WISIN Y YANDEL FT. CHRIS BROWN & T-PAIN, “ALGO ME GUSTA DE TI”

20th October, 2012

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The first #1 of the streaming era is almost a caricature of the immediate effect that replacing the carefully-calibrated audiences of radio with the undifferentiated firehose of streaming had on the chart. Puerto Rican reggatoneros-turned-dancepop-bros Wisin y Yandel are familiar faces to the #1 spot, but their guests on this track, the uncancellable Virginia R&B bad boy Chris Brown and the cuddly Atlanta electro-soul king T-Pain, provide the crossover juice that made this not just the last Hot Latin #1 of 2012 but the first of 2013, with an unbroken thirteen-week reign that had only been exceeded four times in the history of the chart: 1986, 1988, 2005, 2007. (It had been matched two additional times, by "Rompe" and "Danza Kuduro".) But long unbroken (or briefly punctuated) reigns are now the new norm: the rest of 2013 will only feature seven different songs at the top of Billboard's principal Latin pop chart.

So in an attempt to reconcile this new chart with the history I've traced heretofore, each new entry on this travelogue will end with an Airplay Watch: a list of songs that were at #1 on the Latin Airplay chart (a new chart calculated using the old Hot Latin metric) during the reign of the Hot Latin #1 under discussion, with brief capsule reviews, excluding only songs that will become future Hot Latin #1s.

But for the body of this post, we'll still have to wrestle with this thing, a jocular party anthem in a vein that was feeling pretty exhausted by this point. Puerto Rican producers Luis O'Neill and Chris Jedi do their best thumpa-thump, sine-synth imitation of megasuccessful Swedish maestros like Dr. Luke and RedOne, but it's not 2008 anymore for anybody, and the Chris Brown and T-Pain bits just make me want to put on "Forever" or "Can't Believe It" instead. Even Wisin and Yandel sound pretty checked-out themselves, running through standard come-ons and exhortatons to party as though their stock portfolios will dip if they don't. Even the big-budget crossover reggaetón of "Sexy Movimiento" feels like it was ages ago, never mind the hungry, horny, beat-forward "Rakata", their first single (which still hit #2 back in 2005; they've always been a creature of the charts.)

If the first song of the streaming era was a better or more distinctive effort rather than just about the most generic party crossover thing the era could produce, I still wouldn't have been thrilled about the change; but watching this thing stick in the craw of the chart for months on end just as I was attempting the most foolhardy and ultimately destructive change of my life didn't help my feeling that everything was going to shit, that the idiots and the algorithms that catered to them were winning, that nothing interesting or beautiful or meaningful would ever happen again.

Stay tuned, I guess.

Airplay Watch:

• Wisin & Yandel ft. Chris Brown & T-Pain "Algo Me Gusta de Ti"
• Discussed above.
• Leslie Grace, "Will U Still Love Me Tomorrow"
• One of my favorite minor hits of the period, from a Dominican New Yorker bachatera attempting to replicate Prince Royce's playbook by leading off with a classic US pop song in Spanish and English. Grace would go on to have a middling pop career of often very fine Latin pop and little notice before being cast in the film adaptation of In the Heights, and is now primarily known as an actor.
• Arcángel, Zion & Lennox, Lobo, RKM & Ken-Y, "Diosa de los Corazónes"
• The "Danza Kuduro" beat gets another workout on this posse cut/pretty-boy summit from two Puerto Rican duos and two Puerto Rican solo singers (although Arcángel had been in a duo with De La Ghetto). A lot of energy and tremulous vocalizing to very little effect.
• Gerardo Ortíz, "Solo Vine a Despedirme"
• One of the tragedies of the streaming makeover of the chart is that great Mexican regional hits like this are now relegated to footnotes like this one. Ortiz takes this heartbroken farewell song at such a breakneck clip that it's practically punk rock.
• Prince Royce, "Incondicional"
• A bachata cover of the 1989 Luis Miguel hit, dispensing with Miguel's dramatics for Royce's smooth airiness.
• Gusttavo Lima, "Balada (Tchê Tcherere Tchê Tchê)"
• A pop-sertanejo singalong, the spiritual successor to "Ai Se Eu Te Pego", a year later. I probably like it better, because it's more rhythmically interesting, but it's just as vacant of meaning.
• Enrique Iglesias ft. Sammy Adams, "Finally Found You"
• A late and unimpressive entry from Iglesias' Swedish-produced club-pop phase. Guest Sammy Adams is a terrible rapper, but Daddy Yankee doesn't do much better on the Latin-market version.
• Carlos Vives, "Volví a Nacer"
• Discussed in the previous entry.
• Gocho ft. Yandel & Wayne Wonder, "Amor Real"
• Producer Gocho takes another crack at an above-the-line hit, with Yandel along for moral support. The reggaeton riddim haunts the song like a ghost, intangible even as the actual beat echoes it in absentia.

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.

ROMEO SANTOS FT. USHER, “PROMISE”

29th October, 2011

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I think I've mentioned here before that in the early 2010s I was so enamored by bachata and convinced of the truth of the thirty-year cycle of popular music that I believed quite seriously that the future of R&B and romantic music in general was bachata.

(That thirty-year cycle, in brief: jazz had risen in the 1920s, displaced parlor song by the 1940s, then become the establishment; rock & roll had risen in the 1950s, displaced dancefloor orchestras by the 1970s, then become the establishment; hip-hop and electronic dance had risen in the 1980s, displaced rock bands by the 2000s, and so in the 2010s we were due for another shakeup. With perhaps terminal optimism, I thought it would be interestingly unexpected if the future of popular music was Afro-Latin as well as African-American.)

I even made a confident prediction at one point that the first Anglophone R&B singer to make a bachata record would signal a shift in Anglophone tastes. That Usher was the first big R&B star to sing on a bachata song did not disappoint me; but its failure to cross over did. "Promise" only rose to #83 on the Hot 100, shut out of pop radio play as a matter of course, although apparently it was in heavy rotation on MTV (to the degree that any music videos were; the channel had been in an all-reality format for years). But it was a massive hit on Latin radio, spending a total of ten weeks at #1 on the Hot Latin chart over the winter of 2011/2012.

Compare it to the last English/Spanish duet that went to #1 in the winter, "Looking for Paradise". As a collaboration, it's far more successful: Romeo's and Usher's voices are well-matched, Romeo taking the higher falsetto and Usher maintaining his usual liquid tonality without showboating; he's a guest here, and behaves like one. But the skittering rhythm, fluid guitar picking, and fluttering melodies are, as ever, the most memorable element of a bachata song. Although the lyrics suffer slightly from the usual dual-language pop problem of the Spanish lyrics being more poetically expressive than the English, Romeo is not engaging in the extended metaphors and ornate similes that he did with Aventura or on his own: it's consciously an attempt at a big-tent crossover hit, and so circles around the single idea of a man feeling himself trapped by love, and submitting to it gladly, if only he can be assured that his beloved will be faithful to him.

The video takes pains to make clear that Romeo and Usher are both romancing different women, perhaps because the danger of the song being read as two men singing to each other was too high, something that the frequent reiteration of "mami" and "girl" in the chorus already safeguards against. Given R&B history, the meathead association of falsetto singing with suspect heterosexuality is as racist as it is homophobic; but we are still squarely in the "no homo" era, and male sex symbols aimed at a female audience can't be too careful.

Of course bachata did not take over R&B; eventually it even ebbed from mass popularity in the pan-Latin circles represented by the chart, retreating to its Dominican-diasporic roots. But I was not entirely wrong about the thirty-year cycle: although the completeness of earlier displacements has always been overstated, which means that living through another is harder to recognize, because there's always more continuity visible in the present than the tidy periodizations of history suggest. But I would suggest that the most influential (if not necessarily the most profitable) currents of modern pop are now generally Afro-Latin in origin. I'll have more to say about this as we get to it; but while this song may be understood as something of a dead end, it's better constructed and more elegant than many such.

PITBULL FT. NE-YO, AFROJACK & NAYER, “GIVE ME EVERYTHING”

30th July, 2011

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There are a bunch of different ways to take the fact that this song, sung and rapped entirely in English save for the inevitable "dale," went to #1 on the Hot Latin chart in the summer of 2011. The most obvious is that it was inescapable regardless of location or native language: #1 on the Hot 100, Mainstream Top 4, and US Ryhthmic, in addition to hitting #1 in eleven different countries including Mexico; in the US, only Adele, LMFAO, and Katy Perry (twice) outperformed it over the course of the year. A spiritual descendent of the Black Eyed Peas' gloriously meatheaded 2009 "Boom Boom Pow"/"I Got a Feeling" duology, as well as extending the apocalyptic mood that Ke$ha expressed, both in her own songs as well as in writing Britney Spears' "Till the World Ends," "Give Me Everything" was Pitbull's apotheosis moment, the peak from which all subsequent material would, with perhaps one exception, be an inevitable descent.

But another way to take it is as a corruption of the Spanish-language ideals of the Latin radio market. Of course the vast bulk of the Latin radio audience in the United States would speak some or even primarily English; but the dumb corniness of Mr. Armando Pérez's rhymes and sentiment here are an affront to the many poetic, moving, profound Spanish lyricists who have occupied this space in weeks and years past. Of course, the irony is that when Pitbull was rapping partly in Spanish, he never had a hope of hitting #1. His output over the previous couple of years had included some of my favorite pop of the era, including "I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)", "Watagatapitusberry", "Armada Latina", and an album cut that got radio play in my region, "Orgullo", a celebration of Latin immigrantion to the US; but it took a global hit, expressed in as generic terms as possible, to cross the finish line.

A third way to take it is as a premonition of things to come. In 2011, the Hot Latin chart was still radio-only, which meant that it was drawn from airplay on radio stations in a Latin Pop format; but the streaming era, which dumps anything tagged "Latin" in the metadata onto the chart and sorts it by most played, is fast approaching. I don't have reporting to back this up, but my suspicion is that a lot of "Give Me Everything's" Latin Pop radio airplay was similarly algorithmically determined on (for example) Clear Channel stations that didn't employ a DJ, just played whatever was popular and could be considered Latin. Pitbull (and hook singer Nayer Regalado) being very loudly Cuban-American, this fit the bill.

But a fourth way is to simply engage with it as a song, a collaboration between four major musicians (well, three and Armando's frequent hook singer). Its broad popularity across formats was undeniable; and while a lot of that is no doubt due to Pitbull's cheerful, approachable rapping, Dutch producer Afrojack's hustling, trance-derived sonic landscape and perpetual R&B underdog Ne-Yo's creamy chorus deserve the bulk of the song's architectural credit: if (like so much pop of the era) it's essentially an advertisement for spending time and money at the club, it's a polished, even elegant ad. And I won't pretend that my heart wasn't caught every time the radio didn't cut off the disarmingly tender descending piano figure that closes the single.

ROMEO SANTOS, “YOU”

28th May, 2011

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A little over a year after Aventura's departure ("Dile al Amor"'s last week at #1 was April 10, 2010), their former frontman returns with a song that at first blush sounds as though nothing has changed. Bori Rivera's fluid fingerpicked guitar solos are a little less show-stealing than Lenny Santos', but they're very much working in the same smoky bachata + r&b idiom, and Giselle Moya's breathy vocals delivering the English one-word refrain functions just as she had on "Por un Segundo", as an erotic signpost marking the object of the lyrics' extravagant desire.

But to the degree that Aventura was a boy band, Romeo's solo debut participates in a longstanding tradition: more sexually explicit, more grown-up, more concerned with establishing his individual persona separate from that of the group. Structurally, "You" is an exercise in delayed gratification, teasing the listener for four unbroken verses of increasingly florid come-ons, as Romeo sings about drinking his lover's fluids and devouring her for hours, before finally hitting a chorus. Then come the taut guitar solos, a spacey bridge, and one more, slightly less impactful chorus. If it's not intended to be analogous to the rhythms of sex, it doesn't do anything to deter the comparison.

At the time I enjoyed it as a splash of cool bachata intermixed with many other flavors on the radio, as I jumped between Spanish- and English-language stations without compunction, seeking music rather than advertising. I don't believe the horniness made much of an impression, only the romanticism and the mild frisson of psychedelic beauty in Giselle's coos. I was still under the impression that bachata might become popular enough to be absorbed into the r&b mainstream, not really yet aware of how closely identified with a specifically Dominican identity it is and would remain.

Eleven years and many millions of A&R dollars later, there are no more international bachata stars than there were in 2011, as the urbano musics whose stars have risen in the meantime have eclipsed it, and it now sounds slightly old-fashioned, no longer thrillingly modern as it was in the pre-streaming early 2010s, when niches could still be big enough to make an impact without ever having to submit to the indignity of going viral.

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.

AVENTURA, “DILE AL AMOR”

23rd January, 2010

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"Tu grupo favorito, mami."

Romeo Santos wasn't wrong. While this song was at #1, Aventura sold out Madison Square Garden four nights in a row, outselling acts like Lady Gaga and Madonna in terms of total tickets sold. By any metric but Anglophone radio play, they were one of the biggest bands in the United States. Imperial periods have not been frequently represented in this blog, because nothing is more arbitrary than a well-timed #1, but it's undeniable that Aventura split up at their peak, and despite reuniting to tour several times over the past decade, have released only the occasional single and collaboration: Romeo's hugely lucrative solo career takes precedence.

"¿Le gusta mi bachata, mijita?"

I noted in Aventura's previous appearance here that their liquid, R&B-inflected version of bachata was tailor-made to give them a boy-band quality very different from the historicized, reverent incorporation of bachata we'd seen hitherto. Bachata, first termed "amargue" (bitter) was originally Dominican blues music, the music of rural or at least lower-class Black Dominicans expressing pain and loneliness, consonant with Cuban bolero and Puerto Rican plena; it was first recorded in 1962, after the death of repressive dictator Rafael Trujillo. Over the years (especially in the 70s and 80s), it gained a reputation for salaciousness (not unlike certain R&B performers in the same years), but by the historicizing 90s, the options were either to modernize, with steel rather than nylon guitar strings, and adopt merengue-style percussion, or to fossilize and become a legacy music. Aventura's role in creating a newly urban bachata for the hip-hop generation can be overstated (Monchy y Alexandra had earlier hits), but they certainly capitalized on it better than anyone else, and Lenny Santos' instrumental break here might be one of the greatest guitar solos of the twenty-first century, taut and compelling, casting a more complex light on Romeo's romantic complaints.

"So nasty!"

Those romantic complaints are, again, extremely smartly written, if you can get over the initial concept of the entire song being addressed to Cupid. (The video literalizes this in a rather meaningless way, with Cupid as an urban-fantasy archer who keeps missing her shots at Romeo's romantic targets, possibly because she wants him for herself.) Romeo, disillusioned with love because it never ends up being reciprocated, renounces it entirely:

Pues dile al amor que no toque mi puerta

Que yo no estoy en casa, que no vuelva mañana

A mi corazón ya le ha fallado en ocasiones

Me fui de vacaciones lejos de los amores

Dile al amor que no es grato en mi vida

Dale mi despedida, cuéntale las razones

("So tell love not to knock on my door,

That I'm not at home, not to come back tomorrow

It has failed my heart on many occasions

I have gone on vacation far away from loves

Tell love it's not welcome in my life

Give it my goodbye, tell it the reasons why.")

I believe I have occasionally grumbled in these pages about over-the-top, extravagant, or hyperbolic expressions of sentiment in Latin pop over the years. Which may be hypocritical, because I adore this, and freely acknowledge that it's hyperbolic to the point of absurdity. But then I've had more use for songs of romantic disappointment than songs of romantic aspiration or romantic fulfillment over the course of my life; and given how prevalent pro-love propanganda is in pop, the salutary effect of the final lines of this song are as counter-culturally thrilling as Huck Finn's "all right then, I'll go to hell" was at an earlier time in my life.

"I don't need no love in my life."

Ending the song singing in vernacular English, repeating the same line four times, with sparkling boy-band harmonies, cemented "Dile al Amor" definitively as not just my favorite Aventura song, but one of my favorite songs period, perhaps ever. It would have been simple enough not to include those final lines, or to keep them in Spanish: "No requiero (el) amor en mi vida" could fit the meter. But Romeo Santos was perfectly aware that he was outgrowing not just the Dominican market, the bachata market, and the Latin pop market, but even the Spanish-language market generally. And besides, he and all the others had grown up in the Bronx; English was as natural to them as Spanish. The juxtaposition of the poetic, elegant (even perhaps too-elegant) Spanish of the main lyrics and the straightforward, working-class, double-negative-as-emphasis English of the coda also has something to say about class in the US, about the intersections of Latine identity with class, not to mention the further intersection of Afro-Latin identity. It remains the common assumption that people who speak Spanish are (like Black people) working-class or lower in the US, and the anti-immigration furor reaching a fever pitch in the Obama years (not to mention afterward) has long been as much a class war as it is a racist desire to keep the working class white. Against which Aventura's demonstration of Spanish as the classy language and English as the basic one does precisely nothing, but the gesture at least brought me to tears more than once on those long Phoenix drives of the early 2010s.

As did the sentiment: the relief of admitting, even to yourself, that you don't need romantic love in a world that demands you perform it is sometimes overwhelming. I would not categorize myself as either asexual or aromantic, perhaps for much the same reasons that another type of guy my age refuses to disbelieve he could still compete at a pro level in his chosen sport if he applied himself, but a dispassionate survey of my behavior over time would draw its own conclusions. More time for nerdy projects like this one, anyway.

WISIN Y YANDEL FT. ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “GRACIAS A TÍ”

19th December, 2009

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A year ago, Wisin y Yandel had appeared on a remix of an Enrique Iglesias song, giving it a sales and radio boost by endowing a mopey ballad with some stiff-upper-lip machismo. Now the favor is returned, as Enrique guests on a remix of a Wisin y Yandel ballad, enlivening their emotionally constipated shout-out to female fans (coded as a sentimental love song) with his patented straining tenderness.

The reggaetón interregnum sounds odder and odder in hindsight: the soft-rock plod of the drums here, in a song handled by reggaetón superproducers Nesty and El Nasi, feels even more like a concession to the broader pop market than W&Y's previous three appearances here (the last time we heard them over the dembow riddim was on "Sexy Movimiento," in January 2008). It doesn't slow them down any; their machine-tooled voices are still propulsive and authoritative as ever. Charmingly, Wisin even attempts to croon for a bit before returning to his comfort zone of ratatat toasting.

The video, shot in concert in Buenos Aires (where Iglesias recorded his remix and surprised the audience by appearing on stage with the boys to perform it), is even more an homage to the fans who have consistently been propelling Wisin y Yandel to the top of the charts. But for sympathetic non-fans, the song is a lesser rewrite of "Lloro Por Tí," and showcases none of the men involved at their best. 

ALEJANDRO SANZ FT. ALICIA KEYS, “LOOKING FOR PARADISE”

21st November, 2009

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First Shakira, then Nelly Furtado, now Alicia Keys popping up at the top spot on the Hot Latin chart -- I was not, in 2009, aware enough of trends or discourse to realize that this was not representative of a new flourishing in Latin pop, but rather the end of an era in mainstream US pop. All three women had broken through into Anglophone stardom in 2001, with "Whenever, Wherever," "I'm Like a Bird," and "Fallin'," respectively; but eight years later, none of them remained at the top of the Anglophone heap, and the more forgiving Latin charts provided a graceful descent from their 2000s-era peaks.

That's one way to look at it, anyway, and probably the one that the Anglocentric readership of this blog (such as it has), with their knowledge that Furtado and Keys have been irrelevant chartwise for the last decade, plus Shakira having mostly disappeared from Anglo airwaves, would probably naturally assume. The way I looked at it at the time was no doubt idealistic, and probably also condescending to the already rich history of Latin pop: I thought maybe it presaged more interconnection between the English- and Spanish-language sides of the industry, a world in which songs largely in Spanish could have as much chance with English-speaking audiences as songs with the amount of English as this one had had with Spanish-speaking ones.

I wasn't wrong, necessarily -- but it took longer than I expected, with a heavy swing towards masculine voices in both Spanish-language and English-language chart pop, to happen. A kind of masculinity that Alejandro Sanz, gruff and limited as his voice is compared to Keys' professionally liquid tones, could not represent. His name is before the "Ft.," and the single was taken from his album Paraíso Express, but Keys' is the first voice you hear in the duet and arguably makes the most impact in the song. Which fits in fine with Sanz' past performance here: he's a great collaborator who knows how to make his duet partner stand out. The jangly backing track was supposed to evoke the British Invasion of the Sixties, but it sounds to my ears more like the commercial jangle of post-R.E.M. Nineties bands like Gin Blossoms. Which is fine (I loved the Gin Blossoms when I was fifteen and they were all over the radio), but by belonging to neither world it only emphasizes the difference in tonality and tradition between Sanz, with his flamenco-derived rasp, and Keys, with her polite R&B dramatics.

Of course I've been excited in these pages before about songs that mash global musical traditions together, and there's a spark of that here, but it never fully catches into a full conflagration. Maybe Alicia Keys is too limited a singer, maybe Alejandro Sanz is too polite to push her, maybe they're both simply taking the easy route: but even the straightforward, literal English lyrics and the cerebal, conceptual Spanish-language ones seem like both of them are singing past each other rather than to each other, much less together. Whatever the future of Latin pop is, it's not this.

AVENTURA, “POR UN SEGUNDO”

31st January, 2009

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The first new #1 of 2009 is a generational marker. Bachata has appeared here before -- as one element of Juan Luis Guerra's postmodern mélange, as another flavor of nostalgia for Gloria Estefan to swim around in, as a tropical accent for Maná to wear and shrug off as casually as U2 had the blues -- but it has always been handled with the reverence of tradition or nostalgia. Now, as the widescreen r&b-infused bachata of Aventura crashes into the top spot, bachata has become thoroughly pop, vivid and urgent and capable of containing multitudes. But the title of this single's parent album, The Last, signals what stage Aventura has reached in the lifespan of a pop band, and it's only been our misfortune that they haven't appeared on this travelogue sooner.

Aventura formed in the Bronx in the 1990s, where brothers Lenny (guitar) and Max (bass) Santos  developed a unique and innovative style, borrowing from rock and funk to beef up the traditional bachata sound for the hip-hop generation. Singers and songwriters Anthony "Romeo" Santos and his cousin Henry (despite the common last name, they aren't related to Lenny and Max) developed melodic lines more like contemporary r&b than traditional bachata, and Romeo's fluid, angelic singing style and pinup good looks made it easy to market Aventura as a bachata boy band within the Dominican diaspora.

Their first big single, "Obsesión" featuring Judy Santos (also no relation), was an unlikely European smash in 2002, though it didn't make the Hot Latin chart at all, only scraping the bottom of Tropical Airplay. But by 2005, they were collaborating with Don Omar on "Ella y Yo", a bachata/reggaetón hybrid that hit #2 on the Hot Latin chart during the epic reign of "La Tortura". Two years later, the adorable "Mi Corazoncito" got stuck at the same spot behind "Me Enamora". Aventura had broken out of the bachata ghetto and were Latin hitmakers whose audience was only growing: The Last was eagerly anticipated by a ravenous fanbase, and its debut single, "Por Un Segundo" hitting the top of the Latin charts in its third week of release as a digital download was something of a coronation: "the kings," as Romeo murmurs while Lenny arpeggiates into eternity.

Because "Por Un Segundo" is that rare phenomenon, the overdue #1 that actually deserves to be there just as much as any of its (wildly popular and beloved) predecessors that fell short. Giselle Moya's wordless vocal counterpoints to Romeo's chorus add an evocative, pseudo-Eastern quality to the track, and the detailed richness of the production sounds as expensive and polished as any Usher or Ne-Yo song from the same year.

And Romeo's songwriting lives up to it: the story told by "Por Un Segundo" (for a second) is that of a man realizing with a start that the fairy-tale love he's been deluding himself exists between him and his object of affection was a mirage; in fact, she's marrying someone else. With its intricate rhymes (influenced by hip-hop) and richness of imagery ("por un segundo me ahogo en los mares de la realidad" / for a second I am drowning in the seas of reality), it's one of the best lyrics in recent memory, and when he playfully builds the last verse almost entirely out of previous Aventura song titles, it's the sort of assured flex you only get from a performer operating at the top of his craft, entirely aware of the historic nature of the moment.

Stunningly, this isn't even the best single from The Last; but that will have to wait. For now... the kings, yes sir!

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.

ALEJANDRO SANZ FT. SHAKIRA, “TE LO AGRADEZCO, PERO NO”

10th March, 2007

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The third in a trilogy of songs that have been winding through the #1 chart for almost two years, at least in terms of how I've received them. The Shakira/Alejandro Sanz duet "La Tortura", in the summer of 2005, was the longest-reigning #1 song on the Hot Latin chart at the time that I began this blog in 2010, a crowning glory of mid-2000s Latin pop. Then Sanz's solo hit "A La Primera Persona" was only on top for a week in November 2006,  a compact illustration of the difference between pop thrillpower and tasteful male auteurism. Now "Te Lo Agradezco, Pero No," its video a direct sequel to that of "A La Primera Persona," only reigns for only one week: Sanz is still very much the auteur here, Shakira playing a duet partner rather than expressing her own thoughts in her own vivid language. But her very presence lends more color and drama to the song: the music moves to a danceable rhythm (and Sanz himself enters into some choreography in the video, a first for him, apparently at Shakira's insistence), and uses a sturdy Afro-Latin chassis even though the body is auteurist European pop.

And if "La Tortura" was about a woman's rejecting a man's take-me-back whinging, and "A La Primera Persona" was about a man pitying himself over lost love, "Te Lo Agradezco, Pero No" forms a sort of resolution: both man and woman reject the other's overtures at reconciliation, because they are adults and can recognize the toxicity of their past entanglements: they've both hurt the other, and they're setting each other free. Sure, there's still feelings, sure, they will probably return in the future, but they don't belong to each other. All of this, however, is inference and implication: Sanz' lyrics are typically telegraphic and a bit gnomic, and rhythm and sound matter more than laying out a coherent narrative. Multiple readings can reside in any good pop song, and this is a very good pop song.

It begins as a maundering bolero, with acoustic guitar and swaying conga rhythms giving propulsion to Sanz's throaty murmurs, but as the song builds, more and more elements are introduced, including subtle electronic percussion, so that by the time Shakira enters, whispering in unison with Sanz, it's developed into a catalan rumba, the combination of flamenco passion and Afro-Cuban rhythm that served as a particularly Spanish response to the modernism of Anglophone folkies like Bob Dylan. (Sanz works very much in the lineage of Dylan; and of Gato Pérez). And then, after the second chorus, a Memphis soul horn chart breaks out, turning the song into full-out Latin jazz, which Sanz's phrasing and harmonic leaps have been anticipating all along. The chorus is pure 70s r&b, and as more and more voices get added to it it takes the pull of gospel; and when Sanz breaks out into a half-rapped improvised montuno it's a gesture toward both salsa and r&b traditions.

It's notable that none of the traditions Sanz is folding in are particularly new: genre as a capacious grab-bag of historical authenticities is a familiar mode to many postmodern artists of his generation, among whom I'd include people as different as Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, Juan Luis Guerra, or Manu Chao. The gestalt is the point, much more than recreating any one tradition in particular. Shakira, too, has worked in this synthesizing manner (see "Suerte"), and if the traditions she's engaging with here feel more particular to Sanz than to her (her vocal timbre is much more muezzin than gitano), that seems to be exactly what she wanted when she approached Sanz with the desire to be on the other side of the "ft." this time.

RICKY MARTIN FT. LA MARI & TOMMY TORRES, “TU RECUERDO”

23rd December, 2006

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We close out the raucous, pulsating, hotly contested 2006 (a.k.a. the Year Reggaetón Broke) with an older, perhaps more calcified, Puerto Rican sound.

The inevitable music video has four people on stools before the audience. Only the primary singer, a former boy band member and global hitmaker, is pushed a little forward, which makes him look taller than the rest. To his right on guitar and harmonies is the song's writer and producer, who got his start writing and producing for a later iteration of the singer's old boy band. On his right, eventually making the song a duet, a Spanish singer who pushed flamenco vibes into chillout worldbeat music to comparatively limited success, whose close-cropped haircut is a visible reminder of the cancer she had spent the previous year in treatment for. And on the far side of the line, perhaps the world's foremost traditional cuarto player, picking out delicate emotional lines on the traditional Puerto Rican instrument.

The credit line should really read "Ricky Martin ft. La Mari (of Chambao), Tommy Torres, and Christian Nieves," but of course the instrumentalist gets left off: pop has its caste system. Still, of the four spotlit players (there's a full orchestra behind them, because this is a ballad), Torres is the one whose performance is most anonymous: his sweet pop-derived melodies do little but set up volleys for Martin, Mari, and Nieves to spike. La Mari earns applause in the middle of the song for injecting a little cante gitano into her verse, which is the first time I teared up while listening to it; the second was during the dispassionate fluidity of Nieves' cuatro solo. After which Martin gently improvising as though over a salsa montuno rides out the song on a high note.

It's a gorgeous performance, and if the song itself doesn't quite live up to it, that may be because it's a stitched-together pop recreation of traditional jíbaro music rather than a song emerging naturally from that tradition. Not that a traditional jíbaro would ever float within a million miles of #1; but this, with the r&b-inflected rhythms in Martin's voice, the flamenco hints in La Mari's voice, and the pura romántica in Torres, is even more gloriously miscegenated than most pop.

It's the kind of thing that used to be able to go to #1 in the closing weeks of the year, traditionally slow for music buying or radio adds, giving older or less dominant audiences a time of year to hear themselves represented at #1. There's nothing necessarily festive about it (it's a song about still feeling conflicted about an old flame), but in the year of reggaetón it still feels like sentimental throwback to a classicist never-never land, and so it's holiday music regardless.

JENNIFER PEÑA, “VIVO Y MUERO EN TU PIEL”

29th May, 2004

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If Jennifer Peña's career proceeded in emulation of Selena's, this might be the point where Selena's ended: with a frosty, devotional ballad. But Jennifer never crossed over to the English language, preferring to remain resolutely, and indeed polyphonically, Latin -- the regionally-aimed cumbia version of the song also had a video, in which her hips move with much greater freedom than they do in the canonical ballad version -- and this is her last appearance in our travelogue. She would only issue one more studio album, and then marriage (to Obie Bermúdez?!), her recording contract going into legal limbo as a result of label mergers, and finally a turn to Christian music would sideline her pop career for good.

The parent album, Seducción, also featured a salsa version of this song among its bonus tracks, because although the recording industry was undergoing the precipitous slide from its millennial peak, diversification was still a good bet. But it was the pop ballad version that was the hit, judging by its view count (although the cumbia version sounds much more lively and interesting at a remove of fourteen years), and Rudy Pérez's mooning lyrics about the overwhelming, totalizing way that the early stages of a crush affects the enamored one only really make sense in a ballad form: in the cumbia, such lugubriousness ring hollow among so much boot-scooting good cheer.

"Vivo y Muero en tu Piel" means "I live and die in your skin," a striking image that, in the context of the song, is really just an elaboration of the "whither thou goest, I will go" of Ruth 1:16. And I'm reminded again of how much more sensual, how much more willing to consider physical bodies and mention skin and flesh, Latin pop is than Anglo pop. The fundamental Gnosticism of American religion, its pretense that love can be purely an intellectual-emotional exercise without corresponding physicality, casts long shadows.

LUIS MIGUEL, “TE NECESITO”

25th October, 2003

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And so Luis Miguel bows out of this travelogue. Shockingly, he does so with his best song and warmest performance since the mid-90s -- the airy, jazzy r&b of "Te Necesito" (I need you) is a throwback not only to his own pop youth, when he was a teenager covering soulful 1960s standards for his first #1, but to an entirely vanished era of music-making. Compared to the hard-bodied futurism of a Shakira or a Ricky Martin, it's irredeemably old-fashioned, a late-70s jazz-fusion dream of 50s doo-wop, all soft edges and pillowy sentiment.

Which doesn't make it bad, just out of place. Luis Miguel has never, since achieving adulthood, particularly cared about following the trend of the moment, and while that's frequently led him to artistic success (the first two Romances albums remain stunning tributes to midcentury bolero), it's just as often led to a solipsistic disregard for fashion that means he's the corniest thing in the world. In the video, he looks more like the handsome, tanned, lion-maned Julio Iglesias than Enrique ever has, and although he's a better singer than either of them, his pop instincts are just as schlocky.

Thank God he's not relying entirely on his own instincts here. "Te Necesito," as its hyperverbal patter lyrics might have suggested, was written by the great Dominican polymath Juan Luis Guerra, and the background vocals are by the peerless US gospel-jazz sextet Take 6; their lush rhythms and advanced harmonics push Luis Miguel to keep up, and he sings with more focus and verve than he has in a long time. The song itself is just pleasant, a clever love song married to a cheery tune; the arrangement makes it shine.

For the good times, Luis.

JUANES FT. NELLY FURTADO, “FOTOGRAFÍA”

19th July, 2003

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Summer, 2003 was fairly late in the millennial-pop era which had first crested in the late 90s: in the Anglosphere, *NSYNC had parted ways, Beyoncé had gone solo, and even Eminem had started taking himself seriously with 8 Mile. The Latin boomlet of 1999 was experiencing its own growing pains, as the next generation of Latin pop stars were coming into their own; mainstays like Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, and Shakira would have to adapt to new climates.

This song introduces two voices we'll meet again (one more frequently than the other), and whose highest moments of pop imperiality are still some years off. But their careers, intersecting here for the first time, have run in odd parallel. Their debut albums debuted within a week of each other in October 2000, and their first hits, "I'm Like a Bird" and "Nada," though quite different thematically, showed off a shared melodic flair and deceptive lightness of touch (and thinness of voice) that meant they would both be perpetually underrated for years.

"Fotografía," as the title suggests, is in a long string of pop songs about mooning over a lost loved one's recorded image: the Pretenders/Selena, Def Leppard, and a bit later Nickelback have all bettered it in terms of staying power, but for sheer charm, the Colombian Juanes and Portuguese-Canadian Furtado are hard to beat. The thin, shuffling beat, the carefully but not intricately picked guitar, an electronic whine, and eventually an electric buzz, make up nearly the whole of the production: the focus is on their voices, both nasal and unadventurous, sticking closely to the sing-song pseudo-reggae template. Which sounds like a formula for dullness, but Juanes' melodic gifts and Furtado's surprisingly excellent Spanish make the song one of the best Hot Latin #1s of 2003, behind only Shakira and India.

They would collaborate again, reversing the ft. credit on Nelly Furtado's 2006 single "Te Busqué", but since it only hit #1 in Spain, we won't cover it here. But we'll have plenty of time to get to know Juanes: he's only getting started.

JENNIFER PEÑA, “EL DOLOR DE TU PRESENCIA”

24th August, 2002

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The hunger, as much spiritual as commercial, for a replacement for Selena had been an undercurrent of the Latin music industry since her death. One of the likeliest candidates was Jennifer Peña, whose first large-stage performance had been at a Selena tribute concert at the Astrodome in 1995, when she sang "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom" at eleven years old. She was already being managed by Selena's father; her debut album as a singer fronting Jennifer y los Jetz,  would be released the following year.

But like Selena herself, her career was less one of meteoric success than of constant work, slow movement forward, and gradual leveling-up. Libre, released in 2002 when she was eighteen, was her fifth album, but the first attributed entirely to her name and also the first after jumping from EMI, where the Quintanillas had signed her, to Univision, which had also broken Selena widely in 1993. She retained the cumbia sound which was her signature, but with production from Rudy Pérez and Kike Santander, aimed more squarely at the broader Latin Pop market.

It worked, clearly. "El Dolor de Tu Presencia" (the pain of your presence) is both a lush r&b ballad and a skanking cumbia jam, with pure pop harmonies and a bassline that won't stop. Although it was written by Rudy Pérez, it's very much a teenager's song, moaning about how the boy she's in love with is in love with her best friend, tearing their friendship apart and causing her pain. Still, it's smartly produced and sung with a warmth older than her years.

A power-ballad pop version, all swelling strings and crashing drums, was also released, which no doubt had a lot to do with bringing it to #1 (cumbia remained popular on the border, but not necessarily in the larger US Latin Pop market), but the cumbia rendition made the video, which cuts shots of her mooning over the love triangle with shots of her dancing in front of her cumbia band, acknowledging that after all, everything's a performance.

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.

SON BY FOUR, “CUANDO SEAS MÍA (MISS ME SO MUCH)”

30th December, 2000

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I haven't tracked it in this blog, but the entire back half of 2000 has been punctuated by Son by Four's "A Puro Dolor" -- nearly every song we've looked at since has had its chart reign interrupted by the return of the millennium's silkiest salsa band. Now, here at the end of the year, Son by Four are back with their second, and final (as of press time), number one.

As a piece of popcraft from songwriting to production to performance, it's far superior to "A Puro Dolor," with a tense, dramatic arrangement, gorgeous tropical instrumentation, and Ángel López singing to save his life. Despite the title ("When you are mine") setting the emotion in the future, it's a grownup song about adult relationships (the physical very much included), where "A Puro Dolor" is sheer adolescent bathos. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call "Cuando Seas Mía" an undiscovered gem, but if I were assigning these songs numbers out of ten it would easily clear the 6.

But it only topped the chart for a week at the slowest point of the year, and that was it, from our vantage point, for Son by Four. Ángel López left the group several years later for a solo career which has so far only fizzled (he campaigned for Bush in 2004), and the rest now produce Christian music for the evangelical Latin market. Gentle as doves they may have been, but in the cutthroat music business serpent's wisdom is preferable.

CHRISTINA AGUILERA, “VEN CONMIGO (SOLAMENTE TÚ)”

14th October, 2000

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Although in low-resolution hindsight it's easy to mistake Christina Aguilera for being part of the wave of young Latinos renovating Latin pop around the turn of the century -- a peer to Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, at least -- this is her sole appearance (as of mid-2017) on this travelogue, and after the comparatively middling sales of Mi Reflejo would rarely record in Spanish again, and then only in duet with an established Latin star.

While she did hire hitmaking Cuban-American songwriter and producer Rudy Pérez (we last saw him assisting Luis Fonsi) to translate "Come on Over Baby (All I Want Is You)" into vernacular Spanish, the production remains pure Stockholm, Johan Åberg's piano, string stabs, and fake scratching ported over wholesale from the English-language original.

So ultimately, despite Aguilera's half-Ecuadorian heritage, "Ven Conmigo" is exactly as much an opportunistic cash-in on the newfound brand-expansion possibilities of the Latin market as any Anglo star might have done: indeed, acts like N'Sync were recording versions of their hits in Spanish, as would Beyoncé years later. That it worked, to the extent that she is one of the exclusive club to have both Hot 100 and Hot Latin #1 hits with the same song, is a tribute to the breezy, galvanic joy of Åberg's production, Pérez' solid work finding rhythmic equivalence in Spanish, and her slightly mechanical but always impressive performance.

It's one of those songs (common early in her career, much rarer later on) when her overdriven vocals sync up with an overdriven emotional state (the excitement of young, sexually curious love), so that her endless elaboration feels like a spontaneous expression of excitement rather than mere showboating. If we're not going to see here again here, at least she left her mark.