DON OMAR, “TABOO”

16th July, 2011

Wiki | Video

When I wrote this blog's entry on the 1990 #1 "Lambada", I was still in many ways blindly groping in the dark when it came to hearing and describing music from a non-rock tradtition. But I'm grateful to the younger version of myself for not getting into the song's background (was I too rushed to look at Wikipedia that week?), because it gives me a chance to do it for this revival.

"Taboo" follows directly in the pattern of Don Omar's enormous crossover success with "Danza Kuduro", another turbo-slick rewrite of a big splashy hook from the Lusophone world that was itself raiding from another, slightly older tradition. This time he's pilfering from French producers Kaoma's bandwagon-jumping "Lambada," a reinterpretation of the Brazilian Maria Ferreira's 1986 lambada hit "Chorando Se Foi" which was itself based on Bolivian folkloric group Los Kjarkas' "Llorando Se Fue", first recorded in 1981.

Each subsequent version keeps the swooning melody, but ups the party-anthem quality, and Don Omar's "Taboo," coming twenty-two years after Kaoma had their moment in the sun, has none of Los Kjarkas' quality of lamentation, even as he keeps several of their original lyrics intact; but he switches from Spanish to Portuguese from verse to verse, as the music video switches locations from Puerto Rico to Rio de Janeiro -- and also inserts shots from the then-current fifth movie in the Fast & the Furious franchise, which happened to also include setpieces in those locations, and in which Omar himself appeared.

Music as an extruded byproduct of international corporate entertainment synergy is more or less representative of where things stood in the early 2010s. The recording won "Urban Song of the Year" at the ASCAP awards, a traditional recognition of revenue generated; but despite drawing from a rich history, it was a terminus, a dead end that led to nothing more; even the later return to reggaetón that raided Latin music history left it alone.

And why is it called "Taboo"? Because of the "forbidden dance" press legend around the lambada, presumably. Everything else about it is shiny and ersatz; of course you print the legend.

WISIN & YANDEL, “PAM PAM”

4th November, 2006

Wiki | Video

It made sense, during reggaetón's first imperial period, when many observers considered it a flash in the pan, a novelty that would be finished in a season or two as the Latin youth audience moved on to the next shiny thing, that one of the hits of the era would join the dots to a flash in the pan of a previous generation. If you're not listening for it, it might be easy to miss the pitched-down flute from Bolivian folklorico group's 1981 rendition of "Llorando Se Fué" in the mix, playing a melody last heard on this blog as played by an accordion in French dance-pop group Kaoma's 1989 "Lambada".

I definitely did not do "Lambada" justice when I covered it in 2010, trying to connect it to contemporary English-language material I already knew rather than working backwards through the Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Peruvian, and Afro-Bolivian roots of the material. But this revival isn't the last time we'll encounter it in the reggaetón era, and the novelty connection I made above is once more an Anglocentric one: the real connection is that the new pan-Latin music of the 2000s is harkening back to an earlier pan-Latinism of the 1980s, giving it a a grittier, minor-key hip-hop gloss, but retaining the dance-centric fusion that an electronic age demands.

But that's just one sound in the stew of sounds cooked up by producers Luny Tunes, Tainy and Naldo for this one-week-wonder, an organic hit which was never released as a single but topped the charts anyway. The lyrics consist largely of the usual boasting: Yandel's refrain "Bailando la toqué y ella se dejó/Me aprovecho y pam-pam-pam, la toco y pam-pam-pam" is perhaps more of a reference to the sexual legend of the lambada than to the actual song (although it structurally echoes the original "Llorando Se Fué" lyrics). I'd translate it "Dancing I touched her and she let me/I seize the opportunity and bam-bam-bam, I touch her and bam-bam-bam."

But in the video (shot in Brazil, and it wants to make sure you know it), the rhythmic "pam-pam" of the title is keyed to the hip and thigh movements which will later be formalized in English as twerking. Some Anglophone musicologists' dismissive attitude toward reggaetón as "just" dancehall in Spanish sometimes makes me eager to catalog the ways in which reggaetón has developed into its own distinctive genre: but it should never be forgotten that all post-hip-hop Afro-Caribbean music, from Jamaican dancehall to Puerto Rican reggaetón to Dominican dembow to New Orleans bounce, feeds on each other, especially in the real physical spaces in which the music is celebrated.

KAOMA, “LAMBADA”

10th February, 1990

Wiki | Video

This is — and again, I'm guessing, I'm listening to these in real time, and unless I've encountered them organically haven't listened to any songs in advance — about as close to rave culture as this journey will ever take us. Happily, it's also just about as close to rave culture as I'm comfortable getting, for reasons which have as much to do with geography and history as education and taste.

The 4/4 beat (almost) straight through, that backbone of remixes and DJ sets, ties it to the mainstreaming of the dance underground that was then going on all around the world — it could easily fit on a mix with Snap!, C + C Music Factory, and Technotronic. But it's the sped-up tango bandoneón, the modified cumbia rhythm, and the timbale fills that make it the great crossover Latin Dance song of its era, and the first of several such dance crazes to appear on our journey. It's also the first time I was ever vaguely aware of a song that would appear on this list. I don't mean that I ever actually heard it (as far as I know) until today; but I read about the Lambada — the "forbidden dance" — in Newsweek and was both slightly scared and slightly aroused by what I read. (I was twelve; everything slightly scared and slightly aroused me.)

But unlike some of what's to follow, the Lambada doesn't seem to have had any staying power as a dance. Possibly that's because unlike, say, the Macarena (similarly the butt of jokes but still a common social dance), you can't half-ass it and have fun anyway — and if the video's any guide, one partner has to be comfortable in a thong. (Thereby full-assing it, ha ha.) But at twenty years' remove from the song — and the dance's — peak in popularity, it's hard to hear much of a punchline in the music. It sounds like what it is, South American exoticism by way of French producers, and for me, anyway, that's enough.