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.

ANDY & LUCAS, “SON DE AMORES”

18th September, 2004

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One of the beauties of Billboard's old method of determining chart placements for various musical subcultures -- like R&B, hip-hop, country, alternative rock, or Latin -- being primarily about what was popular on the playlists of radio stations which served those audiences is that one-week miracles like this were still possible. Another Andy & Lucas will never happen in the streaming age, which is set up to reward the broadest-audience music possible as long as it's given the appropriate genre tag, regardless of whether the music's core audience cares about it, with endless reigns only occasionally broken up by viral sensations.

There was nothing particularly viral about Andy & Lucas, aside from the age-old sensation of cute boys singing sensitive love songs. The flamenco-inspired guitar runs which open and interrupt the song are more an indication of their Spanish nationality, as if their lisping accents hadn't given it away, than an indication of musical virtuosity. There hasn't been as simplistic, or even simple-minded, a song as this on this travelogue for quite some time -- maybe not since "Aserejé," which at least had the virtue of being fun.

But the comparison points to Spain's odd-man-out place in this travelogue. Enrique Iglesias aside (and a argument can be made that he really belongs more to Miami than to the mother country), Spanish artists can only really be novelties on the Hot Latin chart after the millennium. Which would have surprised me back in the 80s, when Rocío Dúrcal and Julio Iglesias were a regular presence; but one consequence of the increased Latinx population in the US over the last thirty years is that it's more and more Central American and Caribbean, so that the white, Iberophilic Latinos who once made up a much more significant portion of the Latin music audience are less significant, and Spain now plays an even more diminished role in Latin pop than the UK does in US English-speaking pop.

All of which is by way of skirting the fact that while Andy & Lucas are certainly cute and give good puppy-dog eyes, there is almost nothing to say about the song: its pseudo-profundities are nostrums that were old when the book of Proverbs was written, and its one lyrical stroke of inspiration, the three-syllable rhyme of "calor y frío" (heat and cold) with "escalofrío" (shiver) is still pretty goofy. Everything else is super generic, from the electronic shuffle of the rhythm to the rise and fall of verse and chorus. I hope the young people who made it #1 for a week in 2004 remember it fondly; that's probably the best use it could have.

LAS KETCHUP, “ASEREJÉ”

9th November, 2002

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All right, settle in.

One of the reasons I wanted to start this blog, way back in 2009, was that I saw British people talking about "Aserejé" as a glorious piece of ephemera that came from nowhere and led to nothing, and I suspected that there was more to it than that, that there was a history there invisible to Anglophone eyes. As it happens, I had never heard the song: I lived in the only major market (the United States with the English-language overlay switched on) where the song was not a massive hit, and had not happened to be interested in both pop and the broader world in 2002 -- my interest in the UK's experience of music at the time was entirely NME-led, to my regret.

It took me this long to get to it, and I can't be sorry it did, because my knowledge of Spanish girl group and novelty pop history would have been incomplete without the researches into 1977 I did in 2012 and 2014 or the deep dive into 80s Iberian pop I did in 2015. But even this blog contains hints of what would come: Mexican girl group Pandora a decade ago, Mexican pop group Onda Vaselina four years ago, Nuyorican hip-hop group Barrio Boyzz, novelty dances from Banda Blanca to Azul Azul, pseudo-flamenco from Gipsy Kings to Enrique Iglesias and most prominently, Ricky Martin's own novelty crossover.

It's the surf guitar from "Vida Loca," mixed down and looped throughout the chorus as a constant drone (and in so doing, getting back to the Eastern origins of the surf twang) that is Las Ketchup's most prominent association with current Latin pop trends, but there are others: the affection for, but cultural distance from, hip-hop (the nonsense refrain is a Hispanicization of the opening bars of "Rapper's Delight"), the acoustic dance-pop instrumentation (throw in accordion and it could be a Carlos Vives song), and even the vague Orientalism (a constant feature of Iberian roots music) is consonant with Shakira's contemporary gestures towards her Lebanese heritage.

But all of that is incidental, and possibly coincidental. What Las Ketchup are really in dialogue with is in their own country's history of novelty girl-group songs, from the unison-sung flamenco-rock of Las Grecas, whose Franco-era "Te Estoy Amando Locamente" was as heavy as Zeppelin, to the electro-pop of Objectivo Birmania, whose "Los Amigos de Mis Amigas Son Mis Amigos" was a hookup anthem for the movida madrileña, to the flamenco-house of Azúcar Moreno, whose "Bandido" lasted better than the songs that beat it at the 1990 Eurovision.

Although Las Ketchup were from Andalusia, "Aserejé" doesn't include any traditional flamenco signifiers, unless the lyrics' coding of their hip-hop-loving protagonist as Roma counts, but rather gestures towards Western European urban music. The rootsy shuffle-and-guitar of the backing track represents an early-2000s pop assimilation of 90s worldbeat pioneers like Manu Chao and Rachid Taha, in which Spanish, French, American (often via-Britain), and Arabic musical traditions were blended: if the result sometimes sounded painfully generic, that's one of the hazards of attempting to boil a continent's worth of musical diversity down to its common denominators.

But part of that global mish-mash is Catalan rumba, the urban Barcelonan variation on the Cuban-influenced "rumba" palo of flamenco, as popularized in the 70s by Peret and continued in the 90s by Spanish-pop heiress Rosario Flores (among many others). A greater emphasis on rhythm (as befits its Afro-Cuban origins) and less on florid emotional virtuosity made Catalan rumba one of the default roots musics of post-Franco Spain: "Aserejé" just barely qualifies, as its rhythm aims for dance-pop consistency rather than "gitana" funkiness, but the great joy of millennial-era dance pop was its ability to assimilate any cultural tradition and return it to the world: 2010s dance-pop flattens everything into the build-and-drop patterns of EDM, leaving textural differences as the only distinguishing characteristics between songs.

But, background aside, what do I think of the song? It's a pleasurable enough way to pass the time; its four-week run at the top of the Hot Latin chart is about right. I always appreciate novelty songs more than I actually enjoy listening to them, and my generalized American chauvinism includes the entire hemisphere: despite the length of this post, the most exciting and interesting Latin Pop in the millennial era was not coming out of Spain. "Aserejé"'s most noteworthy quality is its global success, which (like that of Psy and OMI a decade later) was less dependent on the specific qualities of the track itself and more on the popular appetite for a particular kind of nonsense in a given moment. 

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.

MDO, “NO PUEDO OLVIDAR”

27 March, 1999

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It took until the end of the second decade of this travelogue, but we have finally encountered the group whose name was synonymous with Latin Pop, at least in the US, for the half-decade leading up to the beginning of it. Menudo (for it is they) hit their peak of popularity before 1986, and since then their passionate fanbase had been too small a portion of the overall Latin-music audience in the US to push them to the top before the late 90s made unabashed teenpop fashionable again.

Then again, this isn't quite the world-famous Puerto Rican boy band Menudo, kept famous today by Anglos who remember the 80s shaking thing their heads about how crazy Latin pop culture is; this is four of the five guys who were in Menudo in 1996, when the rights to the name were sold by Edgardo Díaz, the Puerto Rican svengali who had cooked up the concept back in the 70s, to a Panamanian company. So they called themselves MDO and carried on. There was no difference in the sound or the concept: cute boys singing love songs and dancing, and not doing either very well. "No Puedo Olvidar" (tr. I can't forget) isn't one of the more deathless songs we've encountered; its strongest selling point is the drum loop which suggests that someone involved in the production heard M/A/R/R/S at some point. The voices are pretty but personality-free, the lyrics are the definition of bland, the melody is just sticky enough to hang around but not enough to do anything once it's there.

But hey, it's M(enu)DO at number one! Good for these boys, all of whom joined between 1991 and 1995, long after the group's heyday, and only two of whom were even Puerto Rican (Alexis Grullón is Dominican, and Abel Talamántez is Tejano). It's too bad the teenpop-friendly climate didn't catch them on a better single. But stay tuned.

ONDA VASELINA, “TE QUIERO TANTO, TANTO”

22nd August, 1998

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One of the flattening effects of examining the Latin chart from this top-down position, as it were, is that we never get much of a feel for the nitty-gritty of a single country's pop scene: with so many competing constituencies making up the US Latin market, it's small wonder the chart moves slowly and relatively lumberingly: flukes excepted, it's the artists that have the widest transnational appeal who consistently show up on this particular radar.

This is one of the flukes. Like most countries, Mexico has long had its little galaxy of well-scrubbed teenpop stars and "manufactured" groups given plenty of time by local variety or light entertainment programs, but that aren't known outside the country -- or even sometimes outside the capital. Onda Vaselina (wave, or sound, of grease) was originally put together in 1989 by Mexican pop lifer Julissa to perform in a production of Grease, at which time their ages ranged from six to twelve. Nearly a decade and several casting changes later, they were perhaps closer in appeal and musicianship to Saved by the Bell: The College Years than to their pop contemporary Ricky Martin.

But then an odd thing happened: "Te Quiero Tanto, Tanto," a seriousface guitar ballad (so seriousface that the chord progression follows vaguely but not actionably in the footsteps of Cat Stevens' "Father and Son") became a hit off the back of the popular telenovela Mi pequeña traviesa (my little imp), and if Youtube is any indication, was the song of choice for Mexican quinceañeras, graduations, weddings, and reunions in 1998. The vocal performances are wobbly, the backing is dull montage-bait, and the song itself is hackneyed and syrupy -- all of which is why, despite myself, I kind of like it. Look at these spunky kids, putting on a show. I wouldn't be surprised if they were trying to save the rec center from some evil developer.