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.

PITBULL FT. MARC ANTHONY, “RAIN OVER ME”

15th October, 2011

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On Mr. Worldwide's last visit to these shores, I noted that the meatheaded dumbness of the English-language lyrics stood in contrast to the many floridly poetic Spanish lyrics that preceded his over the past quarter century. Well, he raps half a verse in Spanish here, and it's just as dumb. I recall reading an Argentinean blogger around this time who sniffed at the Latin rappers and Mexican regional musicians who were having such great success in the United States, suggesting that the low education level of immigrant populations meant that even when Spanish was their native language it was still a rudimentary, ignorant peasant Spanish untouched by the language's centuries-old literary tradition. Which may well be true; but to quote Mark Sinker it's good not bad. People making the same arguments about English-language rappers would be self-evidently classist and racist; but a lot of intra-Hispanic prejudice is invisible to English speakers because of their automatic association of "Hispanic" with "subaltern."

Against which this song flails mightily. Pitbull and Marc Anthony are two immensely wealthy white-coded men singing and rapping about generic love using liquid imagery (which also happens to plug the vodka brand one of them owns) over a very expensive trance-pop production, itself courtesy of white-coded immigrants. The list of writers and producers on "Rain Over Me" is extensive, but Swedish producer and co-writer RedOne, whose signature heat-blast synth sound is all over early-2010s pop, was born in Morocco, and his collaborators Bilal "The Chef" Hajji, Rachid "Rush" Aziz, and Achraf "AJ" Janussi have similar SWANA backgrounds. We're very far from the Dirty South rap and Nuyorican salsa scenes where the headliners first made their names: the carefully generic adrenaline fuel behind their voices is very intentionally crafted to sound from nowhere in particular, a global (or worldwide) noise that flattens genre as much as nationality or race.

But this is also a victory lap for Pitbull; after the studied genericism of his lyrics for "Give Me Everything," he lets his triumphalist instincts take over in the second verse here, crowing about Latins being on track to be the "new majority" in the US and giving a chat-up line in working-class Spanish. Marc Anthony's chorus, which could have been sung by anyone and makes little use of his gifts, ends up being primarily another flex, a highly expensive guest appearance singing the kind of English-as-a-second-language pabulum that is Swedish pop's specialty. Let what rain over him? There is no idiom in English that this line gestures toward; but it was too obviously anodyne a song for there to even have been a notable rumor that it was really about golden showers.

RICKY MARTIN FT. NATALIA JIMÉNEZ, “LO MEJOR DE MI VIDA ERES TÚ”

12th February, 2011

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I didn't mean to wait to write about this song until June, but it's an appropriate way to mark Pride: Ricky Martin's first (and to date only) #1 Hot Latin song since coming out as gay in 2010. a shot of feel-good pop-reggae that Martin suggested to producer Desmond Child as his own version of "Don't Worry, Be Happy."

Which as a symbol for how gay liberation was codified and marketed in the early 2010s could hardly be bettered: a wealthy white hunk singing a domestic love song generic enough to be pitched as much to one's child (Martin's interviews at the time were filled with happiness over his twin sons, then three years old) as to a lover of any gender. The excision of his featured guest in the video version of the track (Martin takes her verse instead, and she's relegated to background hums and harmonies) might be read as ambiguating the song's referent, since otherwise it would be too easy to read as a man and woman singing heterosexually to each other, but instead it ends up seeming a touch narcissistic, something which not all the United Colors of Benetton imagery in the video can assuage.

The English-language version of the song, "The Best Thing About Me Is You", featured British blue-eyed soul yowler Joss Stone, and her replacement in the Spanish-language version by Natalia Jiménez, who had recently gone solo from Madrid (soon relocated to Mexico) pop-rock band La Quinta Estación, was part of a push by Sony to make Jiménez a global star which never really happened. As this is Jiménez' only appearance here, it's worth remarking a bit on her career: an expressive, powerful singer in a very Spanish tradition of full-bore dramatics, she's struggled to find material that matches her instrument since the breakup of 5a. Estación. Their 2009 dramatic rock single "Que Te Quería" (Who loved you) was my introduction to her singing on Phoenix-area Spanish-language radio, and it was the highest they ever charted in the U.S., although they had been regular hitmakers in Spain and Mexico for the past half-decade. Since then, however the most notable highlights of her career have been a tribute album to ranchera singer Jenni River and a stint as a judge on Mexico's version of The Voice. 

This is our farewell to Ricky Martin as well, as he aged out of the pop market (in addition to, perhaps, taking himself off the board for the projected dreams of heterosexual teenage girls) and into a role as a senior statesman and conscience of pop; he will spend the next decade exterting his influence to advocate for gay rights and for justice for Puerto Ricans. It's nice to leave him sounding so relaxed and happy after an imperial decade performing hetero horniness and emotional tribulation; even if "Lo Mejor de Mi Vida Eres Tú" isn't any great shakes as a song, it remains a considerable vibe. At its worst, it's an instance of pop as Live Laugh Love wall art, a cliché that can nevertheless resonate, because people are not as complicated as we like to pretend we are.

CHINO Y NACHO, “MI NIÑA BONITA”

 20th March, 2010

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Theoretically, pop music from a decade ago is the uncanny valley in pop nostalgia: far enough away to sound uncool and irrelevant compared to current work, but not far enough away to have accrued the patina of age, to sound enough unlike contemporary trends that it has its own, entirely separate charm.

And indeed the version of reggaetón that Chino y Nacho, former boy-band members from Venezuela, perpetrate here is very unlike any kind of reggaetón currently keeping pace on the global pop charts: the bright, cheery merengue horns and piano, the uncomplicated puppy-love sentiments supported by charming doo-wop vocalisms, Nacho's motormouthed rapping, are all relics of a more manic, less depressive pop scene.

But they also point toward the current landscape in less obvious ways: the way non-Black South Americans have come to dominate the reggaetón landscape at the levels of highest popularity, the remove of reggaetón from the concrete urban concerns of Puerto Ricans (and before that Panamanians) into a generalized pop language. If it's too simplistic to say that Chino y Nacho ran so that the likes of J Balvin and Karol G could fly, it's also not entirely wrong. A few years ago I drew an invidious comparison between Wisin y Yandel and Andy & Lucas, praising the Puerto Rican reggaetoneros for being more forthright and grown-up than the Spanish prettyboys; part of the story of reggaetón since 2006 is the way in which the Andy & Lucases of the pop world have been assimilated into the tropical riddim.

It's worth pointing out that the first words shouted in the song are the name of its producer Richy Peña, a Dominican-American who had been put onto the international reggaetón radar by Nely "El Arma Secreta" and Don Omar. Peña won a Latin Grammy for "Mi Niña Bonita" -- well-deserved, according to my ears, for the sheer ebullience of the tune -- and a good half of what I love about the song is his work rather than that of Chino y Nacho.

Because I really do love it: I am old enough that a decade ago is no longer distant enough to have fallen into the uncanny valley of pop nostalgia, and the glee and joy I still clearly remember experiencing when hearing it on the radio during my commute in 2010 and 2011 are undimmed by any concerns about coolness or relevance. Merengue and doo-wop were just as uncool in 2010 as they are in 2021, but their deployment here remains as heart-stirring as it was then. If the doofy, lovestruck lyrics were even the slightest bit more cynical or knowing they would ruin the song: its virginal naïveté is part of what makes it great.

A minor classic, compared to the long history of this chart, but a classic nevertheless.

NELLY FURTADO, “MANOS AL AIRE”

12th September, 2009

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If "Loba" made me excited about the Hot Latin charts, "Manos al Aire" (hands in the air) made me intrigued. If the charts were this wide open for being crashed, what else might not appear? It's one of the most unusual crossovers we've seen throughout this travelogue: a Canadian singer of Portuguese descent had a Latin #1 without an equivalent English-language version. Wikipedia says, incorrectly, that she "was the first North American act to have an originally written Spanish song reach #1," and despite the error (even if you don't count Mexico as North America, Selena was Texan born and bred), it's a notable achievement for someone who only learned Spanish as an adult to have a hit with a Spanish-language song.

A lot of that is due to her co-writer, Afro-Cuban singer and instrumentalist Alex Cuba, who grew up in the Havana area but emigrated to British Columbia as an adult and was a regular winner of Juno awards for "world music" in the 2000s. But Furtado was smart enough to refuse to translate the song to English, because the poetic idioms of Spanish and English are different enough that a lovely Spanish-language song about surrendering to love could sound bathetic or self-loathing in English.

The plastic sound of the song, all crisp electronic drums, repetitive palm-muted acoustic guitar chords, and soaring ersatz string sections, was extremely in vogue in the late 2000s, and in its moment sounded a bit like Anglophone pop crashing Hispanophone pop, productively. Furtado's previous record, Loose, had been a smash on the strength of the Timbaland collaborations "Promiscuous" and "Maneater," which were so rhythmically slippery that her limited voice could just be another texture within the soundscape, but it had also contained Spanish-language collaborations with Calle Ocho and Juanes (again). neither of which troubled the Hot Latin chart; for her 2009 Mi Plan, an all-Spanish-language album (and her first after going independent), she gathered collaborators like Cuba, Lester Mendez, and Julieta Venegas to try to solidify her presence in the Latin market.

It worked, insofar as "Manos al Aire" was #1 for four weeks in the fall of 2009, the album went platinum within a month of release, and Furtado won a Latin Grammy for her pains. But her attempts to return to the English-language market in 2012 and 2017 were met with a stony reception, and she has made no further gestures in Spanish since. Perhaps she's wisely sitting out the streaming era, which as one of the surprise winners of the CD era, she can presumably afford to do.

Twelve years later, "Manos al Aire" no longer sounds as revelatory or heart-gripping as it did back when it was my only companion hurtling through the freeway around Piestewa Peak on my way to work. It sounds thin and clipped, all sharp angles and unconvincing sentiment. A surrender to its joys would be a surrender to nostalgia, and I'm wary enough of the people I used to be that I'm suspicious of that. I still love that it happened; three years later, it could not. And I want to squeeze every last drop out of my affection for these years while I can.

SHAKIRA, “LOBA”

8th August, 2009

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For eleven years, Shakira's #1 songs have served as a bellwether for Latin pop: rock auteurism in the late 90s, big-tent pop universalism in the early 2000s, collaborative reggaetón formalism in the mid-2000s. Now she once more has her eyes on the future, and if her rubbery disco doesn't exactly predict the trance-heavy sounds of the next few years, that's because it took Anglophone pop until "Get Lucky," "Blurred Lines" and "Happy" to catch up to it. But perhaps the most important relative of "She-Wolf"/"Loba" in the Anglosphere was "Call Me Maybe," another fizzy throwback pop song sung and written by a woman but produced by a pop-rock veteran, in this case Jim Hill of Apples in Stereo, who gives the song modern rock dynamics without neglecting the groove.

But the echoes in English are of less import to this blog than the song's effect on Latin pop, which was immediate and in some ways profound. Not that there was an explosion of disco necessarily, but that Shakira's formal eccentricity, as always, gave implicit permission to those who considered her a peer or a model to move in unexpected and unintuitive directions. Although her musical models are fairly obvious (Daft Punk and Kylie Minogue had had recent electro hits with similar patterns, not to mention the Chic sample that gives the song its transcendent moment), her lyrical embrace of a grown woman's sexuality, unable to be confined to a single marital bed, was as bold an intervention in the habitual language around feminine desire in Latin pop as there has ever been. To dip into unworthy gossip-rag territory, it's perhaps unsurprising that her unmarried but committed relationship with her Argentine lawyer-manager ended the following year, after ten years together.

On a personal level, this song was probably the clearest impetus for beginning this blog that I heard in 2009. I've talked before about what Shakira had meant to me earlier in the decade, but being startled by "Loba"'s beautiful, horny weirdness while driving in the purple twilight of a Phoenix evening (the southbound Camelback exit of SR 51, forever) was the kind of aesthetic experience that this blog, as shallow and intermittent as it has been over the years, was built to chase.

Shakira's commitment to following her own muse, and making her pop audience follow her, rather than chasing the most current sound, has never been stronger than it was in this moment, and the fact that that commitment will end, or at least diminish, in years to come is one of the greatest shames this blog will chart. But more about that when it happens. For now, the softest, demurest "a-wooo."

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.

FANNY LÚ, “TÚ NO ERES PARA MÍ”

25th April, 2009

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When Fanny Lu first appeared here a little under two years ago, I talked about how her debut, "No Te Pido Flores," was the stronger and more iconic song than the song with which she first went to #1 on the Hot Latin chart. But this one leaves "No Te Pido Flores" in the dust.

In fact, I'm hard-pressed to think of the last time we had such a hard-hitting, compressed, machine-tooled POP song at #1. "Ni Una Sola Palabra"? "Suerte"? "Livin' La Vida Loca"? And it's still fully tropipop, that faintly embarrassing middle-class Colombian combination of vallenatio, cumbia, merengue, and pure pop; but taken at such a driving pace that it's practically pop-punk. There's even a pop-punk guitar solo rising up out of the accordion/drums/guacharaca stew late in the song.

And like a good pop-punk song, it's focused with sneering intensity on a cutting dismissal of a would-be lover. "Tú No Eres Para Mí" means "you are not for me," and the verses' detailing of it's object's fantasies of himself as a romantic lover are gleefully smacked upside the head by the chanted, headlong chorus in which she wants him to understand that he isn't for her, she isn't for him, and she won't stand any more failures. The contrast between the verses' adherence to romantic Spanish poetic conventions and the choruses' modern, self-respecting feminist rejection of all those tropes is a brilliant lyrical device that in some ways feels like a culmination of so many of the foregoing #1 hits in which men offered their hearts at lugubrious length to unreal, fantastic women who had no existence except in their imagination.

Fanny Lu is very much her own woman here: despite the Shakira-esque vocal phrasing, which can be understood as Colombian rockera convention by now, she's pushing tropipop into new realms of emotional certainty and musical intensity. The middle eight even introduces the unnaturally flanged vocals of AutoTune to this travelogue for the first time, a sound which will dominate much of the decade to come. Of course, its use marks this song indelibly as belonging to 2009, and the fact that i'm writing this in 2020 means that it's just reached the sweet spot where changes in musical fashion have made it sound embarrassing, but the period hasn't been historicized enough for it to sound nostalgic yet. Let me say, to the future, that I'm betting this will sound even more amazing then.

DJ NESTY FT. WISIN Y YANDEL, “ME ESTÁS TENTANDO”

21st March, 2009

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Reggaetón's evolution out of underground dancehall versioning and hip-hop mixtapes in the 1990s has meant that even as it became the most dominant commercial force in the Latin world, its discographies remained untidy, sprawling across all kinds of release formats on a variety of label-sanctioned (or not) modes.

So this song, which is only found under Wisin y Yandel on today's streaming services (the video link above has it hosted on their official YouTube account), was initially released as the first single from DJ Nesty's 2008 compilation album Wisin y Yandel Presentan: La Mente Maestra (Wisin y Yandel present: the mastermind), a mixtape of previously unreleased tracks featuring a host of more underground Puerto Rican reggaetoneros and producers. The song was later included on the deluxe edition of Wisin y Yandel's 2009 album La Revolución as a bonus track, but Billboard listing it as DJ Nesty ft. Wisin y Yandel at the time (they now list it as "Wisin & Yandel Featuring Nesty") was only following the original parent album.

And to an extent putting the producer first makes sense, because while this is definitely a Wisin y Yandel song, it's not technically a reggaetón song: the dembow riddim never appears, only a stuttering loop during Wisin's verses. Wikipedia lists it as EDM, which whether accurate or not would be the first appearance of that particular tag on the Hot Latin #1s. There's definitely a sawtoothed synth rather reminiscent of the "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These)" riff that cycles throughout, and the percussion is more or less disco: the detailed production by Nesty, Víctor "El Nasi" and Marioso could slot this directly into a turn-of-the-decade synthpop mix, no questions asked.

But Wisin and Yandel are still Wisin and Yandel: you can take the boys out of the reggaetón riddim, but you can't take the reggaetón out of the boys. Yandel's electro croon, Wisin's punchy rapping, and their constant shouted interruptions make even this moodily sparkling track as rowdy and cheerful as the rest of their #1 hits. The lyrics are their usual declarations of horniness and machismo: "Me Estás Tentando" means "you're tempting me" and Yandel's portrait of a dancing woman getting him excited is punctured by Wisin's more free-associative hype, calling himself "el tiburón a comerse la sirena" (the shark to eat up the mermaid). The video is all late-00s electro classiness (I swear I've seen dozens of rap, R&B, and dance acts on that set or ones very like it), the boys and some models striking poses against austere black-and-white light grids.

Wisin y Yandel (and their management) could be excused for believing that pure reggaetón would not be sustainable for a long-term pop career, some three years after it broke into #1 here, and so moving in a broader pop direction would only be canny. And this song was only #1 for a week in between Banda El Recodo reigns -- maybe the market was shifting away from urban tropical music entirely. Maybe. Stay tuned.

FANNY LÚ, “Y SI TE DIGO”

18th August, 2007

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Another case of a delayed number one (tip of the hat once more to chart analyst Chris Molanphy's AC/DC Rule, though he's discussing albums), where the single after the breakthrough hit is the one that goes to #1 on the Hot Latin Chart. We've seen it most notably before with Daddy Yankee, whose worldwide hit "Gasolina" primed the pump for "Rompe" to become the first reggaetón #1; and now Fanny Lú, already well-known in Colombia as a television presenter, hits #1 with the single after "No Te Pido Flores", the song that made her famous throughout Latin America.

A word I haven't used before on this travelogue, even though it's occasionally applied, is unavoidable here: "tropipop," a specifically Colombian mixture of traditional genres like vallenato and cumbia with Caribbean genres like merengue, salsa, and bachata, plus international pop. It was coined to describe Carlos Vives' collaborations with Emilio Estefan, and it's generally been quite commercially successful, if not very respected by practitioners of either traditional Colombian or Caribbean genres -- surface-level pop stars taking sounds without respecting the history, is what the charge boils down to -- and there hadn't been a female tropipop star before. Until producer José Gaviria decided that Fanny Lú, who had been trying to get a music career going since the mid-90s but kept having to give her television career higher priority, should be the female face of the genre.

And so that's what this is: if it sounds like bachata timbales, vallenato accordion, merengue bounce, and generalized international pop singalong melodies, that's tropipop. Not that bets weren't hedged: there was also a bachata version in which she duetted with Toby Love, and a merengue version with Eddy Herrera; but neither of them is quite as solid as the original; and the original isn't quite as solid as "No Te Pido Flores." She seems to be imitating Shakira's phrasing a bit here, but expresses none of her wit: it's a straightforward love song, subcategory "I don't have the courage to tell you how much I love you." It's perfectly pleasant, if rather anonymous and a touch overproduced -- those massed background vocals, for example, are highly unnecessary; she's not such a weak singer as to need the support.

But this isn't the last time we'll see Fanny Lú, and when we do again it will be with one of the signature songs of the era, so this isn't just the valley after a peak; there's a higher peak coming.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “DÍMELO”

19th May, 2007

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When Iglesias fils first burst onto this travelogue in 1995 with back-to-back-to-back number ones, I was at a loss to understand how the Enrique Iglesias I knew (and had a certain affection for) from popwatching in the early 2010s had emerged from that very unprepossessing whiner. Even when I liked some of his later material over the years (nearly all of which we've gotten to sample, as no one has ever hit number one as regularly as him), I rarely recognized him. So this single, parenthetically declared (The Ping Pong Song) in its English-language release, is notable for me as being the first time I recognized him as the same man I knew from later hits.

It's been four years since his last number one, the longest he's ever gone without an appearance here, and he seems to have figured out exactly what his lane would be for the next decade. (It's not far from what I predicted in my discussion of the 1999 hit "Ritmo Total".) R&B producer Sean Garrett (best known for Usher & co.'s immortal "Yeah!") gives him a thoroughly modern, high-tech track with a memorable, even novelty-esque rhythm sample, compresses and pitch-corrects his voice so that his limitations are invisible, and layers digital textures around him to keep the track exciting even during the maundering verses. (Apparently every sound on the track apart from Enrique's voice is from a single well-known loops package, which if not a first on this travelogue is at least indicative of where we are in terms of production history.) The synthesized blasts of sound in particular indicate the direction chart pop would be taking in the near future, as four-on-the-floor dance music took over from more varied R&B-based beatmaking.

The result is my favorite Enrique Iglesias song since "Ritmo Total," although like that song I prefer the Spanish-language version to the more well-known English-language one -- Iglesias is no Shakira in terms of ability to creatively shift between languages. "Dímelo" is less incoherent than "Do You Know," although neither of them are deathless lyrics. It's a typically self-involved love song with a strong central image: "¿Dímelo por qué estas fuera de mí / y al mismo tiempo estás muy dentro?" (Tell me why you're outside of me / while at the same time you're deep inside?) It doesn't quite make sense in Spanish either, which is one way to make excellent pop: arresting, unidiomatic phrases that make the listener pause over them is a great way to keep them in the air, as Swedish songwriters have found for some time.

RBD, “SER O PARECER”

2nd December, 2006

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There's a reason "come to Brazil" is such a common refrain among internet pop fandom that it's become a meme: Brazilian youth culture in the twenty-first century (like Japanese youth culture in the late twentieth) has an endlessly voracious appetite for pop music from all around the globe, and pop acts who cultivate that audience are often richly rewarded.

RBD, a Mexican pop sextet formed in the 2004 telenovela Rebelde (a teen soap in the Degrassi or 90210 tradition with a students-forming-a-band plot like The Heights), cultivated their Brazilian audience early and often: every one of their Spanish-language releases was closely followed by a Portuguese-language version, years before anyone though to have them record in English.

Like many a "manufactured" pop act before and after them, they released material frequently: "Ser o Parecer" (in Portuguese "Ser ou Parecer") was the lead single from their third album in three years. And the video, although released in Spanish, was shot in São Paulo, with the addition of very Brazilian CGI making the urban landscape even more colorful, fantastic, and otherworldly.

The young women, Anahí, Dulce María, and Maite Perroni, trade off the lead vocals, with the young men (Christian Chávez, Alfonso Herrera, and Christopher Uckermann) only joining in for the terrace-chant chorus. A mixed-gender pop group is such an atypical formation that it's hard to say whether it's unusual for the format for the song to be sung from a female point of view (there are no genders in the lyrics, just the eternal "you" and "I"), but it's notable anyway: the strained vocal fry of the female half of the group is far more distinctive here than the smooth anonymity of the male.

Anahí and Maite Perroni have both remained major pop stars in Mexico since the band broke up in 2009; the rest of them (save Herrera, who was always more of an actor) continue to release music to less fanfare. For all RBD's success between 2004 and 2009, this will be their only appearance here: their playful fashion and innocuous sentiments are very much tied to a time and place. Rebelde (the show) was set in an exclusive private school in Mexico City, an embrace of privilege and whiteness that the concurrent reggaetón revolution is, if not actively rejecting (reggaetoneros gotta make money), at least complicating.

DAVID BISBAL, “¿QUIÉN ME IBA A DECIR?”

28th October, 2006

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We interrupt your regular Latinoamericano programming for a three-week interpolation of furrowed-brow idol pop from Spain. David Bisbal first gained attention on the peninsula as the runner-up of the first season of Operación Triunfo (the Spanish edition of Star Academy) in 2002. He kicked around for a while, failing to win the opportunity to represent his country at Eurovision, before embarking on the kind of pop career that everyone in those early days of reality singing competitions was allowed. Smartly, he hooked up with producer and songwriter Kike Santander, who had helped shepherd the solo Gloria Estefan and Alejandro Fernández to glory, and used that production savvy and his own imitation-soul singing to become Spain's biggest pop star, for a time.

We've not been troubled by him here, but not for lack of effort: his second single went to #3 on the Hot Latin chart in 2002. It would take his third album, Premonición, and its debut single, an ungainly and outdated mix of rock muscle, flamenco noodling, Bisbal's impassioned yowl, and electronic scratching, before he landed at #1 stateside.

The single's cover art makes all too obvious what early-2000s careers he's trying to emulate: Justin Timberlake's Justified fedora, Ricky Martin's Almas de Silencio tight t-shirt and Pietà pose. Unfortunately he doesn't have either man's charisma or lightness of touch, and the result is a self-aggrandizing plod that slides off the memory almost as soon as it touches it. The lyrics are a bombastic, hyperbolic description of doomed love, exactly in line with Hispanist tradition and with nothing whatever new to say.

Not to worry, we'll hear from Bisbal again: the Latin market loves nothing more than a handsome, self-consciously brooding man. Maybe the second time's the charm.

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!

MARC ANTHONY, “AHORA QUIÉN”

19th June, 2004

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The song that replaced Jennifer Peña's "Vivo y Muero en Tu Piel" (and indeed danced a duet with it, as the two songs passed the #1 spot back and forth for eight weeks in the summer of 2004) is a perfect illustrative example of the way the Latin pop industry, and even the Latin pop listenership, treat men and women unequally. "Piel," you may remember, was released in both a pop and a cumbia version, with a glossy video for both (more or less the same video, but her lip-syncing is different to go with the different styles) -- and "Ahora Quién" was released in both a pop and a salsa version, with the same glossy video for both; only slightly more frantic editing in the salsa version distinguished them.

But where for Peña (at least going by current YouTube counts, which is the only data I have) the pop ballad version was more popular by an order of magnitude, Marc Anthony enjoys the privilege of having the regional, tropical, "ethnic" version be the more popular one, again by an order of magnitude. For both of them, the swelling, bombastic pop renditions of the songs are full of florid emotion and a certain amount of stately narcissism; the ones with the Caribbean rhythms and punchy arrangements make the same emotional point, but also invite the listener to participate in a living tradition of dance and movement rather than just wallowing in lugubrious emotional identification.

It's indisputably true that throughout the history of pop music women have been used as a point of lugubrious emotional identification more frequently than men, who are more often awarded the guardianship of ethnic traditions and the authority of inscribing their personality (rather than just their emotional reactions) onto whatever they perform. This is sexism at its most basic and primal, and few listeners in even the most progressive circles are wholly free from its logic (I certainly would not claim to be). But it's also true that Marc Anthony was, and is, just a bigger star -- both his videos are several orders of magnitude more popular than Peña's -- and his career both preceded hers and has continued since her withdrawal from the market. There's no one-to-one correspondence here.

With its neurotic, motormouthed expression of jealousy, "Ahora Quién" is a pretty good song qua song -- songwriter and producer Estéfano plays the role here that Rudy Pérez did for Jennifer Peña -- but it's neither Marc Anthony at his best nor entirely free from awkwardness: it's pretty obvious that it was composed as a power ballad and had to be retrofitted into a tropical dance number. And even in the salsa version, the first verse still contains a fragment of the pop ballad; but once the montuno gets the upper hand, the funky rhythm never leaves it.

It's the second salsa #1 of 2004, which given how little salsa has appeared here since 2000 might mean the music was experiencing a bit of a renaissance -- but it's only too obvious how unrepresentative the #1 spot is of the entirety of musical activity. It's the mid-oughts already; other island rhythms are coming up from behind.

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.

JUANES FT. NELLY FURTADO, “FOTOGRAFÍA”

19th July, 2003

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Summer, 2003 was fairly late in the millennial-pop era which had first crested in the late 90s: in the Anglosphere, *NSYNC had parted ways, Beyoncé had gone solo, and even Eminem had started taking himself seriously with 8 Mile. The Latin boomlet of 1999 was experiencing its own growing pains, as the next generation of Latin pop stars were coming into their own; mainstays like Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, and Shakira would have to adapt to new climates.

This song introduces two voices we'll meet again (one more frequently than the other), and whose highest moments of pop imperiality are still some years off. But their careers, intersecting here for the first time, have run in odd parallel. Their debut albums debuted within a week of each other in October 2000, and their first hits, "I'm Like a Bird" and "Nada," though quite different thematically, showed off a shared melodic flair and deceptive lightness of touch (and thinness of voice) that meant they would both be perpetually underrated for years.

"Fotografía," as the title suggests, is in a long string of pop songs about mooning over a lost loved one's recorded image: the Pretenders/Selena, Def Leppard, and a bit later Nickelback have all bettered it in terms of staying power, but for sheer charm, the Colombian Juanes and Portuguese-Canadian Furtado are hard to beat. The thin, shuffling beat, the carefully but not intricately picked guitar, an electronic whine, and eventually an electric buzz, make up nearly the whole of the production: the focus is on their voices, both nasal and unadventurous, sticking closely to the sing-song pseudo-reggae template. Which sounds like a formula for dullness, but Juanes' melodic gifts and Furtado's surprisingly excellent Spanish make the song one of the best Hot Latin #1s of 2003, behind only Shakira and India.

They would collaborate again, reversing the ft. credit on Nelly Furtado's 2006 single "Te Busqué", but since it only hit #1 in Spain, we won't cover it here. But we'll have plenty of time to get to know Juanes: he's only getting started.

OLGA TAÑÓN, “ASÍ ES LA VIDA”

1st February, 2003

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The miniaturized and necessarily distorted picture of entire careers that this blog, scraping only along the top level of a single ancillary chart, presents is rarely given such a finished narrative as Olga Tañón's three appearances. (This was the third; as of this writing, fourteen years later, it's unlikely but not impossible that she will return.)

In her first appearance, she had partnered with the great Mexican songwriter Marco Antonio Solís to create an elaborate diva ballad on a very traditional Spanish-language pattern with poky, amber-frozen production; in her second, five years later, she had moved on to millennial-era adult-contemporary, all glistening production and sublimated R&B. Here, she finally sounds like the merengue star she always was, even if the pop production is more generic kitchen-sink Latin Pop than actual merengue -- the merengue version of "Así Es la Vida" (Such is life), all rhythm and horns, is an object lesson in the way that Peak Music Industry of the millennial era understood regional Latin music as essentially subtractive.

But having the third act of a #1s career being a celebratory uptempo song is in itself not particularly noteworthy, although as a rule I'm all for celebratory uptempo songs. What really makes it narratively satisfying is the lyrics. In "¡Basta Ya!" (Enough!) Tañón was ending a relationship, fed up with deception and aloofness; in "Cómo Olvidar," (How to forget) she was mourning the loss of physical love, the body remembering what the mind doesn't want to; and in "Así Es la Vida," she responds to the overtures of a past lover with a lightly philosophical chorus (my rather free translation): "Isn't that like life, your luck changes day to day, I gave my life to have you, and now you want me back / Isn't that like life, you win some you lose some, I lost when I loved you, and now you're losing so much more."

It's practically an Elizabethan kiss-off, and paired with the dramatic flamenco guitars, drumline percussion, and merengue horns and delivered in Tañón's deep, resonant voice (she was 33, which in traditional pop terms meant she was due for divadom), it's one of the strongest songs we've had in what has been a pretty good couple of years. 

THALÍA, “NO ME ENSEÑASTE”

26th October, 2002

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Two singles, two number ones: Thalía, after a decade of hard pop work, has fully arrived. She is part of the generation of pan-Latin modernizers like Enrique, Marc, Ricky, Alejandro, and Shakira, and although a silly gender-essentialized literalism might suggest that she has the most in common with Shakira, she actually reminds me more of Enrique Iglesias. A similarly limited range, thin voice, and reliance on expressiveness over sonority means that she's carried by production more often than the burnished voices of Marc Anthony, Ricky Martin or Alejandro Fernández are. (Shakira's even more unconventional voice is its own animal.) But unlike Enrique, Thalía knows how to use her voice to ends other than balled-fist self-pity.

This was the second single from her 2002 album Thalía, and since "Tú y Yo" was an uptempo jam, "No Me Enseñaste" (you didn't teach me) is therefore by venerable pop tradition a ballad. At least on the album it was: the single release, in a now-familiar attempt at covering all bases, contains the "Estéfano Mix" (a club version), the "Marc Anthony Mix" (a salsa version), and the "Regional Mix" (a cumbia version). When she performed the song at the 2002 Latin Grammys, the first half was the ballad original and the second half was the salsa mix, in a triumphant performance that cemented her belated but complete arrival on the US Spanish-language music scene.

Although the "Estéfano Mix" is period trance (and so has perhaps aged better than any of the others for an EDM-centric music scene), Colombian superproducer Estéfano had also co-written and produced the original. The lyric, surprisingly wordy for such a straightforward pop song, is nominally about loss (the central line is "you didn't teach me, love, how to live without you"), but Thalía doesn't play it that way: her gospelly woah-oahs at the end are a celebration of getting over the bastard. Love didn't teach her, goes the narrative of her performance, so she taught herself.

SHAKIRA, “SUERTE”

6th October, 2001

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"Suerte que mis pechos sean pequeños / y no los confundas con montañas."

Long before scattering verbal seeds so that a thousand Twitter memes might blossom had become one of the necessary attributes of a successful pop star, Shakira's verbal flights very nearly memed her into oblivion: everyone who addressed her new English-language makeover brought up the "breasts are small and humble" line as an example of her weirdness or perhaps of her limited facility with English. (And everyone else replied that the line was the same, and just as unexpected, in the Spanish version. This conversation will never stop happening, until the end of time.) But look at her grin in the video during the line: she knows exactly what she's doing.

The fact that Shakira Mebarak Ripoll knew exactly what she was doing when she dyed her hair blonde, began writing in English, and contracted with the Estefans to produce her next album has long been a sticking point for those who had admired her '90s shaggy brown mane, her wild Spanish-language creativity, her proud Latinidad. It felt like a betrayal: no longer Latin America's signature alt-rock act, a Southern Hemispherical riposte to frozen-north icons like Björk or Radiohead, she was now just another bottle-blonde global pop star, joining the Britneys and Beyoncés in Anglophone hegemony.

While this is a valuable and necessary take, I think it overrates the importance of alt-rock and underrates the importance of pop -- Shakira may be differently beloved than she was in the 90s, but she is undeniably more, and more widely, beloved. And she has never gone fully Anglophone: her English-language songs nearly always have (often much better) Spanish-language counterparts -- "Whenever, Wherever" is only okay compared to "Suerte," one of her greatest pop songs in a career stuffed with them.

"Suerte" is very early-2000s, in that there's not a particular tradition of music it is set in. Rather, it's a mash-up of many different influences, incorporating Andean huayno and panpipes, Middle Eastern arabesque, and global dance music, including a prominent funk bassline, tribal drumming, and surf guitar: worldbeat, to use a popular if meaningless catchphrase of the era, but with a strong pop sheen. It was the era of Missy Elliott, the Neptunes, and Richard X, in which imperial pop raided global sounds, an analog globe converging into a united digital future until George W. Bush and Diplo ruined it for everyone. But it was also characteristic of the way Shakira had always worked: of Colombian and Lebanese heritage, she mixed East and West, North and South, as a matter of course, and her dancing, which seamlessly blends Afro-Latin and Eastern Mediterranean traditions, is one of the great pop marvels of the millennial era.

But while she's one of her generations's great dancers and great musical synthesists, she's also one of its greatest lyricists: "Suerte" is a fantastic love song in a style that owes as much to modern poetry -- it's romantic, and funny, and quotidian, and heavily imagistic -- as to modern pop. (Modern poetry listens to pop, of course, Frank O'Hara just as much as Warsan Shire.) "Lo que me queda de vida / quiero vivir contigo" (What is left to me of life / I want to live with you) is such a clearer and more heartfelt sentiment than "I'll be there and you'll be near / and that's the deal my dear" that -- although the latter is striking too -- it's easy to see why some observers thought English was a misstep for her. Luckily, we don't have to bother about her English here: which won't always be the case.

This is only the third time we've met Shakira on this travelogue, which feels wrong: she was and is a much bigger star than that, and some of the songs that happened not to make it to #1 include some of the best songs not only of her career but of pop music entirely. In some ways "Suerte" is a lesser rewrite of "Ojos Así", and "Objection (Tango)" is the best tango song the twenty-first century has produced. But although her presence here will continue to be infuriatingly intermittent (especially as compared to figures like the one who recorded the song that replaced this at #1), she has not yet tapped out. We are still living in the Shakira era, and that in itself is reason for hope.