PRINCE ROYCE, “DARTE UN BESO”

7th September, 2013

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Our final encounter (to date) with Prince Royce in the main travelogue is his second-biggest hit (certified 31x Platinum in  2021, second only to "Corazón Sin Cara"'s 5x Diamond as of 2025). I've been fairly patronizing about Royce's glib, liquid vocal style and relatively shallow material in these pages, largely because the obvious comparison to his bachata senior Romeo Santos does him no favors, but this is easily my favorite of his #1s, as good a marriage between his jejune, open-hearted style and the wide-eyed internationalism of the music as exists in the top layer of his catalog.

The opening ukelele strums are powerfully evocative of the acoustic reggae-pop peddled by the likes of Jason Mraz a couple of years earlier, and although the tune slips into generic bachata rhythms for the bulk of it, that beachy skank returning to punctuate the reverie every so often is an indicator of the breezy, uncomplicated romanticism that Royce is at his best when peddling. The twinkly orchestration of "Las Cosas Pequeñas" returns on the chorus, but its cod-philosophical lyrics vanish here, replaced by a simple, adolescently naïve love song.

He just wants to "darte un beso" (give you a kiss) but that's as far as his physical imagination goes; the rest of his romantic hopes are entirely abstract: a generic desire to make sure you are protected, feel good, and lack for nothing. Which is indistinguishable for any young person's hopes for themselves, and suggests that he doesn't really know the object of his affections as an individual (the opening verse more or less confirms this: his entire relationship with them consists of looking and thinking), and is merely projecting his own desires onto them.

I'm not suggesting that this lyrical solipsism was intentionally crafted to reveal the limitations of the singer's romantic knowledge and imagination -- as far as I know it's entirely sincere, and the people who loved the song and played it over and over took it exactly as the portrait of pure, selfless, and aspirational love it purports to be. Most young people's romantic lives are exactly this naïve and unreflective. And if Royce can't really make me believe that it's exactly as sincere as it's supposed to be, that's for once not a failure of him selling the material: both his delivery and his meaning are exactly as glib as each other. 

Airplay Watch:

• Prince Royce, "Darte un Beso"
• Discussed above.
• Tito El Bambino, "Carnaval"
• A merengue throwback with soca accents, revamping the classic 1985 Dominican carnival tune by Fernando Villalona for a modern island-urbano audience.
• Wisin, "Que Viva la Vida"
• Another entrant in the "Danza Kuduro" sweepstakes, with Wisin's signature guard-dog barking on the rapped verses and the chorus so heavily AutoTuned it might as well be Yandel. 
• Ricky Martin, "Come With Me"
• A banger aimed at gay dancefloors squarely in the 2009–2011 mold, produced by an Australian team in the image of Dr. Luke or RedOne. The "Spanglish version" linked here is only slightly more interesting than the English-only version that was big in Australia and nowhere else.

PRINCE ROYCE, “LAS COSAS PEQUEÑAS”

17th March, 2012

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I've catalogued a number of firsts in the thirteen years (!) I've been writing this blog, but here's another: the first time I (along with everyone else who blurbed it at the Singles Jukebox) am quoted in the "Critical Reception" section of the song's Wikipedia page. My blurb, in its totality, and with links added for context, reads:

It’s deeply unfortunate that this boring lullaby is the Jukebox’s introduction to Royce. Not that he’s ever really been a cause for pulse-rate-raising (unless his duet with Daddy Yankee counts), but his early singles had more sparkle and snap to them — he even made “Stand by Me” interesting, and in the twenty-first century! — and with the exception of the obligatory steel-guitar solo (it is bachata, after all) this one just kind of sits there. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except the “na na na na na na” hook sounds almost exactly like Mike Birbiglia’s Kenny G impression.

Which at this distance feels a little like kicking a puppy. Is "Las Cosas Pequeñas" twee sentimental gloop? It absolutely is. But twee sentimental gloop has its place in the pop ecosystem, and in 2023 I'm kind of entranced by how all-in the production goes in on its tremulous bathos: celeste twinkles, vibrating string sections, dramatic piano ripples. The steel-stringed guitar solo and Royce's sense of rhythm are about all that make it bachata: otherwise it's a straight down the middle r&b song that could have been produced ten, twenty, or thirty years earlier.

Which may feel like a betrayal of bachata authenticity, but Royce was never marketed as authentic (as noted, his first single was a Spanglish cover of the Ben E. King standard), and if teen-idol pop isn't allowed to be bathetic it's fighting with one hand tied behind its back. It's still a little painfully generic, but I don't have it in me to despise it anymore. Maybe I'm just in a mellow mood, happy to luxuriate in another one-week wonder before the chart takes on streaming and everything flattens out much more. "Las Cosas Pequeñas" is itself a cosa pequeña (little thing), and contra the message of the song, it's not worth getting too worked up about.

MANÁ FT. PRINCE ROYCE, “EL VERDADERO AMOR PERDONA”

10th December, 2011

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Over the years that I've been conducting this travelogue I have occasionally run into cases where it's not clear which version of a song is supposed to be represented on the chart, since multiple versions are in circulation at once. Billboard lists this chart entry as "Maná Featuring Prince Royce," but from my memories of Latin radio in Phoenix in late 2011 and 2012, Maná's original plodding dirge was played far more frequently; I only vaguely recognized the bachata-con-Royce version when listening to it to write this.

Of course, other markets presumably had different experiences: New York radio, for example, would surely have promoted the Dominican element over the Mexican. And one of the charms of the old airplay-only method of chart calculation was that the multiple versions and remixes playing on various slightly different radio formats could be collapsed into sharing a single chart entry. Which became part of the strategy for releasing multiple versions to multiple formats at once: get enough traction on each, and your song would do all the better on the overall chart. But I don't know that I've heard a more awkward combination of genres  than this power ballad-meets-airy bachata that Billboard considered the primary version in 2011.

Ten years later, the YouTube video for Maná's original has more than three times the views than the version with Prince Royce interpolating half the lines in his lovely, emotionally vacant falsetto does. It's easy to read this collaboration as a cynical move: "El Verdadero Amor Perdona" (True love forgives) was the third single from Drama y Luz, but didn't look likely to replicate the success of its two predecessors, both of which appeared here, so goosing its chances by adding a flavor-of-the-year prettyboy singer and a generic bachata bed (the hoary rock en español band played much better bachata when Juan Luis Guerra was their guest) for a conveniently-timed "deluxe edition" of the album worked to keep Maná's streak of Hot Latin #1s alive.

As you may have gathered, I'm not a big fan of either the original or its bachatification. The chorus' rewrite of 1 Corinthians 13 to beg a betrayed lover to take the singer back is emotionally manipulative in both the good sense (pop artisans know how to use chord changes and tension-and-release dynamics to engineer feelings), and the bad ("if you don't forgive me, you never loved me"-ass argumentation). It's easier to take the song less seriously when Prince Royce sings half the lines in his glib, cherubic manner, which might make it even more insidious.

Not that demanding perfect moral rectitude from pop is a meaningful, much less achiveable, goal: pop exists to embody emotions, and the emotion embodied here is a widely experienced and expressed one. My complaint is that it fails to make that emotion irresistible to me: it sounds just as stunted and navel-gazing as it is.

PRINCE ROYCE, “CORAZÓN SIN CARA”

12th March, 2011

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The bachata wave continues to crest even as Aventura steps away from the spotlight. The music industry, having discovered the appeal of "Dominican R&B," is loath to let it fade, and a young Bronx-born heartthrob with a sweet voice and utterly sincere songwriting is the perfect substitute for Romeo Santos' more emotionally complicated songwriting while the latter steps away from the spotlight to build up his solo material.

Geoffrey Royce Rojas, the son of a taxi driver and a beautician, was twenty when his debut album, Prince Royce, was released through an independent Miami-based label. His first single was a bachata cover in Spanglish of Ben E. King's "Stand by Me," a statement of his hybrid identity as both a Dominican and a New Yorker; the follow-up, however, was the one to watch. "Corazón Sin Cara" took more than a year to reach #1, first released to radio in February 2010. It started to gain traction by the summer, and had actually fallen from the top spot on the Tropical Latin chart before the mainstream Latin audience caught on to it, finally bringing it to #1 Hot Latin in the spring of 2011.

The song's title translates directly to "Heart without a face," a reference to the Spanish idiom he sings in the chorus, "El corazón no tiene cara," (the heart has no face), which is used in equivalent ways to the English "love is blind" -- a song about loving past superficial appearances, it's very much of a piece with One Direction's contemporaneous "What Makes You Beautiful" (which would be released later in 2011), a song reassuring the teen idols' self-conscious, self-critical young female audience that love is not dependent on beauty, and especially not on a one-size-fits-all standard of beauty.

It's not quite mawkish, because Royce's fluid singing around the rhythms of the song rescues it from the syrupy strings larded on towards the end, but his lyrics are entirely conventional (Romeo's wordplay and sharp wit are beyond him at this point). Still, the 2010s are going to be an era that demands a certain amount of social responsibility from its teen idols, and Royce is ahead of the curve there.