JOSÉ JOSÉ, “AMNESIA”

29th September, 1990

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One major downside of the way I've chosen to conduct this blog is that I spend so little time with these songs before trying to write about them that I can't possibly do them justice. Even if I'd listened to this song twenty times before setting finger to keyboard, I wouldn't be recreating the conditions under which it became a hit. The life of a pop song in its natural environment — heard in many different places under many different emotional conditions over the space of weeks and months, at the center of a whole complex of previously-received information about the artist, the pop hype cycles of the moment, and the songs which surround it on the radio, in the club, and in one's personal music collection — is so radically different from the clinical, concentrated burst under which "criticism" necessarily takes place that the latter exercise may well start to seem pointless.

Especially when I have so little to say about the actual song that I start talking about the mechanics of criticism.

José José has appeared on this travelogue three times already, each time to somewhat lesser effect. That I've ended up considering this his slightest appearance yet has less to do with the virtues of the actual song than with the fact that it's yet another midtempo adult-contemporary ballad with those gleaming, contentless keyboards and an alto sax sprinkling boredom dust over top of it. I know, in a theoretical sense, that the Latin Pop chart wasn't entirely composed of these songs, but since I'm only listening to the number ones it's starting to give me me a highly lopsided view of the period.

His voice is as polished and attractive an instrument as ever; the song is the second in a row about the romance of oblivion (though José Feliciano can't forget, and José José can't remember); and if this post feels a bit like marking time until we get to the next song whatever it is, that's because it is.

JOSÉ JOSÉ, “COMO TÚ”

18th March, 1989

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As someone without strong memories of 80s pop culture — I was twelve by the time they were over, but I had spent most of that time in Narnia or the 1950s of Beverly Cleary and Franklin W. Dixon — there isn't a lot that makes me automatically think of those years, as opposed to the later years when I first encountered most of the usual 80s signifiers. (The early 2000s were my personal golden age of synth-pop.) So when this song came on and I was immediately back to lying on my side in a pastel apartment that belonged to a friend of my mother's, playing her radio very quietly as I flipped through stations for the first time ever, searching for I didn't know what but feeling the scary thrill of doing something unpredictable and secretive, I was startled. Perhaps because my main memory of that first experiment with that forbidden world, secular pop, was disappointed surprise that it didn't sound very different from the Christian pop I knew. (I couldn't possibly hazard a guess as to what I heard then; extracts from the Top Gun soundtrack? Whitney, Debbie, Chaka? The "terrible suddenness" of Rick?) I don't know what I had expected, but it wasn't the same pastel-colored vaguely electronic splashiness I knew from Michael W. Smith and First Call and Teri DeSario; when, two years later in Guatemala, I first heard Megadeth, I knew that that was the terror and ecstasy I had feared.

Personal history aside, this still sounds very close to the Platonic ideal of 1980s music, at least in that familiar narrative in which the 1980s was a nadir for music, only rescued by the grunge revolution of 1992. The electronic timekeeping, neither quite throb nor chug, the drumpad rhythm, the saxophone from which all memory of r&b sweat and lust has been leached away (and which thereby anticipates the Kenny G-ridden 90s). I don't intend to suggest that this is in any way a bad thing, though some will no doubt see it as such — in fact, anything which can stand in so completely for an abstract idea (here, "hairsprayed commercial music of the 80s") is admirable.

In tracking José José's previous appearances in this journey, I've compared him (with slight justification) to Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. But the oblique, reserved way he delivers this song, in a tender, exaggerated croon over a bed of bustling electronics, reminds me of no one so much as Bryan Ferry. Not that I'm claiming this as the Latin response to "More Than This," or anything so foolish; rather, both Ferry and José were inspired by vocalists of the pre-soul era, and the electronic, high-gloss production which Roxy Music did so much to make the standard sound of adult pop reached a particular kind of cheesy apogee here.

The lyrics are a fairly standard, if admirably economical, narrative of how Love Changes Everything (call it the "I'm A Believer" template). He watched life go by, he couldn't disguise his sadness, hurt or loneliness, at time he lost hope of someday sharing his life with . . . (wait for it) . . . someone like you! "Como Tú" means "like you" (the comparative like, not the verb), which doesn't quite count as a complete phrase in English the way it does in Spanish — there have been at least four other hit songs since 1989 with the same title. Chorus: [someone] like you, he dreamed of someone like you, who would immediately change his dreams and his luck, and you arrived. Well done, the idealized you!

This is exactly the kind of fluff its expiration-dated production would suggest, the romantic nonsense on which pop careers have always been built, and which goes down so easily it hardly leaves a trace on the tongue. Hating it would be as disproportionate as loving it: it's just there, the soundtrack to a pointless reverie without which life would be slightly duller.

JOSÉ JOSÉ, “SOY ASÍ”

16th January, 1988

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The last time we saw José José in this space I compared him to Frank Sinatra for his exquisite phrasing and almost jazzy cadences. Well, those have fallen by the wayside now: this is not a gentle, reflective flamenco song, but a roaring ballad of self-justification, a "My Way" for the late 80s.

Though to be fair this is a far more nuanced and even classically structured work than "My Way." In fact it has more in common with the great self-justifications of George Jones in the 1970s as he spiraled into abuse both drug and domestic. Both country music and Latin pop draw on deep wells of tradition that is mostly invisible to the ordinary pop audience — this is what gives both genres a uniform sound to the uneducated ear — and they also play to their dedicated audiences' knowledge of and investment in the singer's personal lives. Just as "He Stopped Loving Her Today" was that much more powerful to a listener who'd been following the Jones-Wynnette soap opera for over a decade, so "Soy Así" gains in emotion and relevance under the knowledge that it was written and sung at a low point in Jose Jose's career, when his wife was leaving him, his manager (and brother-in-law) had abandoned him, and he was drifting into alcoholism and despair, his life an unending circuit of "aviones, camiones, encerrado en un cuarto de hotel" ("planes, trucks, locked in hotel rooms"), as he later put it to the music press.

In that light, the forthright stomp and aggressive rise of this ballad, with its military tempo and big crescendos, is less pompous than angry. Wikipedia translates "Soy Así" as "The Way I Am," but it literally means "I am this way." (Shades of Popeye as well as Old Blue Eyes.) The chorus, with its blustery bangs, goes "I am this way/This way I was born and this way I will die/With all my faults I know it's true/I never deceived you, I never lied to you, I never denied it/I am this way/And I know very well that I will never change/And I accept my fate just as it is/I never deceived you, I never lied to you, I never denied it." In fact the chorus repeats only twice, and it's over, which is one up on "My Way."

We will be meeting José José once more (so far!) in this travelogue, so I won't finish up his life story just yet. But here's a hint: as Frank Sinatra knew well, hit songs rarely do much for personal demons.

JOSÉ JOSÉ, “¿Y QUIÉN PUEDE SER?”

15th November, 1986

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One thing that tends to throw a lot of people off about Latin Pop is that we Anglophones don’t necessarily always get the flow of the stuff’s history. We usually know the US/UK history by heart (jazz to swing to rock & roll to soul to rock to disco to hip-hop to electronic to now) but the generational signifiers of Spanish-language pop, not to mention the immense variety of source musics (which tend to be blurred together by modern pop production) can be opaque to us.

All of this to say, that while in this José José may seem indistinguishable, production-wise, from Juan Gabriel or Emmanuel, his presence here is a bit like Tony Bennett showing up in the pop charts alongside Madonna and New Kids On The Block. A classically-trained vocalist, José Sosa (he added the other José in tribute to his father, a failed opera singer) began in the 1960s as a jazz and bossa nova singer who dreamed of following in the footsteps of Sinatra and Mathis, and you can hear a bit of that precise, carefully-controlled technique deployed here over the Casio presets and drum pads and cooing backup choir.

It’s a slight song, nevertheless, and would be in any arrangement: a standard lament about a woman making eyes at another guy. The catchy if irritatingly repetitive chorus translates as “And who can it be, it sure isn’t me/The one who has erased me from her heart?/And who can it be, it sure isn’t me/The one who could have given her more love?” It was written by a flamenco guitarist from Spain, Paco Cepero, and I’d like to hear a traditional flamenco arrangement of it; but Cepero apparently produced this record and threw the same tinny 80s production on it that we’ve had on everything else so far, without even Juan Gabriel’s sense of dramatic flair to enliven the proceedings.

José José was forty when this was released, which is one of the things that fascinates me about the Latin chart, especially this early on, that veterans of the 50s and 60s, like he and Rocío Dúrcal, were sitting there cheek by jowl with flashy superstars like Gabriel and pretty boys like Franco and Emmanuel. To anyone whose primary experience of pop has been driven by the American charts over the past twenty years, it’s a far more egalitarian, multigenerational affair — though the standard American pop chart was too, Dionne Warwick and Steve Winwood rubbing shoulders with Madonna and Janet Jackson in 1986. The extreme youthification of all pop is still in the future, and the Latin charts will be no exception. Let’s enjoy José José while we’ve still got him, is what I’m saying.