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.

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.

RICKY MARTIN, “Y TODO QUEDA EN NADA”

27th March, 2004

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The fifth single from his 2003 album Almas del Silencio, and the third to appear on this travelogue: just by sheer numbers, this is Ricky Martin's imperial period, his version of George Michael circa Listen Without Prejudice. And like the British star at an equivalent point in his career, he was taking himself very seriously. "Y Todo Queda en Nada" can be translated as "And Everything Comes to Nothing," and textually it's a standard breakup song in which the man wallows rather more in hyperbolic self-pity than usual.

But the video has Martin repeatedly lying or sitting in a crucifix pose, staring down the camera with his unnervingly symmetrical face, as religious imagery -- doves flutter past his face, a crowded bar table is framed like the Last Supper, he contorts his own body to suggest both figures in a Pietà -- flashes past. The Passion of the Martin, then -- and as an aside, Mel Gibson's blood-soaked adaptation of Luke 23 was released a month before this went to #1.

It was co-written and produced by Estéfano, whose signature sound here has largely been just this kind of chest-beating ballad, whether by Chayanne or Thalía. And although much of the sound is super-generic turn-of-the-millennium power ballad, there are details in the production -- the vacuum-sealed background vocals, the sawing strings -- that elevate it beyond the crashing drums that have little function other than as a signpost saying Melodrama Here.

It's notable in Martin's oeuvre to date (or at least his #1s) in being identifiably directed at a woman. The final line of the chorus, repeated again and again, is "Yo no te olvido, mujer" ("I can't forget you, woman," but it's not stilted in Spanish). With that, the over-the-top drama in the lyric, the music, and the video begins to make a little more sense. What if it's not the failure of a particular heterosexual relationship that's torture, but heterosexuality itself?

RICKY MARTIN, “JALEO”

9th August, 2003

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Since 1999, Ricky Martin's uptempo #1s have been notable for their everything-but-the-kitchen-sink aesthetic, in which elements from all over the pop diaspora are jammed together with less concern for coherence than for energy. "Jaleo" is the next step in that process, still as loud and kinetic as anything produced by Desmond Child, but with more unity of aesthetic: it manages to predict certain elements of global 2010s pop even while representing millennial-era mash-up culture at its lavish height.

The change in producers is one reason. Child had moved on to reality-show fodder like Clay Aiken by 2003, and Martin tapped up-and-coming Puerto Rican producer and songwriter Tommy Torres. We've actually met his handiwork already: MDO and Jaci Velásquez had put Torres's compositions on the map back in 1999, but Martin's 2003 album Almas de Silencio was his highest-profile outing. I didn't think much of the brooding ballad rock on "Tal Vez",  but "Jaleo" is straight fire: electronic pulses keep the rhythm while timbales, arabesque strings, and guitars both flamenco and metal provide flourishes. But it's Martin's voice, thick with performed passion, that is the highlight here: no matter how cartoonishly horny "Vida Loca" or "She Bangs" playacted at being, "Jaleo" feels like the sweat and churn of actual desire.

Or maybe that's my cultural tourism showing, in which the exotic is conflated with the erotic through the gaze of colonialism: this is after all the most capital-L Latin track we've heard from Ricky Martin. "Jaleo" is a term of art from the flamenco tradition, and means the handclap-and-shout breakdowns in a flamenco performance: the song uses it as a synonym for passionate physical activity, which could be simply dancing or much more intimate. In the lyric, Martin plays an ageless lothario who has seduced countless lovers but is obsessed (of course) with only "tu" -- a desire which is consuming him. There's a strong theatrical element to the song's structure, with the verses strethching out in tantalizingly delayed gratification, and heartstopping crescendos on the line "Atrapado! Moribundo!" (Trapped! Wasting away!), while the chorus spins into (a musically stereotyped representation of) a whirling dervish, babbling "jaleoleoleoleoleoleoleola" to infinity.

The faux-Middle Eastern elements in "Jaleo" are of a piece with its faux-flamenco texture: the video, as if to generalize all Latinidad into a single indistinguishable mass, was shot in Brazil, with capoeira dancers showing up halfway through. But that generically thrilling quality also means that it's not far from actual post-millennial Middle Eastern pop, which has taken inspiration from the dynamism and showmanship of Martin and Torres (as well as from a host of other influences, Western and Eastern) and applied it to local styles, with the result that uptempo dance music from Morocco to Iran is among the world's most consistently exciting.

Even so, "Jaleo" is a relatively goofy and silly song, like most of Ricky Martin's uptempo numbers. He is above all else an entertainer, but one still operating at a very high level. That can't be said for all his contemporaries.

RICKY MARTIN, “TAL VEZ”

12th April, 2003

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After two major crossover dance-pop albums whereby he had become the Disney-prince handsome face of Latin Pop for the English-speaking world, Ricky Martin had earned a self-important Spanish-language record. The credits for Almas del Silencio (souls from the silence) are a who's who of Latin pop producers and songwriters, from the omnipresent Emilio Estefan and Estéfano to (masculine) stars who were famous in their own right like Ricardo Arjona, Alejandro Sanz, and (still to be met on this travelogue) Juanes. "Tal Vez" (perhaps), the first single and first Hot Latin #1 from the album, was written by Franco De Vita, who we haven't heard in his own voice since 1991, but who was responsible for my favorite Chayanne song in recent memory.

True to De Vita's form, the song is a power ballad with Srs Rock Instrumentation, and Ricky Martin's soulful voice very nearly gives it the sweep and cheesy emotional heft of a Bryan Adams song. Doubling and trebling his voice in the studio, he fails to match the grain and sounds instead like his own duet partner, a gesture towards solipsism which will mark his career going forward. Like many of the charmed generation who came of musical age around the turn of the millennium, he no longer has to try: he's going to be rich and famous no matter what. All that's left is to fill in the details.

So "Tal Vez" represents one path toward a sustainable career in maturity: the chest-beating ballad singer, attractive because brooding, bleating out his masculine pain. It's not an uncrowded field: many exponents are already regulars here, from Chayanne to Enrique. But it's not entirely a comfortable fit for Ricky, and not even necessarily because of any reluctance to enact traditional gender stereotypes. The key line in "Tal Vez" comes at the end of the third verse: "Tal vez yo nunca supe a quien amaba" (Perhaps I never knew who I loved), a stealth uncloseting under the guise of a straightforward "I did you wrong, babe" ballad. The video makes it a generalized love song, about parent-child and even friend relationships as much as romantic ones, Martin himself only a watchful spirit above it all.

A waste of his dynamic boy-band-bred physicality, you might say. But he'll be back.

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.

RICKY MARTIN, “SHE BANGS”

4th November, 2000

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Tom Ewing's framing of "imperial phases" in pop is an idea I come back to a lot. It's been fueling how I think about the "Latin invasion" of 1999-2000, in which a brief confluence of popular dance songs, broad ethnic affiliations, and carefully managed careerism made English-language stars out of people who were already (or would be anyway) stars in their own right. The point of imperial phases is that they don't last, and in that sense the Latin Invasion (which Chris Molanphy recently dubbed a "mini-invasion") was unlike the twin British Invasions of the 1960s and 1980s, in that it didn't remake US pop in its image, only flourished for a time and then fell.

The clear end of that imperial phase -- perhaps it would be better to describe it as an imperial moment, a (Re)conquista that was always demographically unsustainable -- would be this song, with its lavish CGI video, its endless remixes for every imaginable market, and its all-in marketing bet on Ricky Martin as a hetero sex symbol, only reaching #12 on the Hot 100. "She Bangs" may be more fondly remembered in the Anglosphere than "Livin' la Vida Loca," perhaps because it's a better song (though not a better production), less fueled by casual misogyny, but it wasn't nearly as big a hit. No need to weep for Ricky Martin, of course: his eventual withdrawal from the English-language pop market was the English-language pop market's loss, not his; as Tom noted in his analysis of imperial phases, it doesn't mean the hits stop. We'll be seeing lots more of Ricky Martin around these parts.

But none of this describes the actual song, a pumping jam with flamenco guitars, salsa -- and later swing -- horns, mambo piano, and... surf guitar again. If it's Livin' la Vida Loca, Mark Two (also produced by  Desmond Child), that's not a bad thing to be. Unlike with "Vida Loca," there is an actual Spanish lyric, with the only leftover English phrases "she bangs" and "she moves," appropriately enough, as there are no possible rhythmic equivalents in Spanish. It may not be as misogynist as "Vida Loca," but it's surely as objectifying. Which it's hard to fault Ricky for; nobody ever sounded less lecherous than he does singing this song. Joy this unqualified is almost as rare in pop music as it is elsewhere in life, and just as precious.

RICKY MARTIN, “BELLA”

4th September, 1999

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One of the effects of glancing through all the old entries in this blog while getting ready for this return was becoming very embarrassed about how dismissive I was of the many ballads that have made up the bulk of Hot Latin #1s in the twentieth century. Perhaps I'm growing mushy and sentimental in middle age, perhaps I understand Spanish lyricism better than I used to, or perhaps I'm belatedly getting the critical distance which allows me to hear past flimsy or generic production to the emotion, the performance, the song itself. (Particular apologies to Marco Antonio Solís, probably the most undeserved target of my splenetic boredom over the years.)

All this dawned on me while I was listening to "Bella" again and realized that I'm predisposed to rate it highly not because of Ricky Martin's sensitive performance, or because the soaring melody or elegant lyrics are anything out of the ordinary, but just because the production is modern and full-bodied and full of interesting textural accents. The sitar and tabla atmospherics that open it, the falsetto soars leading into the chorus, the fretless bass murmuring throughout, the gated drums, the swirling strings: this is the second most expensive-sounding song we've heard yet. The first, of course, is "Livin' la Vida Loca."

And it's really only within the shadow of that enormous cross-platform hit that "Bella" makes any sense, both as a chart hit at the time and as a pop memory today. As "She's All I Ever Had," it apparently went as high as #2 on the Hot 100, but I have no memory of it, and listening to it now I'm much less impressed with it in English, where the lyrics (and the rhymes) are more generic and the focus is more on the man singing the song than the woman he's singing about.

Not that it's a deathless love song in either language: Ricky Martin was never particularly convincing as a man tortured by love for a woman even before he left the closet, and his performance here is more remarkable for his burnished soulfulness (the song was co-written by Jon Secada, and you can hear hints of his R&B-derived melodicism, even while the tempo lumbers unfunkily) than for any emotional nakedness. Fair enough; lots of straight men have sung unconvincing love songs too. But there's a reason that "Livin' la Vida Loca" and another song still to come are the ones he's remembered for from the millennial era, rather than this.

RICKY MARTIN, “LIVIN' LA VIDA LOCA”

24th April, 1999

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"Give a little more vibe on the track, please..."

I probably crow too often about new realities, new beginnings, new usherings-in of the present era. Reality is manifold; newness begins over every wave. Yet it feels more accurate than ever to say that the millennium begins here -- at least the millennium seen through the specific lens around which this blog is oriented.

It's not the first Hot Latin #1 to also hit #1 on the Hot 100, not by a wide margin (Los Lobos was twelve years ago), but it does introduce a new sense of intimacy between the two charts. Crossover between them will still be rare, but not quite so rare; even if specific songs aren't familiar to both audiences, a good many artists will be. There was a deal of hype the summer of 1999 about a Latin Invasion (which consisted of about three songs), but apart from Tony Concepción's Irakere-imitating trumpet towards the end, there's little that's particularly Latin about "Livin' la Vida Loca."

Indeed, with its whirlwind velocity, rubbery surf guitar, and energetic horn charts, it actually has more in common with that other cod-tropical vogue of the late 90s, third-wave ska, than with anything specifically Puerto Rican. Which is part of the point, both of Martin's crossover pop and of this whole travelogue: Latin identity is not -- cannot be -- tied to some travel-brochure stereotype of UNESCO World Heritage frozen-in-amber cultural practice. Latin people live in the present tense, and Latin pop is modern pop; whatever and whenever that is.

Desmond Child, the producer of "Vida Loca," made his name with the shiny gloss of Bon Jovi and Aerosmith's late-80s hair metal, and that sense of compressed power gives the track its grab-you-by-the-shirt-front immediacy; an important stage in the loudness wars, it was the first all-ProTools hit, electronic even in its Dick Dale gibber, the punchy horns and skittering drum as influenced by the noisy, jungly end of drum 'n' bass as by Child's rock background.

And the lyrics position it directly in Anglophone rock history, the woman who is living the vida loca one with all the brown sugars and witchy women and maneaters that thirty years of guitar-driven misogyny have chronicled. But Martin's performance has none of the spitefulness of a Jagger; he rather admires her rapaciousness than otherwise, and why not? With this production behind him, he's easily able to keep up with her. (And besides, he's not her target. But that's later history bleeding into earlier.) Once more, it's the beginning of the modern era: hedonism presented not as warning temptation or as knowing deviance, but as the basic premise of pop music. EDM, at least in the popular imagination, starts here too.

RICKY MARTIN, “PERDIDO SIN TÍ”

19th September, 1998

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It's a good measure of how much more accomplished a pop performer than his immediate peers Ricky Martin was that this song, a slow ballad based in modern R&B forms, is far more beautiful, superbly phrased and emotionally affecting than anything Enrique Iglesias, who was still singing as though he thought vocal constipation equaled passion, could have hoped to achieve at the time. Some of that, of course, is pure genetic fortune: very few people could sing as quietly and gently as Martin does in these verses here and still have it sound so smooth. Technique counts for a lot, but the quality of the instrument is the difference between pleasure and ecstasy.

The song itself is a sigh of unresolved longing. The title translates to "lost without you," and while the loss Martin expresses is romantic, there are suggestions -- not least in the video -- that it's corporeal as well; that the mourning is not just for lost love, but a lost life. The English-language murmurs in the post-chorus ("I love you; I need you") are haunting in how much is held back in them.

The production does some of the work here, a slow rush of smooth bass, lite breakbeats, and glossy chords, as familiar to adult-contemporary listeners of the 90s as an old shoe, but finessed extraordinarily well. But it's the hushed male chorus (I believe it's simply Martin multitracked) that makes the most emotional impact, circling in increasingly tighter chants that smartly mirror the way that we respond to death or other trauma, the way repeated thoughts circle unceasingly, unresolvingly, in our minds. It's one of the most understatedly lovely ballads we've yet seen; and it's also, despite the ache at its center, one of the most comforting.

RICKY MARTIN, “VUELVE”

28th February, 1998

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And now, as if we were only waiting for Céline to put the capstone on the era, we are fully immersed in modern Latin Pop. Ricky Martin has been a professional singer and entertainer for more than a decade at this point, from his early days in the revolving-door Puerto Rican boy band Menudo to his increasing profile not just in Latin music but crossover dance as well, and he sounds like it, relaxed and professional, with a lively soul/rock delivery — everything Enrique Iglesias wants to be but isn't, not yet.

In fact we haven't heard anything this confident, or this indebted to Stateside R&B, in a long time; not since Selena, or even Jon Secada. Although this is R&B as filtered through Anglo-American pop/rock aesthetics, a loose soul vamp that sweeps up into a declamatory chorus, with broad key changes and plenty of room for a singer to show off, if that's the sort of thing he's inclined to do. Martin's not, for the most part, but that doesn't mean he hasn't got the tools to do it with.

The comparison that keeps urging itself to me is to George Michael, and while I don't want to make too much of it (gay dance-rock-soul men with brilliant smiles who came out later in their careers, after their hitmaking days were behind them), the ease and mastery with which Martin nagivates the funk-flecked power ballad form, swooping up into falsetto on the chorus and engaging gleefully with the gospel choir in the final third, is very Michaelian.

"Vuelve" ("return," both the noun and the imperative) was also the title of its parent album, Martin's fourth, on which he finally scaled the heights of the Latin chart. It was written by the Venezuelan Franco De Vita, who we last saw making a not-so-convincing effort at Anglo-American gospelly rock dynamics. Martin's boyband-bred sense of rhythm is one key improvement, but the big one is that "Vuelve" is not nearly so self-important a song as "No Basta" — while certainly pulling out a big gospel choir for the final chorus is a time-honored Seriousness Indicator, it's impossible to take the grinning sway of Martin's performance as seriously as the lyrics would like us to. Sure, he's begging for his lover's return — without him*, life has no meaning, even air has deserted his lungs — but Martin never sounds anything but totally confident that he* will return.



*I know it's not really kosher to make assumptions about the gender of non-gendered objects of song, especially since Martin was very much still in the closet in 1998, but I'm enough of an English traditionalist that I revolt at the prospect of "hir" or "s/he," and entirely feminine pronouns are equally problematic.