: before him, it was a relative rarity to find an American — that is, a United States of American — at the top spot on the main US Latin chart. It will not be a rarity from here on out. Latin Pop is growing more American, and America is growing more Latin. This is a change which will not slow down in the years to come.

JON SECADA, “ÁNGEL”

31st October, 1992

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I couldn't say with any certainty whether there's a thin line between love and hate — none of my relationships have ever risen to that extreme pitch of emotion — but surely everyone who listens to music is aware of the thin line between enjoyment and disgust.

When I was young, I listened to this song freely, even carelessly, glorying in it as I gloried in all new gifts which rained down from heaven in those magical early teens, when all of experience seemed to be opening to me, flower after flower, petal after petal. All the music on the radio was new, bewitching, even in some sense illicit and all the more alluring for it. This was no different from any other — an opportunity to learn, to work out what this music was for, who it was for, how it worked. Like "November Rain" or "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You" or "I Will Always Love You," it was a dramatic ballad with dynamics that demanded fight-or-die scenarios, aligned with the basic grammar of action movies in which the hero got the girl because he was tougher, more loyal, more willing to sacrifice himself than the other guy.

But I soon learned to disdain the simplicities of these ballads for more problematic, ironized, and abstracted narratives. Alternative rock was an important, if confused social signifier at my high school — it would be many years before I learned that 4 Non Blondes' "What's Up" and the Spin Doctors' "Two Princes" were not widely considered part of rock's avant-garde in 1993 — and ballads, with their dramatic sweep and brimming emotional heft, were for girls and old people. Boys listened for the most unpleasant noise they could find and latched onto it.

But I maintained my omnivorous radio diet, though as it were in secret. The tapes I made off the radio had Bon Jovi cheek by jowl with Ace Of Base and Madonna and the Eagles and this very odd, impossibly shiny song which it would take me until the Internet to learn was Boston's "More Than A Feeling" (Guatemalan English-language radio was let us say unpredictable). Jon Secada's "Angel" (not "Ángel"; we'll get into the difference) was on one of these tapes, a serendipitous play several years after its first flush of success, and I internalized it alongside R.E.M., Take That, Toad The Wet Sprocket, and Yaki-Da as I mowed the half-acre backyard lawn wearing cheap Walkman headphones.

My memories of how I felt about it are as jumbled and confused as most memories of those hormonal times are. I remember singing along, trying to hit the high notes at the climax -- I remember shuddering in disgust and changing the station, fast-forwarding the tape, making up a narrative in my head about Jon Secada being totally creepy because he sang these slow romantic ballads, like couldn't girls tell he was only trying to get into their pants? I remember that it played one afternoon when I hung laundry in the backyard while the twenty-something woman who worked as a maid in the house watched, and later when I went up to write on the computer she followed me and tried to kiss me. Maybe I stopped liking it after that. Or maybe it was a different song that was playing then and my memory's confused.

Today it sounds so utterly familiar, so deeply ingrained in me, that I can't possibly hear it outside of all that loose, jumbled history. Except I knew the English-language version; the Spanish-language version isn't different in sentiment (again the translation is nearly exact), but the rhythms of its lines are different enough that my attempts to sing along in my head are constantly thrown off. But the dynamics — the gently funky rhythm underlying it all, a dreamy r&b memory of salsa, the gorgeous sweep into electric intensity, and the final release of Secada's screaming falsetto — are the same.

It's not the kind of song I would generally ever think to call a favorite, or representative of its era, or even necessarily particularly good; but when it came to an end I hit play again. Not because I had to write about it, but because I wanted to hear it again. That hardly ever happens.

JON SECADA, “OTRO DÍA MÁS SIN VERTE”

4th July, 1992

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The beat drops, a beat coiled and springy like new jack swing, cool and dusty like trip-hop, and we have arrived. This is Modern Music (mk. 1992), as up-to-the-minute and of-its-time as music ever is, and we have entered a new phase in our journey, almost audibly leveling up (as they say in gaming) into a world where the rules of combat and cheat codes are slightly different even if the basic contour maps remain the same.

And another entry in my increasingly-specific list of firsts is born: this song marks the first time I knew and liked a song on this list at the time, and listened to the radio specifically for it, and knew the words and sometimes sang along if I was sure no one was around to hear. I lived in Guatemala, but it was the English-language version I knew best; though I knew "Otro Día Más" well enough to run the two side-by-side in my head and compare the translation. Secada's bilingual songs, by the way, were as precisely accurate in translation as I've ever seen; unlike Gloria Estefan, he stayed on-message regardless of language.

And here also is where I run up against one of the first barriers of memory and experience between myself and my possible? potential? anyone-out-there? readers. Because I know "Just Another Day (Without You)"/"Otro Día Más Sin Verte" as one of the big, all-encompassing, signature hits of the early 1990s; maybe not quite in the league of "Everything I Do (I Do It For You)" or "Losing My Religion," but also not far behind. But I have no idea whether English-language listeners, whether they were there for the early 90s or not, have similar associations with the song. Was Secada confined to the Latin Pop ghetto, or did he cross over? Was he stuck in adult-contemporary purgatory, or did people dance when they heard him? There's only so much that Wikipedia can tell you.

I don't know. But in the context of this list, this travelogue as I've been calling it with rueful hyperbole, it's a sea change. Secada most definitely does not sound like Luis Miguel or Julio Iglesias or Juan Gabriel, the three biggest male stars we've had up to this point — he sounds not Spanish or Mexican, but American, which is to say black. (Well, he sounds Cuban, which is what his parents were; but if you know your ethnographic history, that's just another way of saying black.) The laid-back club beat, the soulful, extemporaneous voice which rides it comfortably, the way he sings in the back of his throat like an r&b singer instead of clear and from his chest like a ballad crooner — after the last sixty entries, it's like hearing Sam Cooke when all your life you've known nothing but Perry Como.

I don't want to oversell this; it's obviously still a very conventional adult-contemporary ballad, perhaps not all that different from what Michael Bolton and Bryan Adams and Rod Stewart were peddling around the same time, but the springy beat and the Cuban floridity of expression hold it in good stead. I can't possibly be objective about it, and I don't want to be; it's one of the signature songs of my youth, and even if I haven't heard it for fifteen years I still know its every detail with the intimacy of early love.