DADDY YANKEE, “LOVUMBA”

25th February, 2012

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The fact that this is only Daddy Yankee's second appearance at the top of the Hot Latin chart really underlines the ways in which the reggaetón to which he remained steadfastly devoted had slipped out of the zeitgeist. Three whole album cycles have gone by since his previous #1, all of which topped the Latin Albums chart, but unlike his compatriots Wisin y Yandel he has not shifted towards a more generic urbano sound, sticking closely to the dancehall origins of reggaetón and maintaining a Caribbean-forward sound rather than chasing the hip-hop currents of the mainland US.

Even this, his crowning return to the top, was only for a week (2012's fleeting attention strikes again), and while the reggaetón riddim is gestured to, in strict generic terms the beat is soca, the dancehall-derived music of Trinidad and Tobago. In the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, tempos this rapid are usually associated with Dominican merengue, itself a twist on Cuban mambo, which has its roots in the son music marketed as rumba in English. The song's title, a portmanteau of "love" and "rumba," is meant to be big, generic, and crowdpleasing; to that same end, witness the remix of the song featuring Don Omar, which appeared on both the parent album and the single in both physical and digital formats.

But even if the song isn't strictly reggaetón -- which tends to flourish at midtempo -- it's a welcome reminder of the cacophonous energy, bragadocious attitude, and overt sexuality which reggaetón brought to Latin pop. Even though the lyrics are relatively mild for Daddy Yankee -- a clue as to why might be in the middle eight, where he shouts out the Zumba fitness program, which was starting to commission high-energy Latin music around this time -- the ambient horniness of the premise (Daddy Yankee is using dance to seduce you) keeps the song vivid and dynamic despite the chintzy synthesized merengue horns.

Ultimately "Lovumba" may belong more in the line of Don Omar's big-tent party songs than in Daddy Yankee's own canon of self-assured reggaetón statements. The Billboard entry doesn't include the Don Omar remix, but I don't doubt that it helped get the song to #1; Daddy Yankee's return to the top spot in a more characteristic vein is still yet to come.

GLORIA ESTEFAN FT. CARLOS SANTANA, JOSÉ FELICIANO & SHEILA E., “NO LLORES”

1st September, 2007

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Gloria Estefan's first album in four years means Gloria Estefan's first #1 in four years, which is roughly an illustration of her fortunes since 1989 -- she is easily the woman with the most #1 singles on the Hot Latin chart, and if she's dominated the 2000s less than she dominated the 1990s, it's because she has more of an empire to maintain; music is only one of her revenue streams, and possibly the least lucrative.

But she's still a brilliant musical mind, and a masterful synthesist; so the big single from 90 Millas, a reference to the distance between Miami and Havana, brings three (four, if legendary Cuban trumpeter Arturo Sandoval is counted) of the most iconic Latin musicians of the later twentieth century onto her celebratory, very Cuban rave-up. Mexican-American fusion guitarist Santana, Puerto Rican Latin jazz guitarist and singer Feliciano, and Mexican-American/Creole R&B percussionist and singer Sheila E(scovedo) are among the only Latin artists to have come close to matching Gloria Estefan's success in the broader US pop market, and Santana's and Feliciano's dueling guitars, one smokily electric and the other tautly acoustic, and Escovedo's erupting timbales bring life and color to what is already a pretty fantastic circular danzón encouraging the listener not to weep, to embrace life and reject fear or regret.

Formally, this is yet another of Estefan's nostalgic tours of pre-Castro Cuban music, but thanks the fire brought by her guests it's closer to everything-and-the-kitchen-sink salsa -- born in hustling immigrant New York -- than to the classicist Havana forms she's often defaulted to.

And that engagement with something like the present tense doesn't stop with her similarly middle-aged peers -- the song was issued with two official remixes, one a celebratory reggaetón featuring the all-conquering duo Wisin y Yandel, and the other a Miami hip-hop jam featuring a still little-known Cuban-American Dirty South rapper calling himself Pitbull. Both the remixes cut out Santana's guitar, which is a bit too bluesy to play nice with contemporary hip-hop, but Gloria and her "no llores, no llores, no llores" chanting singers are intact.

Pitbull even thanks her for the opportunity at the end of his remix -- in two years, "I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)" would make him a household name, though he won't appear on this travelogue for several years more. He and Gloria share a reverential attitude toward Cuba (and an all-American loathing of Castro), along with a canny pop ear and willingness to raid from anywhere to sustain their global pop empires.

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.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “NO ME DEJES DE QUERER”

10th June, 2000

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A victory lap to close out the millennium, a slice of content for the brand-new Latin Grammys (where Emilio was on the board) to award her over, a breezy slab of nostalgia to prove to the younger generation whose party it is that they're crashing -- various cynical readings of this song are possible, but they all melt away in the face of those bright horns, that clave rhythm, and the call-and-response montuno at the end. It's been seven years since Gloria Estefan reinvented her adult-contemporary self (which was itself a reinvention from the Latin party den mother of the mid-80s) as an avatar of nostalgic Cuban identity, and while she has kept up well, not to say brilliantly, with shifting trends in Latin pop, there's a paroxysmic joy to a song like this one that there wasn't to the more high-tech (if still brilliant) "¡Oye!" -- she's aging into a patriot.

An incurious listen would suggest that this is more of the salsa revival, perhaps fueled by the runaway success of "A Puro Dolor," but it's not Nuyorican salsa but Cuban mambo, which is what salsa always was (ask Tito Puente, who refused to call his music salsa), with added Puerto Rican and rhythm & blues overlays. The Havana-nostalgic video (for which she won an inaugural Latin Grammy) makes it clear: this is a celebration not of the horny, sweaty music of the immigrant 70s, but of the faultless, romantic entertainment of the pre-revolutionary 50s.

As a song, it's primarily an exercise in genre: the lyric is a demand that her lover not stop loving her, performed with the confidence of someone who doesn't feel particularly anxious about the result. (Whether that's because she has absolute trust in her partner's fidelity or doesn't really care about it is left as an exercise to the reader.) Compared to the high-energy, recklessly psychologizing music of youngsters like Ricky Martin or Marc Anthony, it's perhaps a little hermetic, a little too classy; but then maybe it's not as overdetermined, not as noisy for the sake of noise. But as a relief from the unchanging reign of "A Puro Dolor," it's a breath of the freshest air.

(Note: this is the first Gloria Estefan song I've had occasion to write about here since I wrote about Gloria Estefan for a week straight three years ago at One Week One Band. A bunch of the YouTube embeds no longer work, but if you like me on Latin Pop, here's a bunch of it.)