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.

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.

PAULINA RUBIO, “NI UNA SOLA PALABRA”

30th September, 2006

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I compared Paulina Rubio's last entry here, "Dame Otro Tequila", to "Since U Been Gone," a song it preceded by several months. The debt that "Ni Una Sola Palabra," two years later, owes to "Since U Been Gone" is notable, although more in the space which Kelly Clarkson and Max Martin's adaptation of indie-rock aesthetics to chart pop opened for female pop artists using rock sounds to do well commercially than in anything inherent to Rubio, whose appearances here have frequently used rock sounds.

But if "Since U Been Gone" was a pop-auteur's adaptation of the Yeah Yeah Yeah's "Maps," "Ni Una Sola Palabra" (not a single word) is no adaptation, but a union of indie-rock and chart-pop sensibilities. It was written by Xabi San Martín of Spanish band La Oreja de Van Gogh, who weren't indie at all in the cloistered Spanish scene (where they were as central to pop as Mecano in the 1980s) but certainly would be in an American context, and it would require a more overtly pop personality like Rubio's to take their sound from local sensation to transatlantic phenomenon.

The result is the best song we've heard from her yet, and one of her most enduring classics regardless of chart placement: with a chugging power-pop guitar line, an exquisite candyfloss melody, and Rubio's throaty vocals playing with the stuttering descant on "amanece-eh-eh-er," it's become something of a Latin pop radio standard in the years since, the Paulina Rubio song that can hold its head up alongside the Julieta Venegases and Natalia Lafourcades who were even then assuming critically-claimed auteur status in Mexican pop. (We will hear from at least one of them down the line.)

The fact that the song never shifts into a key change, forcing Rubio to strain at the upper level of her range in order to approximate a Clarkson-like banshee wail, is probably why it never reached higher than #98 on the Hot 100; bellowing as an approximation of emotion is littered all over postmillennial Anglophone pop, to the degree that something like this which merely circles around its own tight groove may sound unfinished or undercooked to ears conditioned to expect a build-and-release.

But I think that's a failure to appreciate genre. This song doesn't need catharsis, it's not an emotional break-up song, but a wry song about being emotionally ghosted; puzzlement, rather than pain, is its keynote. The campy video, in which Rubio poses as a superhero over the Los Angeles nightscape, gives the game away: at its core, despite the whining synth and spaghetti-western flourishes, this is a pop-punk song.

PAULINA RUBIO, “DAME OTRO TEQUILA”

25th December, 2004

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The last #1 of 2004 is Paulina Rubio's second #1 of the year (and in total): her "Te Quise Tanto" had recurred throughout the first quarter, and as the decade marks its halfway point she's looking like actual competition for Shakira's genre-blending dance-centric global pop.

"Dame Otro Tequila" (give me another tequila) is very much in the mid-00s genre of songs by women feeling liberated from a bad boyfriend: the tres plucks leading into the chorus, as well as the whole quiet-loud structure, sound a bit like "Since U Been Gone," and the video features Rubio smashing up her abusive boyfriend's car à la Carrie Underwood in "Before He Cheats." But it's worth noting that both songs were released after Rubio's -- co-producer and co-writer Emilio Estefan was still thoroughly in tune with the pop zeitgeist, even if Gloria was moving away from it.

It's also a very Mexican song, or perhaps I should say very much a caricature of a Mexican song (fitting enough for a song written and produced by Cubans and Panamanians) -- not just the tequila of the title, but the pseudo-ranchera instrumentation (the aformentioned plucks of the tres and the drunken mariachi horns in the chorus) are invested in reminding you that Paulina es una mexicana. As far as I can tell, it doesn't seem to have been much of a hit in Mexico, and it's not even on her official YouTube channel.

In retrospect, it's a fairly slight song, with a melody that doesn't particularly stick in the mind, very dated electronic percussion, and virtually no low end; the conceit of the production, that the phasing vocals and samples are supposed to imitate the sensation of drunkenness, makes it a relatively uncomfortable fit for casual listening. All of which means it's had very little afterlife: although kudos to Paulina and her fans for getting it to #1 during the quietest sales week of the year. She'll be back, and with better.

In the meantime, bring on 2005!

PAULINA RUBIO, “TE QUISE TANTO”

21st February, 2004

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Thalía has been appearing here since 2000, which I noted then was nearly a decade late given her long popularity in Mexican pop, but the fact that her one-time colleague in Timbiriche, the 80s Mexican children's pop group which functioned as a response to Menudo as well as a Mickey Mouse Club-style incubation of young pop talent, hasn't appeared here before now is if anything more outrageous, since she was much more popular during their dueling early solo careers in the 90s.

At least "Te Quise Tanto" is a hell of a song to break into the penthouse with. Having absorbed the lessons of crossover hits from Ricky Martin and Shakira (not to mention Thalía's recent #1s), it's an uptempo dance song with rock instrumentation, layering surf guitar licks, flamenco soloing, house piano, chunky 80s hair-metal rhythm riffs, funky drumming, Afro-Cuban percussion, and a cheery pop vocal from Rubio's trademark slightly husky alto into such a dense blend that it barely gives you time to catch your breath.

It's a love song, of course (the title means "I loved you so much"), but the past tense matters: it's about a hopeless love, a fixation that's ruining the singer's life because the object of her affections can't be found. The switch between moody minor-key verses and open-hearted major-key chorus is an old trick, but it's effective here: even if the love is hopeless, its all-consuming passion deserves to be celebrated.

It was produced by (who else?) Emilio Estefan. Rubio's previous album, Border Girl, had been her attempt at a Shakira-style English-language crossover, which hadn't gone nearly as well as Shakira's (its top-charting single just missed the Top 40, though I remember hearing it in Tower Records at a time when I was paying virtually no attention to pop). Pau-Latina signaled her return to her already immense Spanish-language audience, and they rewarded her with not only her first Hot Latin #1 but one of the longest (non-consecutive) runs by a female artist since Pilar Montenegro in 2002.

She'll appear more frequently from here on out, but one of the charms of this travelogue in the 2000s is that there is no dominant voice of the period, nobody whose every single hits #1, the way that Juan Gabriel dominated the 80s or Luis Miguel the early 90s or Enrique Iglesias the mid-to-late 90s. And because no one predominates (at least until the 2010s, but we'll get to that), less is overlooked. Plenty still is; wholly satisfying pop histories could be written without reference to any of the songs that will hit #1 for a long time, but variety keeps me coming back to pop, so I'm always glad to see more of it.