PAULINA RUBIO, “CAUSA Y EFECTO”

27th June, 2009

Wiki | Video

The difference in my affection between last week's entry and this one is no doubt entirely due to my once and future identification as a music nerd: dudely pile-up power ballads are terminally uncool, while sexy sassy glitter-schaffel power pop was always cool, and even more so in the 2000s, when the internet's breaking open of pop history gave muso identification with revivalist microscenes more fashionable cachet than ever before (or, as history has continued to evolve past retromania, since).

"Causa y Efecto" (cause and effect) is a straight-up glam-rock song, something that T. Rex or Suzi Quatro might have sung in the 70s, only with shinier post-millennial production and Rubio's practiced pop-idol charisma in place of anything too alarmingly fey or aggressive. Her 2009 album Gran City Pop was one of my favorite pop albums of the year, in part because it was the year I went all-in on listening to current pop after a decade spent immersing myself in music history, and Rubio was engaging with both current pop and pop history in a charming, totally confident way.

In the video, she intentionally evokes the Blondie of Parallel Lines, posing with her band in suits and skinny ties, and a general 1970s nostalgia suffuses it (roller skating! Eames chairs! hippie dress), a nostalgia that Rubio herself is just old enough to experience. But it's a 2000s song too, which means that it's a song about a woman kicking a man who thinks he controls her to the curb: the lyrics taunt a former abusive lover with her independence from his emotional manipulation and her own new-found power to hurt him instead.

My affection for this song is certainly nostalgic, and was even when I first heard it in 2009, as a music nerd who loved glam rock, 70s pop, and 2000s pop with the schaffel beat. (Goldfrapp's "Ooh La La"! Kylie Minogue's "2 Hearts!" Pink's "So What"!) I have no idea how it would strike a listener with no history with or affection for any of that background; possibly as catchy but slight, or as raucous in an old-fashioned way, without any of the slinky smoothness of contemporary urbano. However it struck the Latin audience as a whole, it was #1 for five solid weeks: enough people loved it as much as I did to earn Paulina another notch on her belt. We'll see her again, just before the streaming era buries everything quirky. These remaining years of heterogeneity are precious.

MANÁ, “MANDA UNA SEÑAL”

3rd March, 2007

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The third Hot Latin #1 in a row from Maná's 2006 album Amar Es Combatir (to love is to struggle), and it's time for me to acknowledge that whether I like it or not Maná were speaking to the broader Latin-music audience in the late 2000s in much more meaningful ways than I have been able to understand on this travelogue so far.

But I'm getting closer with this song. It helps that it's a straight-down-the-line power-pop song, with 80s guitar chugs and sparkling harmonies and anthemic choruses, and so feels closer to the derivative, romantic, essentially conservative heart of Maná than incorporating Afro-Latin rhythms or post-grunge posturing does.

I want to be skeptical here of my usual conflation of post-80s rock with conservatism; outside the Anglosphere, rock means different things, and especially on a different time scale, than what the usual histories of US and British fads claim are set in stone. But it is noteworthy that Maná is having bigger hits than ever at the moment that reggaetón is challenging the settled assumptions of the Latin-music industry: Maná are the very definition of a settled assumption, and their not exactly dominance but certainly resurgence here in the 2000s might be comparable to something like the way the rock gods of the 1960s and 1970s reentered the US charts in the late 80s as a sort of comfort food to aging Boomers weirded out by hip-hop and hair metal.

To use a word with more currency in Hispanophone theory than Anglophone, Maná have never made particularly autochthonous music: and reggaetón's refusal to embrace the Estefan-bred crossover ideal, as seen in the paltry "Latin Invasion" of 1999 and the rather less paltry career of Shakira -- reggaetón remains defiantly aimed at an urbano audience, forcing Anglophone audiences to come to it (as they actually did with "Gasolina") rather than seeking to ingratiate itself by crooning in translated English -- is an assertion of greater autochthony, and particularly a darker-skinned, poorer, and urban autochthony, than the comfortable Latin middle class, both in the US and elsewhere, is comfortable with. They're comfortable with Maná, a crossover act in everything but language; Maná makes extremely comfortable music.

It's impossible not to read all of this from the vantage point of 2019, of course, which has proved the reggaetoneros right and the ingratiating middle class wrong; as concentration camps for darker-skinned, poorer, and urban Hispanophones proliferate, as border-wide fortresses are raised to protect the wealthy and white from rising tides and the tropical poor those tides will displace, as Us and Them become ever more deeply riven by race, language, and class, Maná's ode to romantic questing, expressed in beautifully poetic literary Spanish and accompanied by totemic sounds from the past four decades of sensitive white male guitar heroics sounds more and more hollow, an aristocratic fashion for dressing in the workingman's clothes of yesteryear while the mob cries out for justice.

PAULINA RUBIO, “NI UNA SOLA PALABRA”

30th September, 2006

Wiki | Video

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.

RICKY MARTIN, “LIVIN' LA VIDA LOCA”

24th April, 1999

Wiki | Video

"Give a little more vibe on the track, please..."

I probably crow too often about new realities, new beginnings, new usherings-in of the present era. Reality is manifold; newness begins over every wave. Yet it feels more accurate than ever to say that the millennium begins here -- at least the millennium seen through the specific lens around which this blog is oriented.

It's not the first Hot Latin #1 to also hit #1 on the Hot 100, not by a wide margin (Los Lobos was twelve years ago), but it does introduce a new sense of intimacy between the two charts. Crossover between them will still be rare, but not quite so rare; even if specific songs aren't familiar to both audiences, a good many artists will be. There was a deal of hype the summer of 1999 about a Latin Invasion (which consisted of about three songs), but apart from Tony Concepción's Irakere-imitating trumpet towards the end, there's little that's particularly Latin about "Livin' la Vida Loca."

Indeed, with its whirlwind velocity, rubbery surf guitar, and energetic horn charts, it actually has more in common with that other cod-tropical vogue of the late 90s, third-wave ska, than with anything specifically Puerto Rican. Which is part of the point, both of Martin's crossover pop and of this whole travelogue: Latin identity is not -- cannot be -- tied to some travel-brochure stereotype of UNESCO World Heritage frozen-in-amber cultural practice. Latin people live in the present tense, and Latin pop is modern pop; whatever and whenever that is.

Desmond Child, the producer of "Vida Loca," made his name with the shiny gloss of Bon Jovi and Aerosmith's late-80s hair metal, and that sense of compressed power gives the track its grab-you-by-the-shirt-front immediacy; an important stage in the loudness wars, it was the first all-ProTools hit, electronic even in its Dick Dale gibber, the punchy horns and skittering drum as influenced by the noisy, jungly end of drum 'n' bass as by Child's rock background.

And the lyrics position it directly in Anglophone rock history, the woman who is living the vida loca one with all the brown sugars and witchy women and maneaters that thirty years of guitar-driven misogyny have chronicled. But Martin's performance has none of the spitefulness of a Jagger; he rather admires her rapaciousness than otherwise, and why not? With this production behind him, he's easily able to keep up with her. (And besides, he's not her target. But that's later history bleeding into earlier.) Once more, it's the beginning of the modern era: hedonism presented not as warning temptation or as knowing deviance, but as the basic premise of pop music. EDM, at least in the popular imagination, starts here too.