ROMEO SANTOS FT. DRAKE, “ODIO”

15th February, 2014

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I can't be sorry that I dragged my heels on this blog so long that I didn't get to this song until after the Summer of 2024 affixed a permanent asterisk to the featured artist here. Even before then, I still would not have been fulsome about his contribution -- the graceful skittering of bachata, particularly Romeo Santos' bachata, just doesn't work with the plodding whinery of Toronto's favorite son -- but in a post-"tryna strike a chord" landscape, greeting this entry in the Hot Latin #1s list with anything but resigned contempt would feel not just immoral but disloyal.

In a pre-streaming world, being #1 for 13 weeks would have been a notable achievement; in 2014, it just feels like a measure of Drake's overwhelming popularity that a song primarily in a language not spoken by most of his audience outperformed everything else in its category while he was between album cycles. Not that the headliner here doesn't matter: a perfectly adequate Romeo Santos solo song could be carved out with some judicious editing, and sold the song to the Latin audience in a way that Drake's vaguely passable Spanish verse could not have, let alone his more typically self-absorbed rap (in which he spits some of the worst game a self-declared lover boy ever has) in English.

But even with Drake excised, it's by some margin the worst song Romeo has had his name on to reach #1 -- the core thrust at the center of his lyric, "I hate the man who makes you happy," may be a relatable (though ignoble) sentiment, but everything else is just going through the motions, a generic canvas that can accommodate his guest's lazy brushstrokes.

I think I've said on this blog, a long time ago, that I was looking forward to the end of machismo and misogyny on this chart. I was a fool to think it would ever go away. 

Airplay Watch:

• Romeo Santos ft. Drake, "Odio"
• Discussed above.
• Yandel, "Hasta Abajo"
• More "Danza Kuduro"-core from the pretty one of the iconic reggaetón duo, this one notable for actually featuring a jacked-up reggaetón riddim underneath the synthesized accordion and soaring AutoTune.
• Juanes, "La Luz"
• The Colombian rocker goes pop, adding synths to his acoustic guitar strumming and fast-paced mapalé dance rhythms for a kiss-me-at-the-festival song that burns bright and fades as quickly.
• Carlos Vives ft. ChocQuibTown, "El Mar de Sus Ojos"
• Shout out to the avuncular Vives for featuring my favorite Afro-Colombian hip-hop trio on this vallenato/champeta rave-up, even if Slow doesn't get a verse. 
• Wisin ft. Jennifer Lopez & Ricky Martin, "Adrenalina"
• The shouty one of the iconic reggaetón duo plays generous host two famously pretty guests for another uptempo reggaetón-inflected, empty-calorie dance banger.
• Enrique Iglesias ft. Marco Antonio Solís, "El Perdedor"
• Discussed in the previous entry.
• Prince Royce, "Te Robaré"
• Another pretty-boy bachata-cum-R&B song, although this one is the best-arranged and most sincerely-delivered I've heard from Royce since his debut. 

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS FT. ROMEO SANTOS, “LOCO”

19th October, 2013

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It's been a litle while since we had to consider Enrique Iglesias, a one-time constant feature of this travelogue. He hasn't had a solo #1 since 2008 -- two Wisin y Yandel collabs and one with Juan Luis Guerra are his only appearances since -- and his first post-streaming appearance being a duet with the second-biggest solo hitmaker of the year (behind only Marc Anthony) is perhaps indicative of the kinds of high-budget cross-promotional synergies that are now necessary to drive big hits even from the most famous, reliably high-performing, and enormously beloved names in the Latin music industry.

It's also been a while since I've mentioned how I felt about a song at the time. Largely that's because starting in 2013 I was disconnected from Latin radio, having given up my car and with it the hours a day I spent jacked into the airwaves; podcasts and à-la-carte streaming now accompanied me on public transit instead. But I heard "Loco," and I loved "Loco." I hadn't actually remembered "Loco" until it started playing (although I recognized the single art from my 2013 year-end list) -- but those opening lines struck me with the familiar force of a Proustian madeleine. "Te pido de rodillas" (I beg you on my knees) -- and I found myself shocked that this was 2013 instead of two or three years earlier, when I was much more deeply immersed in Latin radio. I guess my tapering-off was more gradual than I remembered.

The songwriting is credited to Iglesias, his frequent collaborator in these years Descemer Bueno (stay tuned for more), and Dominican producer Lenny Medina, which makes sense: Romeo's literate, vivid lyrics are nowhere to be found. But Romeo is credited with co-production of this bachata version of the song (theres's also a banda version with Roberto Tapia for the Mexican market and a pop version with India Martínez for Spain), and his shrewd understanding of the ways that bachata can be applied to a standard pop structure make this a much more successful adoption of bachata on Iglesias' part than his previous effort.

Not that he's not again outclassed vocally -- Romeo can sing rings around him, and the contrast between Iglesis' hangdog huskiness and Santos' angelic fluidity makes for a slightly uneven listening experience. (In the other versions, Roberto Tapia's stentorian belt produces an even more schizoid effect, while India Martínez is the only singer on Enrique's unenthusiastic level, and the result is pure mush.) But the melodic structure is solid, the lyrics -- a standard admiration/complaint about loving a woman to the point of madness -- are good, and the overall effect is that of a minor classic. Would I think this if I hadn't loved it deeply in 2013 and I was just judging it as I've judged the other songs I have no associations with? Possibly.

But all we can play with are the hands we're dealt.  

Airplay Watch:

• Enrique Iglesias ft. Romeo Santos, "Loco"
• Discussed above.

ROMEO SANTOS, “PROPUESTA INDECENTE”

28th September, 2013

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"It feels good to be king," mutters Romeo Santo during a typically florid instrumental break. The not-quite Mel Brooks quotation feels entirely sincere, and only proved more so as the song soared to a global success that not even the streaming chart could really capture. It was only #1 on the Hot Latin chart for a total of four weeks in late 2013 and early 2014, but it is currently the second most-lucrative Latin song of the 2010s, behind only a certain 2017 smash. A lot of its enormous success was cumulative, though: the YouTube video reached a billion views in 2016, and although Romeo had had enormous success for a good decade prior, both with Aventura and as a soloist, it has become perhaps his definitive song for an audience that was still in elementary school when Aventura was breaking records.

The title is a direct translation of the English phrase "indecent proposal," and the lyrics live up to that steamy suggestion. Santos' lyrics have always been aimed at an adult audience, but he strips away some of his literary floweriness here in order to make a nakedly sexual advance, asking permission to seduce the listener in his car, raise her skirt, and "medir tu sensatez" (measure your sensitivity). His usual florid bachata guitar and percussion are joined occasionally by a delirious tango bandoneón, coloring the romantic Latin musical present with perhaps the ultimate avatar of the romantic Latin musical past, and placing himself firmly in the lineage of such towering Latin lovers as Carlos Gardel (and, from earlier in this travelogue, Luis Miguel).

I'm not sure that self-assignment is wholly convincing: he's a little too glib, a little too confident in his own inability to do wrong, to reach those heights, and this song, while gorgeous, isn't as affecting as much of his back catalog. Granted, I'm not in the best position to judge the effectiveness of an allosexual come-on to a heterosexual woman; but to my mind, Romeo has always been more seductive in songs where he is less certain of his chances. Those days are gone forever, though: Romeo Santos is now an institution too big to fail, with the sophomore album this was the lead single of, Formula Vol. 2, carefully engineered to do exactly twice the business of his solo debut, itself already a global smash with numrous #1s.

Still, his transition into becoming an institution means he's that much less of a pop star, and no longer needs to be down in the muck throwing elbows to fight for chart position. This is not quite our last glimpse of Romeo Santos -- although his final #1 (as of this writing) will probably be more about his duet partner than him -- but the necessity of managing his stardom portfolio will increasingly overshadow his artistic efforts. His albums still go reliably multiplatinum, but from here on out they're a smaller and smaller part of the Romeo Santos brand.

Airplay Watch:

• Carlos Vives, "Bailar Contigo"
• A joyous rock 'n' vallenato singalong straight out of Vives' middle-aged comfort zone.
• Romeo Santos, "Propuesta Indecente"
• Discussed above.
• Yandel, "Hablé de Tí"
• Wisin notched a solo Airplay #1 last time, so now it's Yandel's turn: a rubbery dance song with his usual AutoTune-heavy crooning and some millennial whoops to peg it firmly to the mid-2010s. Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall dominates the video, lending it a more futuristic air than the music strictly earns.

ROMEO SANTOS, “LA DIABLA”

4th August, 2012

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The fourth and final #1 off of Formula, Vol. 1 reached the top fifteen months after the first, a feat which would seem to cement Romeo Santos as one of the major voices of contemporary Latin pop, a reliable hitmaker for years to come. But while his subsequent albums will regularly spin off singles that do well in the charts, this particular feat remains unmatched; only two more #1s will (as of this writing) fight their way through the incorporation of streaming data later in 2012, and one of them will be goosed by a more famous Anglophone feature.

But that's for the future to worry about: "La Diabla" (the she-devil) is a remarkable piece of work even in this year of vivid and unusual one-week wonders. Paired with "Mi Santa" in video form (a juxtaposition which evokes, but hardly rises to the level of commenting on, the misogynistic madonna/whore binary), the song recounts, in abstracted poetic imagery, a love affair with a heartless woman who takes the singer for all he's worth, leaving him with nothing but a broken heart. Which is of course an ancient theme: Jezebel, Salome, Nimue, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Mata Hari: sexually available but cruel women who lead to men's destruction are so common in poetry and litererature as to be almost unremarkable. But they're not a very frequent theme in pop music, in part because pop tends towards the Dionysian and so generally celebrates sexuality rather than otherwise, and in maybe greater part because ordinary women have significant purchasing power within pop and aren't generally interested in that kind of narrative.

So Romeo embracing the trope despite so clearly marketing himself for the female gaze is another sign that his solo career is about establishing himself as an auteur in line with traditional markers of masculine artistic prowess: casual misogyny masked by flowery metaphor is part of staking a claim to literary respectability. As if to underscore the gesture, there are 70s rock elements in the mix beneath the bachata flourishes. A burbling synth here, a snappy electric guitar solo there: nobody does salable misogyny like a rock star publicized as a poet.

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.

ROMEO SANTOS FT. USHER, “PROMISE”

29th October, 2011

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I think I've mentioned here before that in the early 2010s I was so enamored by bachata and convinced of the truth of the thirty-year cycle of popular music that I believed quite seriously that the future of R&B and romantic music in general was bachata.

(That thirty-year cycle, in brief: jazz had risen in the 1920s, displaced parlor song by the 1940s, then become the establishment; rock & roll had risen in the 1950s, displaced dancefloor orchestras by the 1970s, then become the establishment; hip-hop and electronic dance had risen in the 1980s, displaced rock bands by the 2000s, and so in the 2010s we were due for another shakeup. With perhaps terminal optimism, I thought it would be interestingly unexpected if the future of popular music was Afro-Latin as well as African-American.)

I even made a confident prediction at one point that the first Anglophone R&B singer to make a bachata record would signal a shift in Anglophone tastes. That Usher was the first big R&B star to sing on a bachata song did not disappoint me; but its failure to cross over did. "Promise" only rose to #83 on the Hot 100, shut out of pop radio play as a matter of course, although apparently it was in heavy rotation on MTV (to the degree that any music videos were; the channel had been in an all-reality format for years). But it was a massive hit on Latin radio, spending a total of ten weeks at #1 on the Hot Latin chart over the winter of 2011/2012.

Compare it to the last English/Spanish duet that went to #1 in the winter, "Looking for Paradise". As a collaboration, it's far more successful: Romeo's and Usher's voices are well-matched, Romeo taking the higher falsetto and Usher maintaining his usual liquid tonality without showboating; he's a guest here, and behaves like one. But the skittering rhythm, fluid guitar picking, and fluttering melodies are, as ever, the most memorable element of a bachata song. Although the lyrics suffer slightly from the usual dual-language pop problem of the Spanish lyrics being more poetically expressive than the English, Romeo is not engaging in the extended metaphors and ornate similes that he did with Aventura or on his own: it's consciously an attempt at a big-tent crossover hit, and so circles around the single idea of a man feeling himself trapped by love, and submitting to it gladly, if only he can be assured that his beloved will be faithful to him.

The video takes pains to make clear that Romeo and Usher are both romancing different women, perhaps because the danger of the song being read as two men singing to each other was too high, something that the frequent reiteration of "mami" and "girl" in the chorus already safeguards against. Given R&B history, the meathead association of falsetto singing with suspect heterosexuality is as racist as it is homophobic; but we are still squarely in the "no homo" era, and male sex symbols aimed at a female audience can't be too careful.

Of course bachata did not take over R&B; eventually it even ebbed from mass popularity in the pan-Latin circles represented by the chart, retreating to its Dominican-diasporic roots. But I was not entirely wrong about the thirty-year cycle: although the completeness of earlier displacements has always been overstated, which means that living through another is harder to recognize, because there's always more continuity visible in the present than the tidy periodizations of history suggest. But I would suggest that the most influential (if not necessarily the most profitable) currents of modern pop are now generally Afro-Latin in origin. I'll have more to say about this as we get to it; but while this song may be understood as something of a dead end, it's better constructed and more elegant than many such.

ROMEO SANTOS, “YOU”

28th May, 2011

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A little over a year after Aventura's departure ("Dile al Amor"'s last week at #1 was April 10, 2010), their former frontman returns with a song that at first blush sounds as though nothing has changed. Bori Rivera's fluid fingerpicked guitar solos are a little less show-stealing than Lenny Santos', but they're very much working in the same smoky bachata + r&b idiom, and Giselle Moya's breathy vocals delivering the English one-word refrain functions just as she had on "Por un Segundo", as an erotic signpost marking the object of the lyrics' extravagant desire.

But to the degree that Aventura was a boy band, Romeo's solo debut participates in a longstanding tradition: more sexually explicit, more grown-up, more concerned with establishing his individual persona separate from that of the group. Structurally, "You" is an exercise in delayed gratification, teasing the listener for four unbroken verses of increasingly florid come-ons, as Romeo sings about drinking his lover's fluids and devouring her for hours, before finally hitting a chorus. Then come the taut guitar solos, a spacey bridge, and one more, slightly less impactful chorus. If it's not intended to be analogous to the rhythms of sex, it doesn't do anything to deter the comparison.

At the time I enjoyed it as a splash of cool bachata intermixed with many other flavors on the radio, as I jumped between Spanish- and English-language stations without compunction, seeking music rather than advertising. I don't believe the horniness made much of an impression, only the romanticism and the mild frisson of psychedelic beauty in Giselle's coos. I was still under the impression that bachata might become popular enough to be absorbed into the r&b mainstream, not really yet aware of how closely identified with a specifically Dominican identity it is and would remain.

Eleven years and many millions of A&R dollars later, there are no more international bachata stars than there were in 2011, as the urbano musics whose stars have risen in the meantime have eclipsed it, and it now sounds slightly old-fashioned, no longer thrillingly modern as it was in the pre-streaming early 2010s, when niches could still be big enough to make an impact without ever having to submit to the indignity of going viral.