J BALVIN, “GINZA”

17th Oct, 2015

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I haven't been mentioning here whether or how these songs have intersected with my previous critical attention, because I have to imagine that that is only interesting to me, but I'm going to waive that forbearance in this case because I do think it says something noteworthy about the song that "Ginza" was at #10 on my year-end list of songs for 2015, a year in which I was as disconnected from the radio, the wider Latin audience, and what my peers were paying attention to, as I have ever been. I was actually surprised to learn that I would end up writing about it for this blog: it seemed so unlike the kinds of things that I had a hazy impression would be clogging up the mid-2010s once I finally reached them. (In 2015, I was still mired in 1999 here, and thought I might be forever.) 

But "Ginza" pushed through that disconnect thanks to the Singles Jukebox, where I compared Balvin negatively to the masculine authoritativeness of Daddy Yankee and Wisin (not yet hearing how he and his South American peers were remaking reggaetón into a more flexible, bubbly pop genre), but much more than Balvin's mushmouthed simper, the fizzy, bubbly electro sounds of the beat (courtesy of Colombian producers Sky Rompiendo and Mosty) stuck with me, an insinuating groove that fell exactly in line with the music I was admiring most at the time, including Drake's "Hotline Bling" -- both of which were taking inspiration from the inventive, lower-key dancehall and soca riddims then emerging. 

The song is named after an Instagram filter Balvin used to use a lot (remember Instagram filters?), which itself was named, of course, after the high-end shopping district in Tokyo; it never makes an appearance in the lyrics, which are very straightforward horny dance-as-metaphor-for-romance verses. It's a back-to-basics approach to reggaetón that feels consonant with punk stripping away the artifice and bombast of dinosaur rock -- or rather, more accurately to both rock and reggaetón history, replacing it with different, and perhaps more marketable to key demographics, forms of artifice and bombast.

It's noteworthy that the video takes cues from video games (especially Assassin's Creed) before dropping into a standard neon-lit dance space brought to you very aggressively by Pepsi Cola and Coors Lite -- it's a deliberately internationalist, middle-class, brand-friendly approach that has none of old school Puerto Rican reggaetón's up-from-below need to prove itself or pride in a racialized minority identity.

And it's the song that made Balvin a superstar; "Ay Vamos" had been #1 for a week, while "Ginza" sat atop the chart for 22 weeks (the longest reign for a song credited to only one person to date), and was equally huge across Latin America and Europe. It's still his all-time most successful song, and a decade later there are still thousands of reggaetón songs released every year in its image.

Airplay Watch:

• J Balvin, "Ginza"
• Discussed above.
• Farruko ft. Shaggy & Nicky Jam, "Sunset"
• Reggaetón meets reggae proper, thanks to Jamaican guest Shaggy. This is Puerto Rican singer Farruko's first appearance here in the lead position, although his guests steal the show.
• Maluma, "Borró Cassette"
• Another entry from the mid-decade Colombian wave of pop-reggaetón, featuring a handsome young man who can handle both vulnerable singing and gruff toasting.
• La Adictiva Banda San Jose de Mesillas, "Después de Ti, ¿Quién?"
• A slowie from a popular banda sinaloense. Singer Memo Garza has a lovely croon, but it's the melting woodwind-and-brass arrangements that get to me.
• Álvaro Soler ft. Jennifer Lopez, "El Mismo Sol"
• A Europop hit (sung by a Spaniard, produced in Germany) given a western-hemispherical push with the addition of J. Lo. Flamenco handclaps can't disguise the oompah bounce.
• Daddy Yankee, "Vaivén"
• The dance-forward Zumbafication of 2000s-era reggaetón continues apace, although Daddy Yankee seems a bit more inspired on the verses than he has lately.
• Yandel, "Encantadora"
• Yandel's most successful single as a solo act, letting the midtempo lope of the dembow riddim simmer sultrily as he sings about a predatory woman.
• Prince Royce, "Culpa al Corazón"
• Royce has never sounded more like Romeo, both in terms of literary songwriting and virtuosic accompaniment; which means he's still very much in his shadow.
• Carlos Vives, "Las Cosas de la Vida"
• The feel-good champion is back with another feel-good anthem; this one leans more towards rock than vallenato in his characteristic stew, but with a euphonium solo.

NICKY JAM & ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “EL PERDÓN”

21st Mar, 2015

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The mid-2010s return of reggaetón with a new center of focus in Colombia rather than Puerto Rico (see J Balvin two weeks ago) now features reggaetón's first comeback story, compelling enough to put this song at #1 for 30 weeks.

Nicky Jam, born in Massachussetts to Puerto Rican and Dominican parents but whose early years were chaotic and ended up having to support himself in Puerto Rico at the age of eleven, released his first Spanish-language rap EP at fourteen years old in 1995 -- the same year he got hooked on cocaine. He was in a reggaetón duo with Daddy Yankee for a bit in the early 2000s before his substance abuse issues became too much for the older star to deal with; Yankee went on to rule the world with "Gasolina," and Nicky spiralled in relative obscurity, almost dying from an overdose in 2010.

It was his relocation to Colombia -- and specifically Medellín, Balvin's hometown -- that turned his life around. Colombians, having only received reggaetón from a distance, treated him like the legend he never really was in Puerto Rico (shades of the UK's reaction to US music in the last midcentury), and he got into the romanticism of vallenato, which encouraged him to sing instead of just rapping. Surrounded by Colombian collaborators, he got clean and started making new music again -- and when Enrique Iglesias came calling, hung up on him because he assumed it was a prank.

Eventually, of course, they worked it out. "El Perdón" (forgiveness) was written exclusively by Nicky -- Enrique generously forewent his usual writing credit -- and although it's literally a song about spiralling after a romantic breakup and asking for an ex's pardon, it's also very easily legible as a song addressing Nicky's own history in the music industry (and maybe especially, for fans hungry for a good gossip narrative, with Daddy Yankee), proving that he's changed. His singing voice, rougher and flatter than Enrique's, is authoritative but vulnerable, and the fact that the entire song is sung, with no rap verses, is an indicaton of reggaetón's future sustainability as a flexible genre outside of its original hip-hop/dancehall lineage.

It's also, of course, an indication of Colombia's emblanquecimiento -- whitening -- of reggaetón, as several observers have noted. It's not a coincidence that Afro-Colombian musicians have tended to draw more directly from Jamaican, Dominican, or US Black sources than from reggaetón in the years since. But that's for another day.

In the meantime, "El Perdón"'s reign at #1 almost exactly matched all of Daddy Yankee's #1 reigns combined before it. The listening public had made its preference clear: not only was reggaetón back, but reggaetón romántica specifically was its top priority.

This is foreshadowing.

Airplay Watch:

• Pitbull ft. Gente de Zona, "Piensas (Dile la Verdad)"
• Cuban expat pop-reggaetón summit with a heavy montuno piano hook. Pitbull's genial ringmastering is getting a bit long in the tooth by this point, but Gente de Zona do enough to keep the energy up. 
• Nicky Jam & Enrique Iglesias, "El Perdón"
• Discussed above.
• Juanes, "Juntos (Together)"
• Throwback cumbia-rock blend for the soundtrack to a Disney movie about a Latino track team in the 1980s coached by Kevin Costner. Perfectly adequate.
• Wisin & Carlos Vives ft. Daddy Yankee, "Nota de Amor"
• Cumbia, vallenato and reggaetón are all represented in another Colombia–Puerto Rico summit. DY casually blows both his collaborators out of the water.
• Romeo Santos, "Hilito"
• Chiming bachata that didn't rate a music video. Dwoopy synth sounds introducing the middle eight make it stand out from Santos' typical classy, narcissistic eroticism.
• Daddy Yankee, "Sígueme y Te Sigo"
• As if recognizing the new youthful middle-class appetite for reggaetón, the (forty-year-old) reining champ returns with a song about social-media popularity, with a video set in a high school.
• Yandel, "Calentura"
• Horny, half-rapped reggaetón with big sine-wave synths is still big business in the Puerto Rican wing of the industry; entirely of a piece with Yandel's recent solo work.
• Gente de Zona ft. Marc Anthony, "La Gozadera"
• Marc Anthony becomes the most recent enormous Latin star to co-sign Gente de Zona's party-hearty unity-flavored reggaetón. Salsa accents included to make him feel at home.
• Ricky Martin ft. Yotuel, "La Mordidita"
• Fun, flavorful electroswing-flavored merengue from an elder statesman who simply refuses to age and a rapper from the venerable Cuban hip-hop group Orishas. 
• Wisin, "Si lo Hacemos Bien"
• Dramatic, paranoid reggaetón in classic Wisin y Yandel fashion, just with Wisin singing the Yandel parts, which makes it less smoldering and more tough-guy vulnerable.

J BALVIN, “AY VAMOS”

7th Mar, 2015

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Picture a crusty, several-generations-old image of a Rat Fink-esque illustration of a yellow smiley face screaming so widely that its gums show, spittle in the corners of its mouth, over the words LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOOO in Impact typeface.

Reggaetón's second generation -- at least as recorded by the top of the Hot Latin chart -- begins here, with a white Colombian applying the low-key fuckboy attitude (not to mention nasal singing) popularized by Drake to the head-bobbing skank of the Caribbean. It's over ten years old at this point, and it comes ten years after Puerto Rican reggaetón's initial high-energy breakout into the broader Latin-music conversation, and twenty-five years after the dembow riddim was first applied to Spanish-language dancehall by Panamanians in New York. But this is the point where it becomes clear that reggaetón was not just a late-2000s early-2010s fad, but an ethos, a tent at least as big as salsa or merengue was before it, as generational a dividing line as hip-hop or house was in the 1980s and 90s, as normal for young musicians to latch onto and build an identity around as rock had been in the 1960s.

José Álvaro Osorio Balvin had been born into an upper-middle-class family in Medellín in 1985, but after his father's business went under, the family was forced to move into a rougher neighborhood, where Balvin learned how to code-switch between the rich and working class. In the late 90s and early 2000s, he spent time in the United States, first as a privileged exchange student and then as an illegal visa-overstayer doing construction work. He began rapping in bald imitation of Daddy Yankee at the same time he was studying business at a prestigous universtity back home in Medellín, putting out his first underground record in 2004.

That tension between upperclass origins and underclass coding has remained in his music -- not unlike the Torontonian I compared him to above -- and has also made him more appealling to the Latin American middle class who always kept the original reggaetón generation at the kind of arm's length that white suburban US did with hip-hop. Puerto Rico -- a small, impoverished, racialized appendage of the United States -- is one thing; Colombia -- a large, relatively wealthy nation and one of the five epicenters of 21st-century pan-Latin media -- another. J Balvin, with his European features, economics degree and Nirvana tattoos, was safe for 2015, within the constantly-shifting meaning of safe within the global urban-capitalist socioeconomic imaginary, in ways that Daddy Yankee was not safe for 2005.

All of which is a lot of weight to put on the back of "Ay Vamos" (Hey, let's go), a midtempo electronic reggae song with a nagging "ahhhh, ahhhh" hook and mumble-rap lyrics about talking a girlfriend out of fighting with him. The dembow riddim is foregrounded in a way it hasn't been at #1 since at least Chino y Nacho in 2010, which means that Balvin gets to ride a loping beat contrasted agains the one-drop organ skank, sounding laid-back and cool where the Yankees, Wisins, Yandels, and Omars of the world have all been big, bombastic, and hyper in recent years, trying to impress with the scale of their achievements. Balvin sees that the future is more fugitive than all that busyness: intimacy has its own attraction.

Airplay Watch:

• Maná ft. Shakira, "Mi Verdad"
• Discussed in the previous entry.

DADDY YANKEE, “LIMBO”

2nd February, 2013

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I was mostly disconnected from popular Latin music in 2013. I had moved to Chicago in the beginning of the year, and no longer had a car, so the dedicated radio-listening time I had had for the past decade vanished out from under me. But also, I was listening to less and less music overall, as joblessness and depression shoved me into an abyss, and I grabbed onto other interests in desperation and clung to them instead. It has been twelve years, and I'm only now starting to try to return to having a normal relationship with art, instead of alternately burying myself in it and running away from it as too demanding.

All of that to say, I hadn't really heard "Limbo" before now. Or maybe I had, and it just slid off my brain as though buttered, without leaving a trace behind. It's that kind of song. At first, I was cheered -- isn't that the reggaetón riddim? No, not quite, it's too fast. It's a tresillo, but not the same cadence. And then there's a beat drop, and it just pounds into undifferentiated EDM mush. The lyrics are in Spanish, but it's not exactly aimed at the Spanish-language market. As in his previous appearance here, he shouts out the Zumba fitness program, and this time it's more than just a shout-out: "Limbo" was commissioned specifically by Zumba, and Yankee's description of the song's intent, reproduced on Wikipedia, is as brand-friendly and corporate as they could wish: it is supposed to "invite the imagination, ignite creativity, to step away from the norm and bring something completely different."

Well, one thing about a song written for a fitness company: it's going to be energetic. And that energy is the best thing about it, with Yankee as motormouthed hypeman for an active session, his horndog persona entirely sanded down to a cheerful movement instructor. It still works exactly as it's supposed to, because its ambitions are so low; but it gives you absolutely no reason to listen to it if you're not breaking a sweat.

Airplay Watch:

• Tito El Bambino & Marc Anthony, "¿Por Qué Les Mientes?"
• Discussed in the previous entry.
• Carlos Vives ft. Michel Teló, "Come Le Gusta a Tu Cuerpo"
• Cheerful Colombian vallenato auteur Vives invites similarly cheerful Brazilian sertanejo chantalong huckster Teló for a very fun accordion-led dance tune with lots to chant along to in both Spanish and Portuguese.
• Don Omar, "Zumba"
• Another song obviously commissioned by the same company as "Limbo," this one intended for a dancealong video game. Omar is even more of a cipher than Yankee, but he always was: the music is slightly more interesting, in part because there's a merengue percussion line. 
• Romeo Santos, "Llévame Contigo"
• Another of Santos' stylish, swooningly romantic bachata with unusual musical flourishes, this one about begging a woman who is leaving him to take him with her.
• Prince Royce, "Te Me Vas"
• Another bachata about a woman leaving him, but Royce is nowhere near Santos' level either as a singer or a lyricist: he just complains about it. The musical flourishes are more obvious and feel rather Disney Channel.
• Thalía ft. Prince Royce, "Te Perdiste Mi Amor"
• A third bachata #1 in a row -- the loss of regional music in the streaming #1s is really felt here -- although this is easily the worst of the three. Thalía is a pro but no bachatera, and Royce switching between English and Spanish shows just how much of his appeal is in his voice's tone rather than his control over it.

TITO EL BAMBINO, “DAME LA OLA”

1st September, 2012

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Over the past few years of coverage, I've continued to use the "reggaeton" tag for tropical urbano dance songs that don't actually use the reggaetón rhythm, often because the performers got famous doing reggaetón and would return to it by the end of the decade, so it's more of a scene tag than a strictly musical one. But one effect of doing that is that a tabulation by tags might not be able to indicate just how good it feels to finally get the proper dembow riddim in a #1 song again, even if it is just a goofy horndog one-week-wonder.

I have no specific memory of hearing this song at the time, although it's familiar enough that I'm sure I did. It has very little distinctive about it; for example, it's neither as rhythmically, melodically, musically, or even lyrically interesting as Tito El Bambino's previous appearance here -- but that was a proper song, carefully written and produced to appeal to a wide number of audiences, and this is just a club banger. I say that with love: I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about "El Amor" despite its virtues, while "Dame la Ola" strikes me as a breath of fresh air despite, perhaps even because of, its genericness.

"Dame la Ola" literally means "give me the wave," but the wave it's requesting is not a motion of hands but of hips. "Give me a shake" might be a closer translation; "dance up on me" might be truer in sentiment. The video, all sunshine, tourist-friendly boardwalk, and a rail-slender model gyrating unconvincingly, does a good job indicating what thin gruel this is for fans of reggaetón's origins in whining-and-bouncing dancehall. But even so, this is this travelogue's first reggaetón proper song, with no other genre inmixing, since 2008. Even if it's shallow and lame, it feels good.

GOCHO, “SI TE DIGO LA VERDAD”

30th June, 2012

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The "post"-reggaetón era continues: producer turned would-be heartthrob singer Gocho, who netted his first Puerto Rican hit when he made the beat for Don Omar's "Dale Don Dale" as far back as 2003, earns an unlikely week-long #1 by applying urbano slickness to a straightforward merengue. Although as Billboard acknowledged, a remix with Wisin was probably the key element in getting it all the way to the top, another indication that the personnel of reggaetón's first imperial era, if not the sound, is still a key ingredient in urban tropical Latin success.

And that shallow industry analysis is about all that there is of interest to say about the song. It's nice to hear some genuine merengue this late in the game instead of a more commercial merenhouse adaptation, and Gocho acquits himself fine as a singer, although he's devastatingly free of personality. But the lyrics are the generic (if romantically heightened in classic Spanish love-song fashion) lamentations of a man wanting to be taken back by a lost lover; on the remix, Wisin's guest verse only lards on more evocative imagery.

The law by which urbano singers don't hit #1 until the single after their breakthrough hit applies here: "Dándole", a livelier, hornier, and more party-forward merenhouse track where rapper Jowell of reggaetón duo Jowell y Randy is incorporated from the start rather than tacked onto a remix, was the first single from Gocho's 2011 album Mi Música, but it peaked at #22, a full year before "Si Te Digo La Verdad" was given a last-ditch marketing push. But like Daddy Yankee's "Gasolina" before it, "Dándole" will have to be contented with greater lifetime streaming numbers than the #1 followup. 

DON OMAR FT. NATTI NATASHA, “DUTTY LOVE”

7th April, 2012

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Reggaetón proper is still bubbling just under the surface of urban tropical pop. Although this is formally mostly just Latin dancehall, gesturing towards Jamaica with the title (which never appears in the lyrics) and towards Trinidad with occasional steel-drum accents, the dembow riddim is audible almost in negative, a clipped pulse embedded beneath a sugary haze of pleasant beachy instrumentation that could, quite intentionally, come from anywhere.

Don Omar, who we've heard from several times before, is Puerto Rican, and Natti Natasha, who we will hear from again, is Dominican, but they met and collaborated in New York, and the polish proveded by producers A&X, Link-On, and DJ Robin ends up neither Puerto Rican nor Dominican, but a generic "island sound" calculated to please the widest possible audience by sanding off any cultural specificity that hasn't already been assimilated into the global pop consensus.

Which makes it sound as if I despise this song, and I don't: but there's very little to latch onto. It excels at capturing a vibe, but no more than that: Omar and Natti Nat are, despite the repetition of their names, virtually anonymous chroniclers of a generic romantic encounter in which he initiates, she's unsure because of bad past experiences, and ultimately they lose themselves in a dance which functions as a perfect synechdoche for other physical pleasures.

It's another 2012 number one that only lasted a week at the top (although the year's 400-pound gorilla, which will take up residency at #1 and refuse to leave for months on end, draws near), but for once it feels like it. No video was filmed to prolong the hype cycle, and although it won a Billboard award in the Latin Airplay category, it has not particularly become a classic. Don Omar's biggest hits all came before and Natti Natasha's biggest hits will all come after: "Dutty Love" is our introduction to one of the handful of women who are ever allowed to be massive urbano stars at a time, and little else.

DADDY YANKEE, “LOVUMBA”

25th February, 2012

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The fact that this is only Daddy Yankee's second appearance at the top of the Hot Latin chart really underlines the ways in which the reggaetón to which he remained steadfastly devoted had slipped out of the zeitgeist. Three whole album cycles have gone by since his previous #1, all of which topped the Latin Albums chart, but unlike his compatriots Wisin y Yandel he has not shifted towards a more generic urbano sound, sticking closely to the dancehall origins of reggaetón and maintaining a Caribbean-forward sound rather than chasing the hip-hop currents of the mainland US.

Even this, his crowning return to the top, was only for a week (2012's fleeting attention strikes again), and while the reggaetón riddim is gestured to, in strict generic terms the beat is soca, the dancehall-derived music of Trinidad and Tobago. In the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, tempos this rapid are usually associated with Dominican merengue, itself a twist on Cuban mambo, which has its roots in the son music marketed as rumba in English. The song's title, a portmanteau of "love" and "rumba," is meant to be big, generic, and crowdpleasing; to that same end, witness the remix of the song featuring Don Omar, which appeared on both the parent album and the single in both physical and digital formats.

But even if the song isn't strictly reggaetón -- which tends to flourish at midtempo -- it's a welcome reminder of the cacophonous energy, bragadocious attitude, and overt sexuality which reggaetón brought to Latin pop. Even though the lyrics are relatively mild for Daddy Yankee -- a clue as to why might be in the middle eight, where he shouts out the Zumba fitness program, which was starting to commission high-energy Latin music around this time -- the ambient horniness of the premise (Daddy Yankee is using dance to seduce you) keeps the song vivid and dynamic despite the chintzy synthesized merengue horns.

Ultimately "Lovumba" may belong more in the line of Don Omar's big-tent party songs than in Daddy Yankee's own canon of self-assured reggaetón statements. The Billboard entry doesn't include the Don Omar remix, but I don't doubt that it helped get the song to #1; Daddy Yankee's return to the top spot in a more characteristic vein is still yet to come.

VICTOR MANUELLE, “SI TÚ ME BESAS”

18th February, 2012

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Víctor Manuelle's second and final appearance in these pages comes eight years after his first, which I called overdue at the time; his one-time rival, Marc Anthony, has been and will continue to be a much more regular presence. But Manuelle seems content to settle into an early middle age here, with a lively song about the delights of kissing; in the video he plays a smiling, slightly stocky Cupid to a young, spectacularly beautiful interracial couple in the streets of San Juan, and despite the modern, hustling urgency of the salsa music, with a buried reggaeton pulse deep in the mix, it reminds me of nothing so much as one of Maurice Chevalier's midcentury Hayes-compliant odes to love and romance in which he merely plays the role of avuncular observer.

The real delight of the song is in the soaring melody, which Manuelle's longtime band swerves into with gusto, and the engaged musicianship of his own performance. Once more, his legendary ability as a sonero is given short shrift here, as the ecstatic son which closes the song is only really a couple more choruses that he improvises slightly over, more in an r&b tradition than a salsa one. And the lyrical promises of devotion, safety, and sexual gratification that will be the beloved's if she kisses him are all fairly generic and rote, more focused on the singer's desire than hers.

But then it's just nice to be able to hear some genuine salsa at this late stage in the Hot Latin chart; Marc Anthony was last heard bellowing the chorus to a Pitbull party track, the kind of sellout move that Víctor Manuelle would never consider (or, perhaps, be invited to at this point in his career). Like every other new song so far in 2012, "Si Tú Me Besas" was only at #1 for a week, a pattern that will carry throughout much of the year until the shift to streaming happens. The last gasp of musical diversity at #1 will be glorious while it lasts.

WISIN Y YANDEL, “TU OLOR”

8th October, 2011

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Wisin y Yandel's seventh top-lining #1 (ninth if we count features and remixes) in five years sees them still acting as a bellweather for urban Latin pop. Nesty and El Nasi's slick, turbo-charged production is in line with the trancey synths and urgent dance-pop that have been the signature sound of the summer of 2011, and the syncopated rhythm once more recalls the reggaetón beat without actually using the dembow riddim.

"Tu Olor" was the second single off the duo's seventh album, and comparing it to the lead single "Zun Zun Rompiendo Cadenas", which did not reach #1, is a little instructive. "Zun Zun" was much more firmly an electro song aimed at crossover dancefloor success, with Yandel's voice flanged all to hell by AutoTune; "Tu Olor" is grittier and even more romantic, in the surly masculine way that hip-hop-derived forms tend to be.

The title means "your scent," and Yandel's chorus, "Se me quedó tu olor en mi ropa / la fragancia de tu piel, tu rico sabor a miel / que probé yo de tu boca / Vamo' a repetirlo mami una y otra y otra y otra vez" is a minor masterpiece of erotic pop poetry: "Your scent is still in my clothes / the fragrance of your skin, the sweet honey flavor / that I tasted from your mouth / Let's do it again mami again and again and again." Meanwhile, Wisin's verses expand the narrative from pure nostalgic eroticism: it's much more indirect, but essentially the same premise as T-Pain's 2005 classic "I'm 'n Luv (Wit a Stripper)." And the video turns it into a high-octane action movie with a lot of expensive shots and very little meaning, except of course to communicate how successful and important the performers at its center are.

It was only #1 for a week, though: in a chart where Don Omar's "Taboo" and Pitbull's "Give Me Everything" were still hanging around, it was a relatively small blip that spoke to the dedication of the W&Y fanbase rather than the duo's global dominance in 2011. We'll see them again, in a stronger position.

DON OMAR, “TABOO”

16th July, 2011

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When I wrote this blog's entry on the 1990 #1 "Lambada", I was still in many ways blindly groping in the dark when it came to hearing and describing music from a non-rock tradtition. But I'm grateful to the younger version of myself for not getting into the song's background (was I too rushed to look at Wikipedia that week?), because it gives me a chance to do it for this revival.

"Taboo" follows directly in the pattern of Don Omar's enormous crossover success with "Danza Kuduro", another turbo-slick rewrite of a big splashy hook from the Lusophone world that was itself raiding from another, slightly older tradition. This time he's pilfering from French producers Kaoma's bandwagon-jumping "Lambada," a reinterpretation of the Brazilian Maria Ferreira's 1986 lambada hit "Chorando Se Foi" which was itself based on Bolivian folkloric group Los Kjarkas' "Llorando Se Fue", first recorded in 1981.

Each subsequent version keeps the swooning melody, but ups the party-anthem quality, and Don Omar's "Taboo," coming twenty-two years after Kaoma had their moment in the sun, has none of Los Kjarkas' quality of lamentation, even as he keeps several of their original lyrics intact; but he switches from Spanish to Portuguese from verse to verse, as the music video switches locations from Puerto Rico to Rio de Janeiro -- and also inserts shots from the then-current fifth movie in the Fast & the Furious franchise, which happened to also include setpieces in those locations, and in which Omar himself appeared.

Music as an extruded byproduct of international corporate entertainment synergy is more or less representative of where things stood in the early 2010s. The recording won "Urban Song of the Year" at the ASCAP awards, a traditional recognition of revenue generated; but despite drawing from a rich history, it was a terminus, a dead end that led to nothing more; even the later return to reggaetón that raided Latin music history left it alone.

And why is it called "Taboo"? Because of the "forbidden dance" press legend around the lambada, presumably. Everything else about it is shiny and ersatz; of course you print the legend.

DON OMAR & LUCENZO, “DANZA KUDURO”

13th November, 2010

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The biggest, splashiest, most omnipresent international dance hit of the early 2010s following directly on the heels of "Loca" only underlines the point I was making in my last paragraph. There's a thrilling urgency to this song, a fast-paced recklessness imparted not just by the (sort of) Angolan kuduro beat but by the electronic accordion patterns borrowed from Cape Verdean funaná; but there's also a dead-eyed hollowness to it, a desperate, muleheaded sense of dancing while the ship sinks, of fiddling while the city burns. The unimaginative displays of opulence in the video are in line with global hip-hop-derived culture, an ostentation designed to showcase the heights to which making the music has delivered the artist, but there's no hint of struggle or come-up in Don Omar's glib carnival barker shouting and Lucenzo's AutoTuned wheedling: this is music from the mountaintop, purely aspirational, as fantastical, escapist, and irrelevant as superhero movies or big-budget pornography.

Which isn't to say there's not still a lot to love here. Don Omar's ear for a hook has never served him better, and the velocity, tunefulness and rhythmic insistence on display here is world-class. At that, it's still essentially a Spanish-language remake of Lucenzo's own "Vem Dançar Kuduro" with American rapper Big Ali, released in January of 2010. Omar's cheerfully growled dance instructions are patterned directly on Big Ali's -- among other things this is a rare appearance in 21st century pop of that staple of 1960s pop, the dance record that tells you how to dance it -- and the original video, filmed on the streets of Havana with a multiracial crowd of dancers, is much more of a democratic invitation to party than the exclusive, champagne-and-bikini-babes-on-a-boat production of the song's final form.

As this is likely to be the only place where Angolan kuduro is likely to intersect with this travelogue, a brief discussion of what it is, and why this isn't really kuduro, is in order. Kuduro begins in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as techno and house from the US and Europe made their way into civil-war-torn Angola at the same time that French Antillean zouk and Trinidadian soca did; young producers in Luanda began sampling Caribbean rhythms and layering them over the 4/4 structures of post-disco electronic music, developing a very fast, hard-hitting, herky-jerky sound, to which stiff-limbed dances developed that reflected the high numbers of disabled people in a country strewn with landmines. (Angola was a late proxy in the Cold War, as a US-backed apartheid South Africa funded a protracted campaign against the Cuba-backed Communists who had won power after independence from Portugal.) By the early 2000s, Angolan diasporic populations in Portugal were producing "progressive kuduro" that played well with the global dance fusions of the European market, with Lisbon-based Buraka Som Sistema as the breakout act; meanwhile, Luandan kuduro was drifting ever more favelawards, as it became the hard-edged street music of the sometimes violent shanty towns that were the direct result of Angola's oil-driven spike in wealth inequality. By the 2010s, Angolan kuduro was almost exclusively an aggressive, frequently shouted barebones rap form, closer in some ways to drill or crunk than to the rave-friendly kuduro of Europe.

Lucenzo, born in France to Portuguese parents, was exactly the kind of unthreatening white face to make (European) kuduro a globally popular phenomenon. Still, a Portuguese-forward song, even with Big Ali's English-language interjections, would never blanket the world the way a Spanish-language song could. Enter reggaetón legend Don Omar, whose sole previous appearance here has been the bathetic AIDS ballad "Angelito", but who knows his way around tropical riddims and big-budget marketing. "Danza Kuduro" was released in August 2010; almost exactly three months later, it was the #1 Hot Latin song, a position it would hold for 15 weeks. The rhythms that drive it are not kuduro rhythms as understood in Angola (compare the contemporary "Kuduro" by Agre G), but they're not quite reggaetón either: if anything, they're closest to soca, a crowdpleasing cross-Caribbean fusion that functions as much as a Carnival march as a northern-hemisphere dancefloor filler.

SHAKIRA FT. El CATA, “LOCA”

6th November, 2010

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A year ago, she was on top with "Loba" -- and with the change of a single letter, she is back. But as always with Shakira, there's more going on underneath the surface.

The song is a faithful rewrite of Dominican rapper El Cata's slangy merenguetón "Loca con Su Tiguere" (crazy with her streetwise man), from 2008, with a beefed-up, slicker, and quicker production as befits Shakira's international pop-star profile. She changes the refrain to "soy loca con mi tigre," (i'm crazy with my tiger), a rewrite for global Spanish, since "tiguere" is specifically urban Dominican slang. But the third name in the songwriting credits, after hers and El Cata's, is the real key to understanding not just this song but an entire era of Latin pop: Armando Pérez, a Miami-born Cuban-American songwriter, producer and hook scavenger better known by his stage name, Pitbull. It's the second time he's made a sideways appearance on this travelogue, but his knack for repurposing big crowd-pleasing hooks for even more omnipresent international hits gets its first real showcase here.

Although reggaetón riddims can be detected underneath the merengue horns, the early 2010s were the low point between reggaetón's tentpoles of dominance over Latin pop: it's characteristic of the period that good old-fashioned merengue, rather than urbano, got the credit for the splashy, bouncy joy of "Loca," which was a sizeable hit across all kinds of international markets, thanks to canny marketing pairing Shakira with a different rapper in different languages.

The English-language version trading out El Cata for UK grime emcee Dizzee Rascal is also an extremely 2010 move: he sounds pleased to be there but needs the rhythms rearranged to fit his chewy, off-kilter flow. Shakira's lyrics are roughly the same, generalizing the sentiments even more for the bigger audience while still keeping it subcultural enough to spark curiosity. (I.e. the Dominican slang "yo ni un kiki" (I don't even have a dime) becomes "I got my kiki" (I'm laughing).)

But her introductory line in both versions, the breathy English "Dance... or die" is the most 2010 sentiment of all: the apocalyptic mood in post-subprime pop, from Ke$ha's nothing-to-lose class warfare to Britney's doompartying "Till the World Ends," is enough of a truism among pop-watchers that Shakira adding to the cacophony in praise of madness was hardly even noticed at the time. But the extended hangover from that reckless party mood has outlasted the Obama era: not even dance can palliate the eternal bummer these days.

CHINO Y NACHO, “MI NIÑA BONITA”

 20th March, 2010

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Theoretically, pop music from a decade ago is the uncanny valley in pop nostalgia: far enough away to sound uncool and irrelevant compared to current work, but not far enough away to have accrued the patina of age, to sound enough unlike contemporary trends that it has its own, entirely separate charm.

And indeed the version of reggaetón that Chino y Nacho, former boy-band members from Venezuela, perpetrate here is very unlike any kind of reggaetón currently keeping pace on the global pop charts: the bright, cheery merengue horns and piano, the uncomplicated puppy-love sentiments supported by charming doo-wop vocalisms, Nacho's motormouthed rapping, are all relics of a more manic, less depressive pop scene.

But they also point toward the current landscape in less obvious ways: the way non-Black South Americans have come to dominate the reggaetón landscape at the levels of highest popularity, the remove of reggaetón from the concrete urban concerns of Puerto Ricans (and before that Panamanians) into a generalized pop language. If it's too simplistic to say that Chino y Nacho ran so that the likes of J Balvin and Karol G could fly, it's also not entirely wrong. A few years ago I drew an invidious comparison between Wisin y Yandel and Andy & Lucas, praising the Puerto Rican reggaetoneros for being more forthright and grown-up than the Spanish prettyboys; part of the story of reggaetón since 2006 is the way in which the Andy & Lucases of the pop world have been assimilated into the tropical riddim.

It's worth pointing out that the first words shouted in the song are the name of its producer Richy Peña, a Dominican-American who had been put onto the international reggaetón radar by Nely "El Arma Secreta" and Don Omar. Peña won a Latin Grammy for "Mi Niña Bonita" -- well-deserved, according to my ears, for the sheer ebullience of the tune -- and a good half of what I love about the song is his work rather than that of Chino y Nacho.

Because I really do love it: I am old enough that a decade ago is no longer distant enough to have fallen into the uncanny valley of pop nostalgia, and the glee and joy I still clearly remember experiencing when hearing it on the radio during my commute in 2010 and 2011 are undimmed by any concerns about coolness or relevance. Merengue and doo-wop were just as uncool in 2010 as they are in 2021, but their deployment here remains as heart-stirring as it was then. If the doofy, lovestruck lyrics were even the slightest bit more cynical or knowing they would ruin the song: its virginal naïveté is part of what makes it great.

A minor classic, compared to the long history of this chart, but a classic nevertheless.

WISIN Y YANDEL, “ABUSADORA”

1st August, 2009

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The third Wisin y Yandel #1 in a row without the distinctive reggaetón riddim, although the hip-house beat keeps the same staggered rhythm: the market seemed to be pushing away from puro reggaetón in the usual way that Black music gets coopted and watered down by white practitioners. Still, "Abusadora" was produced by Tainy with W&Y's usual collaborator Víctor El Nasi, so it's not like they were trying to abandon the formula that gave them their success by working with pop producers; if anything, they were demonstrating that reggaetón was a bigger tent than a blinkered focus on the riddim would suggest.

"Abusadora" is, like so many of Wisin y Yandel's songs, a worshipfully horny celebration of a sexually assertive woman at the club. The title literally translates to "abusive woman," but what or who she's abusing is never clear: maybe it's the singers (although Yandel repeats "Bendita sea la hora en que te encontré" -- blessed be the hour in which I met you), maybe it's substances, maybe it's simply her own pretty privilege. But if they're suffering, they don't complain: Wisin brags about his ability to keep up with her, and Yandel croons in silvered fragements of AutoTune about how little control he has over himself.

The sawtoothed synths and AutoTune are more than anything else a time capsule: this is post-subprime mortgage pop, big and splashy and dance-friendly, the cheap blare of foreclosed futures. The long, embittering crisis of the 2010s will temper the noise and energy on display here, but for the next couple of years at least, we'll keep on partying like it's the end of the world.

MAKANO, “TE AMO”

23rd May, 2009

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The channel that Flex opened for Panamanian reggaetón to get a hearing in the wider pop marketplace seems to have only let one more song escape before it was closed off again by the shifting musical tides. Makano, whose name derives from a childhood singing group who called themselves Los Makanos after the macano tree, a symbol of Panama, didn't have the reggaetón roots that Flex did, and leaned even more into the romantic, pinup side of the music. I'm not usually very interested in talking about imitation rather than spheres of influence, but it's noteworthy that Flex's breakout single was "Te Quiero," (literally I want you, but generally used as a way to say I love you without being too intense) and Makano's second single was called "Te Amo" (I love you, directly stated).

Even so, once the song was released internationally in October 2008, it only got as far as #11 on the Hot Latin chart before starting to fall again in March 2009. What really got it to #1 was the remix with Puerto Rican duo R.K.M. y Ken-Y (who I said would not trouble us again, but I was wrong), and perhaps the banda remix with Sinaloan star Germán Montero helped on Regional Mexican radio too.

The latter is perhaps the most interesting of the three official releases, Makano and Montero singing over a banda version of the reggaetón production by Panamanian DJ Fasther; the drummer tries hard to evoke the one-and-three rhythms of banda's polka roots, but because reggaetón is Black in origin, the downbeat is actually on the two and four, and so there's a fascinating tension to the recording that the smooth, undistinguished original lacks.

Makano had only a sliver of Flex's global success before returning to merely local stardom, but he seems to have maintained his stature in Panama better since; he's whiter, so that's unsurprising. We won't see him again from this vantage point, but his contribution toward the domestication of reggaetón will bear fruit.

FLEX, “DIME SI TE VAS CON ÉL”

4th April, 2009

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The largely forgotten follow-up to a fluke hit that prevents a marginal artist from being immortalized as a one-hit wonder is a common enough pop phenomenon that we've already seen several examples in this travelogue -- perhaps most notably Barrio Boyzz and Son by Four. But few have been as delightful as this working-class reggaetón that leans harder into its author's Panamanian roots than "Te Quiero" did.

Because it's as much a vallenato song as it is a reggaetón song, and although vallenato is usually described as a Colombian music, it's easy for Anglos to forget that Panama retains close cultural ties with Colombia, only having been separated from the larger country in 1903 at the behest of U.S. shipping interests for whom an independent Panama was easier to strongarm into conceding their canal than resource-richer Colombia would have been. The combination of the reggaetón riddim and vallenato accordion and guitar figures gives Predikador's production an oddly rustic feeling, with synthesized panpipe sounds further evoking South American rather than Caribbean musical textures.

In Panama, Flex was still using (and still does today) the rap name Nigga, and one of his mentors, Mr. Saik (an adaptation of his original MC name, Psycho), appears on the song, usually bellowing in unison with Flex. Because as aw-shucks vulnerable as the song is -- and lyrically it's a cuckold's plea for his beloved to admit that she's seeing another man -- it's still a macho bellow-along, because first-generation reggaetón. The glorious bounce of the music also keeps it from being very self-pitying; it's practically impossible for vallenato to not sound cheerful.

But like the previous entry, this song too only interrupted Banda El Recodo's #1 reign for a week. The several competing Latin audiences (regional Mexican, tropical, urbano, Latin rock, and more) were in productive tension with each other, a tension which will only increase as the next few years unfold.

DJ NESTY FT. WISIN Y YANDEL, “ME ESTÁS TENTANDO”

21st March, 2009

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Reggaetón's evolution out of underground dancehall versioning and hip-hop mixtapes in the 1990s has meant that even as it became the most dominant commercial force in the Latin world, its discographies remained untidy, sprawling across all kinds of release formats on a variety of label-sanctioned (or not) modes.

So this song, which is only found under Wisin y Yandel on today's streaming services (the video link above has it hosted on their official YouTube account), was initially released as the first single from DJ Nesty's 2008 compilation album Wisin y Yandel Presentan: La Mente Maestra (Wisin y Yandel present: the mastermind), a mixtape of previously unreleased tracks featuring a host of more underground Puerto Rican reggaetoneros and producers. The song was later included on the deluxe edition of Wisin y Yandel's 2009 album La Revolución as a bonus track, but Billboard listing it as DJ Nesty ft. Wisin y Yandel at the time (they now list it as "Wisin & Yandel Featuring Nesty") was only following the original parent album.

And to an extent putting the producer first makes sense, because while this is definitely a Wisin y Yandel song, it's not technically a reggaetón song: the dembow riddim never appears, only a stuttering loop during Wisin's verses. Wikipedia lists it as EDM, which whether accurate or not would be the first appearance of that particular tag on the Hot Latin #1s. There's definitely a sawtoothed synth rather reminiscent of the "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These)" riff that cycles throughout, and the percussion is more or less disco: the detailed production by Nesty, Víctor "El Nasi" and Marioso could slot this directly into a turn-of-the-decade synthpop mix, no questions asked.

But Wisin and Yandel are still Wisin and Yandel: you can take the boys out of the reggaetón riddim, but you can't take the reggaetón out of the boys. Yandel's electro croon, Wisin's punchy rapping, and their constant shouted interruptions make even this moodily sparkling track as rowdy and cheerful as the rest of their #1 hits. The lyrics are their usual declarations of horniness and machismo: "Me Estás Tentando" means "you're tempting me" and Yandel's portrait of a dancing woman getting him excited is punctured by Wisin's more free-associative hype, calling himself "el tiburón a comerse la sirena" (the shark to eat up the mermaid). The video is all late-00s electro classiness (I swear I've seen dozens of rap, R&B, and dance acts on that set or ones very like it), the boys and some models striking poses against austere black-and-white light grids.

Wisin y Yandel (and their management) could be excused for believing that pure reggaetón would not be sustainable for a long-term pop career, some three years after it broke into #1 here, and so moving in a broader pop direction would only be canny. And this song was only #1 for a week in between Banda El Recodo reigns -- maybe the market was shifting away from urban tropical music entirely. Maybe. Stay tuned.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “LLORO POR TÍ”

8th November, 2008

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If the first new single from Enrique Iglesias' retrospective 95/08 collection harkened back to his early pseudo-rock roots, the second embraces contemporary pop, an indication of where his career was heading, as the future would only get more contemporary; even though the original version is more or less a ballad, it has a beat derived from hip-hop.

But the original version isn't the one that has stuck in the popular consciousness, and arguably wasn't the one that was a big hit in 2008. The remix with Wisin y Yandel, released only a few months later, has more than three times the amount of views on YouTube, and is the version on his Greatest Hits released in October 2019. But even with the premier reggaetón duo of the era on it, the remix isn't actually reggaetón either: the hip-hop beat only gets beefed up, with additional synths to support the Puerto Ricans' stronger voices. Ultimately the meaning of this song isn't really about Enrique Iglesias celebrating his dominance over the Latin Pop market with another sentimental heartbreak song; it's about Doble-U y Yandel proving themselves as pop artists outside the strictures of the reggaetón market.

Because the remix is just a better production. Even the gear-shift key change toward the end feels less jarring when Enrique's coming out of a Yandel verse than when it's just his own mopey middle eight. And that, it turns out, is the actual future of Latin pop, like all the rest of pop: collaborations, team-ups, even crossover events (to borrow the language of superhero comics) are going to make for huger hits than a single pseudo-auteur singer ever did.

FLEX, “TE QUIERO”

5th April, 2008

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Oh. This is where I came in.

In the spring of 2008, I accidentally dropped the iPod which had been my constant companion for several years into a bathtub at almost exactly the same time I started a job which meant a two-hour commute each way. For the first time since the late 90s, I started listening to the radio in my car, and not just sticking to the classic rock, oldies, or public-radio stations that had been my comfort food and music education as a young ignoramus. I forced myself to listen to contemporary pop past the kneejerk revulsion that a certain rockcrit-bred devotion to 1960s models of rock, soul and pop had inculcated, and discovered that the chrome electronic textures and hyperhuman vocal melismas could communicate real emotion, different certainly than the man-with-a-guitar model I had trained myself to expect, but true nonetheless. Even after the job allowed me to get a new mp3 player, I kept listening to pop radio, entranced by the churn of sameness and novelty.

And late in 2008, looking for more stations to add to my regular rotation that I could switch over to during ad breaks (never subject yourself to advertising if it's possible to avoid it has been perhaps the most consistently followed principle of my entire life), I started listening to the local Latin Pop station. That was the year of "Te Quiero" that, flipping between pop, hip-hop, and Latin stations on Phoenix highways, I heard as consonant with "Love in This Club" by Usher and Young Jeezy, "Can't Believe It" by T-Pain and Lil Wayne, and "Sexy Can I" by Ray Jay and Yung Berg; a thumping beat with twinkly accents over which a smooth-voiced singer pitched uncomplicated woo, with rap verses offering rhythmic but not emotional variation.

With distance I understand "Te Quiero" as a reggaetón romántica, a combination of modes it certainly did not pioneer, but the success of which was undoubtedly influential on the trajectory of reggaetón over the following decade. It was number one for twenty weeks all told, and was tied with "A Puro Dolor" and "Me Enamora" for second-longest #1 reign (after "La Tortura") until the streaming era changed all chart calculations. That rarified company holds a clue to its success: like "La Tortura," it's a reggaetón song; like "A Puro Dolor" it's by a cute, sweet-voiced young man; like "Me Enamora" it's an uncomplicated love song. Virtually all of the streaming-era songs which will surpass their records will be all three.

Félix Danilo Gómez Bosquez was born in Panama City, where, like many young Afro-Panamanians, he grew up in love with the reggaetón sound that had first been developed by Panamanian dancehall toasters in the late 80s and early 90s before being adopted and consolidated in urban Puerto Rico. His imitations of Jamaican dancehall toasters starting in the late 90s earned him the questionable MC name of Nigga among Panamanian reggaetoneros, but when he was signed by EMI, he was advised to use a shortened version of his first name, Flex, for international releases.

He wasn't quite a one-trick pony: he'll appear here again. But compared to the Puerto Rican reggaetoneros who are his contemporaries, people like Wisin y Yandel, Don Omar, or Daddy Yankee, he didn't change with the times: all of his first three records included the English words Romantic Style. "Te Quiero" is certainly romantic, in a puppy-love kind of way that there will always be a market for as long as there are young people who need pop to express their feelings. I can't tell whether it's really great, or whether just hearing "baby te quiero-wo-wo" and "na-na-na-nai-nai-nai" again after more than a decade is nice.