ENRIQUE IGLESIAS FT. MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “EL PERDEDOR”

8th February, 2014

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My farewell to Marco Antonio Solís back in 2007 (chart time) and 2019 (blog time) was premature: I'd neglected to look up features. And he's appeared as a songwriter twice since then anyway. But here he is purely a singer, playing the same role that Juan Luis Guerra did on "Cuando Me Enamoro" -- the elder pop statesman lending Enrique Iglesias a patina of grizzled accomplishment and emotional authenticity, outsinging him effortlesly even though he's doing his best not to upstage the marquee star: but Iglesias' overreliance on vocal fry for emotional resonance makes this performance a particularly unattractive one.

The song was written by Iglesias (eight years earlier than it was recorded, he claims) with an additional composition credit to Descember Bueno, a Cuban jazz fusion artist whose work with Yerba Buena was popular among mid-2000s "world music" connoisseurs. But there's no Cuba, jazz or fusion audible here: it's an old-fashioned rock ballad of a kind that Bon Jovi might have sung, and although Iglesias claimed to have written it with the hope of getting Solís to sing it with him, there's nothing particularly Solisian about it either, unless a slow pace, romantic focus, and self-pitying lyrics can be claimed as his exclusive property.

The one concession to the early 2010s is the fact that there was a bachata version released as well, which at least adds some rhythmic liveliness, but is otherwise the same song. Presumably that added market (as well as the success of the telenovela that used it as a theme) helped it go the distance for a single week in February 2014, the first new #1 after four months of the previous four (Marc Anthony, Prince Royce, Romeo Santos, and Enrique Iglesias ft. Santos) playing keep away back and forth with one another.

But there are only two more #1s left in 2014. Let's see if they get any more interesting.

Airplay Watch:

• Daddy Yankee, "La Nueva y la Ex"
• The first proper reggaetón song to appear here since Chino y Nacho back in 2010, a big, confident blare of a song about a guy trying to move on with his new, true love while his crazy ex tries to sabotage them online. It's funny, it's sexy, it's mean, it's stupid: it's great pop.

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.

CONJUNTO PRIMAVERA, “¡BASTA YA!”

25th August, 2007

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The third entry on this blog was a double entry, because two singers had recorded the same song and traded each other the #1 spot with it for several weeks. That this, more than twenty years into the chart's existence, is only our second encounter with two artists going to #1 with the same song isn't something I would have predicted all the way back in 2010, when it seemed like the Hot Latin chart might be much more of a wild west than it turned out to be.

But I'm glad for yet another opportunity to revisit Olga Tañón's rendition of Marco Antonio Solís' "¡Basta Ya!", because I was very unfair to it when it came around in 1996. I was comparing her to Selena and finding her wanting, when I should have been hearing her as her own person (which I think I did achieve in her later entries). And hearing the glassy keyboards and pulsing strings of 1996 adult-contemporary translated to the crisp accordion and and saxophone of 2007 conjunto (itself hardly unchanged since the 1970s) only reinforces how immortal that melody is: very few of the gloopy mid-90s ballads I protested against at the time could have been translated as successfully to such a fast-paced two-step as this is.

I believe this is our last encounter with Conjunto Primavera; why they were awarded the nod to be essentially the only Mexican regional act of the 2000s to appear at #1 still escapes me (they're good, but are they noticeably better than their norteño peers?), but their chihuahuense sound, accordion and sax peeling off licks in unison at harmonic intervals (a bit like Thin Lizzy's twin guitars), has been a welcome reprieve from the more globally-oriented modern pop that has been dominating the chart more and more.

I often like the globally-oriented modern pop too; but one of the reasons I wanted to do this project in the first place was because I love how heterogenous Latin music (maybe especially in the U.S.) is: regional Mexican, tropical Caribbean, and urban South American musical traditions all have their own specific pleasures that even the most exciting pop futurism can never replicate. So a salute to Conjunto Primavera: we first heard them covering Juan Gabriel, and that we bid them farewell covering Marco Antonio Solís feels fitting. ¡Viva México!

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “OJALÁ”

30th June, 2007

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This is most likely the last time we will see Marco Antonio Solís on this travelogue; he's been a regular presence here since 1988 (and he's been having Mexican hits since 1975), but the chart is drifting away from the kind of traditional Mexican pop he does very well, and younger and flashier sounds are gaining prominence. In the present tense of when I'm writing this, 2019, he hasn't released an album of new material for six years, the longest he's ever gone before; if he does stage a comeback in the age of urbano (he's not quite sixty yet), I'll be pleasantly surprised.

The 2006 album Trozos de Mi Alma 2 (Pieces of My Soul 2) was an album of new recordings, but it wasn't new material; like its predecessor in 1999, it was Solís covering songs he'd written but given to other singers. I didn't note it at the time, but his 1999 #1 "Si Te Pudiera Mentir" (If I Could Lie to You) was originally recorded by Rocío Dúrcal in 1990. And his version of "Ojalá" sounds like classic Rocío Dúrcal: carefully-produced mariachi-inflected pop, with studio orchestration that replicates the soft-rock sound of 70s pop where Dúrcal had her heyday and Solís got his start.

So who sang the original? Well... Paulina Rubio, in 2004. And if you click on that link you'll get a lesson in what production can do to a song. It was only an album track (her big singles from Pau-Latina, "Te Quise Tanto" and "Dame Otro Tequila" appeared here), but it's still as dense with mid-2000s genre-mashup technofuturism as everything else on the album, mariachi horns snaking across a glitchy, twitchy soundscape which she actually takes at a slightly slower pace than Solís would two years later, purring lyrics which he delivers in his traditional trumpet-like belt. Of the two performances, I'm aesthetically constituted so as to prefer Rubio's, but that doesn't mean I dislike Solís's in the slightest: I enjoy both his soft-focus traditionalism and her lively personality-driven pop. Her hissed ad-lib at the start, "quiero que te arrastres, güey" -- I want you to crawl, dude -- is sublime.

Because the song is, in both versions, a kiss-off, with the title "Ojalá" (literally derived from the Arabic for "God willing" but generally used as an informal expression of hope) in the chorus introducing a series of wishes that the betraying lover will meet with similar terrible fates. It's a wallow in hatred and revenge fantasies, and it's even kind of funny (Solís's first line, roughly "I don't know what name to call you, I looked in the dictionary and couldn't find it," is some classic country songwriting). A terrific song, regardless of version, and perhaps the best farewell to this blog that Marco Antonio Solís could have devised. Three weeks at #1 (interrupting Enrique Iglesias' much longer reign to either side), a victory lap for a long-serving craftsman before ceding the floor to the youth coming up, as always, from behind.

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “MÁS QUE TU AMIGO”

15th May, 2004

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I had steeled myself for another exceedingly well-written but interminable ballad, when the opening notes scratched into life and my eyes lit up. Cuuuuuuuuuumbiaaaaa!

It's immediately my favorite Marco Antonio Solís song I've encountered on this travelogue, and the fact that it's the second to last Marco Antonio Solís song (as of summer 2018, at least) on this travelogue makes me wish there had been more uptempo songs among the number ones scored by Los Bukis or him solo: my blind spot with ballads has significantly hurt my appreciation of his work. (Although I just did a quick spin through the archives, and I've overstated how much I disliked his work in the past. The three-song run off En Pleno Vuelo in 1996-7 really annoyed me, though.)

The song itself has been identified by YouTube commenters as a "friendzone" anthem: Solís confesses his love, and begs to be considered "Más Que Tu Amigo" (more than your friend). But neither the cheerful bounce of the music nor the video, in which he happily flits from model to model, takes the lyric seriously. It's so unserious, in fact, that it was used as a telenovela theme: Velo de Novia (bride's veil), a juicy and preposterous melodrama.

Which is all to the good: the burbling organ, wailing reeds, triumphal horns, sinuous accordion, and thumping, beach-friendly rhythm section make more sense as accompaniment to a man dishing out a line of bullshit he doesn't expect to be believed, but he sounds so charming while doing it that you (the genderless, featureless object of his affections; any listener, in fact) don't mind.

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “TU AMOR O TU DESPRECIO”

12th July, 2003

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My moderated take on Maná's music last week is the product of having worked on this blog for eight years: when I started it, I was certain I would adore Maná as a breath of fresh air. But my esteem for straight-up rock has diminished, while my esteem for the romantic Mexican balladry Maná was always a reaction to has only grown. I've publicly despised (or, more kindly, didn't get) a lot of Marco Antonio Solís's work over the years, but here's where I come around fully on the man.

Possibly it's just the production, thick but detailed, with tenderly atmospheric horn charts and swooping strings, a  rhythm carried by timbales and bajo sexto, that generates this response; the aging classicist in me appreciates how well this follows the template of the Golden Age of Mexican song. Solís's thin voice isn't very like the burnished flexibility of Jorge Negrete's or Pedro Infante's, but his shift into a fuller-throated register for the chorus "Tal vez es un error hoy de mi parte..." (Perhaps it's a mistake on my part) is more than adequate.

"Tu Amor o du Desprecio" (Your Love or Your Contempt) takes a relatively unusual theme in the love-song genre: it's a breakup song, but the singer is hesitant throughout to commit to actually saying so, aware of how much pain -- and how much power to inflict pain -- it will create. The final line, "I will have to take either your love or your contempt," is a remarkably clear-eyed and adult summation, refusing either self-martyrdom or self-pity.

It does run on a touch too long: five minutes is an eternity when you've sung the entire song in two. But I can forgive a lot when it sounds this good.

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “O ME VOY O TE VAS”

29th September, 2001

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Of all the things I think I've gotten wrong over the first four years of this blog (covering 1986-1998), I feel guiltiest about my dismissal of Marco Antonio Solís, both as the leader of Los Bukis and solo. It's taken me a long time to learn how to listen to men whose primary audience is women, and I'm still not very good at it. (Women whose primary audience is women is much easier, and in fact a comfort zone I would do well to spend less time in.) But more than that, before this I couldn't hear traditional Mexican music in his work. It took the (synthetic, I think) string section on this record for me to grasp that it was in the tradition of Miguel Aceves Mejía and José Alfredo Jiménez: the soft-rock instrumentation and Solís' wimpy, James Taylor-y voice had glooped up my ears before.

And in fact what I've disliked about Solís in the past has, more than anything, been category confusion. I suffer from a bad case of chronological determinism: for me, one of the highest virtues of a song is that it sounds like the year it was made, and no earlier. This is, as I've noted before, a way of privileging the fast-paced, quick-turnover pop of the US (and to a lesser extent the UK) -- in many cultures and subcultures, continuity is more important than reinvention, and just because long hair and beards were no longer fashionable in the US after 1980 (although actually revisiting the non-cutting edge US media of the time would say differently) doesn't mean that someone like Solís wasn't, in his own way, and to his own audience, a sex symbol.

Bringing up James Taylor clarifies much for me: Solís was never as demonstrative or rapturous as Juan Gabriel, but he didn't need to be, any more than Taylor needed to be Springsteen. There's room for both. And even though it's a new millennium, which means that his sheer sound benefits from a light scrub-up, getting some rock instrumentation and separating the elements in the mix rather better than I remember his 90s records sounding -- even to the extent that there's a bit of cowbell on the chorus -- Solís is never going to turn dancepop or hard rock or reggaeton. He plows his soft-rock furrow, and he does it well. Looking up the lyrics reveals a depth of careful insight and expression of gradations of human emotions between lovers that only a practiced, emotionally grown-up writer could produce. He still sounds wimpy, but that's no flaw -- machismo has demonstrably done much more evil in the world, however exciting its musical expressions might be.

"Either I Go or You Go," the literal translation of the title, is more of an ultimatum than the song itself expresses: it's a negotiation of space between people who rub each other the wrong way but remain committed, a reminder that everything is contingent, and that forgiveness, and sometimes a diplomatic silence, is necessary in all things human. I actually, and I'm just as surprised as you are, love it.

MARC ANTONIO SOLÍS, “SI TE PUDIERA MENTIR”

13th March, 1999

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In this ever-changing world in which we live in, it's nice to know that some things never change. The sun rises in the east, water remains wet, and Marco Antonio Solís records drippy, overblown ballads which don't even pretend to keep up with musical trends. There have been very few songs over the past several years which could have fit without a murmur into the Hot Latin chart's origins in 1986; that this one could pass unblinking and no questions asked isn't necessarily a mark against Solís as it is a reminder of how slowly the Latin chart can move compared to Anglophone charts and how many disparate audiences it serves, generational as well as regional, ethnic, and socioeconomic.

Here at the end of the twentieth century, Solís has abandoned any hope of forcing his way back into the youth market, and is focusing with consummate skill on the madrecitas and abuelitas and varones-ya-no-jovenes who still swoon to his old-fashioned sweep and bluster. This is a Latin chart that still has a place for his overstated, slightly corny romanticism -- in another ten years, it won't. Solís resides at the most easily-mockable level of adult contemporary (his Anglophone counterpart might perhaps be Sting), which can obscure the solid craftsmanship of his work.

Beneath the soprano sax and the padded drums, "Si Te Pudiera Mentir" (if I could lie to you) is a well-constructed song of romantic regret. The title phrase is followed by "te diría que aquí todo va marchando muy bien... pero no es así" (I'd tell you that everything's going great here... but it isn't), the kind of venerable formulation that reminds the English-language listener of classic country or soul. Like many a guy given the ability to plead his own case over swooping strings, he indulges in negging -- the last verse, repeated twice includes the line "Sé que no hay un corazón que sienta lo mismo por tí" (I know there's no heart that feels as much for you), a sentiment that's closer to the abusive "no one will ever love you as much as me" than I'm comfortable with. But that's overstated romanticism for you; this too is a venerable tradition.

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “LA VENIA BENDITA”

11th October, 1997

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Since Los Bukis’ very first appearance in these pages, I’ve used the “regional” tag on both their and Marco Antonio Solís’ songs. If this is the first time it actually sounds directly applicable, that has more to do with evolving standards of identification with Mexican regionalismo than with an actual change in genre. For students of country music, a comparison with, say, the difference between Ronnie Milsap and Randy Travis in the mid-80s might be useful: both of them were certainly country musicians, but Travis’s neotraditionalism helped to spark a sea change in how country identified itself, so that Milsap’s AC-friendly glossiness now sounds hopelessly dated and unreal. Given the increasing visibility of tradition-minded ranchera, tejano, mariachi, and norteño at the top spot of the Latin chart in the mid-late 90s, Solís is just blowing with prevailing winds.

“La Venia Bendita” (lit. “the blessed arrival,” but see below for an in-context translation) takes the hypertraditional form of a ranchera waltz, complete with mariachi horns and two incandescent, sobbing gritos, one right at the beginning and another at the first completion of the chorus. Its traditionalism is entirely understandable: it’s a wedding song. Not explicitly so (explicitly occasional songs are almost universally terrible), but just take a gander at this chorus:

Besame así despacito y alarguemos el destino
Pues este amor tan bonito que se nos dío en el camino
Tiene la venia bendita del poderoso divino

Kiss me so, slowly, and let us prolong our destiny
For this love so beautiful that has put us on the road
Has the blessing of the Divine Almighty

The verses are similarly hyperbolically sentimental (there’s even a reference to the grave the lovers will share in time), but the astringent rhythm and sweet-sour horns cover a lot. Solís being Solís, his melody doesn’t follow traditional ranchera templates — which is good, because his voice isn’t strong enough to tackle, say, a Vicente Fernández song. Still, it’s the first Solís song I’ve unequivocally enjoyed (I’m totally an authenticitymonger, sadface), and I hope he got nice fat royalties out of the millions of walks down the aisle set to it.

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “ASÍ COMO TE CONOCÍ”

11th January, 1997

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We're deep into that odd stretch of the Hot Latin chart where the top spot alternates between Marco Antonio Solís and Enrique Iglesias with no intermission, and if you're getting sick of it I can't blame you. But skipping irritatedly over Solís' third number one in a row over the same album would be a mistake: it's the best yet.

No doubt I've mostly come to this conclusion because I'm a sucker for Farfisa organs, and the opening riff and later solo are different enough from the usual romántico instrumentation that it caught my ear; but I also appreciate the old-fashioned bolero rhythm and construction, the tasty nylon-stringed guitar playing (sounding like current pop-bachata a decade early), and Solís' carefully-constructed, grown-up lyric. "Así Como Te Conocí" means, roughly, "The way I came to know you," and he draws a portrait that manages to be both clear-eyed and romantic about the end of a relationship. Though he falters into romántico conventionality ("sé que solo fui tu pasatiempo" / "I know I was only your pasttime"), it's mostly as assured a lyric as you might expect from the most acclaimed Latin songwriter of the 90s.

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “RECUERDOS, TRISTEZA Y SOLEDAD”

12th October, 1996

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I don't speak Spanish very well; I went through intensive instruction as a boy in Guatemala, but didn't often use it in daily life, and in the fifteen years since I moved back to the U.S., have almost never spoken it. So when I'm listening to Latin music, there's often a sense in which I feel like I'm not getting the whole story. Not just because Hispanophone songs, like songs in any language, are full of references to other texts — literature, pop culture, standard sayings — that just knowing the dictionary definition of the words won't necessarily make clear to you, but because I feel like I have a hard time judging tone. Literal, or even vaguely approximate, English translations of Latin pop lyrics are often in a heightened poetic manner, with the kind of all-out floridity that hasn't been popular in English for over a century.

Even the name of this song doesn't quite work in English: it translates as "Memories, Sadness, and Loneliness," which — though it would be perfectly acceptable, even ideal, as a subject for an American country, r&b, folk, or pop-punk song — is a little over-the-top as a title. Of course, that over-the-top-ness is a feature of Latin popular culture, not a bug (think of telenovela overacting, or even just the tired stereotype of the Latin lover) — what rings as overheated melodrama in one culture is standard dramatic tension in another; you just have to know the context.

The music here is not much different from what he was doing with Los Bukis, but even through its cheap-sounding synthesizers there's a deliberate anxiousness. (It's in waltz time, but the tempo's too fast to waltz to; which is very odd for a ballad.) The lyrics have Solís describing, in what I've come to expect as the standard imagistic fashion of romántico, the slow dissolution of a relationship. But it was the chorus that really caught my ear: "Fuimos cayendo poco a poco/en la rutina cruel/al ritmo crudo/de este mundo de papel." Which in English, runs "We were falling little by little/into the cruel routine/to the crude rhythm/of this paper world." A paper world! What an unusual image!

And then of course I looked it up, and "en un mundo de papel" is a standard Spanish phrase to describe living in a fantasy ("building castles in Spain" would be an equivalent, if more old-fashioned, English phrase). Well, I tried to think of something nice to say. But it's hard for me to find Marco Antonio Solís anything but boring.

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “QUE PENA ME DAS”

27th July, 1996

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Marco Antonio Solís' triumphant return to the top spot as a solo act, having finally shaken off even the name of Los Bukis, is ironically (or perhaps not so ironically, given the trend of number-one songs in the mid-90s) much less pop and much more traditional Mexican regional, with a twelve-string bajo sexto as the lead instrument whenever Solís isn't singing, and a rhythmic bed that makes room for the lazy scrape of the Afro-Latin güiro and the urgent thunk of a cowbell in addition to the drumpad fills he's always been singing over.

The song itself is a plaintive lament — "Que Pena Me Das" translates literally as "What Trouble You Give Me" (though "pena" is a flexible term that can mean anything from lasting grief to momentary annoyance) — about a woman who has gone chasing after money and left her lover disconsolate. It's pretty, but extremely traditional, and Solís continues his march through the charts as the most successful inconsequential artist we've spent a good deal of this travelogue running into occasionally.

This song, in fact, marks the end of the first decade of the Hot Latin chart, as it remained at the top of the chart through much of September, the one-year anniversary of Rocío Dúrcal's "La Guirnalda," the song at the top when Billboard first published the chart. If we'd heard none of the intervening songs, it would be tempting to imagine that not much had changed in a decade, but much has and there's much more to come.

But I wanted to mark this anniversary by first, thanking everyone for reading so far with me (thanks! you're the best!), and then asking for feedback. What works about this blog? What doesn't? Should I post video? Would it be helpful, or maybe more conducive to triggering conversation, if I gave these songs a mark out of ten, as Tom does on Popular and Sally does on No Hard Chords? I'd love to hear what anyone besides me thinks about any of these songs in particular, or about the blog in general, whether you leave comments here, at my Tumblr, or via e-mail. Especially if you know more about the subject than I do — which isn't hard at all, I'm winging every one of these posts.

Regardless, it's been a lot of fun to trawl through the past ten years. But I make no secret that I'm really looking forward to the next fourteen and counting. Latin Pop, not unlike its Anglophone counterpart, has only gotten better as the millennium turns. How so? Keep reading.

OLGA TAÑÓN, “¡BASTA YA!”

18th May, 1996

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Of course, no sooner is there a new normal — with regional Mexican and border styles suddenly making up a huge proportion of the top of the Latin chart, displacing the old school of blowsy ballads punctuated by sassy dance numbers — than the professionals and the pop lifers start moving in to take it over.

Olga Tañon is a new name in these parts, but a minimum of research uncovers a very familiar name. Marco Antonio Solís, the long-haired, blandly sentimental leader of Los Bukis and latterly a solo artist, wrote and produced the album Nuevos Senderos in a transparent bid to fill the void which the death of young miss Quintanilla-Pérez had left in the affections of Latin Pop listeners all over the hemisphere. Tañon had been singing for years -- in fact her career pretty closely parallels that of Selena's, with Puerto Rico standing in for Tejas, and merengue for tejano.

Still, this is supposed to be a tejano song (you can hear, very faintly, a cumbia rhythm in the verses), and even though it was (briefly) successful, it's no replacement for Selena. Solís drowns everything in his signature bland soup of cascading keyboard riffs and too-patient drum fills, and Tañon's voice is neither as charged nor as flexible as Selena's; the overall effect is that of a script being dutifully followed. Which doesn't mean there aren't pleasures to be had in the song, just that they are minor and without the urgency that the lyrics provide — "¡Basta Ya!" means "Enough Already!", but both the chiming melody and Tañon's too-elegant phrasing give it the sound of a treacly lament instead of the desperate, long-awaited standing-up-for-herself that you get from a straightforward reading of the lyrics.

This isn't Olga Tañon's last appearance in our travelogue, but I'm hoping for something a little more lively in our next encounter.

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS & LOS BUKIS, “UNA MUJER COMO TÚ”

3rd June, 1995

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Los Bukis are back! It's been a while since we've heard from them, and in the meantime they've undergone a name change. Marco Antonio Solís, who was always the frontman, songwriter, face, and leader of the band, is billed up front now; the next time we see him, he'll have left behind the Bukis brand entirely.

But if the band was ever more than a collection of guys who played behind Solís, this is a great note for them to go out on. Listening back to their appearances in this travelogue, they've been more consistent than I think I gave them credit for at the time; back to back, their songs form a sort of interlocking pattern of trad-inflected Mexican pop, moving from the synth-heavy production of the 80s to the rhythm-centric production of the 90s. Of course, there were solid rhythms on their earlier songs, and there are synths here. Maybe the real difference is that the trad is just a little more inflected than previously.

The song is a bolero, and Solís gives it the rich, full vocal that bolero tradition demands — and I'm pleasantly surprised. This is the first time I've been impressed by his singing; not that he's Luis Miguel all of a sudden, but especially on the middle eight, where he has to make a difficult leap alone, he acquits himself so well that you can see exactly why he felt that the band wasn't necessary any more. Still, the sensitive arrangement and tasteful guitar and percussion figures enhance the pleasure, and if this isn't quite in the Gloria Estefan range of superbly evocative traditionalism, it's dreamy enough to do.

LOS BUKIS, “MI MAYOR NECESIDAD”

21st March, 1992

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Another year, another Los Bukis chart-topper. Like the countrypolitan acts of the 70s and 80s I keep comparing them to, they're dependable, comfortable, reassuring. You always know what you're going to get.

Or maybe they can surprise you sometimes. Los Bukis sound here for the first time like the regional band I keep tagging them as; not just in the chord structures and the romantic sentiments, but instrumentally too: the classically-derived norteño guitar solos are both a signifier of Serious Intent and a soothing relief after a rather numbing procession of gloopy keyboard ballads. I know I've been grumbling about ballads a lot here, to the point where even I'm sick of the very word, but I love the dazzling variety of Latin music so much that it's really frustrating to hear so much of it represented by this travelogue as sounding the same.

But as to the Serious Intent: the opening of the video, with its heartwarming cascade of Mexican humanity, will do better than anything else to explain what writer-singer Marco Antonio Solís and company were getting at (and Solís' hair, at its early-90s finest, has to be seen to be believed). It's a love song — an obsessive, can't-get-you-out-of-my-head love song, but a love song — but Solís' spoken intro, the kind of inclusive stage patter that's second nature to any professional entertainer, encourages all of his listeners to hear themselves in the song, so that it's as much an ode to the band's fans as to a woman. Los Bukis were undoubtedly the biggest romántico band in Latin Pop by this point; that this is (spoiler alert) their last appearance here under the band name is as much testament to the irresistible logic of pop hubris as it it is to the various machinations which we'll catch up on the next time we come to Marco Antonio Solís.

LOS BUKIS, “MI DESEO”

11th May, 1991

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Their third album in a row, and their third number one hit in a row — Los Bukis have, in the short space of time that the Hot Latin chart has been in existence, become an institution. And more and more my categorization of them as a "regional" band is slipping away from accuracy; Wikipedia calls them a "romantic" band, and I'm sure it knows better.

But I've drawn the comparison before between regional Mexican music and country music, and this is a fantastic country song, the sort of thing that George Jones in his imperial phase (1969-1982, give or take) would have loved to get his teeth into, a double-reverse narrative that is also nothing but a list of wishes. Marco Antonio Solís, the band's songwriter, singer, and prime mover, spends two verses coming on like Tom T. Hall in "I Love," as he wishes ("Mi Deseo" means "my wish") for universal peace, happiness, and the realization of each individual person's complete good. Then, as the drumpads hit and the chord changes up to the bridge, he sings — well, here's my translation:

But for you, I wish that nobody would be with you

And that sadness envelops you and drags you into bitterness

That everything will be cold, that you weep, that you never feel safe

That when you look at your bed, you see your tomb

Which that right there, oh snap, but he's not finished. The final verse continues:

I wish that you never hear truthful words where you walk

That the whole world turn its face from you, that no one understand you

And although it seems as though you're listening to your worst enemy,

My wish is that soon, you'd return to me

Aw, he's only saying these things because he misses her! How sweet! But nevertheless creepy! And your ultimate judgment of the song depends on how comfortable you are with unreliable narrators.

There's a Tex-Mex drag to the music, a sob in Solís' voice, and the kind of stately build to the melody that recalls old-time hymnody, all of which scream "country" to me, but of course the instrumentation is as synthetic and untraditional as the 80s could wish. Like I say, I'd love to hear George Jones (or maybe Raul Malo) sink his teeth into it. It's the kind of song that could, with the right treatment, become a modern pop-noir classic.

ROCÍO DÚRCAL, “COMO TU MUJER”

10th December, 1988

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We began with her, and we end 1988 with her; and unforeseen revivals aside, we will not meet her again.

It's tempting to call this the passing of the old guard in Latin Pop — or an old guard anyway — but as any honest pop follower knows, there are no clean breaks. Dúrcal, who began her career in as a girl singer in 1950s Spain, may be the earliest-born singer to top the Hot Latin chart (I haven't crunched the numbers yet), but she doesn't sound particularly old here, just authoritative.

That relative agelessness is due in part to the production, massive and tender by turns (while being very much of its moment), with those great trombone farts punctuating the hook; but it's also due to the direct, even stark simplicity of the song. This is nothing like the vague postcard-prettiness of the song with which she ushered in this project: instead of romance-novel guff, this is a showcase for adult passions, with real regret, rejection, and hungry longing despite it all. And where "La Guirnalda" was written and produced by Juan Gabriel, who gave her a pretty frame in which to pose, "Como Tu Mujer" was written and produced by Marco Antonio Solís, who pulls out stops he had left firmly in place with Los Bukis.

The lyrics are a monologue, a woman confronting her cheating lover. She still loves him — the first thing she says is that she's given him her life and more besides — but he's laughing, playing with her trust in him, and in a moment of breathtaking otherworldliness for ears used to the norms of Anglophone pop, she insists that she has to leave in order to prevent God from punishing him. Religion isn't a common enough theme in pop for there to normally be a noticeable gap between the way (ex-)Protestant English speakers and (ex?-)Catholic Spanish speakers approach it, but when it does make its presence known it's a very different beast.

The title, "Como Tu Mujer," translates as "As Your Woman," and comes from the final line of the chorus*:

Es lo mejor, me vuelva libre si tú vas a ser

El hombre aquel que siempre quise ver,

Aunque a tu lado no me puedo ver

Como tu mujer

Which I translate as:

It's better this way, I'll be free again if you will be

That man that I always used to see,

Though I can't see myself at your side

As your woman

I'm not sure anything this indebted to traditional gender norms (playboy man, suffering woman) can be called feminist, but the way it takes a principled stand for what's right is certainly better than, say, "Stand By Your Man."

*I say chorus, but like a lot of the songs we've seen, the structure isn't the standard ABABCB of Anglophone pop, but more like ABCDBCD. Which is a perfectly legitimate structure, of course — I just have to guard against thinking "oh I've heard this bit already" and remain caught up in the emotion of the singer.

LOS BUKIS, “Y AHORA TE VAS”

23rd April, 1988

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We're still on the earlier legs of our journey, early enough for me to still be obsessed with marking firsts. And this is two big ones: the first real regional (pronounced rayhee-oh-NAL) song, which I'll get into later, and our first encounter with a man who will be a more-or-less constant companion throughout the next two decades: Marco Antonio Solís.

Solís, with his cousin Joel, founded Los Bukis in the early 70s in Michoacán, one of Mexico's southwestern states. From their first single ("Falso Amor," 1975) they became one of the most popular bands in the country, with strong followings in the United States and Puerto Rico. Their name means "the kids" in the Yaqui language of northern Mexico, and that identification with the indigenous underclass (however superficial) pointed to the sort of panamericanismo to which most Latin Pop stars would at least pay lip service in the years to come.

But Los Bukis were no trad outfit, singing old songs in old styles and busking for tourist dollars. (It's worth noting here that the questions of authenticity and keeping-it-realism which exercise so many commentators in the American and Anglo pop spheres have very little to do with how Third World pop stars actually make use of their own native pop forms. Solidarity with the poor is better expressed financially than through canons of taste.) Their regionalismo was a glossy, uptown take on the country-fried rancheras and corridos, with plush up-to-date instrumentation and a versatile, tempered instrument in Solís' lead vocals. Like a Mexican version of the countrypolitan movement of the 1960s, Los Bukis gave their listeners a thoroughly Mexican, thoroughly modern music that worked just as well in the bustling urban centers as in the open spaces of the countryside: an aspirational music for the emerging middle class on both sides of the border.

"Y Ahora Te Vas" ("and now you leave") was written by Solís, who wrote nearly all the group's material (his going solo several years down the road, spoiler alert, was less an escandalo de pop than a foreordained conclusion; no one flocked to Los Bukis concerts to see the other guys), and is a solid if unpretentious regional song. My comparison of the genre with country music in the American market is both illuminating and misleading; like country, regional relies on specific images to tell universal stories, but unlike country it's not really relegated to a specialized market (at least in Mexico, and since we're telling the story of Latin Pop in the U.S., there's going to be a lot of overlap with the story of Mexican pop).

It's a breakup song, the kind that George Jones did so well — "and now you're leaving, knowing I couldn't find/The motive in your soul, the love I feel for you/To whom will you give everything you never gave to me/Who will cry for you, as I do, some day" — the faithless beloved throwing over our creamy-voiced hero, but he'd take her back in a heartbeat nevertheless. The instrumentation is dominated by cheap synthesizers, but in 1988 that still coded as uptown, classy, and American in regional music. The occasional interpolation of regionalismo into our story has its own story of change, cool, and identity which doesn't always correspond with the shifts in the larger Latin Pop scene. But more about that when we come to it.