MANÁ FT. SHAKIRA, “MI VERDAD”

28th Feb, 2015

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A pair of Nineties veteran acts joining up for a laid-back swayalong feels like the kind of thing that the streaming-era chart had no room for anymore; and the fact that it only went to #1 for a week in February 2015, one of a series of one-week wonders in late winter sandwiched in between monumental chart runs, seems more a product of chance (or perhaps of Billboard tinkering with its chart calculus) than of true blanket popularity. (On the airplay chart, it managed a whole two weeks at #1.)

Not that I'm complaining! While I've been largely cool on Maná in these pages, I've consistently adored Shakira, and maybe predictably, I find that her sweet-and-sour voice is exactly the ingredient needed to pull Maná out of their latter-day doldrums and sound vividly, achingly sincere, like a sharp, high clarinet cutting through thickets of droning strings.

The lyric is constructed on a dialectic of "mentiras" (lies) and "verdad" (truth) -- the verses list all the falsity and betrayal that exists in the world, from cheating lovers to lying politicians, while the chorus calls the eternal romantic "you" the singer's truth, a refuge from the painful deceptiveness at large in the rest of existence. Although in the video, Shakira caresses a visibly pregnant belly (she gave birth to her second child the month before the single's release), transforming the "you" from romantic to parental love. And in the comments on the video, that seems to be the favorite reading: many family relationships and losses are related there.

The bolero rhythm underlying the verses, and the foursquare rock rhythm of the choruses, have their own implications (the tricksy, scheming Afro-Latin tradition versus the open, honest, white-coded sound?), although Maná are a rock band and believe in rock dynamics above everything. But this is their farewell (as of this writing) to this travelogue, so I can't be sorry that they brought on my favorite Colombian ringer to leave a better taste in my mouth than they might have otherwise.

Airplay Watch:

• Maná ft. Shakira, "Mi Verdad"
• Discussed above.

MANÁ, “HASTA QUE TE CONOCÍ”

15th September, 2012

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One of the few upsides of having taken forever to get through this blog is that songs that had yet to be released when I began it are able to force me to revisit and revise some of the ill-informed, unconsidered, and shallow takes I gave in the first few years of its existence.

Juan Gabriel, first as a songwriter and then a week later as a singer, was the auteur who more than any other defined the first five years of Hot Latin #1s, and I never really appreciated what made him great when I was writing about those years. It was not until his final #1 as a singer in 2001 -- which I only got to after his death in 2016, when I was finally capable of understanding the full breadth of his achievement -- that I really gave him his due in these pages.

But it wasn't in these pages, but in the waning years of the music-writing community on Tumblr, that I really revised my understanding of Juan Gabriel: my somewhat bellicose and overheated in memoriam included twinned valuations of "Debo Hacerlo," a #1 which I had done less than justice to back in 2010, and its immediate predecessor, the epic-length power ballad "Hasta Que Te Conocí," which peaked at #2 and so which I had been ignorant of until his death, when I dove into his discography and learned, to my mortification, that "Debo Hacerlo" had always been a kind of Frankensteined remix of "Conocí," the kind of obvious context that any Spanish-language listener in the eighties would have known immediately and which this blog would theoretically exist to elucidate for English-only readers. I've mentioned before how embarrassed I am by the first two decades covered by this blog, but that entry might be the one of which I'm most ashamed.

I'll go ahead and reproduce my post-mortem Tumblr blurb for "Hasta Que Te Conocí" here, in order to give a starting point for considering Maná's 2012 cover:

In 1986, he had no worlds left to conquer. (The savage wilderness to the north had never counted; it would have been beneath his dignity to mouth their crude, unliterary tongue.) The supreme center of Mexican music, he moved with ease between the internationalist pop of the capital, the classicist ranchera of the provinces, and the party-hearty rock of the border. His songs were sung by Spanish divas and juvenile sensations, he was the face and voice of the television age. With no horizontal territory left to claim, he could only build up: to pierce the sky with monuments to his own emotional torment and eccentric but undeniable musicianship.

“Hasta Que Te Conocí” is an sprawling pop edifice built from ranchera materials, but on a plan only Juan Gabriel could have conceived. An extended ambient ballad built on folkloric repetition and declarations of prelapsarian innocence serves as introduction, his perfectly-timed phrasing the only element of rhythm. When he finally pivots to the title phrase, tight mariachi strums and doomy horns build tension as he lays out his accusation of heartbreak and betrayal. It winds tighter and tighter, until the whole arrangement rises into an extended march-cum-tango-cum-montuno, horns pealing dolorously as Gabriel’s voice raises at last in emotional refusal, the tightly-constructed argument thrown out the window for a repeated, sobbing “no te quiero verte más.” The original studio version is stunning enough, but for the full, extravagantly emotional, experience see his epochal 1990 concert version or even his rendition from earlier this year, arranged and conducted by his longtime champion, composer Eduardo Magallanes.

(I will leave my reevaluation of "Debo Hacerlo" for the clickthrough; I may even have more to say later this year thanks to assorted music nerd challenges on Bluesky.)

Despite my insistence that only Juan Gabriel could have conceived of or pulled off the weird, ungainly, intensely personal structure of "Hasta Que Te Conocí" (tr. "Until I met you"), it's been a frequent target for cover versions in the years since 1986, much in the way that similarly extravagant slabs of high camp in the Anglophone canon like "Bohemian Rhapsody" or "Total Eclipse of the Heart" have been. Merengue, rock, and hip-hop versions all reached the lower reaches of the Hot Latin chart between 1987 and 2009, but the most successful covers would be Marc Anthony's faithful 1993 salsa cover (which reached #13) and, of course, this 2012 rendition by veteran rockers Maná.

I've been very hard on Maná in these pages, especially their latter-day resurgence as a mainstay of the #1 spot -- and it's a little comical that I implied they were in some way antithetical to Juan Gabriel in their first appearance here, given the fact that this cover was waiting for me -- but I have to admit that this is a sensitive, well-delivered cover, primarily in gentle bolero time until they go all Santana on a montuno coda, with Fher keeping his dudely rock bellowing to a minimum. But I can only come to that conclusion after spending weeks away from Juan Gabriel's original: when I listen to them back to back, Maná's limited emotional landscape and unimaginative rock instrumentation stand out in stark relief.

I have no memory of hearing this on the radio at the time, but like so many entries this year, it was only at #1 for a week: the last grains of sand of the airplay-only Hot Latin chart are running out fast.

MANÁ FT. PRINCE ROYCE, “EL VERDADERO AMOR PERDONA”

10th December, 2011

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Over the years that I've been conducting this travelogue I have occasionally run into cases where it's not clear which version of a song is supposed to be represented on the chart, since multiple versions are in circulation at once. Billboard lists this chart entry as "Maná Featuring Prince Royce," but from my memories of Latin radio in Phoenix in late 2011 and 2012, Maná's original plodding dirge was played far more frequently; I only vaguely recognized the bachata-con-Royce version when listening to it to write this.

Of course, other markets presumably had different experiences: New York radio, for example, would surely have promoted the Dominican element over the Mexican. And one of the charms of the old airplay-only method of chart calculation was that the multiple versions and remixes playing on various slightly different radio formats could be collapsed into sharing a single chart entry. Which became part of the strategy for releasing multiple versions to multiple formats at once: get enough traction on each, and your song would do all the better on the overall chart. But I don't know that I've heard a more awkward combination of genres  than this power ballad-meets-airy bachata that Billboard considered the primary version in 2011.

Ten years later, the YouTube video for Maná's original has more than three times the views than the version with Prince Royce interpolating half the lines in his lovely, emotionally vacant falsetto does. It's easy to read this collaboration as a cynical move: "El Verdadero Amor Perdona" (True love forgives) was the third single from Drama y Luz, but didn't look likely to replicate the success of its two predecessors, both of which appeared here, so goosing its chances by adding a flavor-of-the-year prettyboy singer and a generic bachata bed (the hoary rock en español band played much better bachata when Juan Luis Guerra was their guest) for a conveniently-timed "deluxe edition" of the album worked to keep Maná's streak of Hot Latin #1s alive.

As you may have gathered, I'm not a big fan of either the original or its bachatification. The chorus' rewrite of 1 Corinthians 13 to beg a betrayed lover to take the singer back is emotionally manipulative in both the good sense (pop artisans know how to use chord changes and tension-and-release dynamics to engineer feelings), and the bad ("if you don't forgive me, you never loved me"-ass argumentation). It's easier to take the song less seriously when Prince Royce sings half the lines in his glib, cherubic manner, which might make it even more insidious.

Not that demanding perfect moral rectitude from pop is a meaningful, much less achiveable, goal: pop exists to embody emotions, and the emotion embodied here is a widely experienced and expressed one. My complaint is that it fails to make that emotion irresistible to me: it sounds just as stunted and navel-gazing as it is.

MANÁ, “AMOR CLANDESTINO”

27th August, 2011

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The last time Maná had two singles in a row go to #1 was in 2006, when "Labios Compartidos" and "Bendita Tu Luz" followed in quick succession. That was during the first flowering of reggaetón, and my reaction was a simmering displeasure at such old-fashioned rock being dragged out again as if in counterpoint. Here in 2011 it is a similarly dance-friendly moment, with Maná appearing between big splashy international hits, and it feels more than ever like a kind of quiet culture war.

"Lluvia al Corazón" had sat at #1 for three weeks in the spring, and "Amor Clandestino" only popped in for a week; and not to suggest that my tastes are representative of the broader Latin Pop audience's, but I kind of liked the former, and think the latter is Maná at their self-important, pretentious, fauxthentic worst.

Opening with Fher's extremely basic harmonica skills signals that this is going to be a bluesy, authentic rock song, but there's no groove here, just a succession of dramatic builds, key changes and string sections shoring up the slow bits while Fher moans about love that has to be conducted in secret for unspecified reasons. The video gives a number of specifics, none laudable: one person is cheating on their partner, another is a tutor coming on to their student, a third is falling in love with a sex worker trying to keep it professional. The lyrics are certainly in a tradition of self-involved love poetry in which men bemoan the circumstances that prevent them from loving openly and look forward to the ever-delayed day in which they will be allowed to.

Could it be read as a closeted gay song? Of course, and that's the only thing that redeems it, and makes it feel like it's participating in the pop ethos of the 2010s. In the video, a woman looking like she's going towards Fher but instead kissing another woman in an extremely male-gaze shot is the closest we get.

The band is visibly aging, and the concurrent transition to HD videos does them no favors. Still, the next Maná single will also appear here, a record that I believe only Enrique Iglesias has matched. And of course, some day I'll be sorry not to have Maná to kick around any more.

MANÁ, “LLUVIA AL CORAZÓN”

2nd April, 2011

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I've had plenty of criticisms of Maná to make in these pages, and this song is far from making a convert of me: musically it's just as generic and earnest and toothless as all the rest of their #1s. And maybe it's just catching me in a particularly receptive mood; but the sentiment of the song for once matches the heroic-inspirational tone of the instrumentation, and also is actually a noble (if still inevitably limited and flat-footed) sentiment.

"Lluvia al Corazón" means "rain in the heart," and the thrust of the lyric, that a woman (possibly a lover, though she needn't be -- in interviews Fher said she could also be a sister, or a friend) is experiencing depression or worse and expressing suicidal thoughts, and the singer's response is to be with her, to help her through it, and to give her hope. As a therapeutic strategy it's insufficient and probably even harmful in parts (the line "si te vas así yo moriré" (if you go like this i'll die) is at best ill-considered), but I've been so down on Maná that even their hearts being the right place, however clumsy they are about it, is a pleasant surprise.

But then again, maybe that's just my own sentimentality about depression speaking. I was less forgiving of bathos at #1 when the subject was neglectful parenting or domestic abuse, after all. And Maná's generic rock is no better, theoretically, than Franco de Vita's generic pomp or Héctor el Father's generic moody reggaetón; but I have used self-important rock to feel better during depression, in ways I have not used other kinds of self-important music, so once more I spend a Maná entry talking about solipsism. But for a change, this time it's my own.

MANÁ, “SI NO TE HUBIERAS IDO”

26th April, 2008

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One of two songs that briefly interrupted Flex's twenty-week reign in the back half of 2008 was this midtempo chug through nostalgic Mexican pop.

Maná formed in 1986, two years after singer Marisela had a big hit with "Si No Te Hubieras Ido" (if you hadn't left), a soft-rock ballad written and produced by Los Bukis frontman Marco Antonio Solís, who is also the second voice on the choruses. By the time that Solís included his own recording of the song on his album of re-recordings Trozos de mi Alma (pieces of my soul), Maná was a globally successful band who had changed the sound of Mexican pop: Solís' version, though still a syrupy ballad, has a muscular rock arrangement, and went to #4 on the Hot Latin chart in 1999. A year later, there was an awkward salsa version by Puerto Rican singer Charlie Cruz, but it only reached #40.

So when Maná included it on their 2008 live album Arde El Cielo (the sky is burning) as one of two covers (the other is José Alfred Jiménez' classic ranchera "El Rey"), it was as an acknowledgement of Mexican pop history and a desire to place themselves within that lineage. I've quarreled with the Mexicanness of Maná before (which I should again stress that I am in no capacity to judge, being only an outside observer), but whether or not their audience considers them an internationalist improvement on Mexican regionalism, Maná certainly wants to be seen as operating within a Mexican (and broader Latin) tradition at least as much as in the international rock tradition that Fher's throaty vocals and their chugging guitars point to.

It's those relentless, uninflected chugging guitars which make this a more or less failed rewrite of the song. The swooping emotional drama that Marisela and Marco Antonio Solís communicated in their readings of the lyrics' emotional devastation, a drama that was no doubt goosed up by glossy strings, dissipates into friendly sway-along karaoke in Maná's hands, which comes off like a third-hand story rather than a portrayal of heartbreak.

MANÁ, “MANDA UNA SEÑAL”

3rd March, 2007

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The third Hot Latin #1 in a row from Maná's 2006 album Amar Es Combatir (to love is to struggle), and it's time for me to acknowledge that whether I like it or not Maná were speaking to the broader Latin-music audience in the late 2000s in much more meaningful ways than I have been able to understand on this travelogue so far.

But I'm getting closer with this song. It helps that it's a straight-down-the-line power-pop song, with 80s guitar chugs and sparkling harmonies and anthemic choruses, and so feels closer to the derivative, romantic, essentially conservative heart of Maná than incorporating Afro-Latin rhythms or post-grunge posturing does.

I want to be skeptical here of my usual conflation of post-80s rock with conservatism; outside the Anglosphere, rock means different things, and especially on a different time scale, than what the usual histories of US and British fads claim are set in stone. But it is noteworthy that Maná is having bigger hits than ever at the moment that reggaetón is challenging the settled assumptions of the Latin-music industry: Maná are the very definition of a settled assumption, and their not exactly dominance but certainly resurgence here in the 2000s might be comparable to something like the way the rock gods of the 1960s and 1970s reentered the US charts in the late 80s as a sort of comfort food to aging Boomers weirded out by hip-hop and hair metal.

To use a word with more currency in Hispanophone theory than Anglophone, Maná have never made particularly autochthonous music: and reggaetón's refusal to embrace the Estefan-bred crossover ideal, as seen in the paltry "Latin Invasion" of 1999 and the rather less paltry career of Shakira -- reggaetón remains defiantly aimed at an urbano audience, forcing Anglophone audiences to come to it (as they actually did with "Gasolina") rather than seeking to ingratiate itself by crooning in translated English -- is an assertion of greater autochthony, and particularly a darker-skinned, poorer, and urban autochthony, than the comfortable Latin middle class, both in the US and elsewhere, is comfortable with. They're comfortable with Maná, a crossover act in everything but language; Maná makes extremely comfortable music.

It's impossible not to read all of this from the vantage point of 2019, of course, which has proved the reggaetoneros right and the ingratiating middle class wrong; as concentration camps for darker-skinned, poorer, and urban Hispanophones proliferate, as border-wide fortresses are raised to protect the wealthy and white from rising tides and the tropical poor those tides will displace, as Us and Them become ever more deeply riven by race, language, and class, Maná's ode to romantic questing, expressed in beautifully poetic literary Spanish and accompanied by totemic sounds from the past four decades of sensitive white male guitar heroics sounds more and more hollow, an aristocratic fashion for dressing in the workingman's clothes of yesteryear while the mob cries out for justice.

MANÁ FT. JUAN LUIS GUERRA, “BENDITA TU LUZ”

16th December, 2006

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Like Aerosmith or U2, Maná are more beloved by rock fans for their earlier, hungrier work than for the massive hits that blanketed the pop airwaves in middle age. But their collaboration here with Juan Luis Guerra, who is more of a Bowie figure in remaining perpetually relevant (although perhaps to a smaller coterie) throughout many shifts and phases, feels less like a quick muso-cred cash-in (like, say, U2 baptizing themselves in Muddy Waters) than the natural result of writing a very simple and straightforward song that requires some kind of folk-based arrangement in order to have emotional resonance: and hey, it's 2006, bachata is growing in popularity.

Because although Maná are the above-the-line credit, and wrote the song themselves internally (Guerra really is only a guest), it's a bachata song through and through. It's worth noting that in the whole history of the chart, the only people who have ever had a bachata #1 are Juan Luis Guerra himself and a rhythm-raiding Gloria Estefan. This will change in the near future, as the New York bachata scene coalesces into pop strength; but for now Maná are very much appropriating (not necessarily in a problematic sense) a particularly Dominican sound.

Of course when bachata first coalesced as a local version of Cuban boleros and sons in the hinterlands of the Dominican Republic, it was the furthest thing from a point of national pride for the Dominican elite, who despised its rusticity, its frankness, and its Blackness. (Listening to the earliest bachatas makes it hard to believe that such romantic music was once considered unfit for broadcast, but that's elites for you.) By the late 1980s, though, bachata's national popularity was too undeniable to continue being censored, and the switch to electric guitars and more danceable tempos kept it competitive with merengue, salsa, and the other tropical music burgeoning in the Caribbean. Still, it wasn't really a pan-Latin sound until Juan Luis Guerra became a pan-Latin star; and Guerra was never a bachatero so much as an eclectic musical genius who used bachata, among many other styles, because it was part of his Dominican heritage.

This is the second time Maná has appeared here with a swaying Caribbean rhythm instead of their usual rock-based flatfootedness; if "Bendita Tu Luz" is better than "Mariposa Traicionera", it's because of Juan Luis Guerra's rhythmic intricacy and the nimbleness of modern bachata over the somnolence of traditional bolero: but "Mariposa Traicionera" is more complex in its lyrics (even though, as the YouTube comments point out, it's rather slut-shaming), while "Bendita Tu Luz" is so devout in its declarations of love that it could quite possibly double as a Christian hymn. One more way in which Maná recalls U2, then.

MANÁ, “LABIOS COMPARTIDOS”

5th August, 2006

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Maybe it's the date. Thirteen years in the past is long enough to seem embarrassing by its failure to be current, but not so deep in the past to have achieved the varnish of widespread cultural nostalgia. (Of course, i'm in my forties; if you're younger it may seem an eon ago.) It doesn't help that Maná doesn't sound particularly 2006 here, and is closer to the radio-friendly alt-rock of 1996, which sounds particularly ungainly in a chart quickly being reorganized according to the pulse of reggaetón.

The song itself is perfectly serviceable; with a different arrangement, it could have been a ranchera classic, the age-old whine of a man unwilling to share his lover's lips with another, but who can't bring himself to leave her over the infidelity either. If it is infidelity (one irony of hairy rock dudes bellowing this song is that rock was supposed to have relieved us of our sexual hangups back in the seventies. Lennon being a jealous guy was meant as a regretful confession, not a cri d'amour propre); but it's hard to imagine such rigid cultural fetishists as Maná being even aware of polyamory.

The very nineties drumming, which has heard of breakbeats (or, to put it another way, Afro-Latin rhythms) while the rest of the song plods along in a hairy yarl, sounds particularly wan and insignificant compared to the authority and insistence of the dembow riddim, and if the chiming guitars and sub-Bono vocalizing are even more anonymous, it's hardly a point in their favor.

Maná will return, and I may feel differently about them when they do, but it's worth noting that 2006 was so unsettled a time in the US charts, as physical sales tanked, digital sales had not yet fully replaced them, and streaming was still in utero, that this song remains the highest Maná has ever charted on the Hot 100. Why this utterly anodyne moan, which offers so little novelty to the non-Hispanophone, should represent them, other than to confirm the stereotype of rock en español being wholly derivative and failing to transcend its Anglophone models, is a puzzle. But it's not our puzzle.

Onward.

MANÁ, “MARIPOSA TRAICIONERA”

5th July, 2003

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I've been using the "rock en español" tag quite liberally since starting this blog eight years ago (real time) and fourteen years ago (chart time), but this may be the first time it actually applies, at least to the degree that "rock en español" was ever an organic musical movement and not just a marketing campaign. (And to the degree that, under capitalism, there is a difference.)

In the 1980s, "Rock en Tu Idioma" (rock in your language) was a publicity campaign started by a Mexican subsidiary of an international (originally German) record company to sell the middle-class youth of Latin America on local bands playing in styles which had originated in the US and Great Britain between 1956 and 1980, as a complement to rather than as a replacement for the English-language originals; what "rock en tu idioma" was meant as a replacement for was local (and often heavily racialized) styles of music which working-class audiences played and enjoyed, and which nationalist elites, after enough time had passed for nostalgia to do its work, always appropriated for propaganda purposes. What young Mexican Maná fans in the early 90s were rejecting was not the imperialist ubiquity of U2 or Pearl Jam, who they also loved, but the supposed provincialism and sentimentality of Los Bukis or Juan Gabriel (and never mind the traditional bolero, trova, and ranchera music which would have been the Mexican equivalent of jazz song).

When the English-language music press caught on to the Spanish-language rock scene in the 90s as part of their dilettantish interest in "world music," they used "rock en español" as a replacement for "rock in tu idioma," boosting acts like Maná and Café Tacvba whose massive popularity throughout  Latin America was scarcely increased by a handful of semi-adventurous English-language fans. My introduction to Maná was in this English-language press (my younger siblings, who paid closer attention to local popular culture when we lived in Guatemala in the early 90s, knew them already), but it wasn't until I began to really dig into Latin music in earnest in the late 2000s that I listened to them with any attention.

And? They're fine. The trouble with "rock in tu idioma" was the same trouble that rock in general was having in the 1980s and 90s: genre-requisite signifiers of rebellion and Dionysian menace had long since turned itself into the complacent, self-perpetuating mainstream, which by its nature shuts out the poor and otherized, so that truly countercultural rebellion and visions of sexual freedom were taking place elsewhere: in the underground, in hip-hop, dance music, and (in Latin America) the electronic blends of Jamaican and Latin music which would eventually coalesce into reggaetón. (Which in 2018 has become its own hollow, self-perpetuating mainstream, but one thing at a time.)

This is a long way to go without talking about the actual song. Which is unrepresentative of Maná's dully earnest hard-rock catalog, but perfectly representative of where the top of the Hot Latin chart was at in the early 2000s: "Mariposa Traicionera" (Betraying Butterfly) is an old-fashioned swaying bolero played by a rock band with high-gloss studio accompaniment, not wholly unlike recent entries from Gloria Estefan, Alejandro Fernández, or Charlie Zaa. The main "rock" signifiers are singer Fher's hoarse tones and guitarist Sergio Vallín's tasteful guitar runs, which also fit into the Cuban-Mexican tradition the whole song is cast in. The final refrain, with its repeated "ay ay ay ay ay dolor," is even specifically Mexican, a nineteenth-century corrido trope which the trova (troubadour) tradition kept alive in the twentieth century.

Our first encounter with Maná is late enough in their career trajectory that Revolución de Amor was heralded as a masterful self-reinvention; if they're comparable to U2, it's their Achtung Baby. It won't be the last time we see them, but the genius of the charts, the way they flatten out all subcultural distinctions and actually lived patterns into sheer unmeaning numbers, is that they sound here not as a revelation but as continuity.