NICKY JAM & ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “EL PERDÓN”

21st Mar, 2015

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The mid-2010s return of reggaetón with a new center of focus in Colombia rather than Puerto Rico (see J Balvin two weeks ago) now features reggaetón's first comeback story, compelling enough to put this song at #1 for 30 weeks.

Nicky Jam, born in Massachussetts to Puerto Rican and Dominican parents but whose early years were chaotic and ended up having to support himself in Puerto Rico at the age of eleven, released his first Spanish-language rap EP at fourteen years old in 1995 -- the same year he got hooked on cocaine. He was in a reggaetón duo with Daddy Yankee for a bit in the early 2000s before his substance abuse issues became too much for the older star to deal with; Yankee went on to rule the world with "Gasolina," and Nicky spiralled in relative obscurity, almost dying from an overdose in 2010.

It was his relocation to Colombia -- and specifically Medellín, Balvin's hometown -- that turned his life around. Colombians, having only received reggaetón from a distance, treated him like the legend he never really was in Puerto Rico (shades of the UK's reaction to US music in the last midcentury), and he got into the romanticism of vallenato, which encouraged him to sing instead of just rapping. Surrounded by Colombian collaborators, he got clean and started making new music again -- and when Enrique Iglesias came calling, hung up on him because he assumed it was a prank.

Eventually, of course, they worked it out. "El Perdón" (forgiveness) was written exclusively by Nicky -- Enrique generously forewent his usual writing credit -- and although it's literally a song about spiralling after a romantic breakup and asking for an ex's pardon, it's also very easily legible as a song addressing Nicky's own history in the music industry (and maybe especially, for fans hungry for a good gossip narrative, with Daddy Yankee), proving that he's changed. His singing voice, rougher and flatter than Enrique's, is authoritative but vulnerable, and the fact that the entire song is sung, with no rap verses, is an indicaton of reggaetón's future sustainability as a flexible genre outside of its original hip-hop/dancehall lineage.

It's also, of course, an indication of Colombia's emblanquecimiento -- whitening -- of reggaetón, as several observers have noted. It's not a coincidence that Afro-Colombian musicians have tended to draw more directly from Jamaican, Dominican, or US Black sources than from reggaetón in the years since. But that's for another day.

In the meantime, "El Perdón"'s reign at #1 almost exactly matched all of Daddy Yankee's #1 reigns combined before it. The listening public had made its preference clear: not only was reggaetón back, but reggaetón romántica specifically was its top priority.

This is foreshadowing.

Airplay Watch:

• Pitbull ft. Gente de Zona, "Piensas (Dile la Verdad)"
• Cuban expat pop-reggaetón summit with a heavy montuno piano hook. Pitbull's genial ringmastering is getting a bit long in the tooth by this point, but Gente de Zona do enough to keep the energy up. 
• Nicky Jam & Enrique Iglesias, "El Perdón"
• Discussed above.
• Juanes, "Juntos (Together)"
• Throwback cumbia-rock blend for the soundtrack to a Disney movie about a Latino track team in the 1980s coached by Kevin Costner. Perfectly adequate.
• Wisin & Carlos Vives ft. Daddy Yankee, "Nota de Amor"
• Cumbia, vallenato and reggaetón are all represented in another Colombia–Puerto Rico summit. DY casually blows both his collaborators out of the water.
• Romeo Santos, "Hilito"
• Chiming bachata that didn't rate a music video. Dwoopy synth sounds introducing the middle eight make it stand out from Santos' typical classy, narcissistic eroticism.
• Daddy Yankee, "Sígueme y Te Sigo"
• As if recognizing the new youthful middle-class appetite for reggaetón, the (forty-year-old) reining champ returns with a song about social-media popularity, with a video set in a high school.
• Yandel, "Calentura"
• Horny, half-rapped reggaetón with big sine-wave synths is still big business in the Puerto Rican wing of the industry; entirely of a piece with Yandel's recent solo work.
• Gente de Zona ft. Marc Anthony, "La Gozadera"
• Marc Anthony becomes the most recent enormous Latin star to co-sign Gente de Zona's party-hearty unity-flavored reggaetón. Salsa accents included to make him feel at home.
• Ricky Martin ft. Yotuel, "La Mordidita"
• Fun, flavorful electroswing-flavored merengue from an elder statesman who simply refuses to age and a rapper from the venerable Cuban hip-hop group Orishas. 
• Wisin, "Si lo Hacemos Bien"
• Dramatic, paranoid reggaetón in classic Wisin y Yandel fashion, just with Wisin singing the Yandel parts, which makes it less smoldering and more tough-guy vulnerable.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS FT. DESCEMER BUENO & GENTE DE ZONA, “BAILANDO”

17th May, 2014

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Forty-one weeks at number one. Only one other behemoth, lurking ahead in the shadows of 2017, will (as of this writing) beat its record. But that's with streaming; on the old airplay-calculation chart, "Bailando" only notched a respectable twenty, still several weeks behind "La Tortura" in 2005. Radio, which perforce must please both the fans of a record and those who have grown tired of it, has to be higher-churn, while streaming numbers reflect only the fans; skip rates are (to my knowledge) not factored. This naturally feeds the line-go-up appetite of the record labels, but to the detriment of listeners, who may have more options than ever to actively hunt down, but whose passive listening gets trapped in narrowcasted halls of mirrors, in which the active choices of millions of others get reflected back to them in a burning point, and the winner takes it all.

And there has not been a winninger winner in the history of the Hot Latin chart than Enrique Iglesias: this is his twenty-fifth entry at #1 (but not his last), while his nearest competition (Luis Miguel and a certain malevolent lagomorph (cf. the "bunnied" entry at the Popular FAQ)) currently languish at 16. The success of this song must seem to some degree a foregone conclusion: its spring single release is an obvious bid for song-of-the-summer status, and its uptempo, gladsome vibes make it an ideal party soundtrack for old and young alike; the elders can enjoy the flamenco clapping and guitar, while the youngsters can dig the electronic rhythm (it's yet another descendant of "Danza Kuduro") and hip-hop shouting by guests Gente de Zona, who never overpower Enrique and in fact make him sound fresher and more hip than he has in years.

It was the song at #1 when President Obama announced his intent to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba; both of the featured artists were from Cuba (Gente de Zona being the first successful Cuban hip-hop and reggaetón act to circumvent the cultural embargo), and the feeling of optimism that Cuba, which had been the most fecund and innovative center of musical ferment in Latin America in the century before the Revolution, would at last be allowed to join the modern era of pan-Latin collaboration and interchange, was high in the mid-2010s.

All that optimism feels naive and even cruel now, when it appears that the United States government is intent on making the rest of Latin America join Cuba as a pariah state if they refuse to be be a client one. And of course, any dialectical analysis could have told you that capitalist investment by way of record-label promotion is no substitute for genuine political solidarity.

In 2025, Gente de Zona are latecomers jumping on the reparto bandwagon in Cuba -- reparto being a street-level electronic dance music related to Puerto Rican reggaetón and Dominican dembow, with busier percussion and a wholly homegrown sense of build-and-release dynamics born in the Havana repartos (neighborhoods) by impoverished MCs and DJs in the mid-2000s. In the 2020s, it's become a fashionable sound in pan-Latin urbano, always hungry for new fresh sounds it can chew up and recycle into gleaming hypercapitalized pop. Nigerian afrobeats, Brazilian funk, Colombian ritomo exótico, and Guadeloupean bouyon are being similarly cannibalized at the moment; while Barcelonan rumba flamenca has only recently fallen out of fashion again.

But back in 2014, flamenco was the fresh sound being chewed up and recycled, as it has periodically been over the course of this travelogue, including by Iglesias himself fifteen years prior. The flamenco-pop boom centered around Rosalía is still some years off, so this song can sound oddly prescient as well as old-fashioned at the same time.

There was an English-language version that featured Sean Paul's motormouthed toasting, as well as two Portuguese-language versions aimed at the Brazilian and Portuguese markets respectively; none of them are as interesting to me as the original, and even that is more in a what-could-have-been sense than in itself.

Airplay Watch:

• Ricardo Arjona, "Apnea"
• A big dramatic piano-strings-and-rock ballad about drowning in his feelings for a departed lover, with an extremely well-written poetic throughline that leaves me utterly cold.
• J Balvin ft. Farruko, "6:00 AM"
• Colombian reggaetón-pop, incorporating more dancehall and tropipop elements, shows its face for the first time on this travelogue. The song is pretty minor, but shows promise.
• Enrique Iglesias ft. Descemer Bueno & Gente de Zona, "Bailando"
• Discussed above.
• Romeo Santos, "Eres Mía"
• Formula is right. This slinky bachata is about seducing a woman engaged to someone else.
• Carlos Vives ft. Marc Anthony, "Cuando Nos Volvamos a Encontrar"
• Two middle-aged masters of their domains deliver a starry-eyed romantic duet starting in Vives' usual rock n' vallenato style and building to Anthony's usual big-band salsa style.
• Juan Luis Guerra & 4.40, "Tus Besos"
• An adorable bachata with Fifties slow-dance doo-wop aesthetics. Guerra remains the master of genre.
• Romeo Santos ft. Marc Anthony, "Yo También"
• Another summit of big names; this time Romeo bends to Anthony's salsa stylings, and naturally gets himself outsung.
• Víctor Manuelle, "Que Suenen los Tambores"
• A much better salsa song, perhaps because it doesn't have to support two massive music-industry egos, and is about the joy of music instead of some cooked-up romantic drama.
• Gerardo Ortíz, "Eres una Niña"
• Mexican regional assimilates bachata, with brass and woodwinds instead of guitar. Gerardo still sings foursquare, though (complimentary).
• Don Omar, "Soledad"
• Dramatic, po-faced reggaetón with merengue típico accents that just ends up sounding like he's trying to make the "Danza Kuduro" template work as a ballad.
• Voz de Mando, "Levantando Polvadera"
• Good old-fashioned norteño with tuba basslines, accordion fingerwork, and inventive drumming whose rhythmic switch-ups make for an exciting storytelling device.

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.

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.

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.

JUAN MAGÁN FT. PITBULL & EL CATA, “BAILANDO POR EL MUNDO”

31st March, 2012

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"Inténtalo" was the first new #1 of 2012 to get a second week at the top, although they weren't consecutive. The one-week wonder that followed its second reign was this, an echo of the airwave-blanketing #1s of 2011, when party anthems by Pitbull and Don Omar sprawled over months. But the post-subprime blip is already shifting into other gears: this cheery club-ready celebration of women going out and partying will be replaced by another one-week wonder with a stronger dancehall orientation.

Like "Hips Don't Lie", "Loca", and Don Omar's 2010s appearances here, "Bailando por el Mundo" is a reworking of a less successful version of the song. Barcelonan DJ Juan Magán had released "Bailando por Ahí" early in 2011, and it was a local hit, and something of a culmination of a decade-long career. Magán had been making the specfically Spanish genre of hardcore techno known as "mákina" since 1999 with a series of collaborators, and was part of the first Spansih reggaetón act, Guajiros del Puerto, in 2004. (They drop the n-word like it's generic rap slang in the first seconds of their biggest hit, "Veo Veo", in case you wondered how appropriative they were.) He moved on to club music with the act Magán & Rodríguez in 2007, where he started calling his music "electro latino," which primarily seems to have meant raiding Latin American music for sounds and ryhthms to give texture to otherwise very generic house and trance beats: their biggest hit "Bora Bora" borrowed vallenato accordion as a signature sound. When he went solo in 2009, Magán aimed even more squarely at broad pop success.

"Bailando por Ahí" went to #1 on the Spanish charts in October 2011, the same month that "Bailando por el Mundo" was released, with Cuban-American rapper and empresario Pitbull and Dominican rapper El Cata taking Magán's verses and making them both more vivid and more generic: the original song gestures towards wistfulness (preserved in the chorus-ending line "fueron los días más felices para mí" (they were the happiest days for me)), but Pitbull and El Cata are more interested in boasting about their own importance and success than in Magán's loose character study about a woman going out with her friends to party in Madrid. Not that the original is some great achievement in aesthetic sensitivity: the thumping merengue-house and zig-zagging accordion are winningly schlocky but little else.

My memory of this song in 2012 is primarily of ignoring it. I was exhausted by Pitbull at this point (although it's worth noting that this is by far his best showing as a rapper on this travelogue), and Magán's party-happy music wasn't interesting enough to overcome my generic contempt for Spanish DJs compared to the far more more fascinating electronic pop coming from Latin America itself, particularly the amazing Santiago scene that I was deep into at this time. But Javiera Mena, Alex Anwandter, and the rest are in no danger of showing up here; so the limited pleasures of "Bailando por el Mundo" sound better in retrospect.

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.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS FT. WISIN Y YANDEL, “NO ME DIGAS QUE NO”

19th March, 2011

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I was pretty harsh about Enrique's last appearance here, in part because I knew this was coming and was girding my loins in advance. The title of the song, and the cockily-crowed refrain, translate to "Don't Tell Me No," and despite the pseudo-romantic way he dresses it up and the good-time party vibes a team of producers and co-stars surrounds it with, the most forceful sentiment of the song remains a refusal to listen, an overriding of consent, the normalization of assault as a natural extension of masculine desire.

The big trancey synths and hopping club music behind it are extremely early 2010s, post-subprime pop as louche, privileged atavism (and the opposite of what, for example, Ke$ha was using the same basic template to express at the time). The soaring chorus, with its reduplicated, shouting, thin-voiced Enriques, even recalls the hooky pop-punk of ten years earlier, another genre that in its most popular expression was a black hole of whiny male self-regard. There's not a hint of dembow in the rhythm despite classic reggaetón producers Nesty and Victor El Nasi being involved: indeed, only Wisin's rap verse even plays with syncopation at all. Everything else is a foursquare, flat-footed beat that even the whitest listener can pogo along to.

It was only at #1 for a week, sandwiched between "Corazón Sin Cara," and in Iglesias' discography is little more than a footnote compared to the much more massive smashes from his bilingual album Euphoria: "I Like It" and "Tonight (I'm Lovin' You)" were blanketing Anglophone airwaves, while "Cuando Me Enamoró" still lingered on Spanish-language radio. Given his English-language success, it will be a few years before Enrique returns to this travelogue, while Doble-U y Yandel will be a more constant presence. But that's another story.

SHAKIRA FT. El CATA, “LOCA”

6th November, 2010

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A year ago, she was on top with "Loba" -- and with the change of a single letter, she is back. But as always with Shakira, there's more going on underneath the surface.

The song is a faithful rewrite of Dominican rapper El Cata's slangy merenguetón "Loca con Su Tiguere" (crazy with her streetwise man), from 2008, with a beefed-up, slicker, and quicker production as befits Shakira's international pop-star profile. She changes the refrain to "soy loca con mi tigre," (i'm crazy with my tiger), a rewrite for global Spanish, since "tiguere" is specifically urban Dominican slang. But the third name in the songwriting credits, after hers and El Cata's, is the real key to understanding not just this song but an entire era of Latin pop: Armando Pérez, a Miami-born Cuban-American songwriter, producer and hook scavenger better known by his stage name, Pitbull. It's the second time he's made a sideways appearance on this travelogue, but his knack for repurposing big crowd-pleasing hooks for even more omnipresent international hits gets its first real showcase here.

Although reggaetón riddims can be detected underneath the merengue horns, the early 2010s were the low point between reggaetón's tentpoles of dominance over Latin pop: it's characteristic of the period that good old-fashioned merengue, rather than urbano, got the credit for the splashy, bouncy joy of "Loca," which was a sizeable hit across all kinds of international markets, thanks to canny marketing pairing Shakira with a different rapper in different languages.

The English-language version trading out El Cata for UK grime emcee Dizzee Rascal is also an extremely 2010 move: he sounds pleased to be there but needs the rhythms rearranged to fit his chewy, off-kilter flow. Shakira's lyrics are roughly the same, generalizing the sentiments even more for the bigger audience while still keeping it subcultural enough to spark curiosity. (I.e. the Dominican slang "yo ni un kiki" (I don't even have a dime) becomes "I got my kiki" (I'm laughing).)

But her introductory line in both versions, the breathy English "Dance... or die" is the most 2010 sentiment of all: the apocalyptic mood in post-subprime pop, from Ke$ha's nothing-to-lose class warfare to Britney's doompartying "Till the World Ends," is enough of a truism among pop-watchers that Shakira adding to the cacophony in praise of madness was hardly even noticed at the time. But the extended hangover from that reckless party mood has outlasted the Obama era: not even dance can palliate the eternal bummer these days.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS FT. JUAN LUIS GUERRA, “CUANDO ME ENAMORO”

12th June, 2010

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I've been writing -- one might even say complaining -- about Enrique Iglesias on this blog since his first appearance at the end of 1995. It's been fifteen years, and no one has been a more consistent presence here, to my general chagrin and occasional grudging approbation. In great part, this is because I've been comparing the Enrique Iglesias I've been hearing in those trawls through the past with the Enrique Iglesias I remember first clearly paying attention to in 2010, the Enrique Iglesias who chose this as the lead single from his ninth album, perhaps to shore up good faith with his core Latin audience before hitting the Top 40 with songs in English featuring the likes of Pitbull and Ludacris, perhaps to ride the bachata wave that Aventura's farewell was cresting, perhaps because it was just as consonant with the jangly rock en español that Diego Torres, Alejandro Fernández and David Bisbal were having hits with as it was with bachata.

But the poorly-aged video, a montage of narcissistic schoolboys playing dirty to win the attention of their female classmates, and the fact that the song had appeared, a week before the single hit #1, as the theme song to the Mexican telenovela of the same name, are perhaps stronger reasons for "Cuando Me Enamoro" leading off one of Iglesias' most globally successful string of singles. Iglesias has always been a kind of avatar of louche male privilege, and the narrative embedded in the video, of boys as pursuers and girls as the passive rewards of pursuit, is perfectly suited to both Iglesias' persona and to the Latin machismo that he, as rich as he undoubtedly is and as sensitive as he performs being, still perfectly represents.

Juan Luis Guerra's genial artistry co-signing this crass commercialism is the outlier; but as well and casaully as he outsings Enrique on this duet, he is merely a hired gun: the song was written by Iglesias and Cuban former jazzman turned pop songwriter Descemer Bueno, and the form of the song is strictly pop, without any of Guerra's prankish genre-bending. A bachata rhythm section supports a lilting rock sway, and the two men trade nostrums about the grand acts they would perform for love, describe the depths of emotion to which love sends them, and ultimately impute a Christological meaning to secular love ("me viene el alma al cuerpo" -- my soul enters my body, a pop detournement of the doctrine of the Incarnation). It's all perfectly in line with the romantic tradition of Spanish love poetry, and the semi-tropical rhythm and irregular bursts of melody serve the lyric well.

Make no mistake: I adored it at the time. If it ultimately rings hollow a decade later, perhaps especially by comparison with what Guerra had served up on his own only a week prior, put it down to my fuller experience with Enrique Iglesias, and my vastly decreased patience with boys-will-be-boys messaging throughout media.

WISIN Y YANDEL FT. ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “GRACIAS A TÍ”

19th December, 2009

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A year ago, Wisin y Yandel had appeared on a remix of an Enrique Iglesias song, giving it a sales and radio boost by endowing a mopey ballad with some stiff-upper-lip machismo. Now the favor is returned, as Enrique guests on a remix of a Wisin y Yandel ballad, enlivening their emotionally constipated shout-out to female fans (coded as a sentimental love song) with his patented straining tenderness.

The reggaetón interregnum sounds odder and odder in hindsight: the soft-rock plod of the drums here, in a song handled by reggaetón superproducers Nesty and El Nasi, feels even more like a concession to the broader pop market than W&Y's previous three appearances here (the last time we heard them over the dembow riddim was on "Sexy Movimiento," in January 2008). It doesn't slow them down any; their machine-tooled voices are still propulsive and authoritative as ever. Charmingly, Wisin even attempts to croon for a bit before returning to his comfort zone of ratatat toasting.

The video, shot in concert in Buenos Aires (where Iglesias recorded his remix and surprised the audience by appearing on stage with the boys to perform it), is even more an homage to the fans who have consistently been propelling Wisin y Yandel to the top of the charts. But for sympathetic non-fans, the song is a lesser rewrite of "Lloro Por Tí," and showcases none of the men involved at their best. 

ALEJANDRO SANZ FT. ALICIA KEYS, “LOOKING FOR PARADISE”

21st November, 2009

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First Shakira, then Nelly Furtado, now Alicia Keys popping up at the top spot on the Hot Latin chart -- I was not, in 2009, aware enough of trends or discourse to realize that this was not representative of a new flourishing in Latin pop, but rather the end of an era in mainstream US pop. All three women had broken through into Anglophone stardom in 2001, with "Whenever, Wherever," "I'm Like a Bird," and "Fallin'," respectively; but eight years later, none of them remained at the top of the Anglophone heap, and the more forgiving Latin charts provided a graceful descent from their 2000s-era peaks.

That's one way to look at it, anyway, and probably the one that the Anglocentric readership of this blog (such as it has), with their knowledge that Furtado and Keys have been irrelevant chartwise for the last decade, plus Shakira having mostly disappeared from Anglo airwaves, would probably naturally assume. The way I looked at it at the time was no doubt idealistic, and probably also condescending to the already rich history of Latin pop: I thought maybe it presaged more interconnection between the English- and Spanish-language sides of the industry, a world in which songs largely in Spanish could have as much chance with English-speaking audiences as songs with the amount of English as this one had had with Spanish-speaking ones.

I wasn't wrong, necessarily -- but it took longer than I expected, with a heavy swing towards masculine voices in both Spanish-language and English-language chart pop, to happen. A kind of masculinity that Alejandro Sanz, gruff and limited as his voice is compared to Keys' professionally liquid tones, could not represent. His name is before the "Ft.," and the single was taken from his album Paraíso Express, but Keys' is the first voice you hear in the duet and arguably makes the most impact in the song. Which fits in fine with Sanz' past performance here: he's a great collaborator who knows how to make his duet partner stand out. The jangly backing track was supposed to evoke the British Invasion of the Sixties, but it sounds to my ears more like the commercial jangle of post-R.E.M. Nineties bands like Gin Blossoms. Which is fine (I loved the Gin Blossoms when I was fifteen and they were all over the radio), but by belonging to neither world it only emphasizes the difference in tonality and tradition between Sanz, with his flamenco-derived rasp, and Keys, with her polite R&B dramatics.

Of course I've been excited in these pages before about songs that mash global musical traditions together, and there's a spark of that here, but it never fully catches into a full conflagration. Maybe Alicia Keys is too limited a singer, maybe Alejandro Sanz is too polite to push her, maybe they're both simply taking the easy route: but even the straightforward, literal English lyrics and the cerebal, conceptual Spanish-language ones seem like both of them are singing past each other rather than to each other, much less together. Whatever the future of Latin pop is, it's not this.

DAVID BISBAL, “ESCLAVO DE SUS BESOS”

31st October, 2009

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The continued popularity of David Bisbal continues to confound me. I guess if I think really hard about it I can find similar music that meant something to me around roughly the same time: the production isn't a million miles away from Kelly Clarkson's epochal "Since U Been Gone," a good five years earlier, and there was a Hollywood Records wave of rockish teenpop around this time, from which Selena Gomez and the Scene and the Jonas Brothers have aged the best. But Bisbal was a full-grown adult; he turned 30 in 2009, and his larynx-shredding sincerity remains ungainly to Anglophone ears.

I had an ear glued to Latin radio at this point, but if I ever heard this song there it slipped out of my brain just as quickly as it entered. I'm tempted to attribute this unfamiliarity to the solid good sense of the Phoenix-area Latin market, too Mexican and working-class to give much shrift to a Spanish prettyboy; but my own anti-rockism by now was probably even more salient. I've never had any compunction about switching stations on the thinnest pretext.

"Esclavo de Sus Besos" means "slave of her kisses," and it's a typical Bisbal song in that it presents him as unable to fully commit to his current love because he's still hung up on the previous one. Of course the literate, sensitive lyrics put it more sympathetically than that: the title metaphor is a hyperbolic one, but entirely in line with poetic usage. And relistening I can see how the ebb and rush of the music, a slick combination of jangle-pop and hair metal, could propel the listener deeper into their emotions if they were feeling themselves in a similar situation: it's expertly crafted by people who know their business. But it doesn't move me.

LUIS FONSI FT. ALEKS SYNTEK, NOEL SCHAJRIS & DAVID BISBAL, “AQUÍ ESTOY YO”

13th June, 2009

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I try very hard to give every song that ever reached #1 on the Billboard Hot Latin chart a fair hearing. For most of its existence, I was not listening closely to Latin music, and so I come to most of it new; learning to listen past my immediate preconceptions and to consider each song within its immediate cultural, musical, national, and historical context, in addition to any it may have accumulated later, has meant ignoring the inevitable personal associations which any adult will have formed with various musical styles or production qualities. But I've met my breaking point.

The 1993 Bryan Adams/Sting/Rod Stewart hit "All for Love," from the soundtrack to a godawful Three Musketeers movie, has been my least favorite song of all time for the past three decades, for reasons that have almost nothing whatever to do with the song itself (although my critical assessment is that a schlocky piece of crap bellowed gracelessly by three aging buffoons), but rest entirely on my own personal emotional history. (Without going into details I once, in febrile adolescence, meant every word of it, which is reason enough to despise both it and myself till the end of time.) And so this gets caught in the conflagration.

Fonsi, Syntek, Schajris and Bisbal are no Adams/Sting/Stewart: they're still relatively young, for one thing, and their prettily-orchestrated power ballad doesn't have all the air sucked out of it à la Mutt Lang's signature production style in 1993. They also have prettier, stronger voices less overwhelmed by rock-god personality, and so they sound just as good harmonizing as on lead. But when I've said that, I've run out of compliments. Famous men trading off bellowed lines of a self-indulgent, self-regarding love song is my least favorite genre of music, and no amount of careful listening, sympathetic immersion in the individual histories of these four gentlemen, or imagining myself in the place of a listener to whom this song might once have meant the world, can budge me.

This is Puerto Rican Fonsi's sixth appearance here, a victory lap after "No Me Doy Por Vencido." He wrote the song for four male voices, and considered giving it to a boy band before asking his celebrity friends to record it during a fishing trip. Spaniard Bisbal has been here before, as has Argentine Noel Schajris, as one of the two masterminds of Sin Bandera; but this is Mexican pop-industry mainstay and commercial composer Syntek's debut. He, like everyone else here, displays no personality beyond being game and rather full of himself. The capacity of the Hot Latin chart in 2009 to absorb a wide variety of music from all over the Spanish-speaking world is still admirable; the fact that a song like this could get nowhere near #1 a decade later is, as a matter of cultural pluralism, a shame. But selfishly, I don't mind a bit.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “LLORO POR TÍ”

8th November, 2008

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If the first new single from Enrique Iglesias' retrospective 95/08 collection harkened back to his early pseudo-rock roots, the second embraces contemporary pop, an indication of where his career was heading, as the future would only get more contemporary; even though the original version is more or less a ballad, it has a beat derived from hip-hop.

But the original version isn't the one that has stuck in the popular consciousness, and arguably wasn't the one that was a big hit in 2008. The remix with Wisin y Yandel, released only a few months later, has more than three times the amount of views on YouTube, and is the version on his Greatest Hits released in October 2019. But even with the premier reggaetón duo of the era on it, the remix isn't actually reggaetón either: the hip-hop beat only gets beefed up, with additional synths to support the Puerto Ricans' stronger voices. Ultimately the meaning of this song isn't really about Enrique Iglesias celebrating his dominance over the Latin Pop market with another sentimental heartbreak song; it's about Doble-U y Yandel proving themselves as pop artists outside the strictures of the reggaetón market.

Because the remix is just a better production. Even the gear-shift key change toward the end feels less jarring when Enrique's coming out of a Yandel verse than when it's just his own mopey middle eight. And that, it turns out, is the actual future of Latin pop, like all the rest of pop: collaborations, team-ups, even crossover events (to borrow the language of superhero comics) are going to make for huger hits than a single pseudo-auteur singer ever did.

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.

ALEJANDRO SANZ FT. SHAKIRA, “TE LO AGRADEZCO, PERO NO”

10th March, 2007

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The third in a trilogy of songs that have been winding through the #1 chart for almost two years, at least in terms of how I've received them. The Shakira/Alejandro Sanz duet "La Tortura", in the summer of 2005, was the longest-reigning #1 song on the Hot Latin chart at the time that I began this blog in 2010, a crowning glory of mid-2000s Latin pop. Then Sanz's solo hit "A La Primera Persona" was only on top for a week in November 2006,  a compact illustration of the difference between pop thrillpower and tasteful male auteurism. Now "Te Lo Agradezco, Pero No," its video a direct sequel to that of "A La Primera Persona," only reigns for only one week: Sanz is still very much the auteur here, Shakira playing a duet partner rather than expressing her own thoughts in her own vivid language. But her very presence lends more color and drama to the song: the music moves to a danceable rhythm (and Sanz himself enters into some choreography in the video, a first for him, apparently at Shakira's insistence), and uses a sturdy Afro-Latin chassis even though the body is auteurist European pop.

And if "La Tortura" was about a woman's rejecting a man's take-me-back whinging, and "A La Primera Persona" was about a man pitying himself over lost love, "Te Lo Agradezco, Pero No" forms a sort of resolution: both man and woman reject the other's overtures at reconciliation, because they are adults and can recognize the toxicity of their past entanglements: they've both hurt the other, and they're setting each other free. Sure, there's still feelings, sure, they will probably return in the future, but they don't belong to each other. All of this, however, is inference and implication: Sanz' lyrics are typically telegraphic and a bit gnomic, and rhythm and sound matter more than laying out a coherent narrative. Multiple readings can reside in any good pop song, and this is a very good pop song.

It begins as a maundering bolero, with acoustic guitar and swaying conga rhythms giving propulsion to Sanz's throaty murmurs, but as the song builds, more and more elements are introduced, including subtle electronic percussion, so that by the time Shakira enters, whispering in unison with Sanz, it's developed into a catalan rumba, the combination of flamenco passion and Afro-Cuban rhythm that served as a particularly Spanish response to the modernism of Anglophone folkies like Bob Dylan. (Sanz works very much in the lineage of Dylan; and of Gato Pérez). And then, after the second chorus, a Memphis soul horn chart breaks out, turning the song into full-out Latin jazz, which Sanz's phrasing and harmonic leaps have been anticipating all along. The chorus is pure 70s r&b, and as more and more voices get added to it it takes the pull of gospel; and when Sanz breaks out into a half-rapped improvised montuno it's a gesture toward both salsa and r&b traditions.

It's notable that none of the traditions Sanz is folding in are particularly new: genre as a capacious grab-bag of historical authenticities is a familiar mode to many postmodern artists of his generation, among whom I'd include people as different as Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, Juan Luis Guerra, or Manu Chao. The gestalt is the point, much more than recreating any one tradition in particular. Shakira, too, has worked in this synthesizing manner (see "Suerte"), and if the traditions she's engaging with here feel more particular to Sanz than to her (her vocal timbre is much more muezzin than gitano), that seems to be exactly what she wanted when she approached Sanz with the desire to be on the other side of the "ft." this time.

RICKY MARTIN FT. LA MARI & TOMMY TORRES, “TU RECUERDO”

23rd December, 2006

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We close out the raucous, pulsating, hotly contested 2006 (a.k.a. the Year Reggaetón Broke) with an older, perhaps more calcified, Puerto Rican sound.

The inevitable music video has four people on stools before the audience. Only the primary singer, a former boy band member and global hitmaker, is pushed a little forward, which makes him look taller than the rest. To his right on guitar and harmonies is the song's writer and producer, who got his start writing and producing for a later iteration of the singer's old boy band. On his right, eventually making the song a duet, a Spanish singer who pushed flamenco vibes into chillout worldbeat music to comparatively limited success, whose close-cropped haircut is a visible reminder of the cancer she had spent the previous year in treatment for. And on the far side of the line, perhaps the world's foremost traditional cuarto player, picking out delicate emotional lines on the traditional Puerto Rican instrument.

The credit line should really read "Ricky Martin ft. La Mari (of Chambao), Tommy Torres, and Christian Nieves," but of course the instrumentalist gets left off: pop has its caste system. Still, of the four spotlit players (there's a full orchestra behind them, because this is a ballad), Torres is the one whose performance is most anonymous: his sweet pop-derived melodies do little but set up volleys for Martin, Mari, and Nieves to spike. La Mari earns applause in the middle of the song for injecting a little cante gitano into her verse, which is the first time I teared up while listening to it; the second was during the dispassionate fluidity of Nieves' cuatro solo. After which Martin gently improvising as though over a salsa montuno rides out the song on a high note.

It's a gorgeous performance, and if the song itself doesn't quite live up to it, that may be because it's a stitched-together pop recreation of traditional jíbaro music rather than a song emerging naturally from that tradition. Not that a traditional jíbaro would ever float within a million miles of #1; but this, with the r&b-inflected rhythms in Martin's voice, the flamenco hints in La Mari's voice, and the pura romántica in Torres, is even more gloriously miscegenated than most pop.

It's the kind of thing that used to be able to go to #1 in the closing weeks of the year, traditionally slow for music buying or radio adds, giving older or less dominant audiences a time of year to hear themselves represented at #1. There's nothing necessarily festive about it (it's a song about still feeling conflicted about an old flame), but in the year of reggaetón it still feels like sentimental throwback to a classicist never-never land, and so it's holiday music regardless.

ALEJANDRO SANZ, “A LA PRIMERA PERSONA”

25th November, 2006

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When we first ran across Sr. Sanz, as the male foil to Shakira in "La Tortura", I was pretty dismissive of his contribution, approving of his weaselly performance of masculinity without attributing much of the song's punch or heft to him, a European interloper on decidedly American (in the hemispherical sense) turf. But this song has me reconsidering my stance.

Alejandro Sanz was born in Madrid to Andalusian parents, and his earliest musical efforts were entries in a postmodern flamenco revival that was briefly fashionable in late-80s Spain. Even when he made the shift into more commercial adult-contemporary ballad material in the early 90s, his phrasing retained echoes of the throaty "gitano" singing style of flamenco tradition. His 1997 worldbeat album Más remains the all-time best-selling record in Spain, and he responded to that ongoing success by becoming a demonstratively "thoughtful" pop star in the mode of a Sting or a Bono, recording increasingly political material and lecturing at Harvard on Hispanic culture.

His global exposure following "La Tortura" meant that his 2006 album was practically guaranteed to be a hit, which makes this one of the strangest #1s we've ever had, as emotionally florid, hyperverbal and structurally anti-pop as some of Juan Gabriel's most lavish excesses. The flowing, pattery verses recall Bob Dylan at his most motormouthed, though Sanz' soulful, gritted-teeth delivery is in both a flamenco and a rock tradition. The drums beat martially, or funereally, and the trumpet which bursts through the moody, atmospheric instrumentation like a grateful sunbeam could equally be a clarion charge or a variation on "Taps."

Because the point of all Sanz' motormouthed excoriation is the old story: love lost, ego bruised, a man on the hunt for his next source of succor. But there's no confidence that he will get it: the chords perversely refuse to resolve, no chorus ever explodes into certainty, there is only another cycle through the same obsessive refrain. It's a strange art-rock curiosity sitting atop the Hot Latin chart for a week, presumably the beneficiary of early digital download metrics sandwiched in between far more conventional radio pop.

DAVID BISBAL, “¿QUIÉN ME IBA A DECIR?”

28th October, 2006

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We interrupt your regular Latinoamericano programming for a three-week interpolation of furrowed-brow idol pop from Spain. David Bisbal first gained attention on the peninsula as the runner-up of the first season of Operación Triunfo (the Spanish edition of Star Academy) in 2002. He kicked around for a while, failing to win the opportunity to represent his country at Eurovision, before embarking on the kind of pop career that everyone in those early days of reality singing competitions was allowed. Smartly, he hooked up with producer and songwriter Kike Santander, who had helped shepherd the solo Gloria Estefan and Alejandro Fernández to glory, and used that production savvy and his own imitation-soul singing to become Spain's biggest pop star, for a time.

We've not been troubled by him here, but not for lack of effort: his second single went to #3 on the Hot Latin chart in 2002. It would take his third album, Premonición, and its debut single, an ungainly and outdated mix of rock muscle, flamenco noodling, Bisbal's impassioned yowl, and electronic scratching, before he landed at #1 stateside.

The single's cover art makes all too obvious what early-2000s careers he's trying to emulate: Justin Timberlake's Justified fedora, Ricky Martin's Almas de Silencio tight t-shirt and Pietà pose. Unfortunately he doesn't have either man's charisma or lightness of touch, and the result is a self-aggrandizing plod that slides off the memory almost as soon as it touches it. The lyrics are a bombastic, hyperbolic description of doomed love, exactly in line with Hispanist tradition and with nothing whatever new to say.

Not to worry, we'll hear from Bisbal again: the Latin market loves nothing more than a handsome, self-consciously brooding man. Maybe the second time's the charm.