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.

MICHEL TELÓ , “AI SE EU TE PEGO!”

14th April, 2012

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I have partly been looking forward to and partly dreading this song as it came nearer in the timeline. Looking forward because I so rarely get to discuss Brazilian music in these pages, dreading because I had very little to say about this song in particular. And it's barely a song, just a horny chant, an accordion riff, and a couple dozen words of putative context, all repeated over a bed of delighted cheering because it was recorded live, like about 90% of Brazil's most populist music genre in the 21st century, sertanejo. Like many sertanejo stars, Teló is a handsome cipher; and that's about all I had off the top of my head.

But then I did my due diligence and looked into the background of the song, and the story is fascinating. According to not just internet gossip but the Brazilian courts, the song's hook was composed in 2006 by a group of five Brazilian teenage girls in their shared hotel room on a vacation to Disney World in Orlando, in reference to their shared crush on the tour guide. In an evening of youthful high spirits, they developed a little dance along with the chant of "Nossa, nossa, assim você me mata, ai se eu te pego" (rough translation: omg, omg, you're killing me, oh if I get you). Two years later, after returning home -- which was the northeastern Brazilian state of Paraíba -- two of them went with another friend to Porto Seguro in nearby Bahía to celebrate graduation, where local singer Sharon Acioly saw them doing the dance and chant in the crowd and invited them on stage to teach it to the audience.

After which Sharon began incorporating the verses into her performances: this 2009 video shows her dropping the chant into a funk set as a means of hyping up the crowd. She eventually set it to a rudimentary melody, and another Bahían music promoter, Antônio Dyggs, saw her performing that, and worked it up (while drunk, he would later claim) into a song for the forró (rural northeastern Brazilian music) market, calling it "Ai Se Eu Te Pego," crediting Acioly and himself as the songwriters. Dyggs managed a forró group called Os Meninos de Seu Zeh, and they were the first to record his worked-out version. It became something of a local hit, and other nordestino groups jumped on the tune, the biggest of which was Cangaia de Jegue in 2010, whose slowly-paced forró version might have been meant to evoke reverie but just sounds dragging now. Electronic forró band Garota Safada (featuring future solo star Wesley Safadão) brought up the tempo significantly, but apparently Michel Teló, on tour in the northeast, heard Cangaia de Jegue's version first.

Teló is from the southern (and whitest) region of Brazil, and was involved in the music scene from an early age, first performing as an elementary school child and getting his first accordion at the age of ten. He was sixteen when he joined the gaucha band Grupo Tradição, and sang with them for 11 years, finally quitting in 2008 to go solo. (Gaucha music is a more traditional kind of country than sertanejo has become, possibly analogous to western in country-and-western.) He had already been very successful with Grupo Tradição, and that success only continued in his solo career, with a gold record and a number-one song before recording "Ai Se Eu Te Pego" in 2011.

The immediate cause of "Ai Se Eu Te Pego" becoming an international hit was a viral YouTube video of the twenty-year-old soccar star Neymar dancing to it in the locker room to the bemusement of his teammates, which sparked a trend of soccer players dancing to the song on the field throughout Latin America and the European League, boosting digital sales of the song on all continents. The United States was late to taking notice of the song, but its attention was still significant enough that Teló felt it necessary to record a redundant English-language version; compare its impressive 46 million views to the 1.1 billion of the original.

Ultimately the song came and went, an evanescent summer hit even more evanescent than most, since it had very little meaning beyond the dance and an innocently horny sentiment, a "Macarena" for the 2010s but without the staying power of the original because there's nothing confounding about it: it's exactly what it appears to be, and nothing more.

The three girls who originally taught the chant and dance to Sharon Acioly have apparently been compensated from her portion of the song's earnings, but the other three who were involved in the Disney World trip were still tied up in a legal authorship dispute as of the last reporting on the case in 2013; I haven't been able to find anything on the case since.

As if to make up for the variety of one-week hits we've had, "Ai Se Eu Te Pego" was at the top of the Hot Latin charts for ten weeks in the summer of 2012, interrupted only by one week of another live song. I've resented it for years for taking up so much real estate that could have been devoted to even more variety; and although learning the song's backstory has reconciled me to it a little, it's still barely a song, and I still have very little to say about it.

RICKY MARTIN FT. LA MARI & TOMMY TORRES, “TU RECUERDO”

23rd December, 2006

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We close out the raucous, pulsating, hotly contested 2006 (a.k.a. the Year Reggaetón Broke) with an older, perhaps more calcified, Puerto Rican sound.

The inevitable music video has four people on stools before the audience. Only the primary singer, a former boy band member and global hitmaker, is pushed a little forward, which makes him look taller than the rest. To his right on guitar and harmonies is the song's writer and producer, who got his start writing and producing for a later iteration of the singer's old boy band. On his right, eventually making the song a duet, a Spanish singer who pushed flamenco vibes into chillout worldbeat music to comparatively limited success, whose close-cropped haircut is a visible reminder of the cancer she had spent the previous year in treatment for. And on the far side of the line, perhaps the world's foremost traditional cuarto player, picking out delicate emotional lines on the traditional Puerto Rican instrument.

The credit line should really read "Ricky Martin ft. La Mari (of Chambao), Tommy Torres, and Christian Nieves," but of course the instrumentalist gets left off: pop has its caste system. Still, of the four spotlit players (there's a full orchestra behind them, because this is a ballad), Torres is the one whose performance is most anonymous: his sweet pop-derived melodies do little but set up volleys for Martin, Mari, and Nieves to spike. La Mari earns applause in the middle of the song for injecting a little cante gitano into her verse, which is the first time I teared up while listening to it; the second was during the dispassionate fluidity of Nieves' cuatro solo. After which Martin gently improvising as though over a salsa montuno rides out the song on a high note.

It's a gorgeous performance, and if the song itself doesn't quite live up to it, that may be because it's a stitched-together pop recreation of traditional jíbaro music rather than a song emerging naturally from that tradition. Not that a traditional jíbaro would ever float within a million miles of #1; but this, with the r&b-inflected rhythms in Martin's voice, the flamenco hints in La Mari's voice, and the pura romántica in Torres, is even more gloriously miscegenated than most pop.

It's the kind of thing that used to be able to go to #1 in the closing weeks of the year, traditionally slow for music buying or radio adds, giving older or less dominant audiences a time of year to hear themselves represented at #1. There's nothing necessarily festive about it (it's a song about still feeling conflicted about an old flame), but in the year of reggaetón it still feels like sentimental throwback to a classicist never-never land, and so it's holiday music regardless.

LOS TEMERARIOS, “YA ME VOY PARA SIEMPRE”

26th April, 1997

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The first song to break the Iglesias/Solís streak is also the third live norteño song in three years, and the ninth time I've had occasion to break out the "cover" tag. The cover here is of Vicente Fernández' late-70s hit "Ya Me Voy Para Siempre" (you can, and should, see him lipsync to it in the 1980 movie Picardia Mexicana II here), and Los Temerarios, who were a romántico band, not a norteño one, make only a decent fist of it, studio instrumentation filling in the weak spots in their live act.

The Fernández original is a grimly comic song of lost love: "Si sigue este dolor, no le sorprenda que mi hogar sea una cantina," runs the repeated bridge. ("If this pain continues, don't be surprised that my home is a tavern.") Which fit perfectly with Fernández' working-class hero image — in the movie, he ends the song by vowing future loyalty only to the comic proletariat of the supporting cast — but among the moneyed classiness of the mid-90s Latin chart (or that portion of it we're hearing) is something of a shock.

Gustavo Ángel, the singing Ángel brother of Los Temerarios (their name means "the reckless ones") goes for a more dramatic reading than Fernández' classically balanced blue-collar mariachi version (the difference is maybe not dissimilar to Alan Jackson covering George Jones), and he gets off a fantastic grito and shout out to the Temerarios' home state of Zacatecas, but the bulk of the energy here comes from the crowd singing lustily along with the "porque el amor de mi vida solito me dejó" refrain. ("Because the love of my life left me all alone.") Still, I can't be mad at anything that breaks up the pop-establishment ballad monotony.

LUIS MIGUEL, “SI NOS DEJAN”

30th September, 1995

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Let this be a lesson never to assume. You listen to and write about Latin Pop over the course of several years and start thinking you know what the parameters are. But 1994 and especially 1995 have messed with my assumptions so much that WHAT IS HAPPENING seems to be the only appropriate response. Not only have we seen a decisive shift in genre, away from bland romántico ballads towards distinctively flavored regional music whether uptempo or down, but this is the second live cut in a year to make the top of the chart.

Yes, of course it's Luis Miguel at the height of his powers, and nearly anything he recorded was bound to end up here. But this isn't the Luis Miguel we've become familiar, even overfamiliar with in the past eight years. He's looser than he's been in ages — since he was a teen idol, in fact — and deviates from his usual velvet-lunged passionata by letting the band behind him, massive string section and all, play with tempo, even vamp a little. It's a mariachi orchestra, but the song is pure pop in its harmonics and structure, and if it's still a controlled looseness, closer to Sinatra Swings! than to the near-punk of La Mafia's live cut, he doesn't let the side down, acquitting himself handily outside the clinical, glossy perfection of his studio cuts.

"Si Nos Dejan" means "if they let us" (or "if they leave us," but not in this context), and it's either a silly trifle of a love song in which the Always Unspecified They are all that's standing in the way of true love, ultimate happiness, a new dawn, and all the rest, or it's a really powerful, political song about the inescapability of power dynamics and how the system crushes personal happiness with ruthless thoroughness. I think it's the former, but multiple readings is what happens when you don't specify.

LA MAFIA, “TOMA MI AMOR”

8th April, 1995

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When the Hot Latin chart goes norteño, it goes norteño all the way. Forget the politesse of Bronco's string arrangement, or La Mafia's own concessions to electronic modernism — this is the raw stuff, accordion and rhythm section and a singer gritando puro campesino. It's a rare example of a live hit, always unusual outside of 70s AOR, and the fact that it was only on the top of the chart for a week detracts nothing from the fact that hey, it was at the top of the chart at all.

But it's not just the crowd noise that makes this the rawest, most rock & roll record we've encountered yet in our journey. The stiff polka-descended rhythms might not sound very raucous, but the accordion positively shreds, and the gritos aren't a million miles away from Joe Strummer's Peter Pan crows on "London Calling," or from cowboy whoops presaging heavy sales at the saloon and a gunfight in the morning. Sure, people who aren't used to norteño might mutter "Chicken Dance" to themselves, and the lyrics are very nearly simple enough to be a playground chant, but there's a magnificent energy to the song, an organic looseness that suggests that maybe more Latin Pop should have been released to radio from concert recordings.

"Toma Mi Amor" means "take my love," but the verb "tomar" ("take") is also used to mean "drink" — and La Mafia doesn't hesitate to let the suggestiveness bubble up to the surface. It's a bar-band singalong from South Texas, where bar bands are just as likely to be brown as white, and their crowds are composed of shitkickers, hard-working alcoholics, and horndogs either way.