LUIS FONSI FT. ALEKS SYNTEK, NOEL SCHAJRIS & DAVID BISBAL, “AQUÍ ESTOY YO”

13th June, 2009

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I try very hard to give every song that ever reached #1 on the Billboard Hot Latin chart a fair hearing. For most of its existence, I was not listening closely to Latin music, and so I come to most of it new; learning to listen past my immediate preconceptions and to consider each song within its immediate cultural, musical, national, and historical context, in addition to any it may have accumulated later, has meant ignoring the inevitable personal associations which any adult will have formed with various musical styles or production qualities. But I've met my breaking point.

The 1993 Bryan Adams/Sting/Rod Stewart hit "All for Love," from the soundtrack to a godawful Three Musketeers movie, has been my least favorite song of all time for the past three decades, for reasons that have almost nothing whatever to do with the song itself (although my critical assessment is that a schlocky piece of crap bellowed gracelessly by three aging buffoons), but rest entirely on my own personal emotional history. (Without going into details I once, in febrile adolescence, meant every word of it, which is reason enough to despise both it and myself till the end of time.) And so this gets caught in the conflagration.

Fonsi, Syntek, Schajris and Bisbal are no Adams/Sting/Stewart: they're still relatively young, for one thing, and their prettily-orchestrated power ballad doesn't have all the air sucked out of it à la Mutt Lang's signature production style in 1993. They also have prettier, stronger voices less overwhelmed by rock-god personality, and so they sound just as good harmonizing as on lead. But when I've said that, I've run out of compliments. Famous men trading off bellowed lines of a self-indulgent, self-regarding love song is my least favorite genre of music, and no amount of careful listening, sympathetic immersion in the individual histories of these four gentlemen, or imagining myself in the place of a listener to whom this song might once have meant the world, can budge me.

This is Puerto Rican Fonsi's sixth appearance here, a victory lap after "No Me Doy Por Vencido." He wrote the song for four male voices, and considered giving it to a boy band before asking his celebrity friends to record it during a fishing trip. Spaniard Bisbal has been here before, as has Argentine Noel Schajris, as one of the two masterminds of Sin Bandera; but this is Mexican pop-industry mainstay and commercial composer Syntek's debut. He, like everyone else here, displays no personality beyond being game and rather full of himself. The capacity of the Hot Latin chart in 2009 to absorb a wide variety of music from all over the Spanish-speaking world is still admirable; the fact that a song like this could get nowhere near #1 a decade later is, as a matter of cultural pluralism, a shame. But selfishly, I don't mind a bit.

LUIS FONSI, “NO ME DOY POR VENCIDO”

13th September, 2008

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At last, Flex's reign at the top of the Hot Latin Chart in 2008 has come to an end: and it's replaced by a power ballad that will carry us through the rest of the year. "No Me Doy Por Vencido" was going to be the song Luis Fonsi was remembered for, at least until 2017 happened and all calculations changed.

Because it's a giant of a song, purpose-built to be all things to all people. Before being included on Fonsi's album Palabras del Silencio, it first appeared on an album entitled AT&T Team USA Soundtrack, a compilation of vaguely inspirational songs for the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing underwritten by a telecoms giant, on which Fonsi appears last, the sole Spanish-language singer in an album full of all-Americans like 3 Doors Down, Taylor Swift, Chris Brown, Sheryl Crow, Nelly, and (remember, it's 2008) something called Clique Girlz. And the song very much belongs to the sporting-championship genre: "No Me Doy Por Vencido" translates as "I do not give up," and Fonsi's throat-straining choruses are perfectly shaped for soundtracking underdog-victory montages.

The problem is that the song is not actually about the triumph of the human spirit against impossible odds: the lyrics are plainly and unequivocally the self-assertive moaning of a guy who is continuing to bother a woman after she has politely declined. And although as a piece of Western media it is certainly not alone in its conception of romance as a man chest-beatingly refusing to surrender to the decisions of the woman he has determined will be his mate, it's hard for me to take it as being genuinely romantic. As, I should note, millions of women the world over have done; pop, because it is pop, can never be limited to a single reading.

In any case, Fonsi's label knew a hit when they heard one, and it was rushed out in banda, ranchera, bachata and urbano versions; but the slight mariachi horns on the original are all the regional accents it needs. It's a hell of a chorus, but like so many other power ballads, it doesn't do enough to earn those soaring notes.

MANÁ, “SI NO TE HUBIERAS IDO”

26th April, 2008

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One of two songs that briefly interrupted Flex's twenty-week reign in the back half of 2008 was this midtempo chug through nostalgic Mexican pop.

Maná formed in 1986, two years after singer Marisela had a big hit with "Si No Te Hubieras Ido" (if you hadn't left), a soft-rock ballad written and produced by Los Bukis frontman Marco Antonio Solís, who is also the second voice on the choruses. By the time that Solís included his own recording of the song on his album of re-recordings Trozos de mi Alma (pieces of my soul), Maná was a globally successful band who had changed the sound of Mexican pop: Solís' version, though still a syrupy ballad, has a muscular rock arrangement, and went to #4 on the Hot Latin chart in 1999. A year later, there was an awkward salsa version by Puerto Rican singer Charlie Cruz, but it only reached #40.

So when Maná included it on their 2008 live album Arde El Cielo (the sky is burning) as one of two covers (the other is José Alfred Jiménez' classic ranchera "El Rey"), it was as an acknowledgement of Mexican pop history and a desire to place themselves within that lineage. I've quarreled with the Mexicanness of Maná before (which I should again stress that I am in no capacity to judge, being only an outside observer), but whether or not their audience considers them an internationalist improvement on Mexican regionalism, Maná certainly wants to be seen as operating within a Mexican (and broader Latin) tradition at least as much as in the international rock tradition that Fher's throaty vocals and their chugging guitars point to.

It's those relentless, uninflected chugging guitars which make this a more or less failed rewrite of the song. The swooping emotional drama that Marisela and Marco Antonio Solís communicated in their readings of the lyrics' emotional devastation, a drama that was no doubt goosed up by glossy strings, dissipates into friendly sway-along karaoke in Maná's hands, which comes off like a third-hand story rather than a portrayal of heartbreak.

CHAYANNE, “SI NOS QUEDARA POCO TIEMPO”

12th May, 2007

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I think I've often been unfair to Chayanne here, as I often am to handsome young men who sing earnestly romantic songs without gesturing toward any particular regional musical tradition. International balladry, vaguely contemporary in production but wholly conventional in writing and composition, is probably my least favorite body of musical production: not because it's impossible for real emotion or exquisite performances to come out of it (if anything, quite the opposite), but because without obvious genre markers or any grounding in personal history I can't hear a way into it. The instinct I always have is: "This is between the singer and whoever, real or imaginary, he's singing to; it's got nothing to do with me."

This was my reaction here -- at least until the pre-chorus line "Y la melancolía / me ataca por la espalda sin piedad" (and melancholy / attacks me from behind, merciless) made me pause in my tracks. Wait, is this a song about depression?

Well, it's a song about loss, whether real or imagined; the chorus is delivered in a conditional tense, as the title (If We Had Little Time Left) should have made obvious, and the middle eight is more or less a thesis statement: "Nadie sabe en realidad que es lo que tiene / hasta que enfrenta el miedo de perderlo para siempre" (nobody really knows what they have / until they face the fear of losing it forever). Which in English sounds like the tag line to a Spielbergian apocalypse-made-personal or a Nicholas Sparks-style sentimental romance; but the glory of pop music is that it can compress such narratives into three-minute shots of emotion without having to drag us through three-act structures and lingering closeups.

The production supporting Chayanne's throaty rasp here is more muscular than usual: 90s-style post-alt rock production with crashing drums and chugging guitars. There's a certain kind of comfort to it for older or middle-class listeners, particularly in the age of reggaetón, but Chayanne so clearly belongs to an older generation that (as of this writing at least) this song will be his last appearance on this travelogue. It won't be for lack of effort; his late-2010s singles are collaborations with reggaetoneros old and young. But as a valedictory, "Si Nos Quedara Poco Tiempo" works very well.

JENNIFER LOPEZ, “QUÉ HICISTE”

5th May, 2007

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This is only Ms. Lopez' second appearance on this travelogue, and her first appearance by herself -- her debut was eight years ago, in a duet with Marc Anthony, who (as of this #1) she has been married to for three years. And although he doesn't sing on this song, his fingerprints are all over it: the principal melody was, the story goes, given to him in a dream by Rocío Dúrcal (who had only recently died), insisting that it was "for Jennifer." So Anthony, along with a Colombian songwriting husband/wife team he regularly collaborated with, has the writing credit for the song. Which (of course, since I'm writing about it) paid out: a #1 Latin hit, respectable placement throughout the European charts, even Lopez' Spanish-language debut on the Hot 100.

But Lopez is no Dúrcal: she has a dancer's, even an actor's voice, and her singing here is more dramatic (aided of course by tense, massive production) than technically polished. There's nothing wrong with that: in fact it gives her songs something of an everywoman quality, easy to belt along with in the car or in a late-night rage over the fucker who ruined your life. Because it's a kiss-off song, and a really good one, full of righteous fury and reclaimed self-respect, a woman leaving behind a man who destroyed their happiness with uncontrolled anger and words he couldn't take back.

But the lyrics, poetic and specific as they are, are secondary to the production, alternating between quiet, tension-building verses under which plucked guitars and scraping strings burble, and explosive choruses where power chords, rock drums, and swirling strings lend force to Lopez' full-throated denunciations. It's not surprising that the production was handled by Anthony's long-time salsa collaborator Sergio George (or that a salsa remix was made) -- the punchiness and drama of contemporary tropical music underlies the whole thing, even if the tense, sawing rhythms are much more old-world than the liberatory dancefloor beats of salsa.

It's a really good song, one of J. Lo's career highlights, even if its mixture of rock instrumentation and high drama don't quite seem to fit together at a decade's remove. Writing about the mid-to-late 2000s in the late 2010s has been an exercise in trying to see truthfully: it's just far enough away that it feels fundamentally different from the present, but not far enough away for a coherent nostalgia to have accrued around it. Everything still feels awkward and unfinished, like prologue to now; remembering that it felt then like the culmination of history (as is habitual for me with earlier periods) is still work.

LUIS FONSI, “TU AMOR”

24th February, 2007

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Fonsi's fourth appearance here, and he's more invested in the legacy sounds of rock than ever, to a degree which seems inexplicable in today's post-urbano landscape.

 "Tu Amor" is one of those most unlikely of hits -- a new track on a greatest-hits compilation (Éxitos 98:06, in which the use of a colon rather than a dash turns the title from a mere descriptor into a Biblical pun) -- the occasional success rate of which continues to inspire the practice. It's a relatively undistinguished midtempo ballad, chugging along with no variation in tempo, just dynamics, while Fonsi's romántica-oriented voice, unsuited to the more idiosyncratic emotional signifiers of rock, wails glibly over top.

It was only #1 for a week in the interregnum between radio-only and streaming-plus calculations of the chart, which presumably means it was popular in digital downloads (this was two weeks after the release of the deluxe edition of the compilation). Fonsi was at his first commercial peak in the late 2000s, still young enough to be a heartthrob, but mature enough that, having found his voice, he could produce great music and not just generic imitations of it. If this leans more toward generic than great, it's firmly in line with contemporary trends: in the mid-to-late 2000s blustery ballads were all the rage on international versions of Pop Idol and X Factor, and it would be a couple more years before dance music became the center of international pop again. (And Fonsi will be there too. Stay tuned.)

LUIS FONSI, “ABRAZAR LA VIDA”

22nd May, 2004

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We haven't heard from the boyish Puerto Rican crooner Luis Fonsi since 2000, when I was unimpressed. That was written when he wasn't yet on the radar of every music writer for participating in an unlikely global smash. But more about that when we reach 2017: for now, this is a maturation, a more assured return to a spotlight which he will occupy with some regularity in the next few years.

The song itself is a bit of an inspirational power ballad: "Embrace Life" is its title and central theme, and there's enough respectable (rock) musicianship to give it an edge of Seriousness which Fonsi's own performance, alternating between hushed solemnity and clenched-fist wailing, doesn't quite earn. It's still a power ballad, with all the trappings of uncool that implies. But it's a 2000s-era power ballad, which means that before it really starts soaring into post-grunge pomp in the back half, Fonsi's touchstones are genial strummers like John Mayer or Jack Johnson.

This isn't my nostalgia, because I wasn't paying attention to Latin pop yet in 2004, but it's an era which I can recognize the contours of the nostalgia for. My surprising affection for it may be due as much to the silly, casually charming video, in which young Fonsi is in very good looks, as to the music itself.

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.

CHAYANNE, “UN SIGLO SIN TÍ”

6th September, 2003

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Mere weeks after I complimented Ricky Martin for not letting himself be defined by songwriter Franco De Vita's lugubrious chest-beating sentiment-rock, I find that Chayanne has done exactly that. It's probably the best song, and almost certainly the best performance, that we've heard from him throughout this travelogue, but although he's well-suited to De Vita's sturdy, gospel-based sweeping chords and lead-footed rhythms, the result is a kind of emotionally-extravagant narcissist-rock that you have to be keyed into the emotions of or it will fall dispiritingly flat.

"Un Siglo Sin Tí" means "a century without you," and the lyrics of the song are a description of the singer's desolation at having been left, his contrition at having behaved badly, and his insistence that he has changed. Put that way, it doesn't necessarily sound very appealing (every abuser ever could sing along), but I've made the mistake before of believing that pop songs expressing sentiments that would be questionable in actual interpersonal relations are therefore worthless, and (especially) should not appeal to the female audience which does, in fact, enjoy them. Which is just an aesthetic extension on my part of Nice Guy syndrome. Nobody needs my thesis on why Chayanne's grand gesture at the end of the video is creepy.

Pop is, among much else, an idealized version of reality, a safe space where all emotions are allowed to play out without the repercussions that would attend them in life. Even in the real world closing out the possibility of actual contrition and actual forgiveness can be a mistake; but even if there are no good men in fact, let there be some in fiction.

RICKY MARTIN, “TAL VEZ”

12th April, 2003

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After two major crossover dance-pop albums whereby he had become the Disney-prince handsome face of Latin Pop for the English-speaking world, Ricky Martin had earned a self-important Spanish-language record. The credits for Almas del Silencio (souls from the silence) are a who's who of Latin pop producers and songwriters, from the omnipresent Emilio Estefan and Estéfano to (masculine) stars who were famous in their own right like Ricardo Arjona, Alejandro Sanz, and (still to be met on this travelogue) Juanes. "Tal Vez" (perhaps), the first single and first Hot Latin #1 from the album, was written by Franco De Vita, who we haven't heard in his own voice since 1991, but who was responsible for my favorite Chayanne song in recent memory.

True to De Vita's form, the song is a power ballad with Srs Rock Instrumentation, and Ricky Martin's soulful voice very nearly gives it the sweep and cheesy emotional heft of a Bryan Adams song. Doubling and trebling his voice in the studio, he fails to match the grain and sounds instead like his own duet partner, a gesture towards solipsism which will mark his career going forward. Like many of the charmed generation who came of musical age around the turn of the millennium, he no longer has to try: he's going to be rich and famous no matter what. All that's left is to fill in the details.

So "Tal Vez" represents one path toward a sustainable career in maturity: the chest-beating ballad singer, attractive because brooding, bleating out his masculine pain. It's not an uncrowded field: many exponents are already regulars here, from Chayanne to Enrique. But it's not entirely a comfortable fit for Ricky, and not even necessarily because of any reluctance to enact traditional gender stereotypes. The key line in "Tal Vez" comes at the end of the third verse: "Tal vez yo nunca supe a quien amaba" (Perhaps I never knew who I loved), a stealth uncloseting under the guise of a straightforward "I did you wrong, babe" ballad. The video makes it a generalized love song, about parent-child and even friend relationships as much as romantic ones, Martin himself only a watchful spirit above it all.

A waste of his dynamic boy-band-bred physicality, you might say. But he'll be back.

RICARDO ARJONA, “EL PROBLEMA”

7th December, 2002

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Ricardo Arjona's relatively complex and poetic singer-songwriter rock has been a necessary counterweight to the more demotic and direct millennial-era pop which had largely enveloped the top of the Hot Latin chart over the past few years; but this, his biggest-ever hit, is as direct and pounding as any dance song, even if the lyrics' simple structural conceit is still a highly poetic one.

The bulk of the song is made up of couplets whose lines begin "El problema no es que..." and "El problema es que..." (The problem is not that... / The problem is that...), in which the first line describes a difficulty about the beloved, and the second details how it impacts the lover. From the first, relatively benign line "The problem wasn't not finding you / The problem is forgetting you," it grows increasingly obsessive and even masochistic, until lines like "The problem isn't that you hurt me / The problem is that I like it" and "The problem isn't the wounds / The problem is the scars" signal, if the repetitive pounding rock of the music and Arjona's grainy shouting hadn't already, that we're in darker territory than usual.

The music, though, is more varied and even uplifting than just "pounding rock" -- a gospel choir gives its usual unearned gravitas to Arjona's distorted self-pity, and crisply funky piano and guitar runs recall the Rolling Stones at their decadent peak in the early 70s. Arjona's classic-rock instincts work for him on "El Problema," as his first-person character edges into the same kind of psychological unpleasantness that Jagger's protagonists plumbed regularly. None of which really explains why it was such a huge hit in 2002 and 2003: even Arjona, who made it the lead single off Santo Pecado (Holy Sin) was befuddled by the song's success, claiming he never expected it to be played on radio. Maybe it's as simple as that there's a greater hunger for emotional masochism in the pop audience than is generally assumed: I know I relate, strongly.

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.

CHAYANNE, “Y TÚ TE VAS”

15th June, 2002

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The last time Chayanne appeared in these pages, I complained that (at least as far as his #1s history goes) he lacked a real identity beyond "smoldering jawline," his thin voice and limited expressiveness held hostage to his choice of material, and his production rarely keeping up with the times. As if in answer to my complaints, his new #1 begins with a twitchy electronic rhythm which sounds exactly like 2002.

Unfortunately, it's then overlaid with a pillowy bed of bombastic ballad signifiers, less of its time than of the generic "anywhen" of adult contemporary, and all that's left is emoting.

Surprisingly, the emoting works. That's because the song itself is a good one, architecturally well-constructed, and Chayanne's overdriven performance matches the heightened emotions that the chordal structure, the pacing, and the production dynamics evoke. For this, we can thank the song's writer, an almost forgotten name which we only met once, in 1991: earnest Venezuelan singer-songwriter Franco de Vita. I sneered rather heavily at him then, in terms that I now think are not entirely warranted, but his emulation of pop craftsmen like Billy Joel pays off here: "Y Tú Te Vas" (and you leave) is a strong song, its sound structure able to overcome a self-pitying lyric. When Chayanne allows a little pseudo-soulful grit into his voice on the chorus, it's the most effective singing I've ever heard from him.

The video is exactly as lavish and generic as the song: but I like it because its sympathies are never entirely with Chayanne, who smolders ineffectively; the woman leaves anyway, and all his self-pity is for naught.

RICKY MARTIN, “SÓLO QUIERO AMARTE”

7th April, 2001

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As if to seal away Juan Gabriel's old-fashioned but singular emotionalism forever, the next number one is all sleek hypermodernism, generic sentiments and vacant emoting. Ricky Martin has mostly operated in a forward motion in these pages, but this is his comfort zone: using the tropes of soulful singing to do little more than smolder at the camera, or the audio equivalent.

The song came out in two different versions simultaneously: the English-language version is a duet with Christina Aguilera, and is dancier and more florid, with orchestra hits and an 808 rhythmic bed. Without Christina's fluttering extemporizing vocals -- which function as essentially another instrument in the mix -- Ricky doesn't have enough force of personality to hold it together. But the dullness of the Spanish-language version isn't entirely his fault: a more power-ballady production and generic "Latin" guitar runs make it run-of-the-millennium Latin Pop.

He still had enough charisma and goodwill that it spent a month at #1 at a time when the chart moved far more quickly than it does today, but although we aren't saying goodbye to him yet by a long ways, it's a slip down from the his peak of the two previous years. From here on out, the music will take a backseat to the much more important work of remaining Ricky Martin.

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.

RICARDO ARJONA, “CUÁNDO”

7th October, 2000

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We met Guatemalan singer-songwriter Ricardo Arjona earlier in 2000 with a beautiful modern-rock (modern for the 90s) ballad. But it was from his last album, and his new album was Galería Caribe, or Caribbean Gallery, a showcase of his versatility with the multi-colored musics of the tropical islands. Or, perhaps, his lack of it.

"Cuándo" (When), for example, is nominally a bolero, the swaying Cuban lilt that became the glory of midcentury Mexican popular song; but while the congas tap out a swaying rhythm, it's an awfully stiff one, practically 4/4, an unadventurousness which clarifies when electric guitars start revving up in the middle eight, and the song reveals itself as just another power ballad wearing tropical-Caribbean clothes. The muted trumpet, the acoustic guitar runs, the swooning strings, and the conga percussion is all beautifully performed and expertly knit together, but underneath it all is a guy in a flannel shirt whose musical instincts never stray far from the repetitive blues-based structures of classic rock.

With that disappointment, it's a surprise that "Cuándo" is still as good as it is, not just as a piece of production, but as a song. Ricardo Arjona can write a smart lyric, as we knew as far back as 1994, and "Cuándo" is a major performance in lyric-writing. The opening lines, "¿Cuando fué la última vez que viste las estrellas con los ojos cerrados / y te aferraste como un náufrago a la orilla de la espalda de alguién?" (When was the last time you saw the stars with your eyes closed / and clung like a castaway to the shore of someone's shoulder) present much more thoroughgoingly poetic imagery than Anglophone pop usually has room for, even beyond the obvious sexual allusions.

The rest of the song turns into rather a scorned-lover diatribe, but Arjona's closer to Dylan than to Morrissette in that category, and if it weren't for his plodding rhythm and rather anonymous voice, "Cuándo" could be a great, rather than just a good, song.

RICARDO ARJONA, “DESNUDA”

5th February, 2000

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I've been spending a lot of time lately with the literary movement that Spanish calls Modernismo, which is a different beast from the Anglo-Celto-American novels and epic poems we usually refer to as modernism in English: primarily a poetic flowering (the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío kickstarted it in the 1880s), influenced by the French Symbolists but without the strict metrical heritage to rebel against (and so equally influenced by the French Parnassians), deeply romantic in the Harlequin-novel sense as well as the Keats-and-Shelley sense, and very much a Europe-oriented movement, with its its Latin American poets and feuilletonists like Leopoldo Lugones or Horacio Quiroga just as identified with their nations' European elite as Spaniards like Antonio Machado or Juan Ramón Jiménez. It's a whole world of literature I was largely unaware of before the past year, but which my newly-discovered facility with reading Spanish has opened up to me, and which I'm still excited to explore.

I bring all this up because Ricardo Arjona is from Guatemala, but his music is not particularly Guatemalan. Like Enrique Gómez Carrillo, the Guatemalan Modernista poet who spent his career in Europe boosting the Estrada Cabrera dictatorship, Arjona is an internationalist, which (in Latin America) is to say a European; and if I'm particularly sensitive to this point in regards to Guatemala when it doesn't necessarily bother me from any other Latin American nation, it probably has more to do with my own bad conscience towards the place I spent my teenage years than with Guatemala's particular ethnic or aesthetic identities.

But I also bring it up because Arjona is himself a Modernista, aesthetically if not chronologically: "Desnuda" could have been written by Jiménez or Darío, it so thoroughly examines its central image ("desnuda" can be both the adjective "nude" and the imperative "take [your] clothes off") and complicates it, turning it inside out so that a shedding becomes a filling up, and he applies all the rhetorical tricks at his disposal to convince his apparently shy lover of the naturalness, the profitability, and the giddy lunacy of nakedness.

It's one of the best lyrics we've encountered in this travelogue, judged simply as a lyric, poetic and erotic and funny, so it's a bit disappointing that the musical backing is so soft-rock standard. It's as professional and tasteful as Arjona's text, with Elizabeth Meza's harmonies and wordless sighs adding erotic weight to the guitar curlicues and accentuating percussion. Arjona's voice is a fine, burnished instrument in the post-stadium rock tradition -- a little gritty, a little sensitive -- but his performance doesn't live up to his writing. He's a generic Western singer, in other words, which is why I think of him as failing to be particularly Guatemalan.

But Guatemala is not one thing. (Nothing is ever one thing.) Although it is has one of the largest indigenous populations by percentage in the Americas, it is just as much a Western nation as Argentina, or yes, the United States -- if we want to talk about non-Western nations as those with impoverished underclasses, stratified by race and language, that's not a conversation that will flatter the traditional great powers. Art for art's sake has historically been the province of the elite, in every culture, and at least in Arjona's case, his mass art, blanketing radios, constantly on tour, and accessible via every cell phone in the hemisphere, is more widely available, and more widely beloved, than that of any of the precious, finicky Modernistas of a century before.

RICKY MARTIN, “BELLA”

4th September, 1999

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One of the effects of glancing through all the old entries in this blog while getting ready for this return was becoming very embarrassed about how dismissive I was of the many ballads that have made up the bulk of Hot Latin #1s in the twentieth century. Perhaps I'm growing mushy and sentimental in middle age, perhaps I understand Spanish lyricism better than I used to, or perhaps I'm belatedly getting the critical distance which allows me to hear past flimsy or generic production to the emotion, the performance, the song itself. (Particular apologies to Marco Antonio Solís, probably the most undeserved target of my splenetic boredom over the years.)

All this dawned on me while I was listening to "Bella" again and realized that I'm predisposed to rate it highly not because of Ricky Martin's sensitive performance, or because the soaring melody or elegant lyrics are anything out of the ordinary, but just because the production is modern and full-bodied and full of interesting textural accents. The sitar and tabla atmospherics that open it, the falsetto soars leading into the chorus, the fretless bass murmuring throughout, the gated drums, the swirling strings: this is the second most expensive-sounding song we've heard yet. The first, of course, is "Livin' la Vida Loca."

And it's really only within the shadow of that enormous cross-platform hit that "Bella" makes any sense, both as a chart hit at the time and as a pop memory today. As "She's All I Ever Had," it apparently went as high as #2 on the Hot 100, but I have no memory of it, and listening to it now I'm much less impressed with it in English, where the lyrics (and the rhymes) are more generic and the focus is more on the man singing the song than the woman he's singing about.

Not that it's a deathless love song in either language: Ricky Martin was never particularly convincing as a man tortured by love for a woman even before he left the closet, and his performance here is more remarkable for his burnished soulfulness (the song was co-written by Jon Secada, and you can hear hints of his R&B-derived melodicism, even while the tempo lumbers unfunkily) than for any emotional nakedness. Fair enough; lots of straight men have sung unconvincing love songs too. But there's a reason that "Livin' la Vida Loca" and another song still to come are the ones he's remembered for from the millennial era, rather than this.

CHAYANNE, "DEJARÍA TODO"

12th December, 1998

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It's been six years since Puerto Rican pop star Chayanne has bobbed to the surface on these top-of-the-chart waters; although he's been working steadily in the meantime and been relatively successful at it, this still marks something of a comeback for him. Written by Estéfano, a prolific songwriter and producer from Colombia whose previous success stories had  included Jon Secada's debut album and Gloria Estefan's Mi Tierra, "Dejaría Todo" continues Chayanne's success with midtempo ballads. This time, thanks to Marcello Azevedo's nylon-stringed guitar, it has what you might call a stereotypically Latin flavor, a vaguely bolero sway, though not so pronounced that the barreling power-ballad chorus gets tripped up in any kind of polyrhythmic syncopation.

It's a "she's leaving me, my world is ending" song — more or less literally — and if the emotional hyperbole of the lyrics doesn't quite match up with the bland, adult-contemporary longeurs of the production, that's nothing new. Chayanne's voice isn't powerful, but it's pretty and well-suited to the aching romanticisms he's called upon to emote. (Enrique Iglesias, for example, would make an unlistenable fist of what Chayanne relaxes into.) It goes on for too long, as the chorus repeats and repeats, but it remains listenable throughout, Estéfano's production magic keeping each instrumental injection just this side of stultifying. The choral effect on the last several iterations of the chorus is both gilding this particular lily and getting to be a bit tiresome on this travelogue — how many faux-gospel choruses does that make within the past year? — but I'm surprised to discover that I have some affection for Chayanne.

Which is good, because he'll be back.