VICENTE FERNÁNDEZ, “EL ÚLTIMO BESO”

21st February, 2009

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At 68 years old, El Rey de la Música Ranchera instantly became the oldest person to ever top the Hot Latin chart (and one of the oldest people to top a pop chart of any kind). My immediate suspicion was that this was a result of digital downloads being factored into the chart, but Billboard says that the Hot Latin chart was still airplay audience impressions-only at this point. As someone who was occasionally listening to Latin pop stations in Arizona who doesn't remember ever hearing it at the time, I have to wonder if that means that regional-format stations were just playing it around the clock, or if maybe it was a crossover in bigger markets (say in California and Texas). In any case, one of the legends of Mexican music appearing on this blog is reason to celebrate regardless of the metrics that got him here.

Twelve years after his son Alejandro first appeared here, only a few months after his music was first covered here, El Rey at last assumes his proper place at the head of the caravan. The song "El Último Beso" was first released on the 1997 album Para Siempre: in its video, Fernández sings astride a show-prancing horse, only occasionally flashing his million-watt smile. But the live album Primera Fila was released in December 2008, and its first single was a slower, more exquisite rendition of "El Último Beso" (the last kiss), and it was the popularity of that rendition on radio that pushed it to #1.

It was consciously designed to be a capstone on his career: Primera Fila was his 80th album (his first was issued in 1968), it was recorded as an intimate concert at the Vicente Fernández Gómez Arena in Guadalajara (which he owns), and it functioned as a greatest-hits compilation, including Mexican and other Latin classics he had never recorded before.

"El Último Beso" fits right in with that sense of classicism. Written by the legendary songwriter Joan Sebastian in a classic ranchera idiom, its opening lines are as brilliant in their evocation of an entire romantic history in a few words as any twentieth century country or r&b song's. "Si me hubieras dicho que era aquel nuestro ultimo beso/Todavía estaría besándote" (if you had told me that was our last kiss/I would still be kissing you). Fernández wrings all the pathos out of the song of regret that he can, and his voice, weathered as it is, is still strong and precise enough to shade it with the delicate lines of emotions he wants to. As the Hot Latin chart has moved away from traditional expressions of regional music into a more electronic, pan-Latin futurism, we've been hearing such stunning vocal technique less and less. (Q.E.P.D. Jośe José.) This one last wave of the charro sombrero before Vicente Fernández disappears over the horizon should be savored.

LUIS FONSI, “NO ME DOY POR VENCIDO”

13th September, 2008

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At last, Flex's reign at the top of the Hot Latin Chart in 2008 has come to an end: and it's replaced by a power ballad that will carry us through the rest of the year. "No Me Doy Por Vencido" was going to be the song Luis Fonsi was remembered for, at least until 2017 happened and all calculations changed.

Because it's a giant of a song, purpose-built to be all things to all people. Before being included on Fonsi's album Palabras del Silencio, it first appeared on an album entitled AT&T Team USA Soundtrack, a compilation of vaguely inspirational songs for the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing underwritten by a telecoms giant, on which Fonsi appears last, the sole Spanish-language singer in an album full of all-Americans like 3 Doors Down, Taylor Swift, Chris Brown, Sheryl Crow, Nelly, and (remember, it's 2008) something called Clique Girlz. And the song very much belongs to the sporting-championship genre: "No Me Doy Por Vencido" translates as "I do not give up," and Fonsi's throat-straining choruses are perfectly shaped for soundtracking underdog-victory montages.

The problem is that the song is not actually about the triumph of the human spirit against impossible odds: the lyrics are plainly and unequivocally the self-assertive moaning of a guy who is continuing to bother a woman after she has politely declined. And although as a piece of Western media it is certainly not alone in its conception of romance as a man chest-beatingly refusing to surrender to the decisions of the woman he has determined will be his mate, it's hard for me to take it as being genuinely romantic. As, I should note, millions of women the world over have done; pop, because it is pop, can never be limited to a single reading.

In any case, Fonsi's label knew a hit when they heard one, and it was rushed out in banda, ranchera, bachata and urbano versions; but the slight mariachi horns on the original are all the regional accents it needs. It's a hell of a chorus, but like so many other power ballads, it doesn't do enough to earn those soaring notes.

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.

LOS TEMERARIOS, “QUÉ DE RARO TIENE”

24th July, 2004

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We first encountered Los Temerarios in 1997, singing a 1977 Vicente Fernández ballad. Now, seven years later, we meet them again, singing a 1990 Vicente Fernández ballad. That's not all they ever do, of course (we met them again in 1998 with an original), but it's apparently what the most people wanted out of them during the few particular weeks when nothing else was grabbing as many people's fancy.

Their 2004 album, Veintisiete, was as the title suggests their twenty-seventh album, and the image of the two bandleaders, brothers Adolfo and Gustavo Ángel Alba (Gustavo sings, Adolfo is the musical director) in sepiatone on the cover is an indication that it's an album of covers: not only Vicente Fernández but Juan Gabriel, Pedro Infante, and Cornelio Reyna are among the mariachi and ranchera classics the Ángel Alba boys tackle.

As with their 1997 cover, it's a perfectly adequate reading of a song that, not being Vicente, Gustavo doesn't have the lungpower to make his own. It's a classic barroom tearjerker, the complaint of a man who has lost everything, including the respect of society, because he can't keep away from women. "Qué de raro tiene?" he asks: "what's strange about it?" -- that's just how men (weak) and women (temptresses) are. Which is of course profoundly misogynist, and Los Temerarios try to palliate that a bit by making the video about a love triangle in which the woman dies, breaking both men's hearts.

But misogynist or not, classic mariachi will not have a place much longer on this travelogue. I'm inclined to enjoy it, despite its political limitations, while it's here.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “MENTIROSO”

28th September, 2002

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The nadir of the mid-to-late 90s on this blog, when every other single was Enrique Iglesias proving himself incapable of wrangling his strangled whine of a voice into the power-ballad patterns of classic Latin pop, returns!

It's not the song's fault. It would be easy to imagine lovely, powerful, dramatic readings from contemporaries like Marc Anthony, Alejandro Fernández, or Ricky Martin; even Luis Miguel at his most sleepwalking would outperform Iglesias here. It's a good song, and a shimmering production in both the pop and mariachi versions (a cross-genre promotion which made for perhaps the least natural fit for Iglesias' voice), with a lyric confessing to a man's deceptive, predatory behavior towards a woman, all justified because "es que te quiero tanto" (it's that I love you so much).

To a degree, the callowness, self-pity and perpetual adolescence of Iglesias' vocal performance matches the weaselly "I'm a good guy because I'm admitting how bad I am" lyric, but it's hard to believe that any of this was intentional, or that it was received by Latin pop listeners in that spirit. The quivering jaw and tremulous emotion in every line (somehow simultaneously over- and under-sung) strikes me as so patently phony that it's hard to enter sympathetically into the head of a listener who hears it as fulfilling any aesthetic, emotional, or even erotic requirement.

But plenty of selfish, immature brats engage in romantic and sexual partnerships: it must appeal to someone.

ALEJANDRO FERNÁNDEZ, “TANTITA PENA”

10th November, 2001

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The periodic interruptions of Alejandro Fernández into this travelogue have quietly become one of my favorite features of the journey since the late 90s: he is so rarely chasing new trends or crossover success, and his taste in production and songs tends to be so exquisite, that he can come as something of a relief from the more bombastic or kitschy elements that regularly wander into #1.

"Tantita Pena" (so little pity) revives another classic sound: but where Fernández had largely explored the intersection of ranchera and slow-moving, moody bolero before, at least as far as the #1 spot was concerned, he now combines mariachi structure and flamenco rhythms, with a montuno breakdown toward the end, combining Mexican, Andalusian, and Cuban traditions into a thrilling, explosive dance song too rhythmically complex for most gringos to bop to.

The lyrics are as old-fashioned but modernized as the music: the theme is the ancient one of the belle dame sans merci, but Fernández is no blameless, suffering victim: if she abandoned him and left him to die "sin tantita pena" (without a bit of pity), now he hopes to see her weep over the same sorrow, when he too will be sin tantita pena. The video almost lives up to the song: a surreal, Felliniesque celebration of traditional ranchera fashion, telenovela aesthetics, transatlantic Hispanic dance, and Mexican folklore, it's a monument to Fernández' ability to synthesize past and present, tradition and novelty, his intelligent singing, and his glamorous beauty.

Enrique Iglesias will continue to get the glory, but Alejandro Fernández will remain the thinking pop fan's second-generation Hispanophone star.

SHAKIRA, “CIEGA, SORDOMUDA”

21st November, 1998

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And the last piece of millennial-era Latin Pop falls into place. Here we enter the modern world.

Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll had been a child prodigy, writing songs at eight years old and releasing her first album at thirteen; but it wasn't until her third album, Pies Descalzos, that she came into her own: a combination of rock energy, dance rhythms, and pan-global sonics unified by her unmistakable, sweet-and-sour voice and a real brilliance in lyric writing that pushed past conventional expressions of love or self to incorporate bizarre imagery, extravagant hyperbole and unusually rhythmic uses of language. The gospel-tinged "Estoy Aquí", her first mature hit, and the first to do business outside of Colombia, turns the chorus into a breathless rush of syllables imitating the intense everything-at-once emotional whirlwind of the adolescence she was still emerging from.

But that was three years ago, in 1995. And because this travelogue only skims along the surface of the Latin Chart, we have been unable to track her progress. Very few (non-Iglesias) performers begin their careers at the top of any chart; the slow and patient building of a coalition of fanbases, of proving that you make solid work and that listeners can trust you with their ears, hips, and heart, of inculcating enough of an image that it's a surprise and a scandal when you subvert or expand it, is a longer, more arduous, and perhaps more honest task. Shakira in the 90s was not unlike Madonna in the 80s: a bolt of lightning, as ambitious as she was talented, and hard-working enough to compensate for any deficiencies either way. Although I'd say that Shakira was more purely talented than Madonna ever was  as a singer, songwriter, and dancer, and on more or less the same level as an applied theorist of popular music; "Estoy Aquí," in that comparison, would be her early, "Holiday"-era light dance material. "Ojos Así" would be her imperial-era, "Like A Prayer"/"Express Yourself" material. And "Ciega, Sordomuda" would be, oh, say "Into the Groove."

Comparisons can only carry you so far, however: real understanding requires the thing itself. And "Ciega, Sordomuda" is very much a product of the late 90s: the light house beat touches on Swedish pop of the era (the Cardigans, Yaki-Da, Robyn), the mariachi trumpet and guitar were accenting everything from No Doubt to Cake, and even her voice could be similar enough to Alanis Morissette's pained yowl that comparisons litter many of the early English-language introductions to the new Colombian pop/rock starlet. But the sonics of the song, however pleasurable, are only part of what makes it so masterful a piece of pop music: the lyrics, the structure, and Shakira's performance do the rest.

"Ciega, Sordomuda" means "blind, deaf and mute," and are part of an extensive catalog of adjectives she applies to herself as the result of her lover's proximity. (The full list: bruta, ciega, sordomuda, torpe, traste, y testaruda; ojerosa, flaca, fea, desgreñada, torpe, tonta, lenta, nécia, desquiciada, completamente descontrolada. Or: crude, blind, deaf, mute, awkward, clumsy and mulish; haggard, skinny, ugly, unkempt, awkward, foolish, slow, stupid, unhinged, completely out of control ― all of them, naturally, cast in the feminine.) This kind of self-abasement would be unthinkable in English-language pop, especially from such an extremely attractive and self-possessed woman, but it's undoubtedly a faithful report of the kinds of things many of us have felt in the presence of someone who pushes our buttons.

Even her ability with hooks serves the emotional content of the song: apart from the chanting chorus, the swooning "ai, yai yai, yai yai"s that follow the chorus and make space for emotion entirely separate from words are beautiful, sentimental, silly, and sad. Then there's the middle eight, with angry guitars and the bulk of the adjective assault, in which she spits "y no me eschuchas lo que te digo" (and you don't listen to what I'm telling you), admitting that not only is it an incapacitating love, but a hopeless one as well. Shakira's privileging of the contrary and grandly silly vacillations of the human heart over being cool or even making sense has been one of her greatest and most consistent features as a writer over the years.

We'll have plenty of further opportunities to see this in practice: now that she's finally here, Shakira will be a frequent return visitor to the top spot, and indeed the next decade-plus in Latin Pop might well be considered the Shakira Era. Although the chart is getting too busy and diverse for it to be dominated by any one voice, if any voice deserved to dominate, it would be hers.

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.

JUAN GABRIEL, “TE SIGO AMANDO”

4th October, 1997

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Because it is occasionally the case that songs given exposure by movies or television shows become massive hits in Anglophone pop, it can be perilously tempting for Anglophone listeners to assume that the relationship between telenovelas and Latin pop is easily analogous. But just about any music supervisor in Hollywood would kill to have the cultural reach the most popular novelas do — far from being merely "soap operas in Spanish," for decades they've combined being Event Television like HBO dramas, telling complete stories like British series, and moving propulsively, not to say trashily, forward with the gonzo pulp energy that fuels not just soap operas but superhero comics, reality television, political campaigns, and pop music. Because telenovelas don't aspire to Art, they can share their giddy, lurid energy with the pop craftsmen who write and sing their theme songs; and if Art takes place incidentally along the way, no one really minds.

Juan Gabriel should be a familiar name in these pages by now; his own tempestuous battle with his label for money, status, and integrity works as an echo for the themes of the novela Te Sigo Amando (I still love you), in which a beautiful young woman is forced to marry a cruel millionaire while her honorable surgeon lover watches impotently. (Per Wikipedia, anyway.) It's a sign of the respect in which Gabriel was universally held by the Latin entertainment complex — for his hitmaking ability, of nothing else -- that his bleat of a voice (sounding all the rougher in these pages after the exquisite dulzura of Luis Miguel) was not sweetened at all for the signature song of a major broadcast event. Just getting him was no doubt coup enough.

It's a traditional-sounding song (not unexpected, given the both the first and the most recent songs we've heard from Gabriel), a florid waltz with big-band mariachi instrumentation, and the lyric is traditional too, a vow of renunciation and at the same time of unending love. The repeated line "Que seas muy feliz" (may you be very happy) is its own classic of the romantic genre; and if it's more calculated to make the man feel he's being noble than to tend to the woman's happiness, there's plenty of precedent for that. This is the level, of course, on which telenovelas function: grand passions, magnificent gestures, sobs all round. Juan Gabriel's voice keeps it tethered to earth, as does an arrangement that manages to be grand without feeling busy: Gabriel's sense of space and when to insert the exactly appropriate instrumental flourish is unimpaired.

JUAN GABRIEL &; ROCÍO DÚRCAL, “EL DESTINO”

14th June, 1997

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The title of their album, one of the best-selling of the year (it went gold in Mexico, but double platinum in the United States — which should tell you something about the Latin-music market in the 1990s), was Juntos Otra Vez (together again), and even I, who know very little about either Dúrcal or Gabriel, can't help but feel sentimental about their reunion. The beginning of this journey may have been entirely arbitrary, but it began with her singing a song written by him, and this final pairing, just before she developed the lung cancer that would eventually kill her, is very much a fitting swan song, sweeping, majestic, and sumptuously reveling in the fine details of their voices, both separately and together.

Juntos Otra Vez was written and performed as a stage show — performed in a sumptuous opera house in Jalisco, the heart of the nineteenth-century son ranchera movement that Gabriel is evoking with his compositions and orchestrations — and released both as a studio album and a live video. You can see the video of "El Destino" above; its artificial staging and odd light show feel very 90s, but the music is timeless, echoing both nineteenth-century Mexican romanticism and Gabriel's old orchestrations from the 80s (those puffs of trumpets are very like the synthesized horns decorating "La Guirnalda").

The song is equally timeless, a love song — "¿me quieres?" (do you love me), she begins, and he echoes "te quiero" (I love you) — built on an epic scale, meant to soundtrack an epic romance. True to Gabriel's form, however, it's surprisingly bloodless — there's no carnality to the lyrics, no passion (though you could say that he and Dúrcal provide all that's necessary). "Soy tu amigo y tambien tu hermano" (I am your friend and also your brother), he sings at one point, as though brotherly friendship is the stuff of epic romance.

All of which perhaps makes the point that it's a true portrait of the relationship between Juan Gabriel and Rocío Dúrcal. They clearly held each other in great regard and affection — and indeed neither of them was ever as great separately as they were together — but it was a platonic, professional love. Platonic love, however, doesn't pay the pop radio bills. This song was only number one for a week, a tribute to the affection in which both singers were held by the wide Latin audience; but it also marks the end of an era. Newer, younger voices are coming up from behind.

LOS TEMERARIOS, “YA ME VOY PARA SIEMPRE”

26th April, 1997

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

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

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

LUIS MIGUEL, “SI NOS DEJAN”

30th September, 1995

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

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

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

SELENA, “TÚ, SÓLO TÚ”

22nd July, 1995

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That's all there is; there isn't any more.

This is our farewell to Selena, just over a year since we first properly said hello to her. We're gliding inevitably on to the horizon, and she must remain behind. If this hurts more than any other voice which has gradually faded from these pages — we've seen the last of Ana Gabriel, of Yuri, of Jon Secada, to name just three who have given us pleasure over the years — it's because Selena held more than just the promise of future musical success in her voice, in her beauty, in her ambition. She could have been so much more. She could have beaten back the inequalities of race and language, bridged the gap between Hot Latin Tracks and the Hot 100, belonged not just to a single region, not just to a single language, but to the world.

And in a way, she did, at least briefly. Her death made her more famous than her life to date had done; and Dreaming Of You, the somewhat motley collection of tracks she had been working on in various studios at the time of her death, rushed out to assuage the grief, was her biggest-selling album ever. "Tú, Sólo Tú" was the second single from that record; the first, and the one song you probably know by her, "I Could Fall In Love," was the biggest Latin song to hit the Hot 100 since "La Bamba" back in 1987. It peaked at #8 there, and became something of a generational classic, especially in the urban US. It also raced up the Hot Latin chart, of course, reaching #2; only the simultaneous #1 of "Tú, Sólo Tú" kept it from being included in this travelogue.

But "I Could Fall In Love" was an R&B ballad, perfect for teary memorializing; "Tú, Sólo Tú" is a mariachi waltz, so perfect a companion piece to "El Palo" that this period of our travelogue is starting to look less like a generational shift in listening patterns and more like black magic. But it's not just a soundalike throwback; "Tú, Sólo Tú" is a genuine classic, written by the great ranchera composer Felipe Valdés Leal for the 1949 film Perdida, where it was sung by La Torcacita (Matilde Sánchez), and would be covered by virtually every ranchera singer ever, perhaps most notably Pedro Infante and Linda Ronstadt. Selena's performance of it is respectful without being reverential; she digs into the emotion of the lament in her own way, rather than trying to resurrect a bygone vocal style, and towards the end begins to sound a bit like Ana Gabriel in the hoarseness of her moans.

Which brings us more or less full circle; she first came to our notice doing something like an Ana Gabriel imitation. But where the music there was thin and tentative, a bad memory of the underproduced 80s, she — and Latin Pop as a whole — had reached the place where she could glory in sumptuous history without being held back by it. There's a kind of confidence here, confidence in the power of the song and of the classic mariachi instrumentation to retain their full meaning almost fifty years after the fact; like Dylan forcing rock to look back at folk in order to flower in a million different directions, she's almost with her dying breath helping Latin Pop hurtle into the future by taking stock of its past.

And if she's not quite going to be the bridge we had hoped — too young, too soon, never forget — that doesn't mean there won't be one. But that's getting ahead of ourselves.

JUAN GABRIEL, “EL PALO”

15th July, 1995

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Strictly from the evidence of this travelogue, Juan Gabriel is a man of moods. He was introduced to us very early on as a singer of synth-pop mariachi; he said goodbye with an extended dance mix; he said hello again with a gospelly march; and now he's doubling down on the mariachi — or rather, on ranchera (mariachi is a specific form that generally includes charro costumes), digging into the 1940s and 50s and 60s heyday of classic Mexican music.

In a sense this is a culmination of all the backward-looking pop we've been seeing over the course of the past few years, from Gloria Estefan's exploration of Cuban traditionalism and Luis Miguel's homages to the greats of Latin music to exercises by Selena and Los Bukis in modernized classicism. Even though Juan Gabriel's visits to the top spot tend to be brief these days (this was only there for a week), he's still something of a key figure in Latin Pop, and his embrace of traditional ranchera music on El México Que Nos Se Fue ("the Mexico that left us," or rather, "that got away from us") is another confirmation that the mood of Latin Pop (as measured by US airplay, anyway) has changed considerably from where it was ten, or even five, years ago.

"El Palo" is a Gabriel original, but it sounds entirely traditional (except perhaps in the rapid-fire syllable-spitting at the end, which owes more to American funk and soul than the strict rhythm and ornate instrumentation suggest). A "palo" is a stick, and the repeated phrase which gives the song its title, "palo dado, ni Dios lo quita" is a variation on a Spanish-language proverb which means, roughly, "what's done is done" (lit. "stick given, neither does God remove it"). It's a scales-from-the-eyes end-of-relationship song, and if it's performed in a rather breathless rush as the guitars and guitarróns and vihuelas and harps propel us forward, while the glossy, feathery strings swirl above and around and the horns break in like spotlights to show the track, it's still an old pop theme, and an old romantic-poetry theme before that.

But if the instrumentation, the lyric, and the melodymaking are all traditional ranchera, Juan Gabriel's voice is not. He doesn't have the burnished tones of a Vicente Fernández or a Pedro Infante: his voice is high and thin and cracked (a bit like David Bowie's, in fact), and the sobbing wrench in his voice doesn't sound stylized in the traditional method of ranchera, but real. He's still unpredictable, even when writing and singing what might be the most predictable form of music there is. The signature sounds, harmonic structures, and cries (the grito mexicano, again!) of classic Mexican music are as immediately recognizable as any traditional music anywhere; the flexibility of the form is less noted by outside listeners, but Juan Gabriel makes it sound immediate even while sounding old.

ROBERTO CARLOS & ROCÍO DÚRCAL, “SI PIENSAS, SI QUIERES”

29th February, 1992

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I haven't been doing this long enough to really experience the sensation of two titans of the field returning for a joint victory lap, but of course Latin Pop didn't begin in 1986 — the Billboard Latin chart did. Roberto Carlos and Rocío Dúrcal both had much more storied careers than the glimpses we've had, giant unknown (to us) icebergs of careers much greater and deeper than the few measly juts above the waterline we know. But since I haven't (yet) considered it a part of my duty to immerse myself in the full discographies of the artists who attain to the number one spot, all we have to go on is what's broken through that surface.

In comparison to Roberto Carlos' two previous entries, "Si El Amor Se Va" and "Abre Las Ventanas Al Amor," this is a significant improvement (especially on the latter). Where those sounded rather like dusty, plastic-instrumented hymns, this is a living ballad, with a rhythm less stately and more oceanic. It reminds me most, in fact, of Rocío Dúrcal's first appearance (and our inaugural entry), "La Guirnalda," which rode a similar seaside-mariachi rhythm to lovely effect. And while it doesn't rise to the level of her last solo entry, "Como Tu Mujer," which managed to combine mariachi and stateliness to thrilling effect, this is a solid duet, a pair of beautiful performances with an effective if somewhat conventional production.

"Si piensas, si quieres" means "if you think ... if you want," the opening phrases of arguments made by each singer. The occasion of the duet is a possible reunion of separated lovers; each of them is cautious about the idea for different reasons, she because he's broken her heart before, and he because he doesn't want to be tied down. Conventional again; but she's forthright about him having to change his ways, and he weasels around about being a bohemian dreamer in love with life. (Direct translation!) When the song is over, the reunion remains theoretical, conditional, everything hinging on those looming, unbridgeable Ifs.

JUAN GABRIEL, “DEBO HACERLO”

16th April, 1988

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There are three reasons this installment of our journey is running a bit late. First, I'm having a hard time concentrating enough to write anything at all, as readers of my other blogs might have noticed. Second, I recently went through the spreadsheet I've compiled of all the Hot Latin #1s to date and I think got a little intimidated at just how many there are left to cover. I should catch up to the present in a couple of years, but damn. A couple of years. I never make plans more than two weeks in advance. And third, tackling this song in particular has seemed more and more foolhardy the more I've listened to it.

Let's begin with the dry, three-minutes-on-Wikipedia basics: recorded two years earlier, this was Juan Gabriel's last original song for six years thanks to a dispute with his label and publishers. (Shades of another major pop star of the 1980s going into the 1990s.) It is an uptempo dance song with elements of freestyle, mariachi, merengue, and house. And it is nearly ten minutes long.

We've had uptempo songs before: the Franco/Emmanuel double-header, Luis Miguel's Dusty Springfield cover, and of course Los Lobos. But this is the first Dance Song in the modern meaning of the phrase, with electronic rhythms and the sort of bloated running time that would raise suspicions of this being the twelve-inch version if there had ever been a seven-inch. But no; this is it, the song as it appeared on Gabriel's "farewell" compilation of the same name, and as far as I can tell the song as it was played on the radio in late 1987 and early 1988.

And it's the kind of song worthy of that running time. Not only does it have a hot beat that practically demands dancing (I broke into a white-boy boogie almost reflexively the first time I heard it), but Gabriel's performance, pushing himself to the very edge of his range, almost in tears, is a hell of a swan song. He pitches the opening just an emotional notch below opera, with as many dramatic flourishes as he can muster, and when the beat drops he simply rides it. It's a tropical beat, equal parts Havana and Miami (which for thirty years have practically been the same thing) the punchy horn charts which accompany it practically the only concession to the Mexican mariachi on which he made his name in the 70s and early 80s. Aside, that is, from his own near-frenzied performance.

(Mariachi, of course, practically requires being sung with a sob in one's voice. Or more strictly speaking, norteño does. This isn't the moment to get into the distinction, but there is one.)

Structurally, this song is a complete mess, following Gabriel's own circuitous route through whatever sections he apparently felt like singing at the time. There's no particular chorus, although everything gets repeated more than once; there are about five different main hooks, and though it's compulsively danceable throughout it changes tempo so many times and so abruptly that I'd imagine it would be a DJ's nightmare. (If you're feeling brave, though, I dare you to throw it on at a busy club night and see what happens.)

But ultimately, I don't have a whole lot of reference points for this kind of thing. The best I can do is gesture vaguely in the direction of Miami Sound Machine, the only outfit I know of that was making anything like this in the 1980s (we'll be meeting their most famous alumnus before long), and not even they were as garish and cheap-sounding as this can be.

Because while I don't have a lot of reference points in professionally recorded music, I'm intimately familiar with some of the sounds in this song: they were produced by the same cheap not-even-Casio keyboards that I fooled around with as a kid in the 80s: those telltale tinny "bass" notes and the upward flourishes on some "harpsichord" setting or other irresistibly recall the embarrassment I felt when I tried to show off to a more worldly-wise friend and he mocked those sounds. I rarely played with the keyboard again. (Come to think of it, that was probably the first instance of snob-oriented criticism making my revise my musical opinions. It would not be the last.) So I have instant and deeply-set aversions to some of these sounds; but the propulsiveness , rhythmic density, and luxuriant emotionalism of this song overwhelms everything else.

Even the lyric is something of a mess; he needs a love, he's tired of being alone, but he's also rejecting a lover — and finding one, all to the same thumping beat and righteous salsa horn charts. If nothing else, it's a tremendously camp performance (though by Anglo standards what piece of Latin culture isn't?), the kind of florid, flamboyant spectacle that not only invites but practically compels comparisons with Prince or Michael Jackson. The electro-soul, the rhythmic chokes and sighs . . . I can't help wondering what kind of collaborations might have taken place had Gabriel not chosen to walk away at just this moment.

It was only at the top of the chart for a week. You could hardly expect more from a nine-and-a-half-minute camp techno-tropical suite.

JUAN GABRIEL, “YO NO SÉ QUÉ ME PASÓ”

13th September, 1986

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Last time I compared Juan Gabriel to Bruce Springsteen; a more accurate summation of his impact on Latin Pop in the 1980s would be to call him an amalgam of Springsteen, Michael Jackson, and George Michael. (It was Gabriel's world from 1980 to the mid-90s; everyone else was just living in it.) Springsteen for the connection to rootsy tradition, Jackson for the unprecedented popularity; and Michael for the flamboyant soulfulness and sure instinct for the grand gestures of renunciation and demand that pop does so well. Let's take some time to break down the lyric:

The title phrase, the first line of the song, translates as "I don't know what happened to me" — followed by "but I don't love you anymore." So far, so standard; we're in the realm of breakup song, a sturdy genre with lots of history and plenty of directions to go from here. But his rhetoric turns in on itself. "It's better to end than to go on like this/It's very sad, I know/But what can I do if today I no longer feel love?" He's starting to protest too much; but the next line seals it: "Very suddenly it's over/It's better to tell the truth and not lie." He can't be with her any more; he's been living a lie.

It's probably best at this point to refer to Wikipedia:

Juan Gabriel, when he was asked about whether he was gay, replied "Lo que se ve no se pregunta, mijo. Yo no tengo por qué decirle cosas que a usted, como a muchas otras personas, no les interesa, yo pienso que soy un artista que he dado mucho con mis canciones". ("What is seen is not asked about, young man. I have no reason to tell you, nor others, things that are none of your concern, dear. I feel I am an artist who has contributed much with my songs").

Not exactly how I'd translate it (there's no justification for inserting that "dear"), but I think you get the idea.

But that's all verse. Now comes the straining chorus: "For a while you will suffer, I know/But someone will come and give you their love sooner or later/You will see the light again/And he will never wound you/Never humiliate you/Never deceive you/Never hurt your love." That's quite the confession; few pop songs this side of Elvis Costello are quite so savage about the singer's ability to hurt.

Then: "So that you are never left alone/You need to give your love sincerely/To put an end to the betrayals/You need to say goodbye first/As I do." He's just masterful here; the soulful cracking in his voice is added to with a sobbing ranchera tone, and again I'm reminded of George Michael's unique combination of generosity and self-absorption.

Then the mariachi horns come in, playing a vaguely calypso melody with a sea-breeze cleansing quality (even if they sound a bit plastic and readymade), and he sings the whole thing again. Sure, the instrumentation is cheap and mid-80s, but with a voice like that, especially when he reaches up for the grainy high notes in the chorus, it hardly matters.

We'll be coming across Juan Gabriel several more times in the course of this adventure before he founders on the shores of the twenty-first century (just as Bruce and Michael and George would do in the English-speaking charts). But this finds him at the peak of his powers, with the world at his feet — the Billboard Latin chart started up too late to capture him in his world-conquering phase — and that his thoughts had turned to endings and betrayals, with the song drawn from an album titled Pensamientos (lit. "thoughts"), shows a reflectiveness that doesn't generally appear in the stereotypes about Latin pop. Of course Latin ballads have always been full of broken hearts and tragedy; but something this self-aware, and this relatively early, remains cherishable.

ROCÍO DÚRCAL, “LA GUIRNALDA”

6th September, 1986

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Y así empieza nuestro viaje. Promisingly, I think, though I’m curious how people deeply invested in the then-current Latin pop scene heard this.

For example, did it sound old-fashioned? Rocío Dúrcal was a Spanish singer who had been a hitmaker since she was a teenager in the 50s; the success of this song (written and produced by the massively popular Mexican singer-songwriter Juan Gabriel) is a bit like Petula Clark having a US number one with the assistance of Bruce Springsteen. In 1986. Which now that I say it, sounds TOTALLY AWESOME, but not exactly what (say) a teenage Madonna fan would have wanted at the time.

The production here is very 80s, even very mid-80s, in that not-exactly-cutting-edge way that Latin pop tends towards, at least to Anglophone ears. The combination of the rather traditional oompah tempo and mariachi melody with the drum-machine-and-plastic-guitars instrumentation makes for a pleasant tension; and the trick of strategically placing waves-and-seagulls sfx for dramatic effect is a very classicist pop move which you don’t much hear anymore.

Speaking of narrative. The lyrics are pretty great, a kind of imagistic story of a woman who’s had her heart broken sitting on the beach, then meeting a totally awesome dude in a boat and going off with him into the sunset. The guirnalda of the title (lit. “garland”) is a wreath of bougainvillea flowers he gives her, and which in the heightened romantic language of the song, makes her his queen and makes her feel divine. It’s total romance-novel guff, even to the man’s green eyes (“clear like seas, like lakes”), but Dúrcal delivers it in the correct spirit, matching the breezy, pastel feel of the instrumentation with a mostly-light tone. You can hear more in her voice than she’s giving it, but this isn’t the place to pull out the full tragic-diva stops, and so she doesn’t.

So how is this as a beginning point? I like that it gestures towards the past, or anyway towards traditional Mexican music, with the stiff-backed rhythm and the flowing length of the melodic lines. It gives a bit of solidity to where we’ll be going from here: a rooted baseline for the multiple branches and weird dead ends that are the best feature of any chart voyage. But it’s also missing almost everything that excites me about current Latin pop — it’s not particularly danceable, there’s no real fusion of global musics aside from the synthesized production, and there’s no youth-oriented attitude whatever. It’s mom music, basically, which isn’t a bad thing, but also isn’t generally what we think of as pop. Which means, of course, that there’s nowhere to go from here but the future.