ARIEL CAMACHO Y LOS PLEBES DEL RANCHO, “EL KARMA”

14th Mar, 2015

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Mexican regional music is so heavily drowned out by urban Caribbean sounds in the streaming era that it almost exclusively takes an extraordinary event for it to break through to the #1 spot even for a single week. In this case, that extraordinary event was the death of Ariel Camacho in a car accident on February 25, 2015, at the age of twenty-two.

Camacho had been one of the most promising figures in Mexican regional of the 2010s, bringing attention to the little-heard sierreño (tr. of the mountain range) genre. He began his career as a teenager by posting faceless videos to social media platforms in which he played a twelve-string guitar and sang songs by elders like Miguel y Miguel as well as his own compositions; they earned him enough popularity that a Mexican record label sought him out and got him to form a trio with friends on rhythm guitar and sousaphone. Their spare, almost skeletal sound was a novelty in a musical universe dominated by large-scale banda arrangements, and Camacho's songwriting, which dipped into the violent glamor of the narcocorrido as well as more traditional songs of love and heartbreak, was raw but promising. After two minor-label singles in 2013, his debut album El Karma was released in both Mexico and the US in the fall of 2014, produced by regional star Gerardo Ortíz (who has appeared twice in my Airplay Watch), with the title song receiving a relatively lavish video.

They did well enough that Camacho and his Plebes shot another four videos by the end of the year, a rate not unusual in the high-turnover, newly social media-driven world of Mexican regional, especially one aiming at a youth audience. When Camacho died, there was enough recorded material banked to release a posthumous album -- after that, Los Plebes hired a new singer and continued on as Los Plebes de Ariel Camacho, eventually splintering even further into configurations that won't trouble us here.

But the mourning that drove this nearly year-old song (the single went to streaming services on August 5, 2014, but the video had been uploaded to YouTube on March 11th, 2014, though I couldn't swear to when it was made public) to the top of the streaming chart was not mindless: Camacho y los Plebes had released a new single the day before his death, which you might expect to have received the bulk of the outpouring. But "Te Metiste" is a reverent, uncomplicated love song; "El Karma," the stark, first-person tale of a violent killer whose drug trafficking wealth has made him a target for reprisals having his family taken ransom, and whose attempt to kill the kidnappers ends in his own death, with the grim final line "Nadie de la parca se puede escapar" (Nobody can escape their fate), was a much more fitting memorial. 

But also, it had the benefit of already being familiar to his audience: the song had first been noticed in any of Billboard's charts back in August (the Digital Sales chart, on the single release) and grown slowly before reaching a natural premortem peak at #16 on the Hot Latin chart in January. In their article about the event, Billboard noted that its one-week #1 status was driven heavily by streaming, with YouTube receiving 86% of the traffic. It was the first Mexican regional #1 of the streaming era; it will be quite a while before there's another.

Airplay Watch:

• Ricky Martin, "Disparo al Corazón"
• A curious power ballad driven by banjo as much as the standard swelling strings, drum hits and keyboards. It's a generic enough love song that the video shows it applying to parental as well as romantic love, but Martin's committed-as-always performance gives nothing away.

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.

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, “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.

3BALL MTY FT. EL BEBETO & AMÉRICA SIERRA, “INTÉNTALO (ME PRENDE)”

10th March, 2012

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Anything could happen.

That was how I felt in the spring of 2012, shocked and delighted that this underground tribal (pronounced the Spanish way, tree-BALL, hence the artist name) anthem had broken through to the masses and hit #1 on the national Latin chart. A year earlier, I had been deep in music Tumblr (R.I.P.) and my Google Reader (R.I.P.) feed was full of young music tastemakers from all over; I don't remember from which one of them I first heard about the Monterrey rave scene -- probably Club Fonograma (R.I.P.) -- but 3Ball was always at the center of it; I shot off a lazy blurb at the Singles Jukebox (R.I.P.) and ranked it #57 on my year-end 100 best songs list, in between a British indie band and a horrorcore rapper. And then I kept hearing it on the radio, and the album debuted at #2 on the Latin Albums chart, and it had (from my perspective) an unexpected second life as a mainstream Latin hit.

I'm not sure it's easy to explain, at this distance, why it felt so unlikely. (Apart from the fact that it was a season of unlikely hits: I had also included Australian quirk-ballad "Somebody That I Used to Know" in my 2011 list, and then it blanketed the US airwaves in early 2012.) Part of why it's hard to explain is that the aesthetics that 3Ball MTY (and their mentor Toy Selectah) were drawing from have only become more mainstream in the years since: enormous Latin stars are confidently blending tropical rhythms, squelchy synths, sing-song lyrics, and rock simplicity all the time now: global pop stars like J. Balvin and Rosalía owe as much to the Mexican underground as they do to the Puerto Rican 2000s-era reggaetón wave, whether they know it or not.

But everything sounds much more polished nowadays. América Sierra and El Bebeto are clearly jobbing talent collaborating with some teenage DJs, not slick, media-trained professionals. They're both from Sinaloa and had only recorded tiny-label regional music before this; in some ways they remind me of the great Eurohouse glut of the 90s, where an anonymous woman always sang the memorable hook and a dude always rapped awkwardly, but the real star was the zooming beats.

The three DJs, Erick Rincón, Alberto Presenda, and Sergio Zavala, had met online in 2009, when they were all betwen sixteen and seventeen, and started making beats together and putting them the internet; by the end of 2010, they were playing international music festivals and getting attention from labels. They signed with Latin Power Music, a division of Universal (so of course by the time I'd heard of them they were no longer strictly speaking indie), but their music, born of the internet, was both aware of global trends and defiantly local, combining the "tribal guarachero" that had been a lynchpin of Monterrey's underground rave scene since the mid-2000s with international-friendly sounds: once again, you can hear the ghost of reggaetón in the negative space of the triplet patterns, even if the dembow riddim itself never appears.

Structurally the song is more like baile funk or other dancefloor-centric music, made up of repeating patterns, than like a traditional pop song with its contrasting sections of verse-chorus-middle eight: El Bebeto sing-raps two verses, then América Sierra sincs two verses, then they do the same thing over again. It hardly matters: the chicken-scratch rhythms, cumbia mixed with Afro-Cuban percussion, Sly & Robbie drum fills, and nagging, buzzy synths, are the important thing about the song. The adults are singing something about coming together, trying it out, taking one another. The kids don't care. The kids are dancing.

Although nobody here will trouble us again in this travelogue, that doesn't necessarily mean the same oblivion that other one-hit wonders have faced. Rave culture means never having to say goodbye; there's always another festival or DJ gig around the corner. 3Ball, Sierra, and Bebeto have all continued to make music away from the glare of the spotlight that 2012 lent them for a crazy, glorious year. And while tribal guarachero itself is unlikely to appear at #1 again, its eclectic, tropical dance sensibilities will recur again and again in the years to come.

PAULINA RUBIO, “ME GUSTAS TANTO”

11th February, 2012

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Back-to-back singles by women were always a rarity in this travelogue, but their arrival now means that 2012 is already doing better than the previous couple of years: Natalia Jiménez guesting on a Ricky Martin song and Giselle Moya uncredited on Romeo Santos singles were the only female voices heard at #1 in 2011, and a single week of Shakira had been the only respite from male dominance in 2010. The chart had started with a woman singing at #1, and for its first fifteen years male and female voices were about equally distributed; but the influence of hip-hop derived musics (including dancehall) concurrent with a rise in regional music that was if anything worse in terms of gender parity than than its country equivalent north of the border meant that masculine voices, perspectives, and posturing had overshadowed feminine ones since the mid-2000s.

In some ways the first half of 2012 is the last gasp of the old chart before streaming data condemns it to an endless yawn of whatever guy or group of guys makes the biggest party song of the financial quarter, with very occasional interruptions from memes, also dude-heavy. So I'm determined to enjoy it while I can.

Paulina Rubio had toiled in the pop trenches for over a decade before I noticed her here, and her occasional appearances since have been lively, pop-forward visitations to a chart often mired in sentimentality and cliché. This is her fifth (and, as of this writing, final) Hot Latin #1, and the title is a sweetly carefree echo of her first: 2004's "Te Quise Tanto" (I loved you so much" vs. 2011's "Me Gustas Tanto" (I like you so much). Where the former was a kitchen-sink production from Emilio Estefan half-lamenting and half-celebrating a dead passion, this is a much sleeker, even perhaps naïve RedOne production simply and uncomplicatedly celebrating a current infatuation. Almost forty when she recorded it, she is consciously painting with the palette of a younger generation of pop stars, particularly Lady Gaga, whose collaborations with RedOne had transformed the sound of Anglophone pop only a few years earlier, and Belinda, a Spanish-born Mexican pop princess almost half her age whose 2012 was remarkable (if invisible here).

Pulsing heat-blast synths, programmed handclaps, AutoTuned accents, and Rubio singing largely in her sugary upper register rather than her rocker growl: it's like it was engineered to be a hit. And it was, if only for one week. At the time I preferred the follow-up single "Boys Will Be Boys," in which she embraced a fully grown-up, even a cougarish, sexuality, but it didn't make the Hot Latin chart. Later in 2012, Rubio would accept a role as a judge on the Mexican version of singing competition reality show The Voice, and settled into an elder-stateswoman role, only releasing one album and a handful of scattered singles since.

Of her five singles here, my favorite is still "Causa y Efecto," mostly because I'm a sucker for the schaffel beat, but none of them were bad or uninteresting; if I were scoring these records à la my colleague Tom, she might have the highest average hit rate of any performer with multiple entries.

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.

LA ARROLLADORA BANDA EL LIMÓN DE RENÉ CAMACHO, “NIÑA DE MI CORAZÓN”

16th October, 2010

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Pretty much every one of the most popular banda sinaloense groups has a Lizárraga in its history, because they all hail from Mazatlán, but the Salvador Lizárraga who took the reins of Banda El Limón in the 70s does not appear to have been a close relative of the Cruz Lizárraga who founded El Recodo some forty years earlier. When Salvador suffered a stroke in the 90s, clarinetist René Camacho took the reins, and had enough success that once his former boss recovered enough to reclaim his position, Camacho no longer wanted to take his orders. And so the group split: Camacho's band, La Arrolladora (the overwhelming), has continued to have pop success, while Lizárraga's Original Banda El Limón has retained its audience, occasionally coming close to La Arrolladora's heights but staying a little more traditional.

Not that "Niña de Mi Corazón" is paricularly iconoclastic: lyrically, it's an extremely old-fashioned love song in which Jorge Medina's male lover sees his female beloved as an innocent young girl in need of protection. It could read as extremely paternalistic, not to say creepy, something the video ameliorates by having the love story be an old man's memory of childhood love in an orphanage; and the girl is adopted, leaving the boy behind. But the lightness and complexity of the rhythm, a modified bolero, keeps the big-band arrangement from feeling too stodgy. Camacho's wind-forward arrangements are among the most gorgeous in banda, and Medina's tender singing is unrivaled in the banda I've covered to date.

But this is the last banda #1 we will encounter before Billboard's metholodology for calculating the Hot Latin chart changes to incorporate streaming. I haven't decided yet whether, when I reach that milestone, I'll switch over to the Airplay chart, which uses the same methodology that has served this chart since 1986, or stick to the Hot Latin chart for continuity's sake. If you have a strong opinion one way or the other, consider leaving a comment or atting me on Twitter about it.

BANDA LOS RECODITOS, “ANDO BIEN PEDO”

20th March, 2010

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This is only the fourth banda sinaloense record at #1, but it's the third to be managed by the superemely successful Lizárraga family, whose Banda El Recodo was the first to have a pop following. Los Recoditos was formed in 1989 when patriarch Cruz Lizárraga put together an ad-hoc group of young musicians (including his eldest son, Alfonso Lizárraga) to perform for a visiting eminence gris, and they had an abbreviated career until Alfonso told them they could no longer use the name in 1998, having graduated to the leader of El Recodo since his father's passing. The remaining members changed their name to Banda Vuelta del Río, but a year later, Los Recoditos was reformed as the junior wing of El Recodo, with oversight by Alfonso, and some but not all of the band members returned. (There are still people who refuse to accept it as the real Recoditos, as is their right.)

In 2008, singer Carlos Sarabia, who had quit El Recodo in 2003 after butting heads with Alfonso, joined Los Recoditos in order to fulfill the terms of his contract with the family, and based on commercial performance he seems to have been exactly the breath of fresh air the outfit needed. Although this song is primarily sung by Luis Ángel "El Flaco" Franco, who had been singing for Los Recoditos since 2003, Sarabia's shit-eating grin in the video's opening shot and whooping backup on the choruses gives the song its raffish charm: especially compared to the main outfit's politely romantic "Me Gusta Todo de Tí," which alternated with it at #1 for a while, the freewheeling swagger of "Ando Bien Pedo" (I'm very drunk) is joyous in its careening recklessness, the brass bright even to harshness and the tempo a clattering lurch. Marco "Zapata" Figueroa's songwriting is vernacular without being very slangy beyond the title line, making use of repeating trisyllabic words to evoke the punchy circularity of drunken thought.

Raucousness, working-class rowdiness, male bonding through alcohol: all of these are longtime drivers of pop energy throughout so many different kinds of cultures. It's tempting to call "Ando Bien Pedo" the most rock & roll song we've seen on this travelogue in a long time, almost certainly more rock & roll than anything that's under the "rock en español" tag. And if we remember 2010 in Anglophone pop, it was very much part of the zeitgest: this was the era of Ke$ha, 3OH!3, and "Like a G6" -- partying while we can, because there might not be a tomorrow. Although "Ando Bien Pedo" is textually about drinking due to romantic disappointment rather than due to more existential concerns, sonically and visually it's very much about recklessness and having no regrets.

ALEJANDRO FERNÁNDEZ, “SE ME VA LA VOZ”

6th February, 2010

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We haven't heard from Alejandro Fernández since 2004, and so much has changed since then. Maybe the most obvious change is signalled by the fact the single for "Se Me Va la Voz" (losing my voice) was supported by two remixes: a bachata one featuring Héctor Acosta, and an urbano one featuring Tito El Bambino. What we're missing, maybe more obviously from Alejandro Fernández than from anyone else, is a Mexican regional version. But that's because "Se Me Va la Voz" was the second single from Dos Mundos, which was a double album released as Dos Mundos: Tradición (a ranchera record) and Dos Mundos: Evolución (a modern pop/rock record). The first single, "Estuve", was from the Tradición side, and covers much the same themes, athough in a classicist black-and-white video compared to the hypercontemporary, moody pop/rock of "Voz."

"Se Me Va la Voz" was written by Roy Tavaré, a Dominican-born journeyman singer, songwriter, and arranger based in Miami, and produced by Áureo Baqueiro, a long-serving Mexican producer who was responsible for Sin Bandera's signature sound from nowhere. Comparing it to the sound of "Estuve" is instructive: Fernández sounds painfully generic and buried beneath the rock-band swell of the production here, where in the ranchera song his voice is given the sonic space to resonate with the superb technique I first admired him for way back in the late 90s.

Insofar as the song means anything more than "here's Alejandro Fernández singing a rock-inflected song" (complete with fourth-generation Beatlesesque na-na-nas), it's a song of romantic longing, the singer losing his voice because of desire for an unattainable woman. The fact that it ports over so easily to bachata and reggaetón is itself a cautionary sign: nothing about it is intrinsic to its form, and it just as easily slips out of the mind as it slipped into the ears, a one-week wonder at #1.

As of this writing, it's the last we'll hear from Alejandro Fernández: his one-time rivalry with the other second-generation pop pinup has been definitively won by Enrique Iglesias, whose comfort with the limited range and aggressive egotism of contemporary production far outstrips Fernández's. He remains an enormous star, but the contortions necessary to remain relevant in an ever-increasingly pop-focused market are beyond him. Ave, Alejandro.

BANDA EL RECODO DE CRUZ LIZÁRRAGA, “ME GUSTA TODO DE TÍ”

26th December, 2009

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Banda El Recodo's second number-one of 2009, and their last: the moment in which banda crossed over so thoroughly to the larger pop audience did not last long. Although they continued to consistently make the charts well into the 2010s (as indeed they had since the late 90s), and retain their devoted regional audience.

Luis Antonio "El Yaki" Partido's vocals again take center stage here, as they did in "Te Presumo", but the aw-shucks sentiment of that song is replaced by mere bland desire here. "Me Gusta Todo de Tí" means "I like all of you," and the lyrics are a dull recitation of everything the singer likes about his object of affection. The banda orchestration feels much more pro forma here too, with few grace accents or flourishing solos. That's on purpose, of course: the point is to highlight the very trite, very sincere lyrics. It's very much the kind of song that gets played at weddings, that a groom sings to a bride, traditional in the deepest sense.

In fact, it was #1 for a month in the winter of 2010 before the spot moved on to other, more exciting songs; but after a gap of twelve weeks it returned to #1 for a week in the middle of April, which does seem to suggest that weddings really did have something to do with its popularity.

It also happens to be the song that was at #1 when I started writing this blog in January of 2010. I don't remember specifically hearing it then, because I was still in an "all banda sounds the same" headspace (and indeed I'm not sure I would have known enough to even call it banda then), although the title melody stirs a vague memory. But I can't help but appreciate it anyway, because I wanted to like it (from looking at the #1s list on Wikipedia) and was daunted by how much lay between the first #1 in 1986 and it. Eleven and a half years later, there are a lot of Hot Latin #1st to get through still, but it seems unlikely we'll ever hear anything this intentionally naïve ever again.

ESPINOZA PAZ, “LO INTENTAMOS”

8th August, 2009

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Only the second banda sinaloense song ever to hit #1, and the second within the same year: 2009 is as diverse a year for Hot Latin #1s as there has been on record to date. Which says as much about the changing formats of Latin radio airplay within the US in the late 2000s as it does about audiences (or even the specific virtues of the individual performers, which we'll get to). For decades, Billboard had divided its Latin charts between Hot Latin, Tropical, and Regional Mexican, because that was more or less the divide in radio formats: Hot Latin (across the country) played pop music in Spanish, generally whatever was popular throughout continental Latin America and Spain, Tropical (keyed to the New York and Miami markets) played what was popular among the Caribbean diaspora within the US, and Regional Mexican (keyed to the Southern California and Texas markets) played what was was popular among blue-collar Mexican immigrants and their children.

There had always been plenty of overlap between the Hot Latin and the Tropical formats, as we've seen, and Regional Mexican had also made plenty of inroads into the Hot Latin chart as well, depending on the year and the region. But several trends over the past decade -- including the massive growth of native Spanish speakers within the US (between 1990 and 2010, their percentage of the population almost doubled), the consolidation of commercial radio in the hands of a few major corporations, and the rise of truly national Spanish-language media (Telemundo and Univision did not segregate their music programming by region) -- meant that Regional Mexican music began to have a stronger presence than ever in the Hot Latin charts just at the moment when the strongest threads in that chart had become Puerto Rican reggaetón and Dominican bachata, both Tropical genres.

And "Lo Intentamos" (we tried it) actually begins with traditionally Cuban percussion, sounding almost like a bolero, before the full banda comes in and the foursquare stomp of the drums solidifies the rhythm. But it's never quite as oompah as so much banda is: this is a highly contemporary pop song written by a man whose long apprenticeship took place in the United States, where he'd been a seasonal migrant laborer, as well as in Mexico. Structurally, it has R&B and rock in its DNA as well as banda, and it's easy to mentally recast the swaying tempo as a rock & roll ballad.

Espinoza Paz was born in Sinaloa in 1981, where he began writing songs as a childhood hobby, and first crossed the border at the age of fifteen, following the footsteps of his father, who had also been a migrant worker in the US. After a decade of work and struggle, he finally managed to sell a brace of songs to an established banda singer in 2004, gaining a foothold in the industry; his first major-label album, which marketed him as a singer/songwriter of the people, was released in 2008, giving him the minor hit "El Próximo Viernes." The follow-up Yo No Canto, Pero Lo Intentamos (I don't sing, but let's try it) gave him this, his sole Hot Latin #1.

It's a superb song, romantic and sad and vernacular -- the language is very plain and unadorned in a kind of way that many Spanish speakers sneer at, dismissing it as simpleminded underclass music aimed at uneducated first- or second-generation immigrants who are losing touch with, or never knew much, Spanish. Maybe so; but they deserve popular music that speaks to and for them just as much as, and maybe more than, university graduates and Europeanized Latin Americans do. Paz expresses his regret at not doing enough to keep his lost love, and the pain that her new love gives him, in basic, universal language, and his untrained voice struggles to keep up with the melody as it pushes into a higher register.

Within three years, he will announce a short-lived retirement from music in a bid to regain control of his career; he will never again be as popular as he was around the turn of the 2010s, as the genre of banda moves away from his slightly callow, aw-shucks persona. But we only have a few more years left in which banda can break through to the top of the chart at all; the streaming era is coming up quickly.

PAULINA RUBIO, “CAUSA Y EFECTO”

27th June, 2009

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The difference in my affection between last week's entry and this one is no doubt entirely due to my once and future identification as a music nerd: dudely pile-up power ballads are terminally uncool, while sexy sassy glitter-schaffel power pop was always cool, and even more so in the 2000s, when the internet's breaking open of pop history gave muso identification with revivalist microscenes more fashionable cachet than ever before (or, as history has continued to evolve past retromania, since).

"Causa y Efecto" (cause and effect) is a straight-up glam-rock song, something that T. Rex or Suzi Quatro might have sung in the 70s, only with shinier post-millennial production and Rubio's practiced pop-idol charisma in place of anything too alarmingly fey or aggressive. Her 2009 album Gran City Pop was one of my favorite pop albums of the year, in part because it was the year I went all-in on listening to current pop after a decade spent immersing myself in music history, and Rubio was engaging with both current pop and pop history in a charming, totally confident way.

In the video, she intentionally evokes the Blondie of Parallel Lines, posing with her band in suits and skinny ties, and a general 1970s nostalgia suffuses it (roller skating! Eames chairs! hippie dress), a nostalgia that Rubio herself is just old enough to experience. But it's a 2000s song too, which means that it's a song about a woman kicking a man who thinks he controls her to the curb: the lyrics taunt a former abusive lover with her independence from his emotional manipulation and her own new-found power to hurt him instead.

My affection for this song is certainly nostalgic, and was even when I first heard it in 2009, as a music nerd who loved glam rock, 70s pop, and 2000s pop with the schaffel beat. (Goldfrapp's "Ooh La La"! Kylie Minogue's "2 Hearts!" Pink's "So What"!) I have no idea how it would strike a listener with no history with or affection for any of that background; possibly as catchy but slight, or as raucous in an old-fashioned way, without any of the slinky smoothness of contemporary urbano. However it struck the Latin audience as a whole, it was #1 for five solid weeks: enough people loved it as much as I did to earn Paulina another notch on her belt. We'll see her again, just before the streaming era buries everything quirky. These remaining years of heterogeneity are precious.

LUIS FONSI FT. ALEKS SYNTEK, NOEL SCHAJRIS & DAVID BISBAL, “AQUÍ ESTOY YO”

13th June, 2009

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I try very hard to give every song that ever reached #1 on the Billboard Hot Latin chart a fair hearing. For most of its existence, I was not listening closely to Latin music, and so I come to most of it new; learning to listen past my immediate preconceptions and to consider each song within its immediate cultural, musical, national, and historical context, in addition to any it may have accumulated later, has meant ignoring the inevitable personal associations which any adult will have formed with various musical styles or production qualities. But I've met my breaking point.

The 1993 Bryan Adams/Sting/Rod Stewart hit "All for Love," from the soundtrack to a godawful Three Musketeers movie, has been my least favorite song of all time for the past three decades, for reasons that have almost nothing whatever to do with the song itself (although my critical assessment is that a schlocky piece of crap bellowed gracelessly by three aging buffoons), but rest entirely on my own personal emotional history. (Without going into details I once, in febrile adolescence, meant every word of it, which is reason enough to despise both it and myself till the end of time.) And so this gets caught in the conflagration.

Fonsi, Syntek, Schajris and Bisbal are no Adams/Sting/Stewart: they're still relatively young, for one thing, and their prettily-orchestrated power ballad doesn't have all the air sucked out of it à la Mutt Lang's signature production style in 1993. They also have prettier, stronger voices less overwhelmed by rock-god personality, and so they sound just as good harmonizing as on lead. But when I've said that, I've run out of compliments. Famous men trading off bellowed lines of a self-indulgent, self-regarding love song is my least favorite genre of music, and no amount of careful listening, sympathetic immersion in the individual histories of these four gentlemen, or imagining myself in the place of a listener to whom this song might once have meant the world, can budge me.

This is Puerto Rican Fonsi's sixth appearance here, a victory lap after "No Me Doy Por Vencido." He wrote the song for four male voices, and considered giving it to a boy band before asking his celebrity friends to record it during a fishing trip. Spaniard Bisbal has been here before, as has Argentine Noel Schajris, as one of the two masterminds of Sin Bandera; but this is Mexican pop-industry mainstay and commercial composer Syntek's debut. He, like everyone else here, displays no personality beyond being game and rather full of himself. The capacity of the Hot Latin chart in 2009 to absorb a wide variety of music from all over the Spanish-speaking world is still admirable; the fact that a song like this could get nowhere near #1 a decade later is, as a matter of cultural pluralism, a shame. But selfishly, I don't mind a bit.

BANDA EL RECODO, “TE PRESUMO”

28th February, 2009

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And another genre that defined the Hot Latin chart when I first encountered it at last breaks through to #1. This is banda, specifically banda sinaloense (i.e. from the Mexican state of Sinaloa), the brass-heavy music that has been a strain in Mexican regional music since the late nineteenth century as a result of heavy German immigration, but as a formal genre really exploded in popularity in the 2000s as conjunto (smaller combos, often playing the same styles) music declined. Banda El Recodo is considered "la madre de las bandas" (the mother of the bands), as it was founded in 1938 by Cruz Lizárraga and cut its first record in 1951. A lot of water has flowed under the Recodo bridge -- imagine a version of the Count Basie Orchestra, or even a Sousa-descended marching band, hitting #1 in 2009  to get some understanding of just how differently Mexican (and Mexican-American) audiences relate to pop history than Anglophone ones do.

Then again, some things are constant: perhaps the biggest reason that this song went to #1 when no banda record ever had before was that Luis Antonio Partida, a.k.a. "El Yaki," had signed on as a vocalist in 2008. Formerly of the Banda Estrellas de Sinaloa de Germán Lizárraga (the band founded by Cruz Lizárraga's son once he left El Recodo in 2002), El Yaki was that universal draw in pop, a cute boy with a sweet voice.

It helps that "Te Presumo" is a good song, a swooning waltz with an appealingly vernacular lyric. The refrain "te presumo" is sheer bad grammar in most Spanish-speaking countries, the same way its literal translation, "I presume you," is in English, but in the Mexican vernacular it means something like "I aspire to you" -- it's the language of courtship, even of country courtship. And to the degree that banda is the country music (really, a country music) of Mexico -- rural, working-class, and hewing to conservative musical tradition -- it achieves emotional authenticity by being earnestly true to what a sophisticated urbanite might consider a corny, outdated sound.

But I love the textures of banda, from the flatulent tuba keeping the bass anchored to the silvery tang of the brass and the sharp flutters of the woodwinds. These are all orchestral instruments, but (as in hot jazz) they're being used to pop ends, each section playing as one instrument (the way Duke Ellington or Brian Wilson used pop orchestras) to create novel timbres and support El Yaki's romantic yearning with propulsive immediacy. These precious few years before streaming crowds nearly all variation out of the top of the chart need to be savored: as much as I love reggaetón, the Hot Latin calculus that rewarded many different kinds of music was way more interesting and fun than one that just presents the most frequent common denominator.

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.

LOS TEMERARIOS, “SI TÚ TE VAS”

19th July, 2008

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I haven't kept faithful track of the beats per minute of every song on this travelogue, but I'd be surprised if this wasn't the slowest one we've had in a very long time. And while I'm generally an uptempo maniac, paradoxically, low bpms past a certain point stop being dull and start being fascinating again: there's a tension and drama to the pulse when you're forced to wait for it.

Which is to say that this, the swan song of Los Temerarios at the #1 spot (barring unexpected comebacks), is maybe the most arresting of the four songs we've heard from them. Twice we heard them covering Vicente Fernández, and twice singing their own songs, and while they're slightly better at their own work (or maybe they're just not as great as Vicente Fernández at recording Vicente Fernández songs), here they drop the pretense of being even remotely a regional band. the orchestra-plus-guitar production is thoroughly universal, and thoroughly anodyne: so all the focus is on Gustavo Ángel Alba's voice. It's a fine voice, better than Marco Antonio Solís' but not as good as Luis Miguel's.

They had stopped pretending to be a band by this point too; as the A and G in their logo on the album cover indicate, Los Temerarios were Adolfo and Gustavo. The song itself, written by Adolfo Ángel Alba, is rather lame, a sparse introduction followed by three choruses whining about how the singer's world would come crashing down if his lover were to leave: the glacial pace, the trumpet solo, and the gear-grinding key change before the final chorus, invest it with what little structural drama it has. The expensive-looking video, with its elegant desaturation and highly physical models, is a signpost as to the audience Los Temerarios were pitching themselves to now: the music-from-nowhere internationalism of glossy bourgeois pop, among the Eros Ramazzottis, Céline Dions, and (remember, it's 2008) Leona Lewises of the world.

It was only #1 for a week before Flex's bouncier, scrappier, and younger romanticism took back over. Romántica music isn't dead, but it will take different forms in the future.

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.