MAKANO, “TE AMO”

23rd May, 2009

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The channel that Flex opened for Panamanian reggaetón to get a hearing in the wider pop marketplace seems to have only let one more song escape before it was closed off again by the shifting musical tides. Makano, whose name derives from a childhood singing group who called themselves Los Makanos after the macano tree, a symbol of Panama, didn't have the reggaetón roots that Flex did, and leaned even more into the romantic, pinup side of the music. I'm not usually very interested in talking about imitation rather than spheres of influence, but it's noteworthy that Flex's breakout single was "Te Quiero," (literally I want you, but generally used as a way to say I love you without being too intense) and Makano's second single was called "Te Amo" (I love you, directly stated).

Even so, once the song was released internationally in October 2008, it only got as far as #11 on the Hot Latin chart before starting to fall again in March 2009. What really got it to #1 was the remix with Puerto Rican duo R.K.M. y Ken-Y (who I said would not trouble us again, but I was wrong), and perhaps the banda remix with Sinaloan star Germán Montero helped on Regional Mexican radio too.

The latter is perhaps the most interesting of the three official releases, Makano and Montero singing over a banda version of the reggaetón production by Panamanian DJ Fasther; the drummer tries hard to evoke the one-and-three rhythms of banda's polka roots, but because reggaetón is Black in origin, the downbeat is actually on the two and four, and so there's a fascinating tension to the recording that the smooth, undistinguished original lacks.

Makano had only a sliver of Flex's global success before returning to merely local stardom, but he seems to have maintained his stature in Panama better since; he's whiter, so that's unsurprising. We won't see him again from this vantage point, but his contribution toward the domestication of reggaetón will bear fruit.

FLEX, “DIME SI TE VAS CON ÉL”

4th April, 2009

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The largely forgotten follow-up to a fluke hit that prevents a marginal artist from being immortalized as a one-hit wonder is a common enough pop phenomenon that we've already seen several examples in this travelogue -- perhaps most notably Barrio Boyzz and Son by Four. But few have been as delightful as this working-class reggaetón that leans harder into its author's Panamanian roots than "Te Quiero" did.

Because it's as much a vallenato song as it is a reggaetón song, and although vallenato is usually described as a Colombian music, it's easy for Anglos to forget that Panama retains close cultural ties with Colombia, only having been separated from the larger country in 1903 at the behest of U.S. shipping interests for whom an independent Panama was easier to strongarm into conceding their canal than resource-richer Colombia would have been. The combination of the reggaetón riddim and vallenato accordion and guitar figures gives Predikador's production an oddly rustic feeling, with synthesized panpipe sounds further evoking South American rather than Caribbean musical textures.

In Panama, Flex was still using (and still does today) the rap name Nigga, and one of his mentors, Mr. Saik (an adaptation of his original MC name, Psycho), appears on the song, usually bellowing in unison with Flex. Because as aw-shucks vulnerable as the song is -- and lyrically it's a cuckold's plea for his beloved to admit that she's seeing another man -- it's still a macho bellow-along, because first-generation reggaetón. The glorious bounce of the music also keeps it from being very self-pitying; it's practically impossible for vallenato to not sound cheerful.

But like the previous entry, this song too only interrupted Banda El Recodo's #1 reign for a week. The several competing Latin audiences (regional Mexican, tropical, urbano, Latin rock, and more) were in productive tension with each other, a tension which will only increase as the next few years unfold.

FLEX, “TE QUIERO”

5th April, 2008

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Oh. This is where I came in.

In the spring of 2008, I accidentally dropped the iPod which had been my constant companion for several years into a bathtub at almost exactly the same time I started a job which meant a two-hour commute each way. For the first time since the late 90s, I started listening to the radio in my car, and not just sticking to the classic rock, oldies, or public-radio stations that had been my comfort food and music education as a young ignoramus. I forced myself to listen to contemporary pop past the kneejerk revulsion that a certain rockcrit-bred devotion to 1960s models of rock, soul and pop had inculcated, and discovered that the chrome electronic textures and hyperhuman vocal melismas could communicate real emotion, different certainly than the man-with-a-guitar model I had trained myself to expect, but true nonetheless. Even after the job allowed me to get a new mp3 player, I kept listening to pop radio, entranced by the churn of sameness and novelty.

And late in 2008, looking for more stations to add to my regular rotation that I could switch over to during ad breaks (never subject yourself to advertising if it's possible to avoid it has been perhaps the most consistently followed principle of my entire life), I started listening to the local Latin Pop station. That was the year of "Te Quiero" that, flipping between pop, hip-hop, and Latin stations on Phoenix highways, I heard as consonant with "Love in This Club" by Usher and Young Jeezy, "Can't Believe It" by T-Pain and Lil Wayne, and "Sexy Can I" by Ray Jay and Yung Berg; a thumping beat with twinkly accents over which a smooth-voiced singer pitched uncomplicated woo, with rap verses offering rhythmic but not emotional variation.

With distance I understand "Te Quiero" as a reggaetón romántica, a combination of modes it certainly did not pioneer, but the success of which was undoubtedly influential on the trajectory of reggaetón over the following decade. It was number one for twenty weeks all told, and was tied with "A Puro Dolor" and "Me Enamora" for second-longest #1 reign (after "La Tortura") until the streaming era changed all chart calculations. That rarified company holds a clue to its success: like "La Tortura," it's a reggaetón song; like "A Puro Dolor" it's by a cute, sweet-voiced young man; like "Me Enamora" it's an uncomplicated love song. Virtually all of the streaming-era songs which will surpass their records will be all three.

Félix Danilo Gómez Bosquez was born in Panama City, where, like many young Afro-Panamanians, he grew up in love with the reggaetón sound that had first been developed by Panamanian dancehall toasters in the late 80s and early 90s before being adopted and consolidated in urban Puerto Rico. His imitations of Jamaican dancehall toasters starting in the late 90s earned him the questionable MC name of Nigga among Panamanian reggaetoneros, but when he was signed by EMI, he was advised to use a shortened version of his first name, Flex, for international releases.

He wasn't quite a one-trick pony: he'll appear here again. But compared to the Puerto Rican reggaetoneros who are his contemporaries, people like Wisin y Yandel, Don Omar, or Daddy Yankee, he didn't change with the times: all of his first three records included the English words Romantic Style. "Te Quiero" is certainly romantic, in a puppy-love kind of way that there will always be a market for as long as there are young people who need pop to express their feelings. I can't tell whether it's really great, or whether just hearing "baby te quiero-wo-wo" and "na-na-na-nai-nai-nai" again after more than a decade is nice.

MDO, “TE QUISE OLVIDAR”

13th January, 2001

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Son by Four had ridden the crest of a larger boy-band moment in global pop, but they were far from the first. MDO, now without a single Puerto Rican left (the 2000 lineup was Dominican, Cuban, Mexican, Tejano, and Italian-American), were back with a... well, decidedly not a brand-new invention. A sturdy old invention, lustily sung and expensively produced. written by Venezuelan singer-songwriter Carlos Baute: "Te Quise Olvidar" (I wanted to forget you) is a we-broke-up-but-you-haunt-my-memory song, steroided up to a power ballad, and even the middle-eight tribal harmonies are (though great) too little, too late.

But the lyrics are surprisingly frank for a boy band: the chorus is about how the singer has sought forgetfulness by having sex with another woman, but to no avail. Which fits well with Baute's womanizing persona, but sounds refreshingly adult in the mouths of young men whose uniform white dress, outstretched hands, and cupid's-bow lips are presumably targeted at a rather less adult demographic. (I confess I have never studied the lyrics of the millennial boy bands very closely; maybe I'm wrong and they were all about sophisticated adult sexual triangles.) But that's the most interesting thing about the song.