JUANES, “LA SEÑAL”

5th May, 2012

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The reign of "Ai Se Eu Te Pego" at the top of the chart in the spring and early summer of 2012 was interrupted for only a week by a familiar face in a new context.

The old 1990s MTV Unplugged series, which had run its course in the US by the turn of the millennium, was kept alive mostly in international markets, where live music still had some youth-culture cachet; Juanes' edition, recorded February 1st 2012 in Miami Beach, isn't even listed on the series' English-language Wikipedia entry. The resulting album was his third live album overall, and the catalog of hits he played that night was deep, and frequently documented here. But "La Señal" was new, and as a single it struck enough of a chord with the Spanish-language radio audience that it nudged past Michel Teló's bland come-ons with its own bland platitudes.

We've seen a lot of men with guitars ruminating on life over the years here, and Juanes is no Alejandro Sanz, Ricardo Arjona, or Juan Luis Guerra (he's closer to Maná's Fher or Luis Fonsi). "La Señal" (the sign or the signal, but it could also mean the omen, portent, or signpost) attempts to reach for Greater Meaning, but all it has to do it with is the stripped-down language of rock, and ultimately Juanes' rhythnic capabilities are greater than his poetic ones.

But those rhythmic capabilities shouldn't be counted out. "La Señal" is clearly the product of a post-Jason Mraz world, and the unusual arrangement (a violin takes a solo as though this were the Dave Matthews Band) makes the song more sprightly and energetic than the bathetic lyrics would suggest. It's still ultimately a confused, inarticulate song stringing together longstanding rock tropes (freedom, desire, love, the road) into a mishmash of wants and demands, but it sounds great while it lasts.

Apparently Juan Luis Guerra was the producer for the live set and album, which may be part of why it sounds so great; but I'm petty enough to wish he'd taken a pass at the lyrics, too.

JUANES, “YERBATERO”

 4th September, 2010

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We haven't heard from Juanes in two years, and given the blandified, soothingly jangly direction that so many rock-inflected male singers have had success with since his last rock romántica #1, it would be easy to assume he would fall in line. But from the opening notes, with a crisply distorted blues guitar riff, sharp handclaps, and cumbia scrape, it's apparent that Juanes is here to actually rock.

He's still in love with 70s rock signifiers, but the tropical percussion keeps him light on his feet, and his choice of lyric -- "Yerbatero" literally means "Herbalist," and the song is sung in the voice of a traditional plant-based healer from Latin American indigenous traditions, whose "medicines" soothe the heartache of romantic disappointment by inducing euphoria and altering consciousness -- breaks more sharply with the traditional love-song lyric than he ever has before.

It's easy enough to read "Yerbatero" as being exclusively about marijuana, and the Spanish-speaking stoner audience alone was probably enough to send it to #1, but the byproducts of other indigenously-cultivated plants, from agave to psilocybin to coca to ayahuasca, fit the lyrics just as well, and the lightly psychedelic music video, as well as the guitar tone's imitation of psych-era UK rock, suggest a more generalized valorization of expanded consciousness. But even for the non-indulgers, the sharpness of the rhythm, melody, and song structure are enough to make this the best rock 'n' roll song to have hit #1 in years, probably since Juanes' own "La Camisa Negra", possibly since "Ciega, Sordomuda", and maybe even, depending on the strictness of your definition, ever. 

It reigned for only a week before ceding the floor to "Cuando Me Enamoro" again. Which is appropriate: in the broader scope of Latin Pop history, it's a footnote, a glib, self-indulgent appropriation of indigenous culture by a white singer in a very rock tradition; but as rock fades from not just playlists but memory itself, an old white rock-bred listener like myself can't help appreciating its energy and sheer joyful noise.

JUANES, “GOTAS DE AGUA DULCE”

23rd February, 2008

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Perhaps the most notable thing about this song is that it ushered Juanes into the exclusive club of those who have replaced themselves at #1 in any chart. He is actually the first to achieve that milestone on the Hot Latin chart (or the second if Alejandro Fernández replacing his own duet with Gloria Estefan counts with a sixth week of "Si Tu Supieras" in 1997 counts) -- and of course he wouldn't have done it if the Hot Latin chart, determined as much by airplay as by digital sales at this point, wasn't so friendly to bringing songs back to the #1 spot: although on this travelogue Wisin & Yandel's "Sexy Movimiento" has come between "Me Enamora" and "Gotas de Agua Dulce," on the chart it was a week sandwiched between month-long reigns of "Me Enamora."

But the first clause of the above paragraph isn't necessarily fair: it's a fine pop song regardless of stats-nerd chartspotting. Juanes' reggae-inflected rock and roll is slightly modified by more local Colombian rhythms (I think I hear cumbia, or maybe champeta, within the skank), and the falsetto crowing with which he introduces the song is delightfully high-spirited, a Peter Pan ebullience which is perfectly matched to the Never-Never Land of cheery bluff his music increasingly occupies.

The parent album is titled La Vida... Es un Ratico (Life...is a moment), which sounds like it might contain existentialist drama, but instead is full of cheerful tropical rock, comfortable as old shoes, taking the "eat, drink and be merry" view rather than the "memento mori" one. (Not that they're mutually exclusive.) "Gotas de Agua Dulce" means "drops of fresh water," one of a series of images he uses in the chorus to describe his love for the indispensable "you" of every love-song lyric: wishes that feed the heart, drugs that immunize him to pain, drops of fresh water, ray of sunlight. As ever, Latin Pop tends to be more poetic, even archaically so, than Anglophone pop with similar commercial ambitions: few North American lyricists this side of Leonard Cohen would care to pile up metaphor so recklessly. Maybe that's why "Hallelujah" is so overplayed, to make up for the poetry deficiency in English-language pop.

JUANES, “ME ENAMORA”

29th September, 2007

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We haven't heard from Juanes since the triumph of "La Camisa Negra", and in the two years since he's beefed up his sound and gotten a haircut: the success of that application of guasca flavor to his tropical rock demands replication. So this taut boogie, with verses that sound like new wave-era stadium rock and a chorus with a cumbia shuffle buried beneath reggae bop, is an attempt to be even more crowdpleasing.

The lyrics are just as much full of dopey I'm-in-love cheer as the title "Me Enamora" (I'm in love with) would suggest: the clipped, staggered tension in the music on the verses is nowhere in the words. But the easy lope of the chorus, and particularly the ecstatic cock-crow of the guitar solo, is fully in line with the breezy sentiment.

He has found the furrow he will plow for years to come: cheerful, mostly uncomplicated music that provides a not-too-intrusive soundtrack to the listener's experience: the moodiness and ambition of some of his earlier appearances here are gone. It's a synechdoche for how rock has been assimilated into the larger pop world since the 1990s: acts like Maroon 5 or Imagine Dragons don't participate in the tradition of rock as carrier of musical or emotional authenticity, and just provide rock textures to the more easily-generalized emotions of pop.

JUANES, “LA CAMISA NEGRA”

9th April, 2005

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It's been a while since we last encountered a song that, if I gave each of these songs scores out of ten, I would have given a ten. (The last one would have been "Que Me Quedes Tú".) I'm not even entirely sure I would give "La Camisa Negra" a ten (it's no "Que Me Quedes Tú," for one thing), but the impulse is there, and that counts for a lot with me.

Like many people who didn't pay much attention to Latin pop in the 2000s, I first heard Juanes via this song -- and if you think you haven't heard it, try listening to it first, because you well may have without noticing. It was not only one of the biggest hits of 2005 (eclipsed only by the next stop on our travelogue), but a generational hit: it was still being spun regularly when I started listening to the Phoenix-area Latin pop stations in 2009, and I've heard it fairly frequently in Mexican restaurants and at cookouts in Chicago for the past five years.

It's a bit curious that it's become such a pan-Latin touchstone, because it was written as a very Colombian song, Juanes' tribute to the elder statesman of Colombian guasca (rural) music Octavio Mesa, whose cumbias and parrandas were as earthy and salty as any blues or roots reggae. Because Juanes is a polished pop composer, "La Camisa Negra" (the black shirt) is not actually filthy -- but his patter lyrics keep setting up potential filth before veering off to an innocent meaning, in the age-old tradition of double-entendre. It was still suggestive enough for its airplay to be banned in the Dominican Republic. Meanwhile, Italian leftists protested it for a different reason: the black shirt of mourning in Juanes' lyrics was reinterpreted by neo-Fascists as an approving reference to Mussolini.

None of the controversy hurt its popularity, of course, and the crisp, slick production, which blends blues smoke, reggae lilt, and parranda scrape with masterful skill, makes it one of the highlights of 2000s pop. Juanes' performance, the entire song sung on the edge of lascivious rasp, is also superb: with this song, so indebted to specifically Colombian traditions, he perfectly inhabits the global rocker persona he's been playacting all along. Still, it's the Big Pop Key Change into the soft-lens refrain "Por beber del veneno malevo de tu amor" (due to drinking the malevolent poison of your love), where his voice goes from rasping to yearning, that pushes this song out of rurally-bound tradition whether Colombian, North American or Jamaican, and into the sphere of glorious internationalist pop.

2005 was the beginning of the nadir for pop-music videos in the United States; cable TV had by and large gotten out of the music-video business, and the Internet had by and large not yet gotten into it. But the different broadcasting cultures of Latin pop, especially big-budget Latin pop, were still producing inventive and original videos: and this one, like the song that soundtracks it, is a minor classic.

JUANES, “VOLVERTE A VER”

5th February, 2005

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I said not long ago that we'd hear Juanes do better than "Nada Valgo Sin Tu Amor." Peak Juanes is yet to come, but "Volverte a Ver" (see you again) isn't far off: a Nineties-style combination of rock grit and reggae flow, it's corny, but authentically corny: the emotions it communicates are sincerely communicated, if easily commoditized and hyper-consumable.

Juanes' performance at the center of the song is what really sells it, of course: his voice is as thin and strained as ever, but he knows how to use it to maximum effect to sell the song's heroic-faithfulness emotions without spinning into the kind of self-regarding bathos that (for example) Enrique Iglesias would. And the production backs him up with classic rock-band dynamics: Emmanuel Briceño's Fender Rhodes laying out a rootsy but polished bed for the opening verse and Juanes' guitar only crunching into stop-start bridge to the reggae chorus.

Juanes is undeniably a pop classicist, in love with the sounds and structures of the past, but the gloss and dynamism of his work means that he can sound just as contemporary and vital as his generational peers like Ricky Martin or Shakira. As of this #1, he hasn't yet achieved their heights with a perfectly iconic song; but one is on its way.

JUANES, “NADA VALGO SIN TU AMOR”

25th September, 2004

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From the viewpoint of the #1 spot, the mid-2000s is the most rock & roll that Latin Pop has ever been or presumably will ever be again. It's still not very rock & roll -- pop serves its own needs -- but the signifiers at least of rock have been present on six out of the sixteen forgoing songs of 2004, which feels like a kind of wave. And then there's this, the most straightforward rock song since, gosh, maybe "Ciega, Sordomuda"? (Not that anything Shakira has done has ever been all that straightforward.)

Juanes' shoulder-length hair, tattoo sleeves, and Seventies guitar solo are all valorizing a particular historicized (and Anglo-American) vision of emotional authenticity in popular music, but the glockenspiel hits on the rousing chorus show that he's paying attention to contemporary (Anglo-American) indie rock as well. Since the last we saw of him was a cod-reggae duet with Nelly Furtado, this makeover might be kind of a surprise, but he's always been a rocker, or at least he's always enjoyed playing dress-up in rock clothing. And the shifts between the slow, power-ballady verses and the rousing Ramonesy chorus are a model of how to make rock interesting and engaging to a pop audience that doesn't have automatic affection for it.

It was a big hit, dominating the last half of 2004 on Latin radio and winning Best Rock Song at the Latin Grammys and the first-ever Rock/Alternative Song of the Year at Univision's Lo Nuestro awards. (Lo Nuestro had been awarding Latin cultural achievement since 1989; that they just now started recognizing rock speaks to the change I noted in my first sentence.) And yet... it's a bit soggy, a bit unwieldy. The title, translated as "I'm not worth anything without your love," is the kind of old-fashioned romantic hyperbole that the honesty and irony of Anglo-American rock had once been understood as puncturing. It's a very Latin sentiment, but because it's expressed in a blues-derived form without the traditional emotive flourishes of Latin music, there's a tension between the joyous bounce of the chorus and the plaintive feelings it's expressing.

Which doesn't mean it's bad, just a touch awkward. Juanes has done better. We'll get to hear some of it.

JUANES FT. NELLY FURTADO, “FOTOGRAFÍA”

19th July, 2003

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Summer, 2003 was fairly late in the millennial-pop era which had first crested in the late 90s: in the Anglosphere, *NSYNC had parted ways, Beyoncé had gone solo, and even Eminem had started taking himself seriously with 8 Mile. The Latin boomlet of 1999 was experiencing its own growing pains, as the next generation of Latin pop stars were coming into their own; mainstays like Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, and Shakira would have to adapt to new climates.

This song introduces two voices we'll meet again (one more frequently than the other), and whose highest moments of pop imperiality are still some years off. But their careers, intersecting here for the first time, have run in odd parallel. Their debut albums debuted within a week of each other in October 2000, and their first hits, "I'm Like a Bird" and "Nada," though quite different thematically, showed off a shared melodic flair and deceptive lightness of touch (and thinness of voice) that meant they would both be perpetually underrated for years.

"Fotografía," as the title suggests, is in a long string of pop songs about mooning over a lost loved one's recorded image: the Pretenders/Selena, Def Leppard, and a bit later Nickelback have all bettered it in terms of staying power, but for sheer charm, the Colombian Juanes and Portuguese-Canadian Furtado are hard to beat. The thin, shuffling beat, the carefully but not intricately picked guitar, an electronic whine, and eventually an electric buzz, make up nearly the whole of the production: the focus is on their voices, both nasal and unadventurous, sticking closely to the sing-song pseudo-reggae template. Which sounds like a formula for dullness, but Juanes' melodic gifts and Furtado's surprisingly excellent Spanish make the song one of the best Hot Latin #1s of 2003, behind only Shakira and India.

They would collaborate again, reversing the ft. credit on Nelly Furtado's 2006 single "Te Busqué", but since it only hit #1 in Spain, we won't cover it here. But we'll have plenty of time to get to know Juanes: he's only getting started.