ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “DÓNDE ESTÁN CORAZÓN”

1st March, 2008

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It's appropriate that this song was the new radio single from the greatest-hits comp 95/08 Exitos, since it calls back to Iglesias' earliest 1995 hits in rock instrumentation and moody angst, but he's grown so much as a singer and performer since then -- by which I mean that he's figured out how to make his vocal limitations work for rather than against the emotion of the track -- that it could only have been made in 2008.

He takes the whole song in a low-energy croon, never attempting to reach for notes that he will strain to hit. (Again, he co-wrote it, which seems to help.) There's a laziness (in formal terms) to the singing which from a decade's distance seems to predict the rise of mumble rap and deadpan darlings like Billie Eilish. And while most of Iglesias' material from here on out will be much higher energy, he will never again attempt to be as passionate as he did in the 90s.

"Dónde Están Corazón" is a melancholic song about a universal experience that Spanish calls "desamor," and can be translated "lack of love" or "heartbreak" but more frequently means "falling out of love," the converse of the more frequently celebrated "enamoración" (falling in love). The lyrics are vague as to details -- or generously universal -- but suffused with an appreciation of the closeness and mutual satisfaction that the singer once shared but is now gone forever. I couldn't help comparing it to Juanes' more cheerful song the week before: the lyrics are much less poetic and more straightforward, which is partly the difference between Juanes' vaguely aristocratic rock and Iglesias' more demotic pop.

Not that Enrique is anything but a child of privilege. At this point, he has stopped pretending to be anything else, and it suits him.

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.

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “O ME VOY O TE VAS”

29th September, 2001

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Of all the things I think I've gotten wrong over the first four years of this blog (covering 1986-1998), I feel guiltiest about my dismissal of Marco Antonio Solís, both as the leader of Los Bukis and solo. It's taken me a long time to learn how to listen to men whose primary audience is women, and I'm still not very good at it. (Women whose primary audience is women is much easier, and in fact a comfort zone I would do well to spend less time in.) But more than that, before this I couldn't hear traditional Mexican music in his work. It took the (synthetic, I think) string section on this record for me to grasp that it was in the tradition of Miguel Aceves Mejía and José Alfredo Jiménez: the soft-rock instrumentation and Solís' wimpy, James Taylor-y voice had glooped up my ears before.

And in fact what I've disliked about Solís in the past has, more than anything, been category confusion. I suffer from a bad case of chronological determinism: for me, one of the highest virtues of a song is that it sounds like the year it was made, and no earlier. This is, as I've noted before, a way of privileging the fast-paced, quick-turnover pop of the US (and to a lesser extent the UK) -- in many cultures and subcultures, continuity is more important than reinvention, and just because long hair and beards were no longer fashionable in the US after 1980 (although actually revisiting the non-cutting edge US media of the time would say differently) doesn't mean that someone like Solís wasn't, in his own way, and to his own audience, a sex symbol.

Bringing up James Taylor clarifies much for me: Solís was never as demonstrative or rapturous as Juan Gabriel, but he didn't need to be, any more than Taylor needed to be Springsteen. There's room for both. And even though it's a new millennium, which means that his sheer sound benefits from a light scrub-up, getting some rock instrumentation and separating the elements in the mix rather better than I remember his 90s records sounding -- even to the extent that there's a bit of cowbell on the chorus -- Solís is never going to turn dancepop or hard rock or reggaeton. He plows his soft-rock furrow, and he does it well. Looking up the lyrics reveals a depth of careful insight and expression of gradations of human emotions between lovers that only a practiced, emotionally grown-up writer could produce. He still sounds wimpy, but that's no flaw -- machismo has demonstrably done much more evil in the world, however exciting its musical expressions might be.

"Either I Go or You Go," the literal translation of the title, is more of an ultimatum than the song itself expresses: it's a negotiation of space between people who rub each other the wrong way but remain committed, a reminder that everything is contingent, and that forgiveness, and sometimes a diplomatic silence, is necessary in all things human. I actually, and I'm just as surprised as you are, love it.