ENRIQUE IGLESIAS FT. JUAN LUIS GUERRA, “CUANDO ME ENAMORO”

12th June, 2010

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I've been writing -- one might even say complaining -- about Enrique Iglesias on this blog since his first appearance at the end of 1995. It's been fifteen years, and no one has been a more consistent presence here, to my general chagrin and occasional grudging approbation. In great part, this is because I've been comparing the Enrique Iglesias I've been hearing in those trawls through the past with the Enrique Iglesias I remember first clearly paying attention to in 2010, the Enrique Iglesias who chose this as the lead single from his ninth album, perhaps to shore up good faith with his core Latin audience before hitting the Top 40 with songs in English featuring the likes of Pitbull and Ludacris, perhaps to ride the bachata wave that Aventura's farewell was cresting, perhaps because it was just as consonant with the jangly rock en español that Diego Torres, Alejandro Fernández and David Bisbal were having hits with as it was with bachata.

But the poorly-aged video, a montage of narcissistic schoolboys playing dirty to win the attention of their female classmates, and the fact that the song had appeared, a week before the single hit #1, as the theme song to the Mexican telenovela of the same name, are perhaps stronger reasons for "Cuando Me Enamoro" leading off one of Iglesias' most globally successful string of singles. Iglesias has always been a kind of avatar of louche male privilege, and the narrative embedded in the video, of boys as pursuers and girls as the passive rewards of pursuit, is perfectly suited to both Iglesias' persona and to the Latin machismo that he, as rich as he undoubtedly is and as sensitive as he performs being, still perfectly represents.

Juan Luis Guerra's genial artistry co-signing this crass commercialism is the outlier; but as well and casaully as he outsings Enrique on this duet, he is merely a hired gun: the song was written by Iglesias and Cuban former jazzman turned pop songwriter Descemer Bueno, and the form of the song is strictly pop, without any of Guerra's prankish genre-bending. A bachata rhythm section supports a lilting rock sway, and the two men trade nostrums about the grand acts they would perform for love, describe the depths of emotion to which love sends them, and ultimately impute a Christological meaning to secular love ("me viene el alma al cuerpo" -- my soul enters my body, a pop detournement of the doctrine of the Incarnation). It's all perfectly in line with the romantic tradition of Spanish love poetry, and the semi-tropical rhythm and irregular bursts of melody serve the lyric well.

Make no mistake: I adored it at the time. If it ultimately rings hollow a decade later, perhaps especially by comparison with what Guerra had served up on his own only a week prior, put it down to my fuller experience with Enrique Iglesias, and my vastly decreased patience with boys-will-be-boys messaging throughout media.

JUAN LUIS GUERRA, “BACHATA EN FUKUOKA”

5th June, 2010

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In retrospect the week-long reign of this song was merely a prelude to the summer-shattering hit that followed it, a companion piece in many ways. But I remember this week, because I was checking the Hot Latin chart every week in order to write this blog, and the cosmopolitanism and wide-eyed optimism this song, and especially its reign at #1, represented gave me wings. (It's only somewhat an accident that the slowdown of the chart, once streaming data started showing just how geologically-slowly actual listening habits changed, coincided with my own lack of will to continue updating.) My delight in it was probably at least somewhat responsible for my thrilled reception of Juan Luis Guerra himself when he made his first appearance here, way back in 1993.

I've rated all his appearances here pretty highly, but "Bachata en Fukuoka" might be my favorite JLG #1, as much due to my own nostalgia for the vanished world of a decade ago as to anything intrinsic to the record. But the record itself is great too: a romantic bachata about Juan Luis Guerra's own pleased discovery on tour that East Asian audiences were already familiar with the bachata, mambo, and merengue he was playing for them. The port city of Fukuoka as representative of Asia could have been chosen for the meter, but also its relative unfamiliarity to Western ears, as the sixth-largest city in Japan, shifts the focus away from busy cosmopolitan uban centers like Tokyo or Kyoto and into the humdrum Japanese everyday. Beaches are beaches everywhere in the world, from Japan to the Dominican Republic.

The recording's arrangement, with brief keyboard parts meant to evoke the sound of a koto, is elegant and dreamy without forsaking the danceability of bachata (or the Cuban mambo that the middle eight breaks into, hauntingly, eye-wateringly). The video is one of the best of the modern-era videos in this travelogue, a magical-realist short film that takes the Japanese urban landscape seriously, without exoticization or condescension. As he always has, Juan Luis Guerra feels like an adult making art who occasionally appears in between adolescents making money, regardless of the actual ages of the people involved.

The lyrics are well-crafted enough that the song's inspiration -- the after all relatively banal observation that globalization flows in all directions -- is submerged in more specific imagery, from seagulls wheeling on the beach to wearing your lover's skin as an overcoat. The repetition of Japanese 101 vocabulary can feel, with distance and age, a bit cringey (especially as younger Westerners are often more casually otaku than their elders), but within the context of the US Hot Latin chart in 2010 it felt almost radically expansive, an acknowledgement that Latin pop was, and deserved to be, as globally dominant as its Anglo counterpart.

JUAN LUIS GUERRA Y 440, “LA LLAVE DE MI CORAZÓN”

31st March, 2007

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The moment has perhaps never been riper for one of Juan Luis Guerra's hyperliterate, musically inventive, and shrewdly contemporary songs to make a return to this travelogue. Alejandro Sanz (like Shakira, from an entirely different direction) is one of his few peers in terms of intellectual sophistication, and the rise of reggaetón, the first post-hip-hop Latin music form, means that neither his Caribbeanness nor his engagement with the contemporary has to be watered down for mass appeal.

It doesn't hurt that this song presses down on two nostalgia buttons at once: its merengue foundation bears 1950s mambo horn charts, while Guerra's dense, motormouthed lyrics are undeniably post-hip-hop, though for a rather more old-fashioned value of hip-hop than the younger reggaetoneros might recognize; it's much more patter song than boom-bap. But Guerra isn't just mixing Dominican merengue and Cuban mambo (which would develop, in Puerto Rican New York, into salsa), he's also delivering half the lyrics in English, and particularly a formalized pop-song kind of English which listeners to old rock & roll, doo-wop, or British Invasion records would recognize. The effect is kind of a mashup of all the different kinds of music he might have heard on the radio as a young child, energetic as hell and supporting a typically screwball lyric about a guy calling into a radio psychologist who gives love advice to talk about the girl he met online.

Because it's 2007, online dating is going mainstream (although Guerra was broaching the topic here a decade ago), and even though the video casts the caller as an overweight dude (and a young Zoe Saldaña as the out-of-his-league object of his affections), it's not mean-spirited: once he enters the black-and-white nightclub space where Guerra y 440 are playing, he's as dapper and smooth as anyone else, which is part of the point of the throwback music: elegance isn't an inherent virtue but a stylistic choice, and the contemporary is capacious enough to contain whatever of the past we still find useful.

MANÁ FT. JUAN LUIS GUERRA, “BENDITA TU LUZ”

16th December, 2006

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Like Aerosmith or U2, Maná are more beloved by rock fans for their earlier, hungrier work than for the massive hits that blanketed the pop airwaves in middle age. But their collaboration here with Juan Luis Guerra, who is more of a Bowie figure in remaining perpetually relevant (although perhaps to a smaller coterie) throughout many shifts and phases, feels less like a quick muso-cred cash-in (like, say, U2 baptizing themselves in Muddy Waters) than the natural result of writing a very simple and straightforward song that requires some kind of folk-based arrangement in order to have emotional resonance: and hey, it's 2006, bachata is growing in popularity.

Because although Maná are the above-the-line credit, and wrote the song themselves internally (Guerra really is only a guest), it's a bachata song through and through. It's worth noting that in the whole history of the chart, the only people who have ever had a bachata #1 are Juan Luis Guerra himself and a rhythm-raiding Gloria Estefan. This will change in the near future, as the New York bachata scene coalesces into pop strength; but for now Maná are very much appropriating (not necessarily in a problematic sense) a particularly Dominican sound.

Of course when bachata first coalesced as a local version of Cuban boleros and sons in the hinterlands of the Dominican Republic, it was the furthest thing from a point of national pride for the Dominican elite, who despised its rusticity, its frankness, and its Blackness. (Listening to the earliest bachatas makes it hard to believe that such romantic music was once considered unfit for broadcast, but that's elites for you.) By the late 1980s, though, bachata's national popularity was too undeniable to continue being censored, and the switch to electric guitars and more danceable tempos kept it competitive with merengue, salsa, and the other tropical music burgeoning in the Caribbean. Still, it wasn't really a pan-Latin sound until Juan Luis Guerra became a pan-Latin star; and Guerra was never a bachatero so much as an eclectic musical genius who used bachata, among many other styles, because it was part of his Dominican heritage.

This is the second time Maná has appeared here with a swaying Caribbean rhythm instead of their usual rock-based flatfootedness; if "Bendita Tu Luz" is better than "Mariposa Traicionera", it's because of Juan Luis Guerra's rhythmic intricacy and the nimbleness of modern bachata over the somnolence of traditional bolero: but "Mariposa Traicionera" is more complex in its lyrics (even though, as the YouTube comments point out, it's rather slut-shaming), while "Bendita Tu Luz" is so devout in its declarations of love that it could quite possibly double as a Christian hymn. One more way in which Maná recalls U2, then.

LUIS MIGUEL, “TE NECESITO”

25th October, 2003

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And so Luis Miguel bows out of this travelogue. Shockingly, he does so with his best song and warmest performance since the mid-90s -- the airy, jazzy r&b of "Te Necesito" (I need you) is a throwback not only to his own pop youth, when he was a teenager covering soulful 1960s standards for his first #1, but to an entirely vanished era of music-making. Compared to the hard-bodied futurism of a Shakira or a Ricky Martin, it's irredeemably old-fashioned, a late-70s jazz-fusion dream of 50s doo-wop, all soft edges and pillowy sentiment.

Which doesn't make it bad, just out of place. Luis Miguel has never, since achieving adulthood, particularly cared about following the trend of the moment, and while that's frequently led him to artistic success (the first two Romances albums remain stunning tributes to midcentury bolero), it's just as often led to a solipsistic disregard for fashion that means he's the corniest thing in the world. In the video, he looks more like the handsome, tanned, lion-maned Julio Iglesias than Enrique ever has, and although he's a better singer than either of them, his pop instincts are just as schlocky.

Thank God he's not relying entirely on his own instincts here. "Te Necesito," as its hyperverbal patter lyrics might have suggested, was written by the great Dominican polymath Juan Luis Guerra, and the background vocals are by the peerless US gospel-jazz sextet Take 6; their lush rhythms and advanced harmonics push Luis Miguel to keep up, and he sings with more focus and verve than he has in a long time. The song itself is just pleasant, a clever love song married to a cheery tune; the arrangement makes it shine.

For the good times, Luis.

JUAN LUIS GUERRA Y 440, “PALOMITA BLANCA”

20th March, 1999

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Our second encounter with Juan Luis Guerra in four months (in chart time, not blog time!) sees a total transformation in approach, content, and even form. Where "Mi PC" was a tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of the brave new computerized frontiers of the late 90s delivered as a whirling merengue, "Palomita Blanca" is an uber-classicist romantic love song delivered as an ornate bachata. They both came from the same album, the 1998 Ni Es Lo Mismo Ni Es Igual (it's neither the same nor equal), one of the hyperliterate, restlessly innovative singer-songwriter's best-selling albums across his multiple fanbases.

The song's title has been used over and over again in popular (and folkloric, and classical) Spanish-language music: the "little white dove" invoked is a traditional Spanish and Latin-American image of purity, hope, and love. Guerra begs the dove to carry his message to a sundered love: "Tell her that the nights have not been quiet / They've talked of love and haven't gone / Tell her that I love her and miss her / That I haven't forgotten and that I've suffered." The harmonies suffusing this chorus are as crystal-saccharine as in the country-rock/soft-rock prime of the Anglophone 1970s (or maybe I'm forcing an association with the café's soundtrack of Pure Prairie League and John Denver leaking through my earbuds as I write this), creating a gorgeous romantic bed for the extravagant neediness of Guerra's lyric.

Since it's missing the complicating irony of his earlier appearances on this travelogue, it would be tempting to call "Palomita Blanca" a lesser work, but pop doesn't work that way. It became his signature love song, the song that even people who wouldn't normally care for his intellectual games and political grandstanding will happily sing along with, the sugar pill (including very traditional gender roles) to make the rest of his more modernist, idea-heavy discography go down more easily. He was always able to pull out something this uncomplicatedly beautiful; that he hadn't before — or that it hadn't been so successful before — is one more element of his skeptical relationship with the pop stardom thrust upon him.

JUAN LUIS GUERRA Y 440, "MI PC"

26 December, 1998

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The waning years of the 1990s were, from the perspective of more than a decade later, a minor Gilded Age, a global utopia of brand names and Internet startups. The great struggles of the twentieth century were over, Western capitalism and American hegemony had won, the final eradication of time and distance was at hand via the Web, and there was nothing left to do but set yourself up in a McMansion, keep raking in the money, and spend it on whatever the lords of Madison Avenue and TRL demanded.

It was a time begging to be satirized ― for God's sake, it was a time when a totally earnest commencement address over trip-hoppy washes could become a massive international pop hit ― and while novelists, comedians, television producers, filmmakers, and suck.com gave of their best, pop music rather lagged behind. Of course pop, at least in the United States, is much more likely to set the tone for an era rather than provide a principled opposition, and the occasional "Barbie Girl" aside, very little in any U.S. chart critiqued rather than egged on the brave new era of Internet commerce, upscale mall culture, and bubbling markets ― or at least, not in the Anglophone charts.

The last time we saw Juan Luis Guerra was much earlier in the 90s, with a song protesting (in an ironic, covert, and danceable manner) American imperialism. He's kept up with the times, though, and here delivers a rollicking merengue which poses as a love song in order to satirize online relationships, mass media, aspirational branding, and global celebrity. The title "Mi PC" should need no translation to even the most ignorant of Spanish, but to make it clear, the first verse goes: "Girl, I want to tell you that I have in my computer/A gigabyte of your kisses and a floppy of your personality/Girl, I want to tell you that only you interest me/And the mouse that moves your mouth reformats my head/Girl, I want to tell you that in my PC I only have/A monitor with your eyes and a CD-ROM of your body."

So far so William Gibson ― indeed so far so creepy otaku ― but the chorus is where Guerra takes aim at the world beyond the desktop, by listing all the things his character doesn't want (at least compared to his virtual love). These include: a limousine, a Hugo Boss vest, Cindy Crawford in Berlin, a palace with pagodas, Burger King, a drawing by Miró, a trip to Paris, an airplane ride, Holyfield's ear, a Ferrari convertible, Pizza Hut, a NASA shuttle, and Shaquille O'Neal tennis shoes. The venerable folk/pop practice of defining reality by means of lists gets turned on its head by Guerra formulating his items in the negative, and he plays with cadence and repetition to further disrupt the accumulated meaning of all these signifiers of fame, wealth, and Westernization.

The form he chooses for the song is very much a straight-ahead merengue, though one that's characteristically fast-paced and even frantic, with whirlwind interjections from the brass and a carnivalesque breakdown to punctuate the song's funhouse take on modern society. Which of course means that many of the people who would most enjoy its satire will never take it seriously; the vast majority of pop-culture consmers in the U.S. have long since consigned merengue, like salsa, mambo, and other trad Latin dance forms, to the bin of pure utilitarianism, good only for dancing to or for indicating exoticization. But Juan Luis  Guerra is no Third World postcolonial outsider: he's making his critique from within the heart of the Western pop system. Not only did this song hit #1, but its parent album (almost routinely) went gold and received two Grammys; he had been a Latin superstar for over a decade, living partly in the US and touring worldwide. In another ten years, as Dominican bachata becomes a more integral thread in the Latin pop fabric, he'll even be an elder statesman. But that's looking too far ahead. We'll get there in time.

LUIS MIGUEL, “HASTA QUE ME OLVIDES”

23rd October, 1993

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It would be easier to find something to say about Luis Miguel's eighth glisteningly-produced, immaculately-sung hit in four years if he changed his game up more often. As it is, the differences between "Hasta Que Me Olvides" and his previous entry, "Ayer," is primarily a matter of the production. "Ayer" was near-symphonic in its lush production; here Miguel waxes merely opulent.

"Hasta Que Me Olvides" means "until you forget me," and the verses are a catalogue of all the things he will do to stave off that inevitable day — promises of fidelity, of obsession, of self-immolation, all in high-flown language that would be a little inaccessible if his voice didn't make the emotions clear. In fact some of the lines have such complex syntax that I'm not quite sure what they're saying, and translation software can only take you so far.

But the song is less an excuse for poetry (it's always just another love song in the end) than it is for Miguel to exercise his gift for timing and phrasing; and the way he pauses and then crashes, with a rush of melisma, on the penultimate "hasta que me olvides" in every chorus is a masterclass in pop ballad singing, keeping the emotional atmosphere fraught without overwhelming the listener with technique or pushing too far into insincerity.

JUAN LUIS GUERRA Y 440, “EL COSTO DE LA VIDA”

20th February, 1993

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Now this is what I'm talking about!

Within the first few notes, "El Costo De La Vida" shimmered its way into my favorite of the songs I've listened to for this project. It's something we haven't heard before, something we haven't even come close to hearing before; even the few trópical tracks we've had before weren't this light-footed and funky, big muscular salsa or jacking dancehall instead of goosey, jiving merengue with bachata guitars and afro-pop percussion.

Or rather afro-pop guitars and bachata percussion. If it's not easy to draw a clear distinction between the dance music of the Dominican Republic and the dance music of Western Africa, there's a reason for that; not only is the music of the Caribbean more African than European or native (a mixed heritage to which Guerra refers when he sings "una raza encendida, negra, blanca y taína" — "a race on fire, black, white and Taíno"), but twentieth-century African pop has long drawn inspiration from the music of the Caribbean.

But then this isn't a song produced by anonymous, collective Caribbean, or even Dominicans — Juan Luis Guerra (both with and without his muso band 440) is one of the major figures of modern Latin Pop, and it's only the vagaries of US airplay that has kept us from considering him before now. Most of Latin America was introduced to him in 1989, when "Ojalá Que Llueva Café" ("if only it rained coffee") became the biggest Dominican hit to date, and introduced his hyperliterate, danceable fusion of merengue, bachata and highlife to an international audience which ate it up. If there's a comparable figure in Anglophone pop, it would be as if Billy Bragg had had George Michael's career — only he never went away. (Not to upset a certain bunny, but stay tuned for lots more Guerra over the years.)

"El Costo De La Vida" means "the cost of living," and as usual with the phrase there's an implicit "high" in there. Both an unrelentingly funky dance track, with the call-and-response and punctuating horns typical of tropical music, and a sharp-tongued analysis of the political and economic woes of the early 90s (although, he noted with despair, very little about it would need to be updated to reflect 2010), it was also, if Wikipedia can be trusted, a source of controversy, as certain [citation needed] listeners heard anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism in its litany of ills (accurately! see below) and certain [citation needed] countries actually banned it from airplay, afraid of pissing off the US. That it reached number one here anyway (if only for a week) is a testament to its innate danceability rather than to the radicalism of the Spanish-speaking population in America.

That radicalism: "Democracy cannot grow if corruption plays chess." "Unemployment also bit me/No one cares, because you see/We don't speak English/Or Mitsubishi/Or Chevrolet." "We are a perforation in between sky and sea/Five hundred years later a race on fire/Black, white and Taíno/But who discovered who?" All of it punctuated with chirrups and "ya ves" ("now you see") because, after all, this is a dance song. But it's also a political song, and a literary political song at that.

Not only is this now my favorite song I've heard so far in this project, the more I listen to it and study the lyrics and shimmy to its intoxicating rhythm, it's fast becoming one of my favorite songs ever. One of the key tracks of the 90s, of world music history, of pop music generally. This is me grabbing you by the lapels and shaking you: listen to this song.