ENRIQUE IGLESIAS FT. MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “EL PERDEDOR”

8th February, 2014

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My farewell to Marco Antonio Solís back in 2007 (chart time) and 2019 (blog time) was premature: I'd neglected to look up features. And he's appeared as a songwriter twice since then anyway. But here he is purely a singer, playing the same role that Juan Luis Guerra did on "Cuando Me Enamoro" -- the elder pop statesman lending Enrique Iglesias a patina of grizzled accomplishment and emotional authenticity, outsinging him effortlesly even though he's doing his best not to upstage the marquee star: but Iglesias' overreliance on vocal fry for emotional resonance makes this performance a particularly unattractive one.

The song was written by Iglesias (eight years earlier than it was recorded, he claims) with an additional composition credit to Descember Bueno, a Cuban jazz fusion artist whose work with Yerba Buena was popular among mid-2000s "world music" connoisseurs. But there's no Cuba, jazz or fusion audible here: it's an old-fashioned rock ballad of a kind that Bon Jovi might have sung, and although Iglesias claimed to have written it with the hope of getting Solís to sing it with him, there's nothing particularly Solisian about it either, unless a slow pace, romantic focus, and self-pitying lyrics can be claimed as his exclusive property.

The one concession to the early 2010s is the fact that there was a bachata version released as well, which at least adds some rhythmic liveliness, but is otherwise the same song. Presumably that added market (as well as the success of the telenovela that used it as a theme) helped it go the distance for a single week in February 2014, the first new #1 after four months of the previous four (Marc Anthony, Prince Royce, Romeo Santos, and Enrique Iglesias ft. Santos) playing keep away back and forth with one another.

But there are only two more #1s left in 2014. Let's see if they get any more interesting.

Airplay Watch:

• Daddy Yankee, "La Nueva y la Ex"
• The first proper reggaetón song to appear here since Chino y Nacho back in 2010, a big, confident blare of a song about a guy trying to move on with his new, true love while his crazy ex tries to sabotage them online. It's funny, it's sexy, it's mean, it's stupid: it's great pop.

CARLOS VIVES, “VOLVÍ A NACER”

13th October, 2012

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This is it: the final #1 of the Hot Latin chart as it had been calculated since its beginning in 1986. Despite my ignorant speculation in early entries on this blog, it had always been an airplay chart; commercial singles of Spanish-language pop were uncommon in the U.S. after the 1960s, as label consolidation created pressure to direct consumers toward higher-ticket albums. Where the charts were concerned, radio formats were a rough but workable approximation of audience: if a song was popular in the Black or Latin communities, regardless of actual genre, it showing up on the R&B or Hot Latin charts meant something.

So Billboard shifting, in October 2012, to a streaming-heavy calculation for its flagship genre charts meant that audiences no longer counted. As an infamous illustration, the streaming switchover meant that Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" would hold the #1 spot on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart for months in early 2013, whereas on the R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart, which used the old calculation, it peaked at #34. But it had the "hip-hop" tag on streaming services, so that's the bucket it went into, even though the core audience for the music wasn't much embracing it. (And in fact it had more play on rock stations than R&B ones, peaking at #13 on Rock Airplay.)

But the Latin audience, being both more diffuse (Texas, California, New York and Florida all have very different Latin-music histories and cultures, as different as the countries they saw the most immigration from) and coming with a significant language barrier, would be affected differently. I'll be discussing some of those effects in future installments, but the most immediate and obvious would be the virtual disappearance for many years of genre variety from the top of the chart: pending the unexpected, this is the last we will see of accordion-led Colombian vallenato. Urbano -- the useful catch-all term for Latin music derived from hip-hop, dancehall, and electronic dance -- will rule the top of the chart for the rest of the decade, with glacial turnover as whatever song with "Latin" in its metadata is being played most at parties sticks around for months at a time.

Don't get me wrong, that will include a lot of great music. The chart as calculated by airplay gave kind of a false impression: because it combined inputs from widely different audiences (Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York, Cubans in Miami, Tejanos in Texas, Chicanos in Los Angeles, not to mention all the rest of the Hispanic diaspora across the country), it actually delivered more genre diversity than individual listeners were likely to experience from their preferred radio stations. Which of course made it ideally suited for my purposes, as a genre-agnostic magpie wanting to get my arms around as much Latin music as possible. But we've already seen how the airplay chart had diminished reggaetón and other forms of urbano ("Gasolina" getting stuck at #17 while a Juanes rock anthem reigned at #1 is the canonical example) -- and urbano is going to be some of the most exciting and interesting music of the 2010s and 2020s, so getting to look at it in all its explosions and contradictions is going to be fascinating.

But before that, a farewell to Carlos Vives, who will not, as of this writing, be gracing this travelogue again (the closest he will come is a duet with fellow Colombian Shakira in 2014, which will stall at #2 behind a third Colombian; but that's a ways off yet). The chart that started with the Spanish Rocío Dúrcal and the Mexican Juan Gabriel has seen many shifts in taste and fashion over the course of its young life, and if we had to have a valedictory for the past twenty-six years from someone who has been a regular presence for the past thirteen, you could hardly ask for a better selection. Always pleasant to hear from, with one foot firmly planted in the soil of local tradition but one eye always cocked to the horizon for the freshness and modernity of international pop success, he's a Latin Grammy favorite who has aged gracefully into an upbeat, avuncular sound that challenges no boundaries and invites everyone into the jolly, communal celebration.

"Volví a Nacer" (I was born again) is a love song said to be inspired by Vives' second wife, Claudia Elena Vásquez, who married him in 2008. Like so many of the love songs we've looked at over the years, it's replete in hyperbolic expressions of devotion and achievement for the sake of the beloved, the kind of vows a medieval knight-errant would recognize as proper to his lady love. Of course the religious symbolism of the title is present (that too is very medieval, which is another way of saying Catholic, which is another way of saying Latin), but it's submerged in the more human anxiety of whether the lover will remain with him.

The music, swelling from piano ballad to vallenato jig to rock & roll guitar heroics, is similarly a wide tent, with massed voices in the chorus just begging for a singalong. If it doesn't quite convince me to sing along here in the fall of 2024, that may not be its fault: the more muted, paranoid atmostphere of the 2020s can't help being a little skeptical of populist bonhomie. While I don't doubt Vives' sincerity, it's not just the sturdy, gospelly uplifting chords that end up sounding a little naïve.

ALEJANDRO SAENZ, “NO ME COMPARES”

8th September, 2012

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Including this song, there are four Hot Latin #1s left until Billboard changes its source for chart calculation from radio airplay to streaming data. This will have a flattening effect on the top of the chart, with a decade to come of months-long reigns of whatever song with the "Latin" medatata tag is most popular at parties and in clubs, occasionally interrupted for a week at a time by some viral meme or another. My entries for the entirety of 2012 have been functioning as a kind of valedictory for what the chart used to be: diverse, disunified, serving widely different audiences and admitting women at its upper reaches far more frequently than  it ever will once streaming rules. But these last four songs before I start engaging almost exclusively with thumping male bravado have been looming almost as ominously as the Return of Reggaetón has, and it's because they too are thumping male bravado, just in a different mode than is suited for clubs.

I've enjoyed, or at worst been pleasantly surprised by, Alejandro Sanz' previous entries here, both as a duet partner for Shakira and on his own, but this impassioned ballad betrays little of his literate musical eclecticism, drawing musically from early-2000s electro-acoustic adult contmporary and lyrically from the exhausted tradition of men bellowing after a lost love. True, the lyrics are far more poetic, with evocative and even provocative imagery in a deeply Spanish tradition, than is typical in pop, but they remain a mere collection of phrases tracking a conventional sentiment and have no surprises to give. Sanz is in fine voice, using his flamenco-descended "gitano" rasp to undeniable effect, but the one-note moodiness of the song means that his performance is also unsurprising, just builds along with the music's conventional swell from mopey intro to self-justifying chorus.

Still, I will miss hearing from Spain on this travelogue. I have mostly merely tolerated the contributions of the Iberian peninsula as compared to the hungrier, more vibrant Latin American scenes, but just as the Anglophone U.S. charts have frequently been at their most interesting when there was a lot of cross-pollination from the UK (the mid-60s, the early 80s), European insularity and self-regard can apply a pseudo-sophistication to the fundamentally Western-hemispherical forms whose absence will be felt once the top of the chart gets turned over almost entirely to tropical bangers.

PRINCE ROYCE, “LAS COSAS PEQUEÑAS”

17th March, 2012

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I've catalogued a number of firsts in the thirteen years (!) I've been writing this blog, but here's another: the first time I (along with everyone else who blurbed it at the Singles Jukebox) am quoted in the "Critical Reception" section of the song's Wikipedia page. My blurb, in its totality, and with links added for context, reads:

It’s deeply unfortunate that this boring lullaby is the Jukebox’s introduction to Royce. Not that he’s ever really been a cause for pulse-rate-raising (unless his duet with Daddy Yankee counts), but his early singles had more sparkle and snap to them — he even made “Stand by Me” interesting, and in the twenty-first century! — and with the exception of the obligatory steel-guitar solo (it is bachata, after all) this one just kind of sits there. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except the “na na na na na na” hook sounds almost exactly like Mike Birbiglia’s Kenny G impression.

Which at this distance feels a little like kicking a puppy. Is "Las Cosas Pequeñas" twee sentimental gloop? It absolutely is. But twee sentimental gloop has its place in the pop ecosystem, and in 2023 I'm kind of entranced by how all-in the production goes in on its tremulous bathos: celeste twinkles, vibrating string sections, dramatic piano ripples. The steel-stringed guitar solo and Royce's sense of rhythm are about all that make it bachata: otherwise it's a straight down the middle r&b song that could have been produced ten, twenty, or thirty years earlier.

Which may feel like a betrayal of bachata authenticity, but Royce was never marketed as authentic (as noted, his first single was a Spanglish cover of the Ben E. King standard), and if teen-idol pop isn't allowed to be bathetic it's fighting with one hand tied behind its back. It's still a little painfully generic, but I don't have it in me to despise it anymore. Maybe I'm just in a mellow mood, happy to luxuriate in another one-week wonder before the chart takes on streaming and everything flattens out much more. "Las Cosas Pequeñas" is itself a cosa pequeña (little thing), and contra the message of the song, it's not worth getting too worked up about.

ROMEO SANTOS FT. TOMATITO, “MI SANTA”

3rd March, 2012

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Romeo's solo conquest of the Hot Latin chart, and his (temporary) expansion of the language of bachata to a broader pop metier, continue apace. "Mi Santa" was, once more, only #1 for a week, but its lush romanticism, hard on the heels of Daddy Yankee's hyper socatón, Víctor Manuelle's genial salsa, Paulina Rubio's cooing dance-pop, and Gloria Estefan's brash electroswing, point to a chart moment that could be considered either vibrantly, capaciously pluralistic or bored, easily distracted and indecisive, depending on how you wanted to characterize it. I am always on the side of musical diversity, so Romeo inviting a flamenco master to share the spotlight in the same way he had R&B mogul Usher works for me: what a purist might see as a cynical appeal to exogenous markets I prefer to see as a big-tent approach to music-making in which nothing is off the table as long as it works.

And it does work: Romeo, at least in this first album, is a master of synthesis, and his bachata harmonizes as well with Tomatito's fluid fingerpicking dramatics as it had with Usher's fluid vocal dramatics. José Fernández Torres, the third member of an Andalusian Roma musical dynasty to be called by some variation of the "El Tomate" nickname (his son is the fourth), first came to fame backing the brilliant and eccentric cantaor Camarón de la Isla in the 1970s; filling the shoes of the equally brilliant and eccentric Paco de Lucía was no easy feat, but Tomatito's jazz and Afro-Cuban influences did just as much to expand the palette of modern flamenco towards the end of the 20th century. His playing here hardly brings that whole history to bear, of course: some basic runs underneath Romeo's verses, and a passionate, harmonics-leaping solo between choruses are about the limit that a contemporary pop-bachata song can take, and he provides it.

It's Romeo's lyrics that give this song its most potent frisson: "My Saint" is a simple translation of the title, but the cultural connotations would require a whole graduate seminar on Latin Catholic thought. Its deeply considered heresy, referring constantly to the lover as an object of religious veneration and his own devotion to her as a specifically Catholic practice, is in line with the conventions of nineteenth-century French (and Spanish and Italian, etc.) Romanticism, and even, in inverse, with older traditions like Teresa of Ávila; by contrast, the earthy, sensual, and deeply human guitar of Tomatito prevents it all from sounding too saccharine or even ascetic.

The video for "Mi Santa," released in January of 2012, mashed two songs from Formula, Vol. 1 together, so for younger listeners "Mi Santa" is perhaps nowadays thought of as the second half of "La Diabla." But I'll have to wait to discuss that; Romeo isn't done with his album cycle.

AVENTURA, “DILE AL AMOR”

23rd January, 2010

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"Tu grupo favorito, mami."

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

"¿Le gusta mi bachata, mijita?"

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

"So nasty!"

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

Pues dile al amor que no toque mi puerta

Que yo no estoy en casa, que no vuelva mañana

A mi corazón ya le ha fallado en ocasiones

Me fui de vacaciones lejos de los amores

Dile al amor que no es grato en mi vida

Dale mi despedida, cuéntale las razones

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

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

It has failed my heart on many occasions

I have gone on vacation far away from loves

Tell love it's not welcome in my life

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

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

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

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

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

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.

LOS TEMERARIOS, “SI TÚ TE VAS”

19th July, 2008

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I haven't kept faithful track of the beats per minute of every song on this travelogue, but I'd be surprised if this wasn't the slowest one we've had in a very long time. And while I'm generally an uptempo maniac, paradoxically, low bpms past a certain point stop being dull and start being fascinating again: there's a tension and drama to the pulse when you're forced to wait for it.

Which is to say that this, the swan song of Los Temerarios at the #1 spot (barring unexpected comebacks), is maybe the most arresting of the four songs we've heard from them. Twice we heard them covering Vicente Fernández, and twice singing their own songs, and while they're slightly better at their own work (or maybe they're just not as great as Vicente Fernández at recording Vicente Fernández songs), here they drop the pretense of being even remotely a regional band. the orchestra-plus-guitar production is thoroughly universal, and thoroughly anodyne: so all the focus is on Gustavo Ángel Alba's voice. It's a fine voice, better than Marco Antonio Solís' but not as good as Luis Miguel's.

They had stopped pretending to be a band by this point too; as the A and G in their logo on the album cover indicate, Los Temerarios were Adolfo and Gustavo. The song itself, written by Adolfo Ángel Alba, is rather lame, a sparse introduction followed by three choruses whining about how the singer's world would come crashing down if his lover were to leave: the glacial pace, the trumpet solo, and the gear-grinding key change before the final chorus, invest it with what little structural drama it has. The expensive-looking video, with its elegant desaturation and highly physical models, is a signpost as to the audience Los Temerarios were pitching themselves to now: the music-from-nowhere internationalism of glossy bourgeois pop, among the Eros Ramazzottis, Céline Dions, and (remember, it's 2008) Leona Lewises of the world.

It was only #1 for a week before Flex's bouncier, scrappier, and younger romanticism took back over. Romántica music isn't dead, but it will take different forms in the future.

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.

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “OJALÁ”

30th June, 2007

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This is most likely the last time we will see Marco Antonio Solís on this travelogue; he's been a regular presence here since 1988 (and he's been having Mexican hits since 1975), but the chart is drifting away from the kind of traditional Mexican pop he does very well, and younger and flashier sounds are gaining prominence. In the present tense of when I'm writing this, 2019, he hasn't released an album of new material for six years, the longest he's ever gone before; if he does stage a comeback in the age of urbano (he's not quite sixty yet), I'll be pleasantly surprised.

The 2006 album Trozos de Mi Alma 2 (Pieces of My Soul 2) was an album of new recordings, but it wasn't new material; like its predecessor in 1999, it was Solís covering songs he'd written but given to other singers. I didn't note it at the time, but his 1999 #1 "Si Te Pudiera Mentir" (If I Could Lie to You) was originally recorded by Rocío Dúrcal in 1990. And his version of "Ojalá" sounds like classic Rocío Dúrcal: carefully-produced mariachi-inflected pop, with studio orchestration that replicates the soft-rock sound of 70s pop where Dúrcal had her heyday and Solís got his start.

So who sang the original? Well... Paulina Rubio, in 2004. And if you click on that link you'll get a lesson in what production can do to a song. It was only an album track (her big singles from Pau-Latina, "Te Quise Tanto" and "Dame Otro Tequila" appeared here), but it's still as dense with mid-2000s genre-mashup technofuturism as everything else on the album, mariachi horns snaking across a glitchy, twitchy soundscape which she actually takes at a slightly slower pace than Solís would two years later, purring lyrics which he delivers in his traditional trumpet-like belt. Of the two performances, I'm aesthetically constituted so as to prefer Rubio's, but that doesn't mean I dislike Solís's in the slightest: I enjoy both his soft-focus traditionalism and her lively personality-driven pop. Her hissed ad-lib at the start, "quiero que te arrastres, güey" -- I want you to crawl, dude -- is sublime.

Because the song is, in both versions, a kiss-off, with the title "Ojalá" (literally derived from the Arabic for "God willing" but generally used as an informal expression of hope) in the chorus introducing a series of wishes that the betraying lover will meet with similar terrible fates. It's a wallow in hatred and revenge fantasies, and it's even kind of funny (Solís's first line, roughly "I don't know what name to call you, I looked in the dictionary and couldn't find it," is some classic country songwriting). A terrific song, regardless of version, and perhaps the best farewell to this blog that Marco Antonio Solís could have devised. Three weeks at #1 (interrupting Enrique Iglesias' much longer reign to either side), a victory lap for a long-serving craftsman before ceding the floor to the youth coming up, as always, from behind.

CHAYANNE, “SI NOS QUEDARA POCO TIEMPO”

12th May, 2007

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I think I've often been unfair to Chayanne here, as I often am to handsome young men who sing earnestly romantic songs without gesturing toward any particular regional musical tradition. International balladry, vaguely contemporary in production but wholly conventional in writing and composition, is probably my least favorite body of musical production: not because it's impossible for real emotion or exquisite performances to come out of it (if anything, quite the opposite), but because without obvious genre markers or any grounding in personal history I can't hear a way into it. The instinct I always have is: "This is between the singer and whoever, real or imaginary, he's singing to; it's got nothing to do with me."

This was my reaction here -- at least until the pre-chorus line "Y la melancolía / me ataca por la espalda sin piedad" (and melancholy / attacks me from behind, merciless) made me pause in my tracks. Wait, is this a song about depression?

Well, it's a song about loss, whether real or imagined; the chorus is delivered in a conditional tense, as the title (If We Had Little Time Left) should have made obvious, and the middle eight is more or less a thesis statement: "Nadie sabe en realidad que es lo que tiene / hasta que enfrenta el miedo de perderlo para siempre" (nobody really knows what they have / until they face the fear of losing it forever). Which in English sounds like the tag line to a Spielbergian apocalypse-made-personal or a Nicholas Sparks-style sentimental romance; but the glory of pop music is that it can compress such narratives into three-minute shots of emotion without having to drag us through three-act structures and lingering closeups.

The production supporting Chayanne's throaty rasp here is more muscular than usual: 90s-style post-alt rock production with crashing drums and chugging guitars. There's a certain kind of comfort to it for older or middle-class listeners, particularly in the age of reggaetón, but Chayanne so clearly belongs to an older generation that (as of this writing at least) this song will be his last appearance on this travelogue. It won't be for lack of effort; his late-2010s singles are collaborations with reggaetoneros old and young. But as a valedictory, "Si Nos Quedara Poco Tiempo" works very well.

CONJUNTO PRIMAVERA, “ESE”

17th March, 2007

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Why Conjunto Primavera has been the only Mexican regional act to have reliably punctuated the #1 spot in the mid-2000s is a question I don't think I'm at all qualified to answer. The portion of this travelogue that has been taken up by regional Mexican music has dwindled since the 1990s, and Primavera, who were here all along but whose first #1 wasn't until 2003, are just about the only holdouts. That will shift in the coming years, as banda gathers pop strength, but regional Mexican music will remain only a minor strain among all the Hot Latin #1s, although of course a much richer part of the full tapestry of the chart.

This song once more strikes me as the kind of thing they could have recorded at any time between 1988, when the band's current lineup was settled, and the present: the usual questions that a music critic tries to ask about a #1 song -- why this song? why now? -- can only be answered with an elaborate shrug. Presumably, the chart being now well into the download era, "Ese" was assisted by digital sales, like many of its contemporaries have been. But also presumably it was huge on the Regional Mexican format, although I would consider it an unlikely candidate for crossover to the broader Latin Pop format.

It's a now familiar sound: norteño-sax, with keyboards imitating a churchy organ, a guitar keeping time, and Juan Dominguez' airy saxophone supporting Tony Melendez' starchy, wounded vocals. delivering an old-fashioned lyric in a strictly conventional tableau: the singer begs the object of the song not to weep over the one who broke her heart, because he's here and has loved her all along. The lyric is full of Nice Guy Energy, although because it isn't formalized into an ideology it's not more than averagely toxic.

CONJUNTO PRIMAVERA, “HOY COMO AYER”

25th February, 2005

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From the opening notes, it's clear that Juan Dominguez and his men have no interest in playing the pop game of keeping up with trends and changing with the times: they're keeping on keeping on, sounding almost exactly like they would have in 1988, with perhaps fuller production and a little more grain in Tony Melendez's voice, but otherwise unchanged.

The previous time we heard them, Félix Contreras was playing an accordion, and this time he's playing a Casio keyboard, which means that "Hoy Como Ayer" (today like yesterday) isn't technically conjunto chihuahuense, but a regional ballad. It's a very good regional ballad, possibly the best we've heard since the 1990s, but it's a rapidly-vanishing tradition, at least at the #1 spot.

The song's melody is as sturdy and repetitive as a hymn's, and there's a churchy stateliness to the entire proceedings, punctuated only by Dominguez' sensual saxophone solos. Whether Conjunto Primavera knew they had a hit and invested it with all the dramatic tension at their disposal or whether the high drama of the production was what made it a hit is an open question; either way, it's a late classic in a style that dominated the early and mid 1990s in this travelogue, the likes of which it's doubtful we'll run across again.

LOS TEMERARIOS, “QUÉ DE RARO TIENE”

24th July, 2004

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We first encountered Los Temerarios in 1997, singing a 1977 Vicente Fernández ballad. Now, seven years later, we meet them again, singing a 1990 Vicente Fernández ballad. That's not all they ever do, of course (we met them again in 1998 with an original), but it's apparently what the most people wanted out of them during the few particular weeks when nothing else was grabbing as many people's fancy.

Their 2004 album, Veintisiete, was as the title suggests their twenty-seventh album, and the image of the two bandleaders, brothers Adolfo and Gustavo Ángel Alba (Gustavo sings, Adolfo is the musical director) in sepiatone on the cover is an indication that it's an album of covers: not only Vicente Fernández but Juan Gabriel, Pedro Infante, and Cornelio Reyna are among the mariachi and ranchera classics the Ángel Alba boys tackle.

As with their 1997 cover, it's a perfectly adequate reading of a song that, not being Vicente, Gustavo doesn't have the lungpower to make his own. It's a classic barroom tearjerker, the complaint of a man who has lost everything, including the respect of society, because he can't keep away from women. "Qué de raro tiene?" he asks: "what's strange about it?" -- that's just how men (weak) and women (temptresses) are. Which is of course profoundly misogynist, and Los Temerarios try to palliate that a bit by making the video about a love triangle in which the woman dies, breaking both men's hearts.

But misogynist or not, classic mariachi will not have a place much longer on this travelogue. I'm inclined to enjoy it, despite its political limitations, while it's here.

JENNIFER PEÑA, “VIVO Y MUERO EN TU PIEL”

29th May, 2004

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

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

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

CHAYANNE, “CUIDARTE EL ALMA”

31st January, 2004

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Before beginning this travelogue, I think I would have expected a lot of it to sound like this: heavily-produced international romantic balladry with sensitive Spanish-guitar runs, a caricature of Latinidad borrowed more from the soundtrack to Don Juan DeMarco than from the living music of some twenty-five different Latin nations. And the caricature is at least somewhat rooted in fact: the song was co-written by Chilean composer Cristian Zalles (who makes it sound like an aching telenovela theme) and Catalan singer-songwriter Marc Durandeau (who gives it a lavish romanticism). 

But it's a natural fit for Chayanne, who has aged into the perfect sensitive crooner with a bit of a rasp. (He was a much better singer than Bryan Adams to begin with.) The studio-orchestral production, with close-miked violins and guitar, is classicist in a way that doesn't feel airless the way so much of the classicist orchestral production of the era can. And the song's natural rhythm, a gentle sway rather than the flat-footed 4/4 or waltz time of so much Anglophone balladry, only adds to the yearning in Chayanne's voice as he builds through it.

It was #1 for three weeks in the winter of 2004, when the charts were historically more open to unexpected hits thanks to diminished sales. It represents the next stage in Chayanne's evolution; into a fully adult crooner. I probably have never given him his full due here the way I have his contemporary Luis Miguel: as of this writing, I'll only have one more chance to do so.

SIN BANDERA, “MIENTES TAN BIEN”

22nd November, 2003

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A new strain in Mexican music opens here. It's not actually new, of course: both members of Sin Bandera, Mexican Leonel García and Argentine Noel Schajris, had been knocking about the industry for the bulk of the 90s, and when they got together the music they made wasn't particularly different from that of, say, Ricardo Arjona. But this is one of the first entrants in this travelogue of a musical tradition which will only grow more important in the years to come: internationalist Mexico City-based pop for thoughtful grownups.

The Distrito Federal's contributions to Mexico's musical traditions have hitherto been limited to the internationalist bolero movement of the 30s and 40s and the schlocky factory-line 80s pop which produced child stars (some of whom became adult stars) like Luis Miguel, Cristian Castro, and Timbiriche; but starting in the early 2000s, a scene began to coalesce that took the earnest, self-conscious artistry of Anglophone singer-songwriters for granted, and married it to all kinds of musical ideas. The producer who helped Sin Bandera's first few albums get off the ground was Áureo Baqueiro (who had gotten his start working for Timbiriche) -- the other debut albums he produced around the same time were Natalia Lafourcade's and Paty Cantú's.

Sin Bandera, who chose their name (without a flag) to indicate their loyalty to no nation or creed, a gesture of artistic freedom with roots in nineteenth-century Romanticism, were not the most creative of the scene's members: in fact "Mientes Tan Bien" (you lie so well) sounds like nothing so much as 70s soft rock, an America or James Taylor with updated production and less distinctive voices. As a song, it's terrific, a series of lies told and accepted which function both lyrically and mechanically as poetry, with superb rhymes and intricate rhythms. But as a record, it's dull and soporific, focusing on the glib prettiness of García's and Schajris' voices with such focus that a listener who isn't paying attention to the density of the words, who is just looking for a hook, is left wanting.

In fact, while the lyric is certainly broadly applicable (YouTube comments are full of broken-heart emojis embedded in countless narratives of trust and betrayal), it never accommodates more than a single idea, reformulated over and over again, and ends feeling rather smug and airless as a result. The video, in which supermodels pretend to be first poor fishing-village waifs and then bored, classy strippers, is the kind of thing which admires its own profundity without actually saying anything, all too indicative of the song's vacuity. The minute-long coda to the video, however, which interpolates an uptempo Sin Bandera song while showing the wrap party for the filming, is much easier to like.

It's a pity that this is Sin Bandera's only appearance at #1 to date (in fact very little of the D.F.'s grown-up pop will ever make it to this travelogue) -- they were more varied than this song suggests. But we have places to be. 2004 awaits.

OBIE BERMÚDEZ, “ANTES”

13th September, 2003

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There is, however, a limit.

Sometimes whiny, self-centered guys are just whiny, self-centered guys. What's more unforgivable is that they bring nothing new to the whiny self-centered guy table. Obie Bermúdez is, on this showing, entirely obviated by Enrique Iglesias, whose clutched-fist ball-of-neediness balladry at least sometimes has interesting production touches. Bermúdez' voice is smoother, and there's a Christian-music prettiness to the cascading harmonies in the chorus which a sophisticate like Iglesias would reject, but the lyrics are straightforward uncomplicating whining about a breakup, and how he demands to get the last word in.

This isn't the last we'll hear of Sr. Bermúdez, and I should note that I'm not writing him off: the Confesiones album as a whole is far more interesting and diverse than the undistinguished ballad "Antes" which carried him to his first #1. We've had unpromising starts here before.

CHAYANNE, “UN SIGLO SIN TÍ”

6th September, 2003

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Mere weeks after I complimented Ricky Martin for not letting himself be defined by songwriter Franco De Vita's lugubrious chest-beating sentiment-rock, I find that Chayanne has done exactly that. It's probably the best song, and almost certainly the best performance, that we've heard from him throughout this travelogue, but although he's well-suited to De Vita's sturdy, gospel-based sweeping chords and lead-footed rhythms, the result is a kind of emotionally-extravagant narcissist-rock that you have to be keyed into the emotions of or it will fall dispiritingly flat.

"Un Siglo Sin Tí" means "a century without you," and the lyrics of the song are a description of the singer's desolation at having been left, his contrition at having behaved badly, and his insistence that he has changed. Put that way, it doesn't necessarily sound very appealing (every abuser ever could sing along), but I've made the mistake before of believing that pop songs expressing sentiments that would be questionable in actual interpersonal relations are therefore worthless, and (especially) should not appeal to the female audience which does, in fact, enjoy them. Which is just an aesthetic extension on my part of Nice Guy syndrome. Nobody needs my thesis on why Chayanne's grand gesture at the end of the video is creepy.

Pop is, among much else, an idealized version of reality, a safe space where all emotions are allowed to play out without the repercussions that would attend them in life. Even in the real world closing out the possibility of actual contrition and actual forgiveness can be a mistake; but even if there are no good men in fact, let there be some in fiction.

JUANES FT. NELLY FURTADO, “FOTOGRAFÍA”

19th July, 2003

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

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

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

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