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.

RICKY MARTIN FT. NATALIA JIMÉNEZ, “LO MEJOR DE MI VIDA ERES TÚ”

12th February, 2011

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I didn't mean to wait to write about this song until June, but it's an appropriate way to mark Pride: Ricky Martin's first (and to date only) #1 Hot Latin song since coming out as gay in 2010. a shot of feel-good pop-reggae that Martin suggested to producer Desmond Child as his own version of "Don't Worry, Be Happy."

Which as a symbol for how gay liberation was codified and marketed in the early 2010s could hardly be bettered: a wealthy white hunk singing a domestic love song generic enough to be pitched as much to one's child (Martin's interviews at the time were filled with happiness over his twin sons, then three years old) as to a lover of any gender. The excision of his featured guest in the video version of the track (Martin takes her verse instead, and she's relegated to background hums and harmonies) might be read as ambiguating the song's referent, since otherwise it would be too easy to read as a man and woman singing heterosexually to each other, but instead it ends up seeming a touch narcissistic, something which not all the United Colors of Benetton imagery in the video can assuage.

The English-language version of the song, "The Best Thing About Me Is You", featured British blue-eyed soul yowler Joss Stone, and her replacement in the Spanish-language version by Natalia Jiménez, who had recently gone solo from Madrid (soon relocated to Mexico) pop-rock band La Quinta Estación, was part of a push by Sony to make Jiménez a global star which never really happened. As this is Jiménez' only appearance here, it's worth remarking a bit on her career: an expressive, powerful singer in a very Spanish tradition of full-bore dramatics, she's struggled to find material that matches her instrument since the breakup of 5a. Estación. Their 2009 dramatic rock single "Que Te Quería" (Who loved you) was my introduction to her singing on Phoenix-area Spanish-language radio, and it was the highest they ever charted in the U.S., although they had been regular hitmakers in Spain and Mexico for the past half-decade. Since then, however the most notable highlights of her career have been a tribute album to ranchera singer Jenni River and a stint as a judge on Mexico's version of The Voice. 

This is our farewell to Ricky Martin as well, as he aged out of the pop market (in addition to, perhaps, taking himself off the board for the projected dreams of heterosexual teenage girls) and into a role as a senior statesman and conscience of pop; he will spend the next decade exterting his influence to advocate for gay rights and for justice for Puerto Ricans. It's nice to leave him sounding so relaxed and happy after an imperial decade performing hetero horniness and emotional tribulation; even if "Lo Mejor de Mi Vida Eres Tú" isn't any great shakes as a song, it remains a considerable vibe. At its worst, it's an instance of pop as Live Laugh Love wall art, a cliché that can nevertheless resonate, because people are not as complicated as we like to pretend we are.

JUANES, “GOTAS DE AGUA DULCE”

23rd February, 2008

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Perhaps the most notable thing about this song is that it ushered Juanes into the exclusive club of those who have replaced themselves at #1 in any chart. He is actually the first to achieve that milestone on the Hot Latin chart (or the second if Alejandro Fernández replacing his own duet with Gloria Estefan counts with a sixth week of "Si Tu Supieras" in 1997 counts) -- and of course he wouldn't have done it if the Hot Latin chart, determined as much by airplay as by digital sales at this point, wasn't so friendly to bringing songs back to the #1 spot: although on this travelogue Wisin & Yandel's "Sexy Movimiento" has come between "Me Enamora" and "Gotas de Agua Dulce," on the chart it was a week sandwiched between month-long reigns of "Me Enamora."

But the first clause of the above paragraph isn't necessarily fair: it's a fine pop song regardless of stats-nerd chartspotting. Juanes' reggae-inflected rock and roll is slightly modified by more local Colombian rhythms (I think I hear cumbia, or maybe champeta, within the skank), and the falsetto crowing with which he introduces the song is delightfully high-spirited, a Peter Pan ebullience which is perfectly matched to the Never-Never Land of cheery bluff his music increasingly occupies.

The parent album is titled La Vida... Es un Ratico (Life...is a moment), which sounds like it might contain existentialist drama, but instead is full of cheerful tropical rock, comfortable as old shoes, taking the "eat, drink and be merry" view rather than the "memento mori" one. (Not that they're mutually exclusive.) "Gotas de Agua Dulce" means "drops of fresh water," one of a series of images he uses in the chorus to describe his love for the indispensable "you" of every love-song lyric: wishes that feed the heart, drugs that immunize him to pain, drops of fresh water, ray of sunlight. As ever, Latin Pop tends to be more poetic, even archaically so, than Anglophone pop with similar commercial ambitions: few North American lyricists this side of Leonard Cohen would care to pile up metaphor so recklessly. Maybe that's why "Hallelujah" is so overplayed, to make up for the poetry deficiency in English-language pop.

JUANES, “ME ENAMORA”

29th September, 2007

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We haven't heard from Juanes since the triumph of "La Camisa Negra", and in the two years since he's beefed up his sound and gotten a haircut: the success of that application of guasca flavor to his tropical rock demands replication. So this taut boogie, with verses that sound like new wave-era stadium rock and a chorus with a cumbia shuffle buried beneath reggae bop, is an attempt to be even more crowdpleasing.

The lyrics are just as much full of dopey I'm-in-love cheer as the title "Me Enamora" (I'm in love with) would suggest: the clipped, staggered tension in the music on the verses is nowhere in the words. But the easy lope of the chorus, and particularly the ecstatic cock-crow of the guitar solo, is fully in line with the breezy sentiment.

He has found the furrow he will plow for years to come: cheerful, mostly uncomplicated music that provides a not-too-intrusive soundtrack to the listener's experience: the moodiness and ambition of some of his earlier appearances here are gone. It's a synechdoche for how rock has been assimilated into the larger pop world since the 1990s: acts like Maroon 5 or Imagine Dragons don't participate in the tradition of rock as carrier of musical or emotional authenticity, and just provide rock textures to the more easily-generalized emotions of pop.

JUANES, “LA CAMISA NEGRA”

9th April, 2005

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It's been a while since we last encountered a song that, if I gave each of these songs scores out of ten, I would have given a ten. (The last one would have been "Que Me Quedes Tú".) I'm not even entirely sure I would give "La Camisa Negra" a ten (it's no "Que Me Quedes Tú," for one thing), but the impulse is there, and that counts for a lot with me.

Like many people who didn't pay much attention to Latin pop in the 2000s, I first heard Juanes via this song -- and if you think you haven't heard it, try listening to it first, because you well may have without noticing. It was not only one of the biggest hits of 2005 (eclipsed only by the next stop on our travelogue), but a generational hit: it was still being spun regularly when I started listening to the Phoenix-area Latin pop stations in 2009, and I've heard it fairly frequently in Mexican restaurants and at cookouts in Chicago for the past five years.

It's a bit curious that it's become such a pan-Latin touchstone, because it was written as a very Colombian song, Juanes' tribute to the elder statesman of Colombian guasca (rural) music Octavio Mesa, whose cumbias and parrandas were as earthy and salty as any blues or roots reggae. Because Juanes is a polished pop composer, "La Camisa Negra" (the black shirt) is not actually filthy -- but his patter lyrics keep setting up potential filth before veering off to an innocent meaning, in the age-old tradition of double-entendre. It was still suggestive enough for its airplay to be banned in the Dominican Republic. Meanwhile, Italian leftists protested it for a different reason: the black shirt of mourning in Juanes' lyrics was reinterpreted by neo-Fascists as an approving reference to Mussolini.

None of the controversy hurt its popularity, of course, and the crisp, slick production, which blends blues smoke, reggae lilt, and parranda scrape with masterful skill, makes it one of the highlights of 2000s pop. Juanes' performance, the entire song sung on the edge of lascivious rasp, is also superb: with this song, so indebted to specifically Colombian traditions, he perfectly inhabits the global rocker persona he's been playacting all along. Still, it's the Big Pop Key Change into the soft-lens refrain "Por beber del veneno malevo de tu amor" (due to drinking the malevolent poison of your love), where his voice goes from rasping to yearning, that pushes this song out of rurally-bound tradition whether Colombian, North American or Jamaican, and into the sphere of glorious internationalist pop.

2005 was the beginning of the nadir for pop-music videos in the United States; cable TV had by and large gotten out of the music-video business, and the Internet had by and large not yet gotten into it. But the different broadcasting cultures of Latin pop, especially big-budget Latin pop, were still producing inventive and original videos: and this one, like the song that soundtracks it, is a minor classic.

JUANES, “VOLVERTE A VER”

5th February, 2005

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I said not long ago that we'd hear Juanes do better than "Nada Valgo Sin Tu Amor." Peak Juanes is yet to come, but "Volverte a Ver" (see you again) isn't far off: a Nineties-style combination of rock grit and reggae flow, it's corny, but authentically corny: the emotions it communicates are sincerely communicated, if easily commoditized and hyper-consumable.

Juanes' performance at the center of the song is what really sells it, of course: his voice is as thin and strained as ever, but he knows how to use it to maximum effect to sell the song's heroic-faithfulness emotions without spinning into the kind of self-regarding bathos that (for example) Enrique Iglesias would. And the production backs him up with classic rock-band dynamics: Emmanuel Briceño's Fender Rhodes laying out a rootsy but polished bed for the opening verse and Juanes' guitar only crunching into stop-start bridge to the reggae chorus.

Juanes is undeniably a pop classicist, in love with the sounds and structures of the past, but the gloss and dynamism of his work means that he can sound just as contemporary and vital as his generational peers like Ricky Martin or Shakira. As of this #1, he hasn't yet achieved their heights with a perfectly iconic song; but one is on its way.

SELENA, “BIDI BIDI BOM BOM”

22nd October, 1994

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Tom Ewing’s Popular column at Freaky Trigger — on which this blog is unashamedly based — has a graphic at the top which changes out every so often, using a picture of the biggest pop star(s) of the era that Tom’s covering to orient the readership in the historical moment. If this blog had a similar graphic, Selena would be the unquestioned icon of this age. Not only was she the biggest Latin Pop star of her era — big deal, lots of people have been for lots of respective eras — but she was one of the biggest stars of her era period, doing for Latin Pop roughly what Taylor Swift (at the moment of writing) has been doing for country-pop. Namely, revitalizing it for a lot of people and confirming a lot of other people’s biases against it; a pop star’s probably not doing her job if a significant amount of people don’t hate her.

If “Amor Prohibido” was her all-conquering single, the first triumph in her own voice and style which made her queen over a vast territory of pop, “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom” represents a consolidation of power — she’s not just a lament-singer, she can do uptempo dance music too. Not too uptempo — the cumbia rhythm and skanking guitars suggest a lazy beachfront jam rather than a hot dancefloor stomp — but funky and playful where she’s previously been anthemic, even melodramatic. The secret theme of Nineties Music, cross-genre mélange, is given superb form here: Selena combines cumbia tejano, coastal reggae, beach funk, florid r&b vocalizing, and a crisply, bluesy guitar solo into a perfectly-balanced solution that contemporary “eclectic” magpies like Beck or that dude from Soul Coughing might envy.

The title phrase “bidi bidi bom bom” isn’t dictionary Spanish, but onomatopoeia for the giddy beating of a heart. (A rough translation might be “thumpa thumpa dum dum.”) The lyrics, insofar as they matter beyond the gorgeous swell of Selena’s ex tempora vocalizing, are all about how her heart races when someone walks by or speaks in her hearing. The verses are so magnificently generalized, so completely abandoned to anyone’s use, that not even a gender is attributed to the person who’s to blame for this arrhythmia, just a third-person tense. It’s an intentionally slight song, and Selena delivers a complementary performance. You couldn't describe it as slight, not with that lungpower, but it has the impermanence of real joy — even as you try to latch onto it, it flutters away.

LOS FANTASMAS DEL CARIBE, “MUCHACHA TRISTE”

12th June, 1993

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Los Fantasmas Del Caribe, or The Ghosts Of The Caribbean, were a Venezuelan tropical outfit whose very first single was an unexpected dance hit throughout the Spanish-speaking world. This is that single.

"Muchacha Triste" means "sad girl," but the music doesn't dwell on her sadness. It's got a light synth-reggae beat — plus our first glimpse of a genre that will only grow in importance as we continue, cumbia (the chk-chka-chh triplets in the rhythm), and nothing can sound sad at that bouncy tempo. Anyway, the lyrics focus much more on the singer's swoony love for the muchacha triste, who is repeatedly encouraged to come give him a kiss, than on anything about her.

I'd call it an an evanescent, summery anthem if it didn't feel even too lightweight to be called an anthem. Despite being Venezuelan and therefore creditably Caribbean, it sounds almost British to me. The high, childish vocal melody reminds me of Scottish twee-pop, and the cod-reggae synthesizers with no discernable low end bring to mind Culture Club. But it contains the notes just on the edge of souring which marks working-class Latin pop, and if the voices are fey the funk is real. They dressed like pirates for a reason: George Clinton and Adam Ant must be acknowledged.