JUAN LUIS GUERRA Y 440, “LA LLAVE DE MI CORAZÓN”

31st March, 2007

Wiki | Video

The moment has perhaps never been riper for one of Juan Luis Guerra's hyperliterate, musically inventive, and shrewdly contemporary songs to make a return to this travelogue. Alejandro Sanz (like Shakira, from an entirely different direction) is one of his few peers in terms of intellectual sophistication, and the rise of reggaetón, the first post-hip-hop Latin music form, means that neither his Caribbeanness nor his engagement with the contemporary has to be watered down for mass appeal.

It doesn't hurt that this song presses down on two nostalgia buttons at once: its merengue foundation bears 1950s mambo horn charts, while Guerra's dense, motormouthed lyrics are undeniably post-hip-hop, though for a rather more old-fashioned value of hip-hop than the younger reggaetoneros might recognize; it's much more patter song than boom-bap. But Guerra isn't just mixing Dominican merengue and Cuban mambo (which would develop, in Puerto Rican New York, into salsa), he's also delivering half the lyrics in English, and particularly a formalized pop-song kind of English which listeners to old rock & roll, doo-wop, or British Invasion records would recognize. The effect is kind of a mashup of all the different kinds of music he might have heard on the radio as a young child, energetic as hell and supporting a typically screwball lyric about a guy calling into a radio psychologist who gives love advice to talk about the girl he met online.

Because it's 2007, online dating is going mainstream (although Guerra was broaching the topic here a decade ago), and even though the video casts the caller as an overweight dude (and a young Zoe Saldaña as the out-of-his-league object of his affections), it's not mean-spirited: once he enters the black-and-white nightclub space where Guerra y 440 are playing, he's as dapper and smooth as anyone else, which is part of the point of the throwback music: elegance isn't an inherent virtue but a stylistic choice, and the contemporary is capacious enough to contain whatever of the past we still find useful.

RAKIM & KEN-Y, “DOWN”

29th July, 2006

Wiki | Video

Another minor first: the first reggaetón song to replace a reggaetón song at the top of the chart. Industry observers were quick to note all the signposts of a craze, which sounds comic from the vantage point of 2019, but it was not obvious at the time (especially if you were older than thirty and not attuned to Caribbean culture) that reggaetón would transform the pop landscape rather than burning bright before fading away like, say, Selena-era tejano.

But what Rakim (who would soon start spelling his name R.K.M. to avoid tripping over the legendary Long Island MC's trademark) and Ken-Y have introduced to reggaetón's quickly-growing multiplicity at the top of the chart is a pop element. We've seen pop reggaetón before, of course: but where Shakira and Alejandro Sanz were international pop stars borrowing the dembow riddim for some dancehall authenticity, Rakim and Ken-Y were a Puerto Rican reggaetón duo who aimed for uncomplicated pop sheen from the beginning, an unthreatening hearththrob version of Wisin and Yandel. (Four months ago, I contrasted Wisin & Yandel against Andy & Lucas; Rakim & Ken-Y split the difference.)

Rakim raps rather anonymously, Ken-Y croons in a falsetto-free Timberlake imitation, and they shift between Spanish and English so fluidly that it's hard to believe crossover appeal wasn't uppermost in their mind. The production by Mambo Kingz is similarly straightforward and frictionless, and the lyrics are so uncomplicatedly plaintive a recitation of romantic heartbreak (and so entirely free from the sexuality and violence which the moral guardians of Puerto Rican culture used to justify anti-reggaetón legislation) that these two perhaps better merit the comparison (which I levied against Shakira and Sanz) to the role Pat Boone played in rock 'n' roll history.

Which isn't entirely as a villain, but also as a prophet, hailing the domestication, prettification, and (yes) whitening of a once-dangerous music. For Rakim & Ken-Y, although they'll not trouble us again, set a template which pop-reggaetón crossover acts continue to follow to the present day. Late-2010s reggaetón, with its universalizing romanticism, sounds much less like mid-2000s Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, or Wisin & Yandel and much more like Rakim & Ken-Y. For what that's worth.