ENRIQUE IGLESIAS FT. ROMEO SANTOS, “LOCO”

19th October, 2013

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It's been a litle while since we had to consider Enrique Iglesias, a one-time constant feature of this travelogue. He hasn't had a solo #1 since 2008 -- two Wisin y Yandel collabs and one with Juan Luis Guerra are his only appearances since -- and his first post-streaming appearance being a duet with the second-biggest solo hitmaker of the year (behind only Marc Anthony) is perhaps indicative of the kinds of high-budget cross-promotional synergies that are now necessary to drive big hits even from the most famous, reliably high-performing, and enormously beloved names in the Latin music industry.

It's also been a while since I've mentioned how I felt about a song at the time. Largely that's because starting in 2013 I was disconnected from Latin radio, having given up my car and with it the hours a day I spent jacked into the airwaves; podcasts and à-la-carte streaming now accompanied me on public transit instead. But I heard "Loco," and I loved "Loco." I hadn't actually remembered "Loco" until it started playing (although I recognized the single art from my 2013 year-end list) -- but those opening lines struck me with the familiar force of a Proustian madeleine. "Te pido de rodillas" (I beg you on my knees) -- and I found myself shocked that this was 2013 instead of two or three years earlier, when I was much more deeply immersed in Latin radio. I guess my tapering-off was more gradual than I remembered.

The songwriting is credited to Iglesias, his frequent collaborator in these years Descemer Bueno (stay tuned for more), and Dominican producer Lenny Medina, which makes sense: Romeo's literate, vivid lyrics are nowhere to be found. But Romeo is credited with co-production of this bachata version of the song (theres's also a banda version with Roberto Tapia for the Mexican market and a pop version with India Martínez for Spain), and his shrewd understanding of the ways that bachata can be applied to a standard pop structure make this a much more successful adoption of bachata on Iglesias' part than his previous effort.

Not that he's not again outclassed vocally -- Romeo can sing rings around him, and the contrast between Iglesis' hangdog huskiness and Santos' angelic fluidity makes for a slightly uneven listening experience. (In the other versions, Roberto Tapia's stentorian belt produces an even more schizoid effect, while India Martínez is the only singer on Enrique's unenthusiastic level, and the result is pure mush.) But the melodic structure is solid, the lyrics -- a standard admiration/complaint about loving a woman to the point of madness -- are good, and the overall effect is that of a minor classic. Would I think this if I hadn't loved it deeply in 2013 and I was just judging it as I've judged the other songs I have no associations with? Possibly.

But all we can play with are the hands we're dealt.  

Airplay Watch:

• Enrique Iglesias ft. Romeo Santos, "Loco"
• Discussed above.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “LLORO POR TÍ”

8th November, 2008

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If the first new single from Enrique Iglesias' retrospective 95/08 collection harkened back to his early pseudo-rock roots, the second embraces contemporary pop, an indication of where his career was heading, as the future would only get more contemporary; even though the original version is more or less a ballad, it has a beat derived from hip-hop.

But the original version isn't the one that has stuck in the popular consciousness, and arguably wasn't the one that was a big hit in 2008. The remix with Wisin y Yandel, released only a few months later, has more than three times the amount of views on YouTube, and is the version on his Greatest Hits released in October 2019. But even with the premier reggaetón duo of the era on it, the remix isn't actually reggaetón either: the hip-hop beat only gets beefed up, with additional synths to support the Puerto Ricans' stronger voices. Ultimately the meaning of this song isn't really about Enrique Iglesias celebrating his dominance over the Latin Pop market with another sentimental heartbreak song; it's about Doble-U y Yandel proving themselves as pop artists outside the strictures of the reggaetón market.

Because the remix is just a better production. Even the gear-shift key change toward the end feels less jarring when Enrique's coming out of a Yandel verse than when it's just his own mopey middle eight. And that, it turns out, is the actual future of Latin pop, like all the rest of pop: collaborations, team-ups, even crossover events (to borrow the language of superhero comics) are going to make for huger hits than a single pseudo-auteur singer ever did.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “DÓNDE ESTÁN CORAZÓN”

1st March, 2008

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It's appropriate that this song was the new radio single from the greatest-hits comp 95/08 Exitos, since it calls back to Iglesias' earliest 1995 hits in rock instrumentation and moody angst, but he's grown so much as a singer and performer since then -- by which I mean that he's figured out how to make his vocal limitations work for rather than against the emotion of the track -- that it could only have been made in 2008.

He takes the whole song in a low-energy croon, never attempting to reach for notes that he will strain to hit. (Again, he co-wrote it, which seems to help.) There's a laziness (in formal terms) to the singing which from a decade's distance seems to predict the rise of mumble rap and deadpan darlings like Billie Eilish. And while most of Iglesias' material from here on out will be much higher energy, he will never again attempt to be as passionate as he did in the 90s.

"Dónde Están Corazón" is a melancholic song about a universal experience that Spanish calls "desamor," and can be translated "lack of love" or "heartbreak" but more frequently means "falling out of love," the converse of the more frequently celebrated "enamoración" (falling in love). The lyrics are vague as to details -- or generously universal -- but suffused with an appreciation of the closeness and mutual satisfaction that the singer once shared but is now gone forever. I couldn't help comparing it to Juanes' more cheerful song the week before: the lyrics are much less poetic and more straightforward, which is partly the difference between Juanes' vaguely aristocratic rock and Iglesias' more demotic pop.

Not that Enrique is anything but a child of privilege. At this point, he has stopped pretending to be anything else, and it suits him.

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.

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.

SHAKIRA FT. WYCLEF JEAN, “HIPS DON'T LIE”

27th May, 2006

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"Refugees run the seas cause we own our own boats."

Well, Jesus Christ.

Of course I'm thinking about all the stories, all the photos, all the statistics I've seen about Syrian and Libyan and Sudanese and Colombian and Honduran and Burmese and Tibetan refugees since 2006. Of course I'm thinking about the parallels that are being inexorably drawn between rising anti-refugee sentiment in the US and Europe and the doors which were slammed in the faces of German Jews during the lead-up to the Holocaust. Of course I'm aching with a bone-deep misery over the gap between the triumphant utopianism of pop and the squalid murderousness of the actual world.

I understand that, faced with that gap, one reasonable response is to reject pop as a hollow illusion, an opiate of the masses, Huxley's soma drip-fed into our veins to keep us pacified and unprotesting while Orwell's Big Brother raids our pockets for its unending wars. The squalid murderousness is the fact: triumphant utopianism is a useless and possibly dangerous fiction that obscures our view of reality, reassuring us that everything turns out for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Well, maybe. But Huxley and Orwell aren't the only midcentury British writers to engage with the effects of totalitarianism on the human spirit. In The Silver Chair, one of his books for children, C. S. Lewis includes a sequence in which the adventuring heroes are lulled into a trance by the Queen of the Underworld, who induces them to believe that their memories of the Overland, including vegetation and the cosmos, are entirely made up, a story they've been telling each other, and that no world but hers, hewn from rock and glimmering fragilely in the endless darkness within the earth, exists. The spell is only broken when the gloomy, sensible, semi-amphibious character Puddleglum stamps out her fire, and makes the following speech:

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

Philosophically it's unconvincing -- the argument that because humans can imagine a better world than this one, one must exist, is a very debased theodicy -- but poetically it's magnificent. That, I think, is why I will always return to pop: because it can, and almost necessarily does, imagine radically better ways of living and relating to one another than exist today. But they can; four babies dreaming can't make Narnia exist, but millions of Black, brown, and poor folk working together can reshape the world. It's not going to be easy: all extant power structures and our long inheritance of human inequality are arrayed against us. But we have resources they don't: beauty, and joy, and community, and an equally long inheritance of human resilience and creativity.

That inheritance is on magnificent display in this song, one of the most purely perfect pop songs of the decade. Of course when I say pure I don't mean that it's not complex: a vast array of musical traditions, technological interpolations, and yes, capitalist funding went into it. Supposedly beginning life as a sketch of a song called "Lips Don't Lie" with which Wyclef unsuccessfully tried to tempt Lauryn Hill into a Fugees reunion, it was eventually included on the 2004 soundtrack to Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights as "Dance Like This", a duet with Puerto Rican singer Claudette Ortiz. Listen to that, and you can hear the basic framework of the song, including the unmistakable sample of the trumpet flourish from Jerry Rivera's "Amores Como el Nuestro", but it just circles around itself over and over again, a mime of mutual seduction in which Ortiz sounds utterly anonymous and the song itself sounds bored, trailing off without ever having landed.

So when Shakira's label reached out to him for a remix to extend the life of "La Tortura", Wyclef said he had a better song that she would be perfect for. She rewrote the female duet partner's lyrics in her inimitably unidiomatic English and beefed up the production with Wyclef's producer Jerry Duplessis. Recording was done in Miami, Nassau, London, New York, Bogotá, and Vancouver; samples were cleared; and the single was released in February of 2006, three months after Oral Fixation, Vol. 2 was released to middling sales, a major disappointment after the way that "La Tortura" had boosted Fijación Oral, Vol. 1. But if you remember the summer of 2006 at all, you know that "Hips Don't Lie" was inescapable no matter where you were in the world (a Spanish version was also released, but I've never met anyone who heard it). 2006 was the absolute nadir of my engagement with contemporary pop music, and even I loved it.

I love it more now, twelve years later, as the world has grown crueller and more hateful toward the refugees Wyclef keeps repping in the song, as outright hatred (rather than ignorance) of Hispanic and Caribbean culture has grown more vocal and regularized in the Trump era even while Spanish-language and Spanish-English hybrids have become the lingua franca of international pop. The boiling insanity of xenophobia, isolationism, and apocalypse-mongering in the Anglosphere feeds back on itself until it becomes a white hunger for Black and brown death that can't be shocked back into sensible morality by reading stories of boats sinking in the Mediterranean or seeing images of dead babies on beaches.

As counterpoint to which a recitation of seduction between a Lebanese-Colombian and a Hatian-American, both millionaires, as formalized and mannered as a Noh play with its symmetrical verses and inevitable rap-verse peroration, might seem less than effective.

But the heraldic fanfare which opens and punctuates the song seems to announce more than a mere two-person exchange of intimacies: it is the opening of a tournament, a call to arms, a reveille, but most immediately of all it is a summons to the dancefloor. And "baile en la calle de noche, baile en la calle de día" is a utopian ideal, quoting Fernando Villalona's classic 1985 merengue "Carnaval" but in spirit stretching back to at least the liberatory utopianism of "Dancing in the Street" and perhaps even the celebratory 1902 ragtime song "On Emancipation Day" by Will Marion Cook and Paul Laurence Dunbar. (En Barranquilla se baila así, of course, and the soundtrack to liberation has never been exclusively in English; but I still know the Anglophone canon best.)

Of course it can go either way: the organization of culture purely by the logic of capital means that oppressor as well as oppressed can draw cheer, comfort, and hope from subaltern popular music. Which is why the ground is always shifting, why yesterday's utopian promise is today's banal muzak, why every triumph is also on some level a surrender. Like Carnival itself, a Dionysian space carved out of the Church calendar which only reinforces its control over all the rest of the year, pop has been assigned its quarter, and the eschatological promise it makes of dancing in the streets day and night, when the shackles of labor and the promise of state violence have finally been smashed, can only be an endlessly deferred IOU. Until it isn't. Lord haste the day.

No fighting.

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!

RICKY MARTIN, “Y TODO QUEDA EN NADA”

27th March, 2004

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The fifth single from his 2003 album Almas del Silencio, and the third to appear on this travelogue: just by sheer numbers, this is Ricky Martin's imperial period, his version of George Michael circa Listen Without Prejudice. And like the British star at an equivalent point in his career, he was taking himself very seriously. "Y Todo Queda en Nada" can be translated as "And Everything Comes to Nothing," and textually it's a standard breakup song in which the man wallows rather more in hyperbolic self-pity than usual.

But the video has Martin repeatedly lying or sitting in a crucifix pose, staring down the camera with his unnervingly symmetrical face, as religious imagery -- doves flutter past his face, a crowded bar table is framed like the Last Supper, he contorts his own body to suggest both figures in a Pietà -- flashes past. The Passion of the Martin, then -- and as an aside, Mel Gibson's blood-soaked adaptation of Luke 23 was released a month before this went to #1.

It was co-written and produced by Estéfano, whose signature sound here has largely been just this kind of chest-beating ballad, whether by Chayanne or Thalía. And although much of the sound is super-generic turn-of-the-millennium power ballad, there are details in the production -- the vacuum-sealed background vocals, the sawing strings -- that elevate it beyond the crashing drums that have little function other than as a signpost saying Melodrama Here.

It's notable in Martin's oeuvre to date (or at least his #1s) in being identifiably directed at a woman. The final line of the chorus, repeated again and again, is "Yo no te olvido, mujer" ("I can't forget you, woman," but it's not stilted in Spanish). With that, the over-the-top drama in the lyric, the music, and the video begins to make a little more sense. What if it's not the failure of a particular heterosexual relationship that's torture, but heterosexuality itself?

THALÍA, “CERCA DE TÍ”

28th February, 2004

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As though to prove that Paulina Rubio could not appear on this travelogue without being in Thalía's shadow, "Te Quise Tanto" is immediately followed by "Cerca de Tí." What the structure of this blog won't show, though, is that "Cerca de Tí" only appeared there for a week, while "Te Quise Tanto" returned to the top afterward, and then again after the next #1. And in fact this is Thalía's last #1 as of summer 2018 (though I have no doubt she could return again given the right circumstances), whereas Paulina has several more to come.

It's rather disappointing for a swan song (if it is one): a midtempo rock holleralong with straight-down-the-middle love lyrics, the chiming guitar line from "Maps" (or perhaps "Yellow") and a went-nowhere English-language version with even more unprepossessing lyrics. (There are also salsa and cumbia remixes, both of which lend the arrangement some much-needed funk.) Little of which is Thalía's fault: she gives a characteristically committed performance, even recalling Gloria Trevi during the later, bigger choruses.

As it is, it represents a sort of dead end: Latin pop is not going to thrive by imitating Anglophone acts like Coldplay or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. To take over the world, it is going to have to be both more Latin and more pop.

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.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “HOY”

4th October, 2003

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The charting of Gloria Estefan's musical career only by her Hot Latin #1s has told a necessarily incomplete story (for a fuller but still incomplete version, my One Week One Band on her remains available), but one thing it's actually been quite good at has been tracking her shifts into exploring many different flavors of traditional Latin American music from Cuban son to Cuban/Mexican bolero to Colombian vallenato to Dominican bachata to, here, Peruvian huayno.

Best known among English-speaking audiences as the musical genre of "El Condor Pasa" thanks to the Simon & Garfunkel rewrite, and immediately recognizable for its use of Andean panpines, huayno is perhaps the most Amerindian-inflected popular music genre of the Americas, although its dotted rhythms speak to the hemisphere-wide influence of enslaved African musicians over the centuries. We've only heard it here before as one element in wide-ranging mixtures from Colombians Shakira and Carlos Vives (huayno is a pan-Andean music, and so is common to Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina), and it's not entirely uncut here, only the predominant element in what is otherwise merely a sturdy pop song.

It was simultaneously released in an English-language version as "Wrapped", which didn't make the Hot 100 at all and only scraped the upper 20s on the Adult Contemporary chart. In both languages the song seems to be a vaguely spiritual love song to a loved one, although it could as easily be directed to a parent (or even the Virgin Mary) as to a romantic partner. The video, the same for both versions, is set among the ruins of Machu Picchu, which only adds to the spiritual (and neocolonial) overtones. It isn't the last we'll see of Gloria, by a long ways, but it's not as sharp or smart as we've come to expect from her, either. Whenever she tries to get vaguely spiritual (remember "Más Allá"?) her usual excellent taste seems to fail her.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “PARA QUÉ LA VIDA”

31st May, 2003

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Another Enrique Iglesias number one, another throaty, unconvincing ballad. This one is particularly unprepossessing because the verses borrow imagery from a song (and a legendary performance) so immeasurably better that everyone involved in "Para Qué la Vida" (what's the use of life) should have been too ashamed to carry on with the rest of it. It's different enough from "Nothing Compares 2 U" that there would be no danger of running afoul of the Purple One's (or the Bald One's) legal teams, especially since no English version was ever cut that might attract more attention, but calling up the ghost of that crowning moment in pop history only underlines how damp of a squib the present offering is.

Enrique had more or less mastered the craft of ballad-singing by this point, to the degree that he ever would: nothing but vulnerability in the voice, melodies by committee, and hangdog in extremis lyrics that make a sympathetic listener want to comfort the broody boy with perfect cheekbones and unthreatening stubble. He could go on forever at this rate, and looks likely to. He eclipsed Luis Miguel as the artist with the most Hot Latin #1s with this record, and although the contest isn't technically over yet, it's all but a foregone conclusion.

SHAKIRA, “QUE ME QUEDES TÚ”

1st March, 2003

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I don't know if I can adequately express my thoughts -- or more accurately, my feelings -- about this song. Let's see.

In late 2001, I had a lingering, hopeless crush on a young woman of Mexican heritage who I knew little about except that she loved Shakira (the dark-haired, Spanish-language Shakira of the 90s). It was largely under the influence of that crush that I bought Laundry Service at the strip-mall CD store which was the first physical locus of the music nerdery that would consume much of my adult life.

If I remember correctly, I bought Bob Dylan's Love and Theft in the same purchase. The polarity of the two albums felt right: one a gravelly-voiced recapitulation of a hundred years of folk and blues imagery in creaky arrangements swung just wrong enough to make them feel fresh, the other a hypermodern, fiercely intelligent pop-rock record that blended three continents' worth of unconventionally literate, emotionally expressive, and body-first musical traditions into dance music that even a timid, emotionally stunted nerd like me, more comfortable swimming about in Furry Lewis and Charley Patton rewrites than with beautiful young Latinas who asked me uncomfortable questions, could appreciate.

Every time I listened to Laundry Service, and I did often in 2001 and 2002, it was as though I was listening to it with my eyes averted, trying to hear what Gabriel García Márquez had praised in her rather than admitting that the obvious pleasures of rhythm and tenderness meant anything to me. I still felt wrong, creepy, a dirty old man (I was 23) when I listened to millennial-era pop music, the legacy of a sheltered evangelical upbringing which had left me with the lasting impression that expressions of physicality were tantamount to pornography, and that consuming pornography was the ultimate social crime. But (as with actual pornography) I found myself unable to stop listening to pop, no matter how ashamed I was of it.

"Que Me Quedes Tú" (literally That You Remain to Me, but in context more like "as long as I have you") became an island of solace in the middle of the album. Neither in English nor a dance song, its 60s-throwback chiming sitar-like hook, with a guitar arrangement that reminded me of the Britpop the internet was teaching me I had missed, and Shakira's hushed, back-of-her-throat performance (doing things Alanis Morrissette never could have) felt like one adult speaking to another, rather than a teenager performing for bleachers of creeps.

The distinction, I've come to realize since, was all in my head: there's no intrinsic difference between a rhythm guitar chug and a pulsing sequencer, or between 60 and 120 bpm, only the cultural meanings we assign them. And even at her most scantily-clad and snake-hipped, Shakira was always self-evidently an auteur, making her own performing decisions and entirely in control of her narrative. (Britney Spears is the obvious comparison; her early work, which I dismissed then but now admire, I still prefer only to listen to rather than watch videos which still seem exploitative and uncomfortable.) Poptimism, or the belief that pop music can be as meaningful, as well-crafted, and as culturally relevant as anything set up in opposition to it, whether the "rigor" of art music or the "authenticity" of folk (or the combination of the two attributed to various masculine-identified subgenres like rock or hip-hop), remains the guiding principle of my musical life.

But enough personal history. What about the song in the context of the Hot Latin chart?

It doesn't sound entirely out of place. Ricky Martin, Carlos Vives, Ricardo Arjona, and Shakira herself have been bringing rock instrumentation to the forefront in recent years, and although the ratio of ballads to uptempos has improved since the early 90s, there are still plenty of slow songs. But I don't think there's been a genuine rock ballad at the top of the chart since the heyday of Ana Gabriel, and although a poetic expressiveness to the lyrics has been relatively common thanks to auteurs like Juan Gabriel and Ricardo Arjona, "Que Me Quedes Tú" is still unusual for the apocalyptic thoroughness with which Shakira is willing to sacrifice the rest of the world, as long as she is able to indulge in her lover's inventive kisses and eternal melancholy.

It's an extravagant, hyperbolic expression of love set to such tastefully classicist guitar pop that unless you speak Spanish well, you could entirely miss its weirdness. I did for many years, feeling only the romantic self-indulgence of the chorus rather than the destructive glee of the verses. But as an expression of a complete thought, a doomed but whole-bodied feeling common to many relationships, it's perfect.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “QUIZÁS”

22nd February, 2003

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A significant landmark in the career of both Iglesias fils and the Hot Latin chart at the time, "Quizás" is probably the best song, and certainly the best performance, he's delivered to us since "Ritmo Total," back in 1999. After two album cycles aimed at the English-language market, with Spanish versions as an afterthought, he's returned to the comfort and perhaps the sincerity of a Spanish-only release. It was also, as his 15th number one, the moment he tied with Luis Miguel as the artist to have the most number ones on the chart. That contest will continue, but it will probably not surprise you to learn who eventually won.

"Quizás" is a new mode of song for Iglesias: a personal, even confessional song. It starts with the words "hola viejo," or "hello, old man" -- it is, in fact, addressed to Iglesias père, whose voice we haven't heard since 1992 and whose imperial era we missed entirely -- and as a song sung by a wealthy, directionless young man to his wealthy, directionless father it's got all the emotional indirectness, protective philosophizing, and hedging acknowledgment of mortality and moral vacuity that aristocratic-poetry fans could wish for. The broader, more sentimental video is a beautifully-shot short film that backs away from engaging with Iglesias' (and Léster Méndez') lyrics in favor of a smushy universality.

Perhaps the best thing about the song having been at least partly written by Iglesias rather than for him is that there's nothing in it that's out of his range: he doesn't have to push into a strangled whine, letting most of the song inhabit the choked back of his throat. The quivering-lip emotionalism of his delivery finally sounds earned, or at least not entirely dishonest. But then again, perhaps I'm just more affected by songs about fathers (I've had one) than about lovers.

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.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “MENTIROSO”

28th September, 2002

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The nadir of the mid-to-late 90s on this blog, when every other single was Enrique Iglesias proving himself incapable of wrangling his strangled whine of a voice into the power-ballad patterns of classic Latin pop, returns!

It's not the song's fault. It would be easy to imagine lovely, powerful, dramatic readings from contemporaries like Marc Anthony, Alejandro Fernández, or Ricky Martin; even Luis Miguel at his most sleepwalking would outperform Iglesias here. It's a good song, and a shimmering production in both the pop and mariachi versions (a cross-genre promotion which made for perhaps the least natural fit for Iglesias' voice), with a lyric confessing to a man's deceptive, predatory behavior towards a woman, all justified because "es que te quiero tanto" (it's that I love you so much).

To a degree, the callowness, self-pity and perpetual adolescence of Iglesias' vocal performance matches the weaselly "I'm a good guy because I'm admitting how bad I am" lyric, but it's hard to believe that any of this was intentional, or that it was received by Latin pop listeners in that spirit. The quivering jaw and tremulous emotion in every line (somehow simultaneously over- and under-sung) strikes me as so patently phony that it's hard to enter sympathetically into the head of a listener who hears it as fulfilling any aesthetic, emotional, or even erotic requirement.

But plenty of selfish, immature brats engage in romantic and sexual partnerships: it must appeal to someone.

THALÍA, “TÚ Y YO”

20th July, 2002

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It would no doubt be unfair to attribute the high-gloss sheen, uptempo rock attitude, and high-octane production on this single entirely to the example set by Shakira's English-language makeover, or even to the generational game change led by Ricky Martin now more than three years ago. My examination of the Hot Latin chart solely from the vantage point of its #1s has left me disgracefully ignorant as to the bulk of Thalía's career; but her previous appearance here almost exactly two years ago was less than a knockout.

It's not her fault that the luck of the charts has cast her as playing catch-up: certainly the production and even the instrumentation of "Tú y Yo" sounds exactly like a sequel to "Livin' La Vida Loca," or even to "She Bangs," but it can be understood more in terms of a trend-hopping victory lap than as trend-hopping desperation. The music industry was still feeling relatively imperial in 2002, so multiple renditions of the song were issued: the video version, as linked above, plus a cumbia version featuring the Corpus Christi genre-straddling band Kumbia Kings, founded by Selena's (Q.E.P.D.) brother A. B. Quintanilla; the album version, edited down from the video, and a year later, an English-language rewrite with lyrics by Kara DioGuardi.

The industry formula for "Latin crossover hit" had been perfected by this time, thanks to Desmond Child's Ricky Martin hits, hits by Enrique Iglesias and Marc Anthony, and (sigh) Santana's "Smooth" -- uptempo rock music featuring a montuno piano line, a rhythm section heavy on cowbell, and bright horns that emphasize dynamics rather than carry the melody. The production was handled by the song's co-writer, Colombian hitmaker Estéfano, who has appeared here primarily as the wizard behind Chayanne, and if the formula is predictable it's still effective: Thalía's emotionally-driven performance, snarling and whimpering as necessary, is all personality and no dull virtuosity. She's an excellent pop star still well in her prime -- this song went to #1 a few months before she turned 31 -- and if the song ends up being more about a generalized feeling of excitement than any specified emotion, with fill-in-the-blank lyrics, that's a long pop tradition too.

LUIS MIGUEL, “CÓMO DUELE”

2nd February, 2002

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Luis Miguel's fourth album of bolero and other romantic Latin standards in a decade, especially considering everything else that has changed since 1991, suggests an exhaustion of ideas, of ambition, even of desire. He produced it by himself, apparently unwilling to wait for his usual collaborators Armando Manzanero and Bebu Silvetti, and reviews at the time were unkind, accusing him of prioritizing his bank account over any artistic growth or integrity.

They have a point. "Cómo Duele" was one of two originals on the album, co-written by Manzanero for Miguel, but its pompous strings from the Royal Philharmonic and light disco guitars never approach the painstakingly gorgeous production from the early-90s albums Romance and Segundo Romance. And Miguel, though his voice remains a burnished instrument, sounds as though he's sleepwalking through the song, gesturing towards drama but never embodying it.

He was still on top of the world: the tour broke box-office records, even while the album itself only sold middling (for a Luis Miguel album). He won a Latin Grammy for it, the usual reward for making a lot of people a lot of money. But he is more definitely than ever a relic, left in a nostalgic, going-through-the-motions past while the Latin pop produced by his peers and his juniors rapidly transforms and evolves around him.

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.

CRISTIAN CASTRO, “AZUL”

30th June, 2001

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It's been four years since Sr. Castro last troubled the top spot of the chart, and glancing forward, he won't do so again for another four. He's been an intermittent presence since 1993, never distinguishing himself with a great song or embarrassing himself with a terrible one: his middle-of-the-road instincts mean that even when the arrangement is modern or inventive his performance is never more than agreeable.

"Azul" starts off sounding as though it might be a breath of fresh air: an honest-to-gosh rock song! maybe a little thin-sounding, but... no, it settles immediately into a mid-tempo chug, and it turns out the rock guitars and drums are just an arrangement, a way of distinguishing a generic love song by sound, not by genre. It could just as easily have been backed by electronic music, or orchestral pomp.

The song, like its parent album, was co-written and produced by long-time Estefan associate Kike Santander, but while I've generally appreciated his touch on the work of Alejandro Fernández, "Azul" just ends up sounding stodgy and out-of-date, the guitar heroics just imitating an older decade's classic rock imitators. In some of the more ballad-heavy doldrums of the 90s, I might have embraced this as a breath of fresh air; but the millennial era has raised my expectations.

"Azul" means blue, but the connotation of sadness which the color has in English is nowhere in this lyric: it's an uncomplicated love song, the blue that of a cloudless sky and calm sea. But "Azul" is also a woman's name: which makes any search for thematic coherence in color symbology fruitless. There's no deeper meaning: the song's pleasures are all on the surface.