MANÁ, “HASTA QUE TE CONOCÍ”

15th September, 2012

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One of the few upsides of having taken forever to get through this blog is that songs that had yet to be released when I began it are able to force me to revisit and revise some of the ill-informed, unconsidered, and shallow takes I gave in the first few years of its existence.

Juan Gabriel, first as a songwriter and then a week later as a singer, was the auteur who more than any other defined the first five years of Hot Latin #1s, and I never really appreciated what made him great when I was writing about those years. It was not until his final #1 as a singer in 2001 -- which I only got to after his death in 2016, when I was finally capable of understanding the full breadth of his achievement -- that I really gave him his due in these pages.

But it wasn't in these pages, but in the waning years of the music-writing community on Tumblr, that I really revised my understanding of Juan Gabriel: my somewhat bellicose and overheated in memoriam included twinned valuations of "Debo Hacerlo," a #1 which I had done less than justice to back in 2010, and its immediate predecessor, the epic-length power ballad "Hasta Que Te Conocí," which peaked at #2 and so which I had been ignorant of until his death, when I dove into his discography and learned, to my mortification, that "Debo Hacerlo" had always been a kind of Frankensteined remix of "Conocí," the kind of obvious context that any Spanish-language listener in the eighties would have known immediately and which this blog would theoretically exist to elucidate for English-only readers. I've mentioned before how embarrassed I am by the first two decades covered by this blog, but that entry might be the one of which I'm most ashamed.

I'll go ahead and reproduce my post-mortem Tumblr blurb for "Hasta Que Te Conocí" here, in order to give a starting point for considering Maná's 2012 cover:

In 1986, he had no worlds left to conquer. (The savage wilderness to the north had never counted; it would have been beneath his dignity to mouth their crude, unliterary tongue.) The supreme center of Mexican music, he moved with ease between the internationalist pop of the capital, the classicist ranchera of the provinces, and the party-hearty rock of the border. His songs were sung by Spanish divas and juvenile sensations, he was the face and voice of the television age. With no horizontal territory left to claim, he could only build up: to pierce the sky with monuments to his own emotional torment and eccentric but undeniable musicianship.

“Hasta Que Te Conocí” is an sprawling pop edifice built from ranchera materials, but on a plan only Juan Gabriel could have conceived. An extended ambient ballad built on folkloric repetition and declarations of prelapsarian innocence serves as introduction, his perfectly-timed phrasing the only element of rhythm. When he finally pivots to the title phrase, tight mariachi strums and doomy horns build tension as he lays out his accusation of heartbreak and betrayal. It winds tighter and tighter, until the whole arrangement rises into an extended march-cum-tango-cum-montuno, horns pealing dolorously as Gabriel’s voice raises at last in emotional refusal, the tightly-constructed argument thrown out the window for a repeated, sobbing “no te quiero verte más.” The original studio version is stunning enough, but for the full, extravagantly emotional, experience see his epochal 1990 concert version or even his rendition from earlier this year, arranged and conducted by his longtime champion, composer Eduardo Magallanes.

(I will leave my reevaluation of "Debo Hacerlo" for the clickthrough; I may even have more to say later this year thanks to assorted music nerd challenges on Bluesky.)

Despite my insistence that only Juan Gabriel could have conceived of or pulled off the weird, ungainly, intensely personal structure of "Hasta Que Te Conocí" (tr. "Until I met you"), it's been a frequent target for cover versions in the years since 1986, much in the way that similarly extravagant slabs of high camp in the Anglophone canon like "Bohemian Rhapsody" or "Total Eclipse of the Heart" have been. Merengue, rock, and hip-hop versions all reached the lower reaches of the Hot Latin chart between 1987 and 2009, but the most successful covers would by Marc Anthony's faithful 1991 salsa cover (which reached #13) and, of course, this 2012 rendition by veteran rockers Maná.

I've been very hard on Maná in these pages, especially their latter-day resurgence as a mainstay of the #1 spot -- and it's a little comical that I implied they were in some way antithetical to Juan Gabriel in their first appearance here, given the fact that this cover was waiting for me -- but I have to admit that this is a sensitive, well-delivered cover, primarily in gentle bolero time until they go all Santana on a montuno coda, with Fher keeping his dudely rock bellowing to a minimum. But I can only come to that conclusion after spending weeks away from Juan Gabriel's original: when I listen to them back to back, Maná's limited emotional landscape and unimaginative rock instrumentation stand out in stark relief.

I have no memory of hearing this on the radio at the time, but like so many entries this year, it was only at #1 for a week: the last grains of sand of the airplay-only Hot Latin chart are running out fast.

CONJUNTO PRIMAVERA, “UNA VEZ MÁS”

22nd March, 2003

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Juan Gabriel has made his swan song as a performer on the chart, but his songs remain. "Una Vez Más" (Once more) was a song on his 1982 album Cosas de Enamorados (Lovers' things), and its swoony romanticism, a fragile soft-rock ballad in the original, is an unusual if ultimately congruent fit for a sound which we have only met once before on this travelogue: conjunto chihuahuense.

Mexican conjunto is a style of norteño focused on relatively small combos of musicians with formalized instrumental setups. The style of conjunto played in the state of Chihuahua is almost unique in that a saxophone is typically added to the accordion as the primary carrier of melody in the conjunto, which is otherwise almost all rhythm: electric bass, drums, and the plucking bajo sexto.

As if to underscore the importance of the saxophonist to the Chihuahua sound, the only member of Conjunto Primavera to have remained constant since the band was founded in 1978 to the present day is saxophonist and leader Juan Domínguez. Singer Tony Melendez, whose buttery, reverb-drenched pipes place "Una Vez Más" in the classic midcentury pop tradition, was Primavera's second lead singer starting in 1988, and under his voice the band became more than just a local success, slowly gaining ground over the 90s until they scored an unlikely #1 in the midst of the world-straddling pop stars of 2003.

Compare them to the rowdier Rieleros del Norte, the only previous chihuahuense combo to appear here, three whole years ago, and there's a mellowness and classiness to Primavera's sound that isn't wholly due to the cover. Juan Gabriel was writing in a self-consciously classicist pop mode, but the intense intimacy of his vocals is smoothed out in a much more self-possessed cover: even though the lyric is a drama of longing and renunciation, Melendez' voice only shows any strain on the middle eight, where the key shifts into the stratosphere. 

JUAN GABRIEL, “ABRÁZAME MUY FUERTE”

27th January, 2001

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The songwriter who inaugurated this travelogue, who was the first truly great artist I learned about for the first time because I chose to do this blog, whose voice and songs were all over its first dozen years, takes his leave of the #1 spot with this valedictory, fifteen years before he took his leave of everywhere else. I am grateful to this blog for letting me share, even if briefly, in the astonishment and adoration that millions of Latinos (but especially Mexicans) have felt towards JuanGa and his work over the decades.

And I note that the impulse which led me to start this blog almost eight years ago, a baffled frustration with an Anglophone music-crit discourse which refuses to acknowledge or understand Latin music as anything but peripheral, an exotic fringe to the English-language center rather than a center (indeed multiple centers) in its own right, was by no means diminished by the conversations which followed his death last year. Comparisons to David Bowie and Prince on the basis of a shallow sense of gender-play and label skirmishes were less than accurate, merely timely: a combination of Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, and Freddie Mercury might have been truer, but in fact comparison itself is useless: Juan Gabriel was himself, a figure so towering and all-encompassing that not only are there no Anglophone equivalents, but even reaching for them is a subtle act of disrespect, another intimation that the fringe can only be understood by reference to the center.

All right, then. "Abrázame Muy Fuerte" was the title song of his 2000 album, which wasn't a comeback -- he had been releasing music regularly since the resolution of his label woes in 1994 -- so much as a final acknowledgement that he was now ceding the pop game to the youth. He turned fifty in 2000, and (not incidentally) got all his publishing back; in the next decade, he would release only one more album of entirely new material, before turning retrospective in 2010.

Characteristically for Juan Gabriel in his late period decadence, it's less a pop song than a tone poem, its structure not a cyclical one of verses and choruses but of plateaus and builds. The orchestral pomp (courtesy of Argentine-born orchestrator and producer Bebu Silvetti) which has characterized much of his work since the 1990s doesn't enter until nearly two-thirds of the way through; the focus is on Gabriel's voice, thin and cracking and full of suppressed emotion, as he recites a lyric so metrically uneven and repetitive that only one singer could ever make it work. But it does work: and it's in this moment that I finally recognize the affinity he always claimed in interviews with the great soul and r&b singers of the US. The late Martin Skidmore on soul music is my reference point here: and the way Juan Gabriel uses the crack in his voice in "Abrázame Muy Fuerte" is as smart a use of the technique of emotion as anything Al Green or Gladys Knight ever accomplished.

"Abrázame Muy Fuerte" means literally "Embrace Me Very Strongly" (an idiomatic English equivalent might be something like "Hug Me Tight"), and the song keeps circling back to that request, or demand, or plea: hold me close, to banish the pain of my past and the awful passage of time. "God forgives, but time does not," is one of the more striking phrases among the rush of philosophical and emotional sentiments he expresses, and although in the world of the marketplace the song is a supremely confident triumph, within the world of in the song it's the rage and terror of an aging man (perhaps even particularly an aging gay man, but vanity is not limited by sexual orientation), full of regret and neediness, an open wound begging to be filled by love. It's an astonishing song, and as the orchestral pomp grows and swirls and Juan Gabriel's voice pushes into the next octave, it can be almost battering.

And then, suddenly, it's over. Breaking off almost in the middle of a thought, with the abruptness of a cut to commercial. Death? Orgasm? The final scene of The Sopranos? It's dramatic tension as an art in itself, and of course it was used as a theme song for a telenovela of the same name: what a way to kick into the first scene.

Because if it's a swan song of sorts, it is also one last challenge to the whippersnappers: "top this." No one did; although its reign at the top was intermittent (as were many Hot Latin reigns at the turn of the century), "Abrázame Muy Fuerte" spent nine weeks in total at the top of the chart, and was ultimately declared by Billboard the best-performing Latin single of 2001, outstripping Ricky, Enrique, and even a newly-blonde Colombian we will catch up with later.

JUAN GABRIEL, “TE SIGO AMANDO”

4th October, 1997

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Because it is occasionally the case that songs given exposure by movies or television shows become massive hits in Anglophone pop, it can be perilously tempting for Anglophone listeners to assume that the relationship between telenovelas and Latin pop is easily analogous. But just about any music supervisor in Hollywood would kill to have the cultural reach the most popular novelas do — far from being merely "soap operas in Spanish," for decades they've combined being Event Television like HBO dramas, telling complete stories like British series, and moving propulsively, not to say trashily, forward with the gonzo pulp energy that fuels not just soap operas but superhero comics, reality television, political campaigns, and pop music. Because telenovelas don't aspire to Art, they can share their giddy, lurid energy with the pop craftsmen who write and sing their theme songs; and if Art takes place incidentally along the way, no one really minds.

Juan Gabriel should be a familiar name in these pages by now; his own tempestuous battle with his label for money, status, and integrity works as an echo for the themes of the novela Te Sigo Amando (I still love you), in which a beautiful young woman is forced to marry a cruel millionaire while her honorable surgeon lover watches impotently. (Per Wikipedia, anyway.) It's a sign of the respect in which Gabriel was universally held by the Latin entertainment complex — for his hitmaking ability, of nothing else -- that his bleat of a voice (sounding all the rougher in these pages after the exquisite dulzura of Luis Miguel) was not sweetened at all for the signature song of a major broadcast event. Just getting him was no doubt coup enough.

It's a traditional-sounding song (not unexpected, given the both the first and the most recent songs we've heard from Gabriel), a florid waltz with big-band mariachi instrumentation, and the lyric is traditional too, a vow of renunciation and at the same time of unending love. The repeated line "Que seas muy feliz" (may you be very happy) is its own classic of the romantic genre; and if it's more calculated to make the man feel he's being noble than to tend to the woman's happiness, there's plenty of precedent for that. This is the level, of course, on which telenovelas function: grand passions, magnificent gestures, sobs all round. Juan Gabriel's voice keeps it tethered to earth, as does an arrangement that manages to be grand without feeling busy: Gabriel's sense of space and when to insert the exactly appropriate instrumental flourish is unimpaired.

JUAN GABRIEL &; ROCÍO DÚRCAL, “EL DESTINO”

14th June, 1997

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The title of their album, one of the best-selling of the year (it went gold in Mexico, but double platinum in the United States — which should tell you something about the Latin-music market in the 1990s), was Juntos Otra Vez (together again), and even I, who know very little about either Dúrcal or Gabriel, can't help but feel sentimental about their reunion. The beginning of this journey may have been entirely arbitrary, but it began with her singing a song written by him, and this final pairing, just before she developed the lung cancer that would eventually kill her, is very much a fitting swan song, sweeping, majestic, and sumptuously reveling in the fine details of their voices, both separately and together.

Juntos Otra Vez was written and performed as a stage show — performed in a sumptuous opera house in Jalisco, the heart of the nineteenth-century son ranchera movement that Gabriel is evoking with his compositions and orchestrations — and released both as a studio album and a live video. You can see the video of "El Destino" above; its artificial staging and odd light show feel very 90s, but the music is timeless, echoing both nineteenth-century Mexican romanticism and Gabriel's old orchestrations from the 80s (those puffs of trumpets are very like the synthesized horns decorating "La Guirnalda").

The song is equally timeless, a love song — "¿me quieres?" (do you love me), she begins, and he echoes "te quiero" (I love you) — built on an epic scale, meant to soundtrack an epic romance. True to Gabriel's form, however, it's surprisingly bloodless — there's no carnality to the lyrics, no passion (though you could say that he and Dúrcal provide all that's necessary). "Soy tu amigo y tambien tu hermano" (I am your friend and also your brother), he sings at one point, as though brotherly friendship is the stuff of epic romance.

All of which perhaps makes the point that it's a true portrait of the relationship between Juan Gabriel and Rocío Dúrcal. They clearly held each other in great regard and affection — and indeed neither of them was ever as great separately as they were together — but it was a platonic, professional love. Platonic love, however, doesn't pay the pop radio bills. This song was only number one for a week, a tribute to the affection in which both singers were held by the wide Latin audience; but it also marks the end of an era. Newer, younger voices are coming up from behind.

JUAN GABRIEL, “EL PALO”

15th July, 1995

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Strictly from the evidence of this travelogue, Juan Gabriel is a man of moods. He was introduced to us very early on as a singer of synth-pop mariachi; he said goodbye with an extended dance mix; he said hello again with a gospelly march; and now he's doubling down on the mariachi — or rather, on ranchera (mariachi is a specific form that generally includes charro costumes), digging into the 1940s and 50s and 60s heyday of classic Mexican music.

In a sense this is a culmination of all the backward-looking pop we've been seeing over the course of the past few years, from Gloria Estefan's exploration of Cuban traditionalism and Luis Miguel's homages to the greats of Latin music to exercises by Selena and Los Bukis in modernized classicism. Even though Juan Gabriel's visits to the top spot tend to be brief these days (this was only there for a week), he's still something of a key figure in Latin Pop, and his embrace of traditional ranchera music on El México Que Nos Se Fue ("the Mexico that left us," or rather, "that got away from us") is another confirmation that the mood of Latin Pop (as measured by US airplay, anyway) has changed considerably from where it was ten, or even five, years ago.

"El Palo" is a Gabriel original, but it sounds entirely traditional (except perhaps in the rapid-fire syllable-spitting at the end, which owes more to American funk and soul than the strict rhythm and ornate instrumentation suggest). A "palo" is a stick, and the repeated phrase which gives the song its title, "palo dado, ni Dios lo quita" is a variation on a Spanish-language proverb which means, roughly, "what's done is done" (lit. "stick given, neither does God remove it"). It's a scales-from-the-eyes end-of-relationship song, and if it's performed in a rather breathless rush as the guitars and guitarróns and vihuelas and harps propel us forward, while the glossy, feathery strings swirl above and around and the horns break in like spotlights to show the track, it's still an old pop theme, and an old romantic-poetry theme before that.

But if the instrumentation, the lyric, and the melodymaking are all traditional ranchera, Juan Gabriel's voice is not. He doesn't have the burnished tones of a Vicente Fernández or a Pedro Infante: his voice is high and thin and cracked (a bit like David Bowie's, in fact), and the sobbing wrench in his voice doesn't sound stylized in the traditional method of ranchera, but real. He's still unpredictable, even when writing and singing what might be the most predictable form of music there is. The signature sounds, harmonic structures, and cries (the grito mexicano, again!) of classic Mexican music are as immediately recognizable as any traditional music anywhere; the flexibility of the form is less noted by outside listeners, but Juan Gabriel makes it sound immediate even while sounding old.

JUAN GABRIEL, “PERO QUE NECESIDAD”

27th August, 1994

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He's back!

You might be forgiven for not immediately jumping to your feet with excitement, but instead wrinkling the brow and murmuring "who now?" After all, it's been more than six years since Juan Gabriel last made an appearance in this travelogue, and six years is an eternity in pop years.

At least that's usually what writers say; in truth, such gaps aren't as uncommon as the breathless hype about whatever comeback kid is in the news would have you believe. Anyone who's had a substantial pop career (that is, one spanning longer than a decade) has had fallow periods, especially as they get older and take longer breaks between albums, spend time with their families, and tour. The difference is that Juan Gabriel's fallow period was not (entirely) of his own choice; embroiled in a contractual dispute with BMG over publishing rights, he refused to write or record any new material until he got ownership of his songs. In 1994 a new contract was drawn up, and in 2000 all rights reverted to Gabriel. A happy ending, then; but while Gabriel's career will continue to flourish to the extent that he's slated for several more appearances as we journey into the future, he is no longer the force of nature he was in the 80s, having been leapfrogged by a generation of stars who were teenagers the last time he was in this position.

His 1988 swan song "Debo Hacerlo," was, if you remember, a profoundly strange song, sounding homemade and beat-boxy while still twisting uncomfortably through several different Latin strains, from flamenco to merengue. "Pero Que Necesidad," in contrast, is a comfortable pop song, with the rolling cadences of an old soul or gospel track. He uses some distancing vocal processing (rather like John Lennon in the 70s, in fact), and his sense of rhythm and structure is still highly idiosyncratic, but this is the second song in a row to earn a comparison to Billy Joel's "River of Dreams." Unlike John Secada, though, Gabriel is better than Joel; building on what could have been a schlocky foundation until the meter stretches out in florid designs.

It may go on too long, a few too many choruses perhaps than is strictly necessary to convey the idea of the song; I can practically hear Anglophone listeners muttering that they got it already. But after six years I don't suppose his fans begrudged him a victory lap or three; and like the gospel music he's referencing, the music swells continually, celebratorily, and we lose track of time. In gospel, this functions as foretaste of eternity; similarly, ecstatic modern dance music can have a related effect of abandon and self-forgetfulness. "Pero Que Necesidad" plods in a little too earthbound a fashion for that, I think, but the intent is there.

It's in writerly structure, not musical rush, that Gabriel approaches abandon: the chorus, two orderly lines followed by a babble of syllables spilling out in an upward swoop, is a masterstroke matching form to content. "Pero que necesidad/para que tanto problema," he sings ("but what need/for what big problem") — he's speaking in romantic generalities, but anyone who had paid attention would know exactly what big problem he's dismissing — "no hay como la libertad de ser, de estar, de ir, de amar, de hacer, de hablar, de andar así sin penas" ("there's nothing like the freedom to be, to exist, to go, to love, to make, to talk, to walk this way without pain").

He's exulting, and properly so; but the second half of the chorus extends the exultation generously to his audience: "Pero que necesidad/para que tanto problema/mientras yo le quiero ver feliz, cantar, bailar, reir, soñar, sentir, volar, ellos le frenan." ("But what need/for what big problem/in the meantime I want to see you happy, singing, dancing, laughing, dreaming, feeling, flying, they will fade away.") It's a song of triumph, even though the verses couch it in a romantic lament, explaining that he wants the best for his nameless auditor (who is even referred to in the third person, the sentiments so abstract) (or in the formal second person, which is even more unusual for a love song). But it's not the verses that stick in the head.

JUAN GABRIEL, “DEBO HACERLO”

16th April, 1988

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There are three reasons this installment of our journey is running a bit late. First, I'm having a hard time concentrating enough to write anything at all, as readers of my other blogs might have noticed. Second, I recently went through the spreadsheet I've compiled of all the Hot Latin #1s to date and I think got a little intimidated at just how many there are left to cover. I should catch up to the present in a couple of years, but damn. A couple of years. I never make plans more than two weeks in advance. And third, tackling this song in particular has seemed more and more foolhardy the more I've listened to it.

Let's begin with the dry, three-minutes-on-Wikipedia basics: recorded two years earlier, this was Juan Gabriel's last original song for six years thanks to a dispute with his label and publishers. (Shades of another major pop star of the 1980s going into the 1990s.) It is an uptempo dance song with elements of freestyle, mariachi, merengue, and house. And it is nearly ten minutes long.

We've had uptempo songs before: the Franco/Emmanuel double-header, Luis Miguel's Dusty Springfield cover, and of course Los Lobos. But this is the first Dance Song in the modern meaning of the phrase, with electronic rhythms and the sort of bloated running time that would raise suspicions of this being the twelve-inch version if there had ever been a seven-inch. But no; this is it, the song as it appeared on Gabriel's "farewell" compilation of the same name, and as far as I can tell the song as it was played on the radio in late 1987 and early 1988.

And it's the kind of song worthy of that running time. Not only does it have a hot beat that practically demands dancing (I broke into a white-boy boogie almost reflexively the first time I heard it), but Gabriel's performance, pushing himself to the very edge of his range, almost in tears, is a hell of a swan song. He pitches the opening just an emotional notch below opera, with as many dramatic flourishes as he can muster, and when the beat drops he simply rides it. It's a tropical beat, equal parts Havana and Miami (which for thirty years have practically been the same thing) the punchy horn charts which accompany it practically the only concession to the Mexican mariachi on which he made his name in the 70s and early 80s. Aside, that is, from his own near-frenzied performance.

(Mariachi, of course, practically requires being sung with a sob in one's voice. Or more strictly speaking, norteño does. This isn't the moment to get into the distinction, but there is one.)

Structurally, this song is a complete mess, following Gabriel's own circuitous route through whatever sections he apparently felt like singing at the time. There's no particular chorus, although everything gets repeated more than once; there are about five different main hooks, and though it's compulsively danceable throughout it changes tempo so many times and so abruptly that I'd imagine it would be a DJ's nightmare. (If you're feeling brave, though, I dare you to throw it on at a busy club night and see what happens.)

But ultimately, I don't have a whole lot of reference points for this kind of thing. The best I can do is gesture vaguely in the direction of Miami Sound Machine, the only outfit I know of that was making anything like this in the 1980s (we'll be meeting their most famous alumnus before long), and not even they were as garish and cheap-sounding as this can be.

Because while I don't have a lot of reference points in professionally recorded music, I'm intimately familiar with some of the sounds in this song: they were produced by the same cheap not-even-Casio keyboards that I fooled around with as a kid in the 80s: those telltale tinny "bass" notes and the upward flourishes on some "harpsichord" setting or other irresistibly recall the embarrassment I felt when I tried to show off to a more worldly-wise friend and he mocked those sounds. I rarely played with the keyboard again. (Come to think of it, that was probably the first instance of snob-oriented criticism making my revise my musical opinions. It would not be the last.) So I have instant and deeply-set aversions to some of these sounds; but the propulsiveness , rhythmic density, and luxuriant emotionalism of this song overwhelms everything else.

Even the lyric is something of a mess; he needs a love, he's tired of being alone, but he's also rejecting a lover — and finding one, all to the same thumping beat and righteous salsa horn charts. If nothing else, it's a tremendously camp performance (though by Anglo standards what piece of Latin culture isn't?), the kind of florid, flamboyant spectacle that not only invites but practically compels comparisons with Prince or Michael Jackson. The electro-soul, the rhythmic chokes and sighs . . . I can't help wondering what kind of collaborations might have taken place had Gabriel not chosen to walk away at just this moment.

It was only at the top of the chart for a week. You could hardly expect more from a nine-and-a-half-minute camp techno-tropical suite.

DANIELA ROMO, “DE MÍ ENAMÓRATE”

20th December, 1986

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This is an epochal moment in Hot Latin history: the first time that a song associated with a telenovela has topped the chart. The telenovela in question, El Camino Secreto, starred Daniela Romo in her breakout role as — well, the details hardly matter. I haven't seen it and neither have you (unless you have, in which case feel free to enlighten us all), but word on the Internet is that El Camino Secreto (lit. "the secret road") was extraordinarily popular as 1986 came to a close, and made Romo a star.

She had been a jobbing Mexican pop singer since the late 70s (her biggest influence was apparently Rocío Dúrcal, to bring our abbreviated version of 1986 full circle), and had had the occasional hit, but it was this song, this telenovela, and this album, "Mujer De Todos, Mujer De Nadie" ("everybody's woman, nobody's woman"), which, coming all together at once and reinforcing each other with a consistent vision of a woman in love aching for the object of her love to turn to her, created a potent pop symbolism around Romo, which she parlayed into long-term balladic success in the decade to come.

Her own biography reads a bit like the plot of a telenovela: the poor-but-beautiful daughter of unmarried parents, raised by her grandmother on the mean streets of Mexico City, idolizing a famous Spanish singer/actress, and slowly, agonizingly, achieving her dream of being a famous singer/actress herself. "De Mí Enamórate" ("fall in love with me") represents the happy finale of the story, in which the biggest pop star in the Latin universe, Juan Gabriel, presents her with a suitably dramatic song to sing over the credits of her very own telenovela.

Of the six songs which topped the Billboard Latin charts in 1986, half were written by Juan Gabriel; and this might be the best of them. Romo's ability to switch from the delicate sigh of the verses to the all-out foghorn of the chorus, then chirp the dancy post-chorus breakdown ties the frankly schizophrenic arrangement together. Structurally, it's not very different from "Yo No Sé Qué Me Pasó" — two verses, a superlong chorus, then repeat the second verse and the chorus, and fade, but Gabriel's instinct for flamboyant dramatics comes alive in the stunning three-octave climb which opens the chorus. In pop terms, it's a "defining moment," like the pause in Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" before she comes crashing in again with "AND IIIIIEEIIII, etc." Much as producers salivate over such moments, they're vanishingly rare in practice — so it's no surprise that Romo's performance set a standard for the Hot Latin charts which is still difficult to match; she was the first performer to spend fourteen weeks on top, and this song is still tied for sixth place in the length of its stay at number one.

Lyrically, it retains Gabriel's (and, let's be frank, Mexican pop's) tendency towards flamboyant all-or-nothing statements. The repeated verse translates: "Since I saw you/I've lost my identity/In my head lives/Only you and no one else/And it hurts me to think/That you will never be mine/Fall in love with me." The enormous shift of the chorus, though, functions as a counterweight: the lyrics move into the future tense, and she dreams of the epic perfection that mutual love will be. The majestic, soundtracky sweep of the chorus works for lines like "The day you love me I will be happy/And with pure love I will protect you/It will be an honor to dedicate myself to you/As God desires." The post-chorus breakdown, with its funky synth drops, only repeats the sentiment in an easy glide: "When you fall in love/With my love/I will at last/See the light for once."

It's that funky, cheery breakdown that sticks in the head, rather than the bombastic swell of the chorus. Perfect for a credits sequence easing us into the action. Y aquí viene Gabriela y su amor David; ¿cómo se harán este semana? . . .

JUAN GABRIEL, “YO NO SÉ QUÉ ME PASÓ”

13th September, 1986

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Last time I compared Juan Gabriel to Bruce Springsteen; a more accurate summation of his impact on Latin Pop in the 1980s would be to call him an amalgam of Springsteen, Michael Jackson, and George Michael. (It was Gabriel's world from 1980 to the mid-90s; everyone else was just living in it.) Springsteen for the connection to rootsy tradition, Jackson for the unprecedented popularity; and Michael for the flamboyant soulfulness and sure instinct for the grand gestures of renunciation and demand that pop does so well. Let's take some time to break down the lyric:

The title phrase, the first line of the song, translates as "I don't know what happened to me" — followed by "but I don't love you anymore." So far, so standard; we're in the realm of breakup song, a sturdy genre with lots of history and plenty of directions to go from here. But his rhetoric turns in on itself. "It's better to end than to go on like this/It's very sad, I know/But what can I do if today I no longer feel love?" He's starting to protest too much; but the next line seals it: "Very suddenly it's over/It's better to tell the truth and not lie." He can't be with her any more; he's been living a lie.

It's probably best at this point to refer to Wikipedia:

Juan Gabriel, when he was asked about whether he was gay, replied "Lo que se ve no se pregunta, mijo. Yo no tengo por qué decirle cosas que a usted, como a muchas otras personas, no les interesa, yo pienso que soy un artista que he dado mucho con mis canciones". ("What is seen is not asked about, young man. I have no reason to tell you, nor others, things that are none of your concern, dear. I feel I am an artist who has contributed much with my songs").

Not exactly how I'd translate it (there's no justification for inserting that "dear"), but I think you get the idea.

But that's all verse. Now comes the straining chorus: "For a while you will suffer, I know/But someone will come and give you their love sooner or later/You will see the light again/And he will never wound you/Never humiliate you/Never deceive you/Never hurt your love." That's quite the confession; few pop songs this side of Elvis Costello are quite so savage about the singer's ability to hurt.

Then: "So that you are never left alone/You need to give your love sincerely/To put an end to the betrayals/You need to say goodbye first/As I do." He's just masterful here; the soulful cracking in his voice is added to with a sobbing ranchera tone, and again I'm reminded of George Michael's unique combination of generosity and self-absorption.

Then the mariachi horns come in, playing a vaguely calypso melody with a sea-breeze cleansing quality (even if they sound a bit plastic and readymade), and he sings the whole thing again. Sure, the instrumentation is cheap and mid-80s, but with a voice like that, especially when he reaches up for the grainy high notes in the chorus, it hardly matters.

We'll be coming across Juan Gabriel several more times in the course of this adventure before he founders on the shores of the twenty-first century (just as Bruce and Michael and George would do in the English-speaking charts). But this finds him at the peak of his powers, with the world at his feet — the Billboard Latin chart started up too late to capture him in his world-conquering phase — and that his thoughts had turned to endings and betrayals, with the song drawn from an album titled Pensamientos (lit. "thoughts"), shows a reflectiveness that doesn't generally appear in the stereotypes about Latin pop. Of course Latin ballads have always been full of broken hearts and tragedy; but something this self-aware, and this relatively early, remains cherishable.

ROCÍO DÚRCAL, “LA GUIRNALDA”

6th September, 1986

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Y así empieza nuestro viaje. Promisingly, I think, though I’m curious how people deeply invested in the then-current Latin pop scene heard this.

For example, did it sound old-fashioned? Rocío Dúrcal was a Spanish singer who had been a hitmaker since she was a teenager in the 50s; the success of this song (written and produced by the massively popular Mexican singer-songwriter Juan Gabriel) is a bit like Petula Clark having a US number one with the assistance of Bruce Springsteen. In 1986. Which now that I say it, sounds TOTALLY AWESOME, but not exactly what (say) a teenage Madonna fan would have wanted at the time.

The production here is very 80s, even very mid-80s, in that not-exactly-cutting-edge way that Latin pop tends towards, at least to Anglophone ears. The combination of the rather traditional oompah tempo and mariachi melody with the drum-machine-and-plastic-guitars instrumentation makes for a pleasant tension; and the trick of strategically placing waves-and-seagulls sfx for dramatic effect is a very classicist pop move which you don’t much hear anymore.

Speaking of narrative. The lyrics are pretty great, a kind of imagistic story of a woman who’s had her heart broken sitting on the beach, then meeting a totally awesome dude in a boat and going off with him into the sunset. The guirnalda of the title (lit. “garland”) is a wreath of bougainvillea flowers he gives her, and which in the heightened romantic language of the song, makes her his queen and makes her feel divine. It’s total romance-novel guff, even to the man’s green eyes (“clear like seas, like lakes”), but Dúrcal delivers it in the correct spirit, matching the breezy, pastel feel of the instrumentation with a mostly-light tone. You can hear more in her voice than she’s giving it, but this isn’t the place to pull out the full tragic-diva stops, and so she doesn’t.

So how is this as a beginning point? I like that it gestures towards the past, or anyway towards traditional Mexican music, with the stiff-backed rhythm and the flowing length of the melodic lines. It gives a bit of solidity to where we’ll be going from here: a rooted baseline for the multiple branches and weird dead ends that are the best feature of any chart voyage. But it’s also missing almost everything that excites me about current Latin pop — it’s not particularly danceable, there’s no real fusion of global musics aside from the synthesized production, and there’s no youth-oriented attitude whatever. It’s mom music, basically, which isn’t a bad thing, but also isn’t generally what we think of as pop. Which means, of course, that there’s nowhere to go from here but the future.