DAVID BISBAL, “ESCLAVO DE SUS BESOS”

31st October, 2009

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The continued popularity of David Bisbal continues to confound me. I guess if I think really hard about it I can find similar music that meant something to me around roughly the same time: the production isn't a million miles away from Kelly Clarkson's epochal "Since U Been Gone," a good five years earlier, and there was a Hollywood Records wave of rockish teenpop around this time, from which Selena Gomez and the Scene and the Jonas Brothers have aged the best. But Bisbal was a full-grown adult; he turned 30 in 2009, and his larynx-shredding sincerity remains ungainly to Anglophone ears.

I had an ear glued to Latin radio at this point, but if I ever heard this song there it slipped out of my brain just as quickly as it entered. I'm tempted to attribute this unfamiliarity to the solid good sense of the Phoenix-area Latin market, too Mexican and working-class to give much shrift to a Spanish prettyboy; but my own anti-rockism by now was probably even more salient. I've never had any compunction about switching stations on the thinnest pretext.

"Esclavo de Sus Besos" means "slave of her kisses," and it's a typical Bisbal song in that it presents him as unable to fully commit to his current love because he's still hung up on the previous one. Of course the literate, sensitive lyrics put it more sympathetically than that: the title metaphor is a hyperbolic one, but entirely in line with poetic usage. And relistening I can see how the ebb and rush of the music, a slick combination of jangle-pop and hair metal, could propel the listener deeper into their emotions if they were feeling themselves in a similar situation: it's expertly crafted by people who know their business. But it doesn't move me.

DAVID BISBAL, “¿QUIÉN ME IBA A DECIR?”

28th October, 2006

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We interrupt your regular Latinoamericano programming for a three-week interpolation of furrowed-brow idol pop from Spain. David Bisbal first gained attention on the peninsula as the runner-up of the first season of Operación Triunfo (the Spanish edition of Star Academy) in 2002. He kicked around for a while, failing to win the opportunity to represent his country at Eurovision, before embarking on the kind of pop career that everyone in those early days of reality singing competitions was allowed. Smartly, he hooked up with producer and songwriter Kike Santander, who had helped shepherd the solo Gloria Estefan and Alejandro Fernández to glory, and used that production savvy and his own imitation-soul singing to become Spain's biggest pop star, for a time.

We've not been troubled by him here, but not for lack of effort: his second single went to #3 on the Hot Latin chart in 2002. It would take his third album, Premonición, and its debut single, an ungainly and outdated mix of rock muscle, flamenco noodling, Bisbal's impassioned yowl, and electronic scratching, before he landed at #1 stateside.

The single's cover art makes all too obvious what early-2000s careers he's trying to emulate: Justin Timberlake's Justified fedora, Ricky Martin's Almas de Silencio tight t-shirt and Pietà pose. Unfortunately he doesn't have either man's charisma or lightness of touch, and the result is a self-aggrandizing plod that slides off the memory almost as soon as it touches it. The lyrics are a bombastic, hyperbolic description of doomed love, exactly in line with Hispanist tradition and with nothing whatever new to say.

Not to worry, we'll hear from Bisbal again: the Latin market loves nothing more than a handsome, self-consciously brooding man. Maybe the second time's the charm.

ANAÍS, “LO QUE SON LAS COSAS”

15th April, 2006

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Any examination of pop in the 2000s is going to have to encounter singing-competition reality shows sooner or later, and I can only be grateful that this song, more than halfway into the decade, is the first time a song by the winner of a singing competition has appeared here.

The Puerto Rican show Objetivo Fama was on its second season: a combination of Big Brother and X-Factor, it featured hopeful pop stars rooming together in a house/studio while competing to win the favor of judges and the viewing public via performances. The first season had only been open to Puerto Ricans, but the second loosened those rules, and Anaís Martínez, from the Dominican Republic, went all the way. Her prize was a recording contract with Univision, and her debut single was a cover of Puerto Rican star Ednita Nazario's 1991 adult-contemporary classic "Lo Que Son Las Cosas" (the way things are, written by her ex-husband, Argentine pop star Luis Ángel Márquez), which only missed appearing here then thanks to Los Bukis.

Of course I like Ednita's version better than Anaís' -- it's straight-down-the-line early 90s adult contemporary in exactly the vein I'm nostalgic for because that was the first period in which I listened to pop music, where the later cover is overproduced and oversung. It's not bad particularly, but it's missing the context of the original: Nazario had been an Olivia Newton John-esque pop starlet since the late 70s, and was entering middle age singing her husband's song expressing fatalistic regret about relationships ending while in the midst of a very public divorce from him. Anaís' cover performs the emotions with convincing correctness, but she's too young and too obviously well-funded (the kitchen sink is thrown at this very reality-show holleralong) for any but the most generalized emotions to come through.