MARC ANTHONY, “VIVIR MI VIDA”

18th May, 2013

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A Nuyorican cover of a song in Arabic and French song by a singer born in Algeria and resident in Luxembourg, produced by a Swedish team: the anodyne feel-good façade of Obama-era globalization reaches something of a crescendo here, with a string of decisions made by individuals who may be nothing but sincere in their motivations but who end up producing a symbol of a global consensus rapidly fading into the rearview in 2025.

Let's start back in 1992, when thirty-two-year-old Algerian raï singer Khaled, having recently moved to France and dropped the prefix "Cheb" (young) from his stage name, released the single "Didi", produced by American quirkmaster Don Was, whose addition of a new jack swing beat, a celebratory horn chart, and funk pop bass to Khaled's lovestruck performance turned him into a global star with a musical footprint across continental Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. He maintained that position for the next decade-plus with a series of raï hits intermingled with Western dance sounds, one of the ambassadors of the 90s vision of "world music" -- and in 2012, at the age of fifty-two, he staged a comeback with "C'est la Vie", produced by Swedish-Moroccan superproducer RedOne, a canny admixture of raï and post-subprime dancepop, with RedOne's signature airy synth blasts and thumping beats overlaying Algerian hand percussion and syncopated keyboard patterns not a million miles away from the montuno figures of Afro-Cuban mambo. It's a big-tent singalong in Arabic and French, and the video, with its photogenic cast of ethnically diverse dancers and models expressing a genericized, unthreatening joy, is virtually a pro-immigration ad campaign aimed at the European petty bourgeoisie, sentimental but vacuous.

"C'est la Vie" was Khaled's biggest hit since "Didi," soaring up a lot of European charts and making waves across the Middle East; and like "Didi" it inspired a bunch of covers, foremost of which was the salsa reimagining by Marc Anthony and Sergio George which is our actual topic today. But let's go back to the early 90s again.

We first met Marc Anthony on this travelogue in 1997, but he'd been making music since 1988, initially as an English-language singer on Latin freestyle and underground house tracks produced by the likes of Little Louie Vega and Todd Terry. But in 1993, after being bowled over by Juan Gabriel's "Hasta Que Te Conocí," he devoted himself to singing in Spanish, and specifically to salsa: his cover was where the real Marc Anthony was born. He's eight years younger than Khaled, but their careers still moved in an odd parallel: both were singers of a specific postcolonial ethnic music closely identified with immigrant enclaves in the imperial core; both also reached out to the broader western pop landscape and were celebrities -- rockstars, even -- beyond their minority identities; both had high-profile marriages whose troubles were splashed over the tabloid press.

Marc Anthony's divorce from Jennifer Lopez was fresh news in early 2013, and the song was widely understood at the time as being a man's declaration of happiness over his newfound independence from an allegedly difficult to please woman. The Spanish lyrics are credited exclusively to Anthony, although the chorus at least is not too far of from the original. Compare the Spanish "Voy a reír, voy a gozar, vivir mi vida, la la la la la" (I'm going to laugh, I'm going to enjoy myself, live my life, la la la la la) with the French "On va s'aimer, on va danser, oui, c'est la vie, la la la la la" (We're going to love, we're going to dance, yes, that's life la la la la la). The video very highmindedly casts the song as a tribute to his fans, particularly in his hometown of New York, but the fact that the fans in the video are mostly very young women is its own indication of the kind of rockstar imagery that was being invoked.

Ultimately I enjoy "Vivir Mi Vida" a lot more than "C'est la Vie," if only because the salsa instrumentation doesn't insist on itself as much as RedOne's bombastic thumping; the sparse Latin percussion, with its generous empty spaces, leaves room for a subtler kind of dancing than slamming trance, and Sergio George's arrangement is full of the kind of detail and narrative that the club-oriented repetition of the original has no room for. Both are still pretty cheesy singalongs, even chantalongs aimed as much at soccer terraces as dancefloors, so maybe it's just my greater familiarity with salsa than with raï that makes Marc Anthony's feal realer to me.

Airplay Watch:

• Intocable, "Te Amo (Para Siempre)"
• A beautiful middle-aged tejano ballad that I'm even more annoyed than usual that the streaming-era chart didn't give me the chance to dig more deeply into. 
• Marc Anthony, "Vivir Mi Vida"
• Discussed above.
• Katherine Alexander, "Put It in a Kiss"
• A forgotten electroswing novelty produced by Dominican producer Maffio adapting the rhythms and melody of Irving Berlin's "Puttin' on the Ritz" to cheerful Zumba-friendly ends. Stuck around for three weeks in January 2014 while "Vivir Mi Vida" and its two late-2013 successors swapped  back and forth before being replaced by the first new Hot Latin #1 of 2014.

TITO EL BAMBINO & MARC ANTHONY, “¿POR QUÉ LES MIENTES?”

19th January, 2013

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The streaming-era chart can still be punctuated by one-week wonders, especially on songs like this that unite two proven hitmakers who can marshal their overlapping fanbases to stream their newest single. Although radio helped as well: the single was released in November, and it peaked at #1 on the Airplay chart two weeks before it made its appearance here. It would remain there for two further weeks, while the streaming-included chart moved on to a more resounding crossover hit.

I took Tito El Bambino's previous appearance here as a breath of fresh air, but this song harkens back to his first appearance back in 2009, another high-drama cumbiarengue song combining classic Latin tropical arrangements with modern plainspoken urbano -- unless I'm much mistaken, this is the first time that the word mierda (shit) has been heard at this chart's #1.

The full line is "me trataste como mierda ante la gente" (you treated me like shit in front of people), an accusation toward a former partner who is now attempting to cause drama about the singer's current partner; the entire song is a refusal to be pulled back into the self-pitying narcissistic vortex of a toxic ex, which would, I'll admit, be more attractive to me coming from women towards a presumptively male interlocutor. But Tito and Marc make it work, particularly Marc -- who had recently been in the news for his separation from Jennifer Lopez; art is not biography, but fans undoubtedly read this song in reference to her.

But then Marc Anthony could make anything sound gripping and real -- El Bambino's more vacuous tonality, digitally smoothed and auto-harmonized as it is, has to rely on reggaetón-trained rhythmic variation in order to even the playing field and not be outshined on his own song. He doesn't quite pull it off, in my estimation: the penultimate chorus, which he takes instead of Marc Anthony, feels weightless by comparison with all the others. But I have to applaud the construction and especially the arrangement of the song: with its glossy strings, punchy horns, and busy percussion, it has a classic Latin sound but enough of a modern bite to make it more than an exercise in nostalgia.

Airplay Watch:

• Tito El Bambino & Marc Anthony, "¿Por Qué Les Mientes?"
• Discussed above.

VICTOR MANUELLE, “SI TÚ ME BESAS”

18th February, 2012

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

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

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

GLORIA ESTEFAN FT. CARLOS SANTANA, JOSÉ FELICIANO & SHEILA E., “NO LLORES”

1st September, 2007

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Gloria Estefan's first album in four years means Gloria Estefan's first #1 in four years, which is roughly an illustration of her fortunes since 1989 -- she is easily the woman with the most #1 singles on the Hot Latin chart, and if she's dominated the 2000s less than she dominated the 1990s, it's because she has more of an empire to maintain; music is only one of her revenue streams, and possibly the least lucrative.

But she's still a brilliant musical mind, and a masterful synthesist; so the big single from 90 Millas, a reference to the distance between Miami and Havana, brings three (four, if legendary Cuban trumpeter Arturo Sandoval is counted) of the most iconic Latin musicians of the later twentieth century onto her celebratory, very Cuban rave-up. Mexican-American fusion guitarist Santana, Puerto Rican Latin jazz guitarist and singer Feliciano, and Mexican-American/Creole R&B percussionist and singer Sheila E(scovedo) are among the only Latin artists to have come close to matching Gloria Estefan's success in the broader US pop market, and Santana's and Feliciano's dueling guitars, one smokily electric and the other tautly acoustic, and Escovedo's erupting timbales bring life and color to what is already a pretty fantastic circular danzón encouraging the listener not to weep, to embrace life and reject fear or regret.

Formally, this is yet another of Estefan's nostalgic tours of pre-Castro Cuban music, but thanks the fire brought by her guests it's closer to everything-and-the-kitchen-sink salsa -- born in hustling immigrant New York -- than to the classicist Havana forms she's often defaulted to.

And that engagement with something like the present tense doesn't stop with her similarly middle-aged peers -- the song was issued with two official remixes, one a celebratory reggaetón featuring the all-conquering duo Wisin y Yandel, and the other a Miami hip-hop jam featuring a still little-known Cuban-American Dirty South rapper calling himself Pitbull. Both the remixes cut out Santana's guitar, which is a bit too bluesy to play nice with contemporary hip-hop, but Gloria and her "no llores, no llores, no llores" chanting singers are intact.

Pitbull even thanks her for the opportunity at the end of his remix -- in two years, "I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)" would make him a household name, though he won't appear on this travelogue for several years more. He and Gloria share a reverential attitude toward Cuba (and an all-American loathing of Castro), along with a canny pop ear and willingness to raid from anywhere to sustain their global pop empires.

SHAKIRA FT. WYCLEF JEAN, “HIPS DON'T LIE”

27th May, 2006

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"Refugees run the seas cause we own our own boats."

Well, Jesus Christ.

Of course I'm thinking about all the stories, all the photos, all the statistics I've seen about Syrian and Libyan and Sudanese and Colombian and Honduran and Burmese and Tibetan refugees since 2006. Of course I'm thinking about the parallels that are being inexorably drawn between rising anti-refugee sentiment in the US and Europe and the doors which were slammed in the faces of German Jews during the lead-up to the Holocaust. Of course I'm aching with a bone-deep misery over the gap between the triumphant utopianism of pop and the squalid murderousness of the actual world.

I understand that, faced with that gap, one reasonable response is to reject pop as a hollow illusion, an opiate of the masses, Huxley's soma drip-fed into our veins to keep us pacified and unprotesting while Orwell's Big Brother raids our pockets for its unending wars. The squalid murderousness is the fact: triumphant utopianism is a useless and possibly dangerous fiction that obscures our view of reality, reassuring us that everything turns out for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Well, maybe. But Huxley and Orwell aren't the only midcentury British writers to engage with the effects of totalitarianism on the human spirit. In The Silver Chair, one of his books for children, C. S. Lewis includes a sequence in which the adventuring heroes are lulled into a trance by the Queen of the Underworld, who induces them to believe that their memories of the Overland, including vegetation and the cosmos, are entirely made up, a story they've been telling each other, and that no world but hers, hewn from rock and glimmering fragilely in the endless darkness within the earth, exists. The spell is only broken when the gloomy, sensible, semi-amphibious character Puddleglum stamps out her fire, and makes the following speech:

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

Philosophically it's unconvincing -- the argument that because humans can imagine a better world than this one, one must exist, is a very debased theodicy -- but poetically it's magnificent. That, I think, is why I will always return to pop: because it can, and almost necessarily does, imagine radically better ways of living and relating to one another than exist today. But they can; four babies dreaming can't make Narnia exist, but millions of Black, brown, and poor folk working together can reshape the world. It's not going to be easy: all extant power structures and our long inheritance of human inequality are arrayed against us. But we have resources they don't: beauty, and joy, and community, and an equally long inheritance of human resilience and creativity.

That inheritance is on magnificent display in this song, one of the most purely perfect pop songs of the decade. Of course when I say pure I don't mean that it's not complex: a vast array of musical traditions, technological interpolations, and yes, capitalist funding went into it. Supposedly beginning life as a sketch of a song called "Lips Don't Lie" with which Wyclef unsuccessfully tried to tempt Lauryn Hill into a Fugees reunion, it was eventually included on the 2004 soundtrack to Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights as "Dance Like This", a duet with Puerto Rican singer Claudette Ortiz. Listen to that, and you can hear the basic framework of the song, including the unmistakable sample of the trumpet flourish from Jerry Rivera's "Amores Como el Nuestro", but it just circles around itself over and over again, a mime of mutual seduction in which Ortiz sounds utterly anonymous and the song itself sounds bored, trailing off without ever having landed.

So when Shakira's label reached out to him for a remix to extend the life of "La Tortura", Wyclef said he had a better song that she would be perfect for. She rewrote the female duet partner's lyrics in her inimitably unidiomatic English and beefed up the production with Wyclef's producer Jerry Duplessis. Recording was done in Miami, Nassau, London, New York, Bogotá, and Vancouver; samples were cleared; and the single was released in February of 2006, three months after Oral Fixation, Vol. 2 was released to middling sales, a major disappointment after the way that "La Tortura" had boosted Fijación Oral, Vol. 1. But if you remember the summer of 2006 at all, you know that "Hips Don't Lie" was inescapable no matter where you were in the world (a Spanish version was also released, but I've never met anyone who heard it). 2006 was the absolute nadir of my engagement with contemporary pop music, and even I loved it.

I love it more now, twelve years later, as the world has grown crueller and more hateful toward the refugees Wyclef keeps repping in the song, as outright hatred (rather than ignorance) of Hispanic and Caribbean culture has grown more vocal and regularized in the Trump era even while Spanish-language and Spanish-English hybrids have become the lingua franca of international pop. The boiling insanity of xenophobia, isolationism, and apocalypse-mongering in the Anglosphere feeds back on itself until it becomes a white hunger for Black and brown death that can't be shocked back into sensible morality by reading stories of boats sinking in the Mediterranean or seeing images of dead babies on beaches.

As counterpoint to which a recitation of seduction between a Lebanese-Colombian and a Hatian-American, both millionaires, as formalized and mannered as a Noh play with its symmetrical verses and inevitable rap-verse peroration, might seem less than effective.

But the heraldic fanfare which opens and punctuates the song seems to announce more than a mere two-person exchange of intimacies: it is the opening of a tournament, a call to arms, a reveille, but most immediately of all it is a summons to the dancefloor. And "baile en la calle de noche, baile en la calle de día" is a utopian ideal, quoting Fernando Villalona's classic 1985 merengue "Carnaval" but in spirit stretching back to at least the liberatory utopianism of "Dancing in the Street" and perhaps even the celebratory 1902 ragtime song "On Emancipation Day" by Will Marion Cook and Paul Laurence Dunbar. (En Barranquilla se baila así, of course, and the soundtrack to liberation has never been exclusively in English; but I still know the Anglophone canon best.)

Of course it can go either way: the organization of culture purely by the logic of capital means that oppressor as well as oppressed can draw cheer, comfort, and hope from subaltern popular music. Which is why the ground is always shifting, why yesterday's utopian promise is today's banal muzak, why every triumph is also on some level a surrender. Like Carnival itself, a Dionysian space carved out of the Church calendar which only reinforces its control over all the rest of the year, pop has been assigned its quarter, and the eschatological promise it makes of dancing in the streets day and night, when the shackles of labor and the promise of state violence have finally been smashed, can only be an endlessly deferred IOU. Until it isn't. Lord haste the day.

No fighting.

MARC ANTHONY, “AHORA QUIÉN”

19th June, 2004

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The song that replaced Jennifer Peña's "Vivo y Muero en Tu Piel" (and indeed danced a duet with it, as the two songs passed the #1 spot back and forth for eight weeks in the summer of 2004) is a perfect illustrative example of the way the Latin pop industry, and even the Latin pop listenership, treat men and women unequally. "Piel," you may remember, was released in both a pop and a cumbia version, with a glossy video for both (more or less the same video, but her lip-syncing is different to go with the different styles) -- and "Ahora Quién" was released in both a pop and a salsa version, with the same glossy video for both; only slightly more frantic editing in the salsa version distinguished them.

But where for Peña (at least going by current YouTube counts, which is the only data I have) the pop ballad version was more popular by an order of magnitude, Marc Anthony enjoys the privilege of having the regional, tropical, "ethnic" version be the more popular one, again by an order of magnitude. For both of them, the swelling, bombastic pop renditions of the songs are full of florid emotion and a certain amount of stately narcissism; the ones with the Caribbean rhythms and punchy arrangements make the same emotional point, but also invite the listener to participate in a living tradition of dance and movement rather than just wallowing in lugubrious emotional identification.

It's indisputably true that throughout the history of pop music women have been used as a point of lugubrious emotional identification more frequently than men, who are more often awarded the guardianship of ethnic traditions and the authority of inscribing their personality (rather than just their emotional reactions) onto whatever they perform. This is sexism at its most basic and primal, and few listeners in even the most progressive circles are wholly free from its logic (I certainly would not claim to be). But it's also true that Marc Anthony was, and is, just a bigger star -- both his videos are several orders of magnitude more popular than Peña's -- and his career both preceded hers and has continued since her withdrawal from the market. There's no one-to-one correspondence here.

With its neurotic, motormouthed expression of jealousy, "Ahora Quién" is a pretty good song qua song -- songwriter and producer Estéfano plays the role here that Rudy Pérez did for Jennifer Peña -- but it's neither Marc Anthony at his best nor entirely free from awkwardness: it's pretty obvious that it was composed as a power ballad and had to be retrofitted into a tropical dance number. And even in the salsa version, the first verse still contains a fragment of the pop ballad; but once the montuno gets the upper hand, the funky rhythm never leaves it.

It's the second salsa #1 of 2004, which given how little salsa has appeared here since 2000 might mean the music was experiencing a bit of a renaissance -- but it's only too obvious how unrepresentative the #1 spot is of the entirety of musical activity. It's the mid-oughts already; other island rhythms are coming up from behind.

VÍCTOR MANUELLE, “TENGO GANAS”

17th April, 2004

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2004 has been a year of belated appearances at #1 -- first Paulina Rubio, now Víctor Manuelle, who had been second only to Marc Anthony as a leading voice of the younger generation of New York salsa singers in the 90s. But although his albums had been cracking the Billboard 2000 since 1999, it wasn't until his ninth album that he was rewarded with his first Hot Latin #1.

In fairness to the Latin radio-listening public, it's a hell of a song. Post-millennial salsa appearances here have been patchy at best: Gilberto Santa Rosa is a legend, but "Que Alguien Me Diga" isn't really salsa; Son By Four were to salsa what *NSYNC were to R&B; Gloria Estefan opted for Cuban nostalgia instead; and only India knocked both sound and performance out of the park. "Tengo Ganas" (I Want) is both classic and modern; as a song, it would have been thoroughly at home in the 80s salsa romántica wave, but Manuelle's detailed, sensitive performance and the plush punchiness of the production (listen for the pause and rush before the chorus) make it fit right in with the Ricky Martins and Shakiras of the modern pop chart.

Manuelle's primary claim to fame is as one of the great soneros of his generation, a singer whose mastery of the improvised post-song son section of a salsa performance (the bit when the other performers chant a scrap of the lyric in unison) was matched only by Gilberto Santa Rosa (who gave him his first break when Manuelle was still in high school). He finds the pocket and lingers in it easily here, but the son is abbreviated because it's a pop record rather than an extended salsa workout.

We'll hear from him again, though not for some time. He hasn't gone away, by any means, although he prefers to make the music industry come to him rather than chasing trends by singing anything other than salsa. His most recent high-profile single was a collaboration with a fellow Puerto Rican, rapper Bad Bunny, which fits Manuelle's silky salsa into the era of reggaeton and Latin trap. This travelogue started in 1986, which felt so removed from 2010 as to be alien; from 2004, we can just glimpse 2018 on the horizon.

INDIA, “SEDÚCEME”

15th February, 2003

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The arbitrariness of the charts strikes again, as the Nuyorican singer to whom Jennifer Lopez is most indebted only appears on this blog now, years after J-Lo made her casual appearance. Linda Viera Caballero, nicknamed "la India" (the Indian) by family because of her darker complexion and straight black hair, had started in a freestyle group in the mid-80s and made a "Latin Madonna" record in 1988, but only really came into her own when she met Latin jazz titan Eddie Palmieri in 1991. Her big but flexible voice and facility with jazz, salsa, and r&b made her one of the great Latin singers of the 1990s, switching between Spanish on dynamic salsa workouts and English on legendary house tracks from local New York and New Jersey producers.

Her 2002 album Latin Song Bird: Mi Alma y Corazón was a kind of capstone on a decade of great work, a summary of her whole repertoire (the next album would be a Greatest Hits), with punchy electronic updates of classic Caribbean sounds from salsa and bolero to merengue and bachata to straightforward romantic ballads and even a Christmas song. "Sedúceme" was the big hit: it was on the album in both salsa and ballad versions, and would also be released in English as a series of house remixes ranging from rote to classic banger.

But the salsa original, which leads off the album and soundtracks the music video, is fully as vibrant and modern as any club mix: much of the salsa instrumentation may be traditional, but synth strings, electric bass, and glassy pianos swirl in the mix much like samples or patches in a DJ's mix. But the star of the song is undeniably her voice, which combines traditional diva power with a jazzy, soulful sense of timing and phrasing. Since most of the female-led salsa we've heard over the course of this travelogue has been from pop singers like Thalía, Gloria Estefan, or Daniela Roma, it's a real pleasure to hear la India's powerful control and rich technique in service of a basic but universal sentiment: love me now, for the moment is fleeting, and I want to carry the memory of your body in mine.

THALÍA, “NO ME ENSEÑASTE”

26th October, 2002

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Two singles, two number ones: Thalía, after a decade of hard pop work, has fully arrived. She is part of the generation of pan-Latin modernizers like Enrique, Marc, Ricky, Alejandro, and Shakira, and although a silly gender-essentialized literalism might suggest that she has the most in common with Shakira, she actually reminds me more of Enrique Iglesias. A similarly limited range, thin voice, and reliance on expressiveness over sonority means that she's carried by production more often than the burnished voices of Marc Anthony, Ricky Martin or Alejandro Fernández are. (Shakira's even more unconventional voice is its own animal.) But unlike Enrique, Thalía knows how to use her voice to ends other than balled-fist self-pity.

This was the second single from her 2002 album Thalía, and since "Tú y Yo" was an uptempo jam, "No Me Enseñaste" (you didn't teach me) is therefore by venerable pop tradition a ballad. At least on the album it was: the single release, in a now-familiar attempt at covering all bases, contains the "Estéfano Mix" (a club version), the "Marc Anthony Mix" (a salsa version), and the "Regional Mix" (a cumbia version). When she performed the song at the 2002 Latin Grammys, the first half was the ballad original and the second half was the salsa mix, in a triumphant performance that cemented her belated but complete arrival on the US Spanish-language music scene.

Although the "Estéfano Mix" is period trance (and so has perhaps aged better than any of the others for an EDM-centric music scene), Colombian superproducer Estéfano had also co-written and produced the original. The lyric, surprisingly wordy for such a straightforward pop song, is nominally about loss (the central line is "you didn't teach me, love, how to live without you"), but Thalía doesn't play it that way: her gospelly woah-oahs at the end are a celebration of getting over the bastard. Love didn't teach her, goes the narrative of her performance, so she taught herself.

THALÍA, “TÚ Y YO”

20th July, 2002

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It would no doubt be unfair to attribute the high-gloss sheen, uptempo rock attitude, and high-octane production on this single entirely to the example set by Shakira's English-language makeover, or even to the generational game change led by Ricky Martin now more than three years ago. My examination of the Hot Latin chart solely from the vantage point of its #1s has left me disgracefully ignorant as to the bulk of Thalía's career; but her previous appearance here almost exactly two years ago was less than a knockout.

It's not her fault that the luck of the charts has cast her as playing catch-up: certainly the production and even the instrumentation of "Tú y Yo" sounds exactly like a sequel to "Livin' La Vida Loca," or even to "She Bangs," but it can be understood more in terms of a trend-hopping victory lap than as trend-hopping desperation. The music industry was still feeling relatively imperial in 2002, so multiple renditions of the song were issued: the video version, as linked above, plus a cumbia version featuring the Corpus Christi genre-straddling band Kumbia Kings, founded by Selena's (Q.E.P.D.) brother A. B. Quintanilla; the album version, edited down from the video, and a year later, an English-language rewrite with lyrics by Kara DioGuardi.

The industry formula for "Latin crossover hit" had been perfected by this time, thanks to Desmond Child's Ricky Martin hits, hits by Enrique Iglesias and Marc Anthony, and (sigh) Santana's "Smooth" -- uptempo rock music featuring a montuno piano line, a rhythm section heavy on cowbell, and bright horns that emphasize dynamics rather than carry the melody. The production was handled by the song's co-writer, Colombian hitmaker Estéfano, who has appeared here primarily as the wizard behind Chayanne, and if the formula is predictable it's still effective: Thalía's emotionally-driven performance, snarling and whimpering as necessary, is all personality and no dull virtuosity. She's an excellent pop star still well in her prime -- this song went to #1 a few months before she turned 31 -- and if the song ends up being more about a generalized feeling of excitement than any specified emotion, with fill-in-the-blank lyrics, that's a long pop tradition too.

SON BY FOUR, “CUANDO SEAS MÍA (MISS ME SO MUCH)”

30th December, 2000

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I haven't tracked it in this blog, but the entire back half of 2000 has been punctuated by Son by Four's "A Puro Dolor" -- nearly every song we've looked at since has had its chart reign interrupted by the return of the millennium's silkiest salsa band. Now, here at the end of the year, Son by Four are back with their second, and final (as of press time), number one.

As a piece of popcraft from songwriting to production to performance, it's far superior to "A Puro Dolor," with a tense, dramatic arrangement, gorgeous tropical instrumentation, and Ángel López singing to save his life. Despite the title ("When you are mine") setting the emotion in the future, it's a grownup song about adult relationships (the physical very much included), where "A Puro Dolor" is sheer adolescent bathos. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call "Cuando Seas Mía" an undiscovered gem, but if I were assigning these songs numbers out of ten it would easily clear the 6.

But it only topped the chart for a week at the slowest point of the year, and that was it, from our vantage point, for Son by Four. Ángel López left the group several years later for a solo career which has so far only fizzled (he campaigned for Bush in 2004), and the rest now produce Christian music for the evangelical Latin market. Gentle as doves they may have been, but in the cutthroat music business serpent's wisdom is preferable.

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.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “NO ME DEJES DE QUERER”

10th June, 2000

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A victory lap to close out the millennium, a slice of content for the brand-new Latin Grammys (where Emilio was on the board) to award her over, a breezy slab of nostalgia to prove to the younger generation whose party it is that they're crashing -- various cynical readings of this song are possible, but they all melt away in the face of those bright horns, that clave rhythm, and the call-and-response montuno at the end. It's been seven years since Gloria Estefan reinvented her adult-contemporary self (which was itself a reinvention from the Latin party den mother of the mid-80s) as an avatar of nostalgic Cuban identity, and while she has kept up well, not to say brilliantly, with shifting trends in Latin pop, there's a paroxysmic joy to a song like this one that there wasn't to the more high-tech (if still brilliant) "¡Oye!" -- she's aging into a patriot.

An incurious listen would suggest that this is more of the salsa revival, perhaps fueled by the runaway success of "A Puro Dolor," but it's not Nuyorican salsa but Cuban mambo, which is what salsa always was (ask Tito Puente, who refused to call his music salsa), with added Puerto Rican and rhythm & blues overlays. The Havana-nostalgic video (for which she won an inaugural Latin Grammy) makes it clear: this is a celebration not of the horny, sweaty music of the immigrant 70s, but of the faultless, romantic entertainment of the pre-revolutionary 50s.

As a song, it's primarily an exercise in genre: the lyric is a demand that her lover not stop loving her, performed with the confidence of someone who doesn't feel particularly anxious about the result. (Whether that's because she has absolute trust in her partner's fidelity or doesn't really care about it is left as an exercise to the reader.) Compared to the high-energy, recklessly psychologizing music of youngsters like Ricky Martin or Marc Anthony, it's perhaps a little hermetic, a little too classy; but then maybe it's not as overdetermined, not as noisy for the sake of noise. But as a relief from the unchanging reign of "A Puro Dolor," it's a breath of the freshest air.

(Note: this is the first Gloria Estefan song I've had occasion to write about here since I wrote about Gloria Estefan for a week straight three years ago at One Week One Band. A bunch of the YouTube embeds no longer work, but if you like me on Latin Pop, here's a bunch of it.)

SON BY FOUR, “A PURO DOLOR”

1st April, 2000

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Over the past year or more of Hot Latin #1s we've tracked how the Latin Pop industry (as variously constituted over some two dozen countries and innumerable regional and local scenes) worked to consolidate its selling power by issuing music in various formats, whether generic or linguistic. Following in the footsteps of Gloria and Emilio Estefan, who were the first to crack the crossover code in the 1980s, and of poor abbreviated Selena, who blazed a new path in the 1990s, a new generation of pop stars has effortlessly taken to code-switching between language and genre, a game which will only grow more high-stakes as the music industry recedes from its turn-of-the-millennium apex. This song represents that apex, a confluence of luck, dedicated craft, and industry willingness and preparedness to immediately exploit any available market.

Which isn't to say that the song, or the band, don't matter; but its gargantuan success spread far beyond the limited capacity of either, so that any examination of "A Puro Dolor" necessarily becomes not about the story within the song, but the story about the song.

That story: Son By Four were a Puerto Rican boy band in the best boy-band tradition, dating back to doo-wop legend: a group of friends who could harmonize behind one angelic-voiced singer and won local talent contests and a record-label exec took a flyer on them. Panamanian composer and producer Omar Alfanno, whose brief career as a singer in the 80s had led to more remunerative behind-the-scenes roles working with legendary salseros as well as up-and-comers, agreed to write songs and produce for them. He remembers writing this one in ten minutes to fill out a major-label debut, and any deep study of the song's lyrics, composition, and arrangement will bear that out: it's a wholly generic love-as-pain song, in a long and often far more distinguished Spanish-language tradition.

But because it was 2000, it was released in both a ballad version and an uptempo salsa version, to get both romantic pop airplay and tropical play, to squeeze a few more nickels out of it before Son By Four inevitably ended up on the ash-heap of pop history. And it became a hit, starting almost immediately in early 2000, as Ángel López's creamy lead vocal and the smooth harmonies of the other three injected 90s R&B smoothness into Latin radio if not for the first time (we remember the Barrio Boyzz, among others) then at a moment when listeners were particularly receptive to it. It was a wider boy-band moment, as anyone alive in 2000 will surely remember: Backstreet, N'Sync, and the rest were also busy injecting 90s R&B smoothness into music that a non-R&B audience could feel comfortable with. Son By Four were in the right place at the right time: riding both the boy-band wave and a return-of-salsa wave (see also in these pages Marc Anthony, Jerry Rivera), they were also perfectly positioned to take advantage of Latin Pop's new-found legitimacy in the wider Anglo pop world.

Because as soon as it was clear that "A Puro Dolor" was a phenomenon, they were rushed back into the studio to record an English-language version, "Purest of Pain", which didn't set the Anglophone charts alight but did respectably. They would also record a ranchera version (inexplicably not online) for the Regional Mexican market. And although Son By Four themselves weren't involved, a cumbia cover and a Brazilian cover were two more of the biggest Latin hits in 2000, keeping Omar Alfanno (and the record label) happy and the song blanketing pan-Latin consciousness throughout the year and beyond.

The Latin Grammys held their first ceremony in 2000. Son By Four won the inaugural Pop Song of the Year and Tropical Song of the Year, and performed with N'Sync, who were peddling their Spanish-language version of "This I Promise You." In total, "A Puro Dolor" spent 20 weeks at the top of the Hot Latin chart, a record at the time, and which even in the streaming era of slow turnover and epic chart reigns has rarely been exceeded. (As of this writing, it's only been broken twice in sixteen years.) Not bad for a song the success of which even its composer couldn't understand; Alfanno told Billboard a year after its release that he had gone back to the piano to try to analyze the song's structure to figure out what had made it a hit, without success.

But that's pop for you: mercurial, fickle, inexplicable, infuriating, adorable, unforgettable. It's why, despite feeling that we've heard it all before, that there are no surprises and no innovations left, we keep listening.

GILBERTO SANTA ROSA, “QUE ALGUIEN ME DIGA”

11th March, 2000

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The iceberg of Latin Pop, of which the #1s discussed in this travelogue represent not even the above-water tip, but rather only the layer of molecules exposed to the air, has contained far more salsa than we've been allowed to glimpse, to the extent that about half of everything on this blog tagged as "salsa" isn't. And neither is this, really, except that Gilberto Santa Rosa is a salsa singer, and so everything he sings is salsa. Kind of.

He's been knocking around Puerto Rican salsa since the mid-70s, he exploded to worldwide fame with a legendary 1990 Carnegie Hall concert (his four-minute improvised soneo in "Perdóname" became so frequently played that he was forced to to memorize it for future concerts), and here on the cusp of the 2000s he's settled into an elder-statesman role. "Que Alguien me Diga" is a romantic song written by Panamanian salsero Omar Alfanno (remember that name) to the accompaniment of a classy string section and glassy keyboards, which only breaks into a gently percussive sway on the chorus rather than breaking into a full-bodied salsa montuno. His voice is undoubtedly a wonderful instrument, soulful and flexible, but like an Olympic athlete playing with kids he's using less than half of its capabilities.

It's probably more accurate to class the song as a bolero rather than salsa, despite the light piano guajeos on the chorus, which isn't a bad thing -- some of my all-time favorite songs are boleros -- except that it's unfortunate that this looks likely to be the sole representative of Santa Rosa's talent in these pages. Swept up in the current of a much bigger hit (stay tuned), he's largely only present as an adjunct, rather than in his own right. But do listen to "Perdóname."

JERRY RIVERA, "ESE"

30th January, 1999

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I've had occasion to lament before that I wasn't listening to Latin radio at the time, which means I'm working at a disadvantage in regard to ambient information and cultural awareness. There are two versions of "Ese" on Puerto Rican singer Jerry Rivera's 1998 album De Otra Manera, one which remains a ballad throughout and one which switches to uptempo salsa about a minute in. Sony released a music video for the ballad version, so that's the one I've linked to and will be talking about, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if airplay being counted for both across radio formats was a factor in driving the song to number one. (The salsa version is here, for comparison.)

Jerry Rivera was an enormous deal in salsa before he reached #1 here. He had been a youthful prodigy in the late 80s, and his 1992 album Cuenta Conmigo broke sales records and remains the highest-selling salsa album of all time. The success of "Ese" on the heels of such a blockbuster might be attributed to what Chris Molanphy calls the AC/DC Rule, if Rivera hadn't released six albums in between. The real difference, from what I can see, is that the top of the Hot Latin chart has been newly open to salsa since Marc Anthony stormed it in 1997. And, of course, the ballad version of "Ese" is by no stretch pure, uncut salsa.

The only reminder of any Cuban/Borinquen influence is in the slow-paced congas and timbales that underlay the glossy synths, nylon-stringed guitar, and Rivera's smooth singing: otherwise, it's simply a romantic ballad that could belong to any Western musical tradition. Even so, the chorus switches to an ordinary drumkit to pound out the rhythm rather than keep up the tropical accents. The result is a big, maudlin love song: the title, roughly translated as "that guy," is invoked over and over again to describe the the big passionate, mercurial, and hopelessly devoted lover of the song's "you." And then, in the very last line of the song, TWIST! "Ese soy yo" — that guy is me. Shock, swoon, clinch, fadeout.

The problem, of course, is that it is practically on the fadeout. The natural peaks of the song, the big swells at the ends of verses and choruses, are romantic declaration enough; no one who's listened to pop before needs to have the lover's identity uncovered, so it's inevitably an anticlimax. Rivera delivers it as slickly as he can, which is considerably, but I can't help feeling as though he'd rather be singing something with more bite and snap; something more, well, salsa. At press time, we're only going to hear from him once more; we'll see in a couple of years whether he — and we — get to pick it up.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “¡OYE!”

5th September, 1998

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If it's possible to draw conclusions about long-term trends in Latin pop from the very top of the Billboard Latin chart (a very shaky proposition), it might be useful to consider Gloria Estefan a bellweather. On the cusp of the 90s, she pointed to the overwhelming preponderance of adult contemporary that would make up the majority of the decade's number ones; and four years later she predicted the revitalization of traditional roots music that would be the major thrust of the decade's second half. Now, as the 90s wane, she returns with the first #1 to invest in modern club music since José Luis Rodriguez' "Baila Mi Rumba" in 1989. This is rather a large hint as to the direction in which Latin pop (or indeed all pop) is headed; but no spoilers.

But "¡Oye!" (listen!) also positions itself in the newly vital salsa current, as jump-started in this travelogue by Marc Anthony; one of the repeated refrains is "mi cuerpo pide salsa" (my body wants salsa), and the production connects the dots between Nuyorican salsa and Detroit house, never more explicitly than when the electric piano beats out a steady melodic rhythm. As a piece of dance music, it's wonderfully and characteristically inventive, balancing the steady bass 4/4 required for modern dance music with trad mambo (which is to say swing) horn charts, Cuban percussion, and call-and-response gritos (from, I belive, Emilio) that urge a physical response.

The Estefan machine was by now world-conquering, of course — Gloria's only real peer at this point was Madonna — and the slickness and efficiency of the production is a little breathtaking even today. 1998 is, it's worth noting, when the Loudness Wars began to heat up in earnest, which means that from the perspective of 2012, it's when everything begins to sound completely modern, mastered at an ear-popping volume which lets you feel the bass in your gut even through tinny Apple buds.

The final marker of modernity is the fact that the video linked above is a remix. The parent album, Gloria!, was mostly in English, and the original Oye! (the video's here) has English-language verses. This is the Pablo Flores Spanish Mix, which is only slightly different (the clubby synths were Flores' addition — he's been the Estefans' in-house mixer and remixer since the 80s), and as far as I can tell this was the version that got playlisted on Latin radio. (It's the one included on her Spanish-language greatest hits package, for instance.) As this travelogue slowly catches up to the present, and artists continue to record and release multiple versions of their songs in order to maximize revenue streams, I'll have to make more of these judgment calls as to which version to feature on the blog. Which in this case isn't much of a big deal; both versions are fantastic.

SERVANDO Y FLORENTINO, “UNA FAN ENAMORADA”

9th May, 1998

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1998 was, globally speaking, the year of the boyband. In the wake of the dissolution of British stalwarts Take That, a new generation of groups like the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, Boyzone, Steps, 98º, and Westlife rushed in to fill the void. The pull of this rising global tide was felt in Latin pop as well — former boyband icon Ricky Martin established himself as a solo artist (not unlike Robbie Williams in the UK), and Servando y Florentino scored, Hanson-like, a solitary left-field #1 out of the Venezuelan pop-salsa scene.

Seventeen and sixteen respectively the week this song hit #1, Servando and Florentino Primera had been homeland heroes for several years already as the voices of La Orquesta Salserín, one of the primary competitors to Menudo throughout the Americas. Like Enrique Iglesias, they had a respectable pop lineage: their father, Alí Primera, had been one of the shining lights of Venezuelan nueva canción in the 60s and 70s; and like Marc Anthony, they stood by the relative authenticity of salsa despite their unabashedly pop profile.

Not that Marc Anthony had anything to worry about. "Una Fan Enamorada" ("a [female] fan in love") is very much boyband material, from the plushy pop-disco melody (recalling an earlier era of boyband, the Bee Gees) to the lyrics' apparently-sympathetic-but-on-examination-not-really portrait of their own fanbase. Such songs are always exercises in ego-stroking for the singers — even when they approach the tragic near-perfection of Eminem's "Stan," the unspoken premise is still how great the artist must be to inspire such cracked devotion in the first place. "Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny."

And Servando and Florentino aren't quite up to even the relatively gentle rigors of the song. The highest reaches of the melody scrape against the limitations of their immature voices, and even the closest thing salsa has to a sure thing, the funky breakdown at the end, is rendered glib and pointless by their inability to riff convincingly. Like too many boybands, they were the sound of a season, and struggle to be heard to any great effect beyond.

MARC ANTHONY, “Y HUBO ALGUIEN”

29th November, 1997

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I need you to have listened to the song before you read this. Not that there's a huge spoiler or anything, but if you just click play and start reading, you won't hear what I'm talking about until two minutes in. Honor system here.

All set? Okay. Honestly, it's as if the U.S. Latin-listening public had not only anticipated my objections to the previous song (recap: sensitive ballad cover of a funky salsa original is a change for the worse), but agreed. What starts off sounding like another ultra-sensitive ballad (but classy! that string arrangement!) eventually turns into a roaring salsa barnstormer, complete with competing horn charts, popping bass, and a lengthy dénouement in which he shouts improvisatorily over the chants of his backing orchestra. The first salsa #1, Wikipedia says, and if my tags disagree I may have misidentified merengue or simply dance music with horns; certainly it's the first #1 by a performer dedicated to the genre.

Salsa, like disco, is essentially a longform medium, structurally flexible but enslaved to the rhythm, highly orchestrated, passionately performed and danced, and an implicit expression of joy regardless of the sentiments in the actual lyrics. (Disco both partly descended from salsa and developed alongside it; but where disco went electro in the 80s salsa has stayed largely true to its big-band roots, and remains a live performer's music rather than a DJ's.)

Those lyrics are where the dramatic ballad-dance structure comes in: it's programmatic music, telling a story even though the change is in mood rather than time. "Y Hubo Alguien" means "and there was someone," and the story Marc Anthony tells is that he was left broken-hearted by the song's addressee -- but it's all right, because there was someone else, someone who took care of him, sacrificed to please him, spoke kindly to him (like a woman should a man, runs the unspoken assumption). And the music and rhythm swell up in response to this joy. The second verse downshifts into a ballad gear again, as he addresses the ex with pity -- and then the chorus whirls back up dramatically, and the long salsa workout that finishes out the song is rubbing it in her face: "I cried over you, now it's your turn to cry a while." Both the sentiment and the music are traditional (well, dating to the 70s), but details of the production (the funky slap bass) and especially Anthony's rich, flexible voice make it thoroughly modern.

For here is another brick in the edifice that is the Latin music world as we know it today: Marc Anthony's first #1, the first single off his third album, carefully dramatized and orchestrated to be a massive hit -- he is of the generation of Enrique Iglesias and Alejandro Fernández, and together they represent the tripartite coalition of Latin music within the United States: Iglesias the international playboy and pop star, Fernández the Mexican craftsman and ranchero, and Anthony the Nuyorican soulman and salsero. The album, Contra la Corriente (against the current), with its starkly miminalist cover, posits Anthony as a Real Musician, modern but also out of time, a salsa belter dressed like Paul Simon in 1969. Of the three, he intrigues the most, and I know least what to expect from him as we barrel into the future.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “ABRIENDO PUERTAS”

21st October, 1995

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This song begins what, scanning the horizon, looks like becoming a semi-annual tradition: another Gloria Estefan album, another Gloria Estefan number-one single. After having thoroughly ingratiated herself to the Latin Pop audience with Mi Tierra (the album that produced three chart-topping songs), she'll never again go without that audience's appreciation for her work — at least as of press time. And she repays that appreciation with some of the most joyful and glorious music we've yet encountered in this travelogue.

"Abriendo Puertas," as even a Sesame Street-level Spanish education should tell you, means "opening doors," and the light, scattered-tempo vallenato rhythm of the song reiterates the dance-yrself-free message of the lyrics, which on the chorus run something like "And we're opening doors, and we're closing wounds/Because in the new year we're going to live life/And we're opening doors, and we're closing wounds/Step by step down the path we're going to find our way." It's the sort of pleasingly universalist message that could, frankly, be a hit at any time, but in the fall of 1995 it perhaps inevitably recalled the great grief of that year (at least as far as US Latin Pop fans were concerned), and its call to get up and dance anyway, to tear down barriers and dismiss failure as a lie, sounds both thrilling and, well, healing.

That vallenato rhythm is worth remarking on: it's a close cousin of the cumbia rhythm that Selena exposed us to, with similar origins in the mixed-race cauldron of coastal Colombia, and the guitar/accordion combination (unrelated to the similar combination in Mexican norteño) is one of the genre's trademarks. Perhaps unusually for the highly-vertically-integrated Estefans, the song was written and arranged by Colombian songwriter/producer Kike Santander, who will be a name to remember in the years to come, as the late 90s fade into the 00s.

Still, Gloria and producer husband Emilio, ever the ambassadorial multiculturalists, make a point of letting the opening guitar sound not only tropical but African — a hint, perhaps, of Congolese rumba echoing back to her own native Cuban rhythms? — and mix the rest with salsa horn charts, funky urban bass, Afro-Cuban percussion, and a call-and-response chorus that could have grown out of any of the above, but which in this travelogue is a Gloria Estefan hallmark. They don't call themselves the Miami Sound Machine anymore — they're bigger than Miami, and far more eclectic than any Sound Machine — but she's had the same band her whole career, and they've kept up with her every swerve and wild goose chases. If she sounds now content — like she could just make variations on this record for the rest of her career and not miss a thing — she has perhaps earned it. How many other openers to fifteenth albums sound so irrepressibly joyful?