31st October, 2009
The continued popularity of David Bisbal continues to confound me. I guess if I think really hard about it I can find similar music that meant something to me around roughly the same time: the production isn't a million miles away from Kelly Clarkson's epochal "Since U Been Gone," a good five years earlier, and there was a Hollywood Records wave of rockish teenpop around this time, from which Selena Gomez and the Scene and the Jonas Brothers have aged the best. But Bisbal was a full-grown adult; he turned 30 in 2009, and his larynx-shredding sincerity remains ungainly to Anglophone ears.
I had an ear glued to Latin radio at this point, but if I ever heard this song there it slipped out of my brain just as quickly as it entered. I'm tempted to attribute this unfamiliarity to the solid good sense of the Phoenix-area Latin market, too Mexican and working-class to give much shrift to a Spanish prettyboy; but my own anti-rockism by now was probably even more salient. I've never had any compunction about switching stations on the thinnest pretext.
"Esclavo de Sus Besos" means "slave of her kisses," and it's a typical Bisbal song in that it presents him as unable to fully commit to his current love because he's still hung up on the previous one. Of course the literate, sensitive lyrics put it more sympathetically than that: the title metaphor is a hyperbolic one, but entirely in line with poetic usage. And relistening I can see how the ebb and rush of the music, a slick combination of jangle-pop and hair metal, could propel the listener deeper into their emotions if they were feeling themselves in a similar situation: it's expertly crafted by people who know their business. But it doesn't move me.
