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.

LUIS MIGUEL, “CÓMO DUELE”

2nd February, 2002

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Luis Miguel's fourth album of bolero and other romantic Latin standards in a decade, especially considering everything else that has changed since 1991, suggests an exhaustion of ideas, of ambition, even of desire. He produced it by himself, apparently unwilling to wait for his usual collaborators Armando Manzanero and Bebu Silvetti, and reviews at the time were unkind, accusing him of prioritizing his bank account over any artistic growth or integrity.

They have a point. "Cómo Duele" was one of two originals on the album, co-written by Manzanero for Miguel, but its pompous strings from the Royal Philharmonic and light disco guitars never approach the painstakingly gorgeous production from the early-90s albums Romance and Segundo Romance. And Miguel, though his voice remains a burnished instrument, sounds as though he's sleepwalking through the song, gesturing towards drama but never embodying it.

He was still on top of the world: the tour broke box-office records, even while the album itself only sold middling (for a Luis Miguel album). He won a Latin Grammy for it, the usual reward for making a lot of people a lot of money. But he is more definitely than ever a relic, left in a nostalgic, going-through-the-motions past while the Latin pop produced by his peers and his juniors rapidly transforms and evolves around him.

LUIS MIGUEL, “O TÚ O NINGUNA”

6th November, 1999

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It's been a while since Luis Miguel has turned up here. Two years, in fact, which is a perfectly reasonable length of time to go between #1 songs, but his career to date has been so extensively documented here that it's hard to feel this appearance as anything but a falling-off, or even a passing of the generational torch.

But a quick check of dates shows that he was born within a year or two of Marc Anthony, Ricky Martin, Alejandro Fernández, Jennifer Lopez, and Selena, all of whom were (or would have been) around 30 in 1999. (Enrique Iglesias was the kid of the bunch at 25, and Shakira even younger at 23.) But where the above (save Selena, QEPD) were consolidating their positions as hitmakers, breakout stars, and even futurists, Luis Miguel was by now a grand old man of Latin Pop, prematurely aged not just by his head start in the business but by his choice of material over the last ten years: a young man singing old men's songs in a faultlessly classy manner, a silken voice united to smoldering good looks without the elasticity or charm of his contemporaries who could play younger and breezier.

If there has been such a thing as a generic Luis Miguel song, "O Tú o Ninguna" is more or less it: exquisitely orchestrated, with the oboe again prominent, but after the punchy fleetness, sexy dynamism, and emotional lavishness of "Ciega, Sordomuda," "Livin' la Vida Loca," "Bailamos," "Loco," and "Dímelo," it sounds tinny and hollow, a thin layer of varnish next to gleaming chrome. "You or Nobody" is the title sentiment, and the lyric is almost exactly predictable: he doesn't care about any face or voice that isn't hers, he doesn't care about his own skin because it's not her. It is, in line with Miguel's history, a well-written lyric, and there are pleasures of imagery and unexpected phrases that the bland sweetness of the music and melody can't entirely erase (the second verse is actually an incisive psychological portrait of the song's object), but ultimately it feels lightweight, and more fatally, old-fashioned. We have seen the future, and Luis Miguel is no longer it.

LUIS MIGUEL, “POR DEBAJO DE LA MESA”

6th September, 1997

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Romances was Luis Miguel's third album of classic boleros and love songs from the rich history of twentieth-century Latin music. As Rod Stewart would find a decade later, it was almost impossible not to keep indulging his audience's nostalgic streak; the records sold too well.

Even the fact that "Por Debajo de la Mesa" (underneath the table) isn't a classic, but a new song written by Miguel's long-time producer for the Romance series (Armando Manzanero, himself a classic song composer of the 60s, 70s and 80s) speaks to the exhaustion that's begun to set in, not only with the series, but with Miguel's own pop career. Only twenty-seven at the time of release, he's already accomplished more than he could have dreamed; and the kids are coming up from behind. Miguel's standard of four hits a year has been slipping for a while, and will only slip away in the years to come. You can build quite a nice career on nostalgia, as thousands of aging entertainers have found; but at least in the modern world, you can't be a pop star too.

"Por Debajo de la Mesa" is a love song — underneath the table he caresses her knee, and then spends the rest of the song wondering what will happen next. Will she accept his advances, will she awaken the fire in his blood? He can't live without her, etc. It's a professional song, professionally arranged, but while Miguel sings it with all the tenderness at his command, he can't make it into a timeless work of beauty. It's filler — gorgeous filler, but filler. And the kids are coming up from behind.

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.

LUIS MIGUEL, “LA MEDIA VUELTA”

26th November, 1994

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Again, before listening to Luis Miguel's version, I highly recommend that you hear the original, recorded by its composer José Alfredo Jiménez in 1963. Jiménez was one of the great ranchera composers and performers in the 50s and 60s, a self-taught songwriter of proletariat origins who contributed immensely to the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, producing a body of work that few songwriters anywhere have equaled in scope and quality.

This particular song takes a bolero form (the punctuated guitar rhythm is what gives it away), making it even dreamier and more classically-minded than usual for ranchera, and ranchera is usually one of the more dreamy and traditional Latin genres. Luis Miguel plays up the classicism, holding the power of his voice mostly in check throughout. As I've had occasion to point out again and again, he's a singer of consummate skill: here, the quality of power held in reserve mirrors the lyric.

"La Media Vuelta" translates literally as "The Half-Turn," and it's a term borrowed from the art of bullfighting; the media vuelta is a method of sticking the bull that requires perfect agility and timing — like a dance, which is the other use of the stock phrase. The singer of "La Media Vuelta" is renouncing his love for her own good; all the power in the relationship lies on his side, as he admits when he says "yo soy tu dueño" (a tricky phrase which translates as "I am your lord and master," but connotes something like "you're so in love with me that you'll do whatever I say"). The sentiments are horrific from a feminist point of view — dude's just dictating to her regardless of her own wishes, can't they sit down and talk this out? — but as a representation of a certain floridly Romantic scenario (it's all a bit Mr. Rochester), it's an effective character portrait. He's aware of the damage he's doing, but power is its own reward.

LUIS MIGUEL, “EL DÍA QUE ME QUIERAS”

17th September, 1994

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Before you do anything else, you're going to want to click here. That's a link to the original version of this song, recorded in 1935 by tango pioneer, pop singer, and first Latin superstar of the twentieth century, Carlos Gardel. To get the full effect you may wish to read along with the lyrics, which I've translated (very roughly) at the bottom of this post.

Are you back? Okay.

Gardel's song, a self-consciously pastoral fantasia, a movie song (it was written by Gardel and lyricist Alfredo Le Pera for the Argentinean movie of the same name, starring Gardel), and a ballad very much in the international Thirties tradition of sumptuous sentiment married to coolly unemotional performances (compare to Bing Crosby or Dick Powell), is one of the great songs in the Latin Pop tradition, the definitive ballad of the Golden Age of Tango (ca. 1915-1955), the sudden flowering of modernism in Latin American popular culture comparable to the mixture of jazz and Art Deco in America. The tango rhythm here is almost subterranean due to the ballad tempo; only the entrance of the bandoneón in the last few choruses ties it to the traditional tango sound.

By covering this song, and by releasing it as the initial single off his new album Segundo Romance (Second Romance), Luis Miguel is explicitly placing himself as the successor to Gardel's fusion of modernism, sentiment, and iconicity -- Gardel died in a plane crash not long after recording this song, cementing his legendary status. Imagine Michael Jackson topping the charts with an Astaire cover (say "They Can't Take That Away from Me") in 1989, and you might get something of the interplay of reverence, ambition, and sheer inertial popularity at work here.

As the title of the album indicates, this is Miguel's second time laying claim to the tradition of classic Latin Pop (you may recall that the first Romance, a more strictly bolero album, produced "Inolvidable" and "No Sé Tú"), but it was far and away his most successful -- in fact it holds the record for highest-selling Latin album by a male singer of the 1990s. This probably has less to do with his fidelity to tradition than to his own magnetic self; his version of "El Día Que Me Quieras" isn't particularly faithful to Gardel's original in either chord voicing or phrasing (though he does keep the bandoneón, the instrument that sounds like a higher, thinner accordion). He converts it, essentially, into a Luis Miguel song of the 1990s, and if (like me) you have a hopeless passion for the thin crackle and low-frequency orchestras of old 78s, the blown-up keyboards and polished, glistening soup of a production is wince-inducing in comparison to the original.

But the polish and temper of Miguel's own voice cannot be denied; and if he is a worthy successor to Gardel, it is in the impeccability of his phrasing. He too paints on a sweepingly sentimental canvas, but his brushes are dry, and the song, which could easily be a wreck of overemoting in other throats, is instead a monumental sculpture, a nostalgia-free tribute to the Art Deco era in modern materials and to a modern scale. Of course, nothing ages so quickly as modernity.

Those lyrics:

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.

LUIS MIGUEL, “AYER”

17th July, 1993

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Jon Secadas may come and Jon Secadas may go, but Luis Miguel is forever. At least that's how it feels now that we are well into the 1990s, as Miguel continues his streak of two hit songs off every album every year, like the hitmaking romance machine he is.

"Ayer" remains true to the Luis Miguel ethic: big, polished, finely crafted, orchestral — very orchestral. Where before Miguel has used classical instrumentation as a sort of filigree on his pop songs, here he attempts a pop-operatic fusion. You could say it was in the air; Guns N' Roses' ridiculously orchestral "November Rain" had been a worldwide smash, and Whitney Houston and Céline Dion were having major hits with studio orchestration that was recorded with the clear, even prissy fidelity of classical recordings rather than the compressed vamping traditional with strings and horns in pop. But far more than at attempt at currency, the hugeness and grandeur of the orchestration is driving home a more timeless point: Miguel is the King of Latin Pop, the most ambitious, accomplished, and able-to-afford-a-symphony-orchestra belter around. Jon Secada may well sound cheap by comparison; as who would not?

"Ayer" ("yesterday") is a song that may not quite live up to the tempestuous orchestration (though Miguel's voice, even more controlled and versatile an instrument than it has been to date, has no problem). Today he dreamed of her, they came together in a whirlwind of passion, oh but it's only a dream. In truth she is lost forever, they tore themselves with love, promises were exchanged, but ... there is a lacuna. He doesn't say how or why it ended, only acknowledges that now, woken from the dream, he realizes that he loved her, and it hurts. Of course it's all said much better — if he doesn't stint on the orchestration he doesn't draw the purse strings tight on the lyrics either. But ultimately it's kind of a weak story for the storming orchestration, and I can't help feeling that he's making too much of it. Maybe if you hadn't taken her for granted in the first place.

LUIS MIGUEL, “NO SÉ TÚ”

18th April, 1992

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If Los Bukis coming round every year with another chart-topper was comfortably predictable by this point, Luis Miguel scoring two chart-toppers in quick succession from his newest album is just as certain. It's becoming clear that the broad outline of Latin Pop history differs in significant ways from both the received and the actual histories of Anglophone pop; in the early 90s, Latin artists were still an-album-a-year entertainment machines, where much of the English-speaking world had already converted to the modern every-few-years release schedule, giving people plenty of time to soak up, get sick of, and maybe forget the last album before renewing the assault. Neither model is necessarily better than the other, but the compression of the first can make artistic growth seem almost instantaneous.

So I said about Luis Miguel's last album that it was the moment when he became not just a pop star, but an institution; but this one, Romance, was the biggest-selling album of his career, and, if Wikipedia is to be trusted, the biggest-selling Spanish-language album of all time. This song sounds it, expansively expensive, the first ballad since Julio Iglesias to bring in classical orchestration -- very few top-selling songs in the last hundred years have had oboe solos -- and a lush sense of space to Miguel's already beautifully sensitive singing. The song itself is just as splendidly ornate a love song; not perhaps as poetic as Iglesias' latter-day triumphs, but in the simplicity of its language and directness of its sentiment, a classic of the genre nevertheless.

And I do mean classic. Googling the lyrics inadvertently reveals that a lot of people have wanted to know what it means in English; and this sweet story on a cooking blog suggests a pop-cultural power I in my ignorance had been unaware of. The title means, literally, "I don't know you," but the saber/conocer distinction* makes that reading impossible; really, it's short for "no sé (que piensas) tú," or "I don't know what you think." The translation given at the link, "I don't know about you, but I etc." is exact even to its informality. Miguel is (once again) relating an obsessive, extravagant love, one which he's not sure is requited; he can't sleep, he's always going back over the night she "created with her kisses." That touch of vulnerability (but without self-pity) is a masterful summary of Miguel's vocal persona: he doesn't go in for the florid emotionality of a lot of Latin Pop singers of his generation and earlier, he's controlled and even, in his adulthood, a little reserved; which makes any vulnerable emotion that much more meaningful when it arrives.

*See also connaître/savoir, wissen/kennen, etc. A lot of languages make a distinction between knowing knowledge and knowing people.

LUIS MIGUEL, “INOLVIDABLE”

25th January, 1992

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The more Luis Miguel I hear, the more I appreciate the technical purity of his singing, the immaculate phrasing and, as he grows older, the sense of powerful emotions in reserve, which he shares with the mature Sinatra. In some ways it feels as if he's been building to this moment, the gorgeous young man who first appeared in these pages as a teen hunk singing a retrofitted 60s pop song growing into the suavely elegant man who rides a light-jazzy rhythm effortlessly and croons as sweetly as Bryan Ferry, as assuredly as Tony Bennett.

I'm told (by the usual source) that this was his biggest-selling album, the final transition into adulthood and traditional pop. That tradition is bolero, the eighteenth-century Spanish slow dance that was the first popular song form in Cuba and Mexico. I had to listen to a few more traditional bolero songs myself before I could hear the bolero rhythm under the funk-guitar flecks, but even if the instrumentation is as plastic and 1992 as possible — between the glossy keys, the rubbery guitar, and the tweeting soprano sax, it's like a crystallized memory of the first smooth jazz station I ever listened to — Miguel's precise, restrained performance rescues it from easy-listening purgatory and places it in the canon of liquid-smooth pop that all my references so far have conjured up.

While most latter-day reminiscence has focused on youth movements like alt-rock and electronic dance, at the time there was some reason to believe that traditional pop was a signal way forward as the nineties gathered steam: Tony Bennett was hip again, Harry Connick, Jr. was on the rise, and Natalie Cole had her biggest, if least defensible, hit duetting with her late father. While this isn't that "Unforgettable" (which is what "inolvidable" means), it's at least as easy to slip into its dreamy tug.

LUIS MIGUEL, “ENTRÉGATE”

23rd November, 1990

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Can you tell I'm running out of things to say about professionally produced, floridly sung, and hyperbolically written ballads? Luis Miguel remains "pop royalty," as I put it in the tags, the King of his era and demesne of Pop so utterly and completely that I'm tempted to borrow a phrase from Tom Ewing (or rather from Neil Tennant) and call this his "imperial phase." His voice, immaculate and creamily expressive, is the focus here, and he sweeps us from a tender, quiet beginning to the standard banners-waving, fist-pumping Big Chorus with such ease that we scarcely notice the seam.

The lyrics are hyperbolic not only in the sense that they would be ridiculous as a rational statement, but also in the sense that spoken rather than sung they would be creepy and domineering: that Big Chorus goes "Surrender yourself/I don't feel you yet/Let your body/Get used to my heat/Surrender yourself/My prisoner/Passion does not wait/And I can't love you more than this." Which may be a relief from song after song about untouchable cruel woman who makes the man weep, but as a portrait of a healthy relationship (consensual s&m excluded) it's hardly better.

Of course, pop songs about healthy relationships are even more rare than romantic comedies where people do sane things -- the drama is in the hyperbole, and a diet of bombastic Latin Pop is as likely to make me feel that Anglo pop norms are anodyne and wussy as that Latin Pop is overheated and misogynist.

LUIS MIGUEL, “TENGO TODO EXCEPTO A TÍ”

21st July, 1990

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There's a subtle shift that happens when a hugely successful pop star becomes more than just a pop star, and it's not always identifiable in a particular song. With Madonna, for example, it happened over the course of the Like A Virgin album; with Michael Jackson, it was obviously Thriller; and with Britney Spears there was no shift, she was always top-of-the-world from the first single. I'm not even particularly confident that this particular song marks Luis Miguel's shift (it could well be the 20 Años album, which broke sales records for Latin Pop from the first week of its release, but which I haven't heard in full) — but his music has definitely moved up a tax bracket since last we saw him.

But it's not just the production, as expensively glossy, spacious, and upscale as we've heard to date (at least this side of Julio Iglesias) — Miguel's singing has lost its teen-pop floridity, the anxious emotionalism of "Fría Como El Viento"or "La Incondicional," and he sounds now like a man supremely confident in his powers, able to work in delicate shades of timbre and phrasing without sacrificing the full-blast power of his gifted lungs.

That top-of-the-world atmosphere is perfect for this song, the kind of song a William Randolph Hearst might sing while pursuing his Marion Davies. The title means "I have everything but you," and while he isn't so gauche as to detail the extent of his holdings, Miguel's performance is that of a powerful, wealthy man missing only the one thing that won't be his for the asking. The alto sax coming in at the end was a signifier of opulent classiness as the 80s turned into the 90s, but it was also, at least for those whose palates considered themselves more refined, a signifier of the bourgeois failure of taste — anyone who remembers the 90s as they actually were (rather than as they were played on TV) hears Kenny G, and winces.

LUIS MIGUEL, “FRÍA COMO EL VIENTO”

21st October, 1989

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I may just be balladed out. But it's difficult for me to hear much in this song except a lot of grimacing emoting, which the video bears out. (Luis Miguel watch: it was clearly shot before the one for "La Incondicional," as witness his uneven mop of hair, and I'm left wondering if was promoted first but took longer to get to the top, thanks to the vagaries of the airplay market.) The backing is thin and conventional, the only faint surprise being a brief electric guitar solo, which is quickly replaced by a saxophone.

That solo is hardly revolutionary or even interesting by Anglo pop standards, but the electric guitar could have decadent, imperialist-American connotations in much of Latin America up through the 80s. Rock en Español was far more upsetting in the context of its home audience in the 80s and 90s than the Anglophoners who embraced it with a patronizing "about time you caught up" air (even as rock lost unrecoverable ground in England and America) could possibly have understood. But we'll have plenty of time to explore that later; for now, just note the almost dangerous sophistication it represents in this song.

The dangerous sophistication, it is to be understood, is not on the part of Miguel himself, who is a nearly invisible presence in his own song. (At least as much as he can be, with that creamy voice emoting so hard all over the place.) The lyrics place an unknowable, untouchable woman at the center, and wind so thickly around her in metaphor and simile that seeing the anonymous model-dancer in the video is an inevitable letdown.

The title translated to English is "Cold As The Wind," and the chorus continues, "dangerous as the sea/sweet as a kiss/Don't let yourself love, because/I don't know if I have you/I don't know if you come or go/You're like an unbroken colt." (Luis Miguel expressing iffy sentiments about women watch: are those supposed to be good things or bad?)

As has been the general rule throughout this travelogue, romantic sentiments inevitably sound even more romantic (or ridiculous!) when written in Spanish, because they're expressed in idioms and images which are unfamiliar or old-fashioned in English. An English-language power ballad about a "cold," "vain, capricious, ideal" woman would be unlistenable; in Spanish, the language is only slightly more heightened than normal for pop.

LUIS MIGUEL, “LA INCONDICIONAL”

27th May, 1989

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This project has really been testing my patience with the Big Ballad, the single song form which I have to work harder to appreciate and, appreciation won, have less desire to revisit, than any other. I'm hardly alone: the single most widely-hated song of the last twenty years (at least among respondents with pretensions to youth and cool) is "My Heart Will Go On," and I'm willing to bet a fair few of you who clicked play on the song above had to resist the impulse to turn it off at the mere sound of that glassy electric piano. (Or maybe you didn't resist.)

The first listen through, it took all my attention just to find things to like in the recording; and those watery flecks of guitar in the chorus, punctuating the beat like a slow-motion skank, helped. On the second and third listen I began paying attention to the lyrics: there's some worrying gender politics at work there (though I think the worry is in the response to the song rather than in the song itself, which like all good pop presents an unbroken fictional narrative), which I'll get to in a bit. This most recent go-round (watching the high-production and largely perplexing video) (maybe if I'd ever seen Top Gun it might make more sense), I focused on Miguel's voice.

He's certainly got one. This is the kind of Big Ballad which would be intolerable with a weaker set of lungs behind it (Michael Jackson, for example, couldn't pull off its plodding directness — he'd need a lot more key changes and skittering rhythm), and while Miguel isn't exactly operating in the bel canto tradition there's a long and proud lineage of belters in Latin Pop to which he is undeniable heir. It was in fact his Today I Am A Man moment, the song with which he graduated from the teen-pop where we last saw him to the big leagues represented (in the 1980s at least) by Juan Gabriel, Julio Iglesias, and José José. As if to mark the moment definitively as an irrevocable step, he cut his hair. The windblown mane on the cover of the album was what fans were expecting, his signature look for the past ten years; but the slick power-coif in the video was what they got.

If he was to sing with the big boys, he also had to share their complexities: no more puppy love songs or simplistic kiss-offs, but oddly tortured dramas in which he acknowledges having preyed on an angelically faithful woman without expressing regret beyond a shrug: "No sé por qué." (I don't know why.) She was always the same, unconditional in her love, making no demands of him, and his response? "No existe un lazo entre tu y yo/No hubo promesas ni juramentos/Nada de nada." (There is no bond between you and I/There were no promises or vows/Nothing at all.) All delivered, of course, with a passion just short of tears, which rescues the cold-hearted son-of-a-bitch lyric and places it in a familiar context: the trifling man who realizes too late, etc.

But I wonder about the response to the song. It was a massive hit, firmly establishing Miguel among the all-time greats of Latin Pop — the decade to come will more than anyone's be his, as far as this travelogue is concerned — and Wikipedia's brief list of covers far outpaces any other song we've seen here save "La Bamba." It's become something of a standard, in effect, but unlike similar Big Ballads in Anglophone pop around the same time (say, by Richard Marx or Bryan Adams), it's not much of a love song, unless you consider praising a woman for faithfulness despite her man's being a dick romantic. Was it heard as a love song? There's no doubt that Latin American gender norms don't quite match up to the egalitarian utopia that Anglophone pop (yes, even hip-hop, in its way) tends to assume. Just something to keep in mind as we hurtle towards the present.

LUIS MIGUEL, “AHORA TE PEUDES MARCHAR”

22nd August, 1987

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Get used to that name; we'll be seeing it regularly from here on out. In fact Luis Miguel makes an excellent case study in the evolution (maturation? commercialization?) of Latin Pop: his career mirrors the trajectory of the time period we are covering. Of course Latin Pop has existed for decades before this, but it tended towards parochialism and regionalism: the gooey embrace of transglobal pop stardom is something new, and Miguel is one of its key players.

We meet him for the first time here, at the age of seventeen. He has been in show business for most of his life, scoring his first hit record when he was eleven. (Shades of another child star turned leading light of the global pop overground.) He has just fired his father as his manager and signed on with Spanish pop empresario Juan Carlos Calderón. A standard hitmaking formula is brought to bear, with excellent results: a number-one song, which will give way twice to Julio Iglesias and once to — but that'd be telling. It's a bumptious dance song, funky in that mid-80s cheap keyboard bass way, with a sax solo that dates it as surely and minutely as counting tree rings. And you know the song.

You probably don't know it as "Ahora Te Puedes Marchar," because the original English title of the song was not "Now You Can Leave." It was "I Only Want To Be With You," and it was first released by Dusty Springfield in November 1963, her first single after leaving folk group The Springfields, and the third British-Invasion hit in the US. Ivor Raymonde's billowy Swinging London production is swapped out for a sub-Huey Lewis go-go, and Mike Hawker's giddy lyrics about new love are refashioned into a don't-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out anthem (directed at Miguel's money-mismanaging father?), but the giddiness remains. Miguel sounds downright gleeful to be singing this song, to be on his own, to be making modern dance music out of classic pop.

Most of the album from which "Ahora Te Puedes Marchar" was drawn is taken up with modernized covers of pop songs from the sixties and seventies — "Reach Out," "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me," "Only You," "All By Myself" — and given a glossy 80s sheen. It's very much, even designedly, a disposable teen-pop record; Miguel is only seventeen, and his pouty lips on the album cover don't invite us to expect much more. But you can hear a bit into the future: he has a fine, strong cock's crow of a voice, he's good with rhythm, and he's interested in raiding the closet of history to enhance his own throbbing good looks.

He will come to be called the Frank Sinatra of Latin music; but as of right now, Michael Jackson is the far better comparison. If Jackson had been born in Puerto Rico ten years later than he was, this — triumphalist, a little cutting, and interestingly sexually ambiguous in terms of who his forebears are — might well be the record he'd have made in 1987.