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.

PAULINA RUBIO, “ME GUSTAS TANTO”

11th February, 2012

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Back-to-back singles by women were always a rarity in this travelogue, but their arrival now means that 2012 is already doing better than the previous couple of years: Natalia Jiménez guesting on a Ricky Martin song and Giselle Moya uncredited on Romeo Santos singles were the only female voices heard at #1 in 2011, and a single week of Shakira had been the only respite from male dominance in 2010. The chart had started with a woman singing at #1, and for its first fifteen years male and female voices were about equally distributed; but the influence of hip-hop derived musics (including dancehall) concurrent with a rise in regional music that was if anything worse in terms of gender parity than than its country equivalent north of the border meant that masculine voices, perspectives, and posturing had overshadowed feminine ones since the mid-2000s.

In some ways the first half of 2012 is the last gasp of the old chart before streaming data condemns it to an endless yawn of whatever guy or group of guys makes the biggest party song of the financial quarter, with very occasional interruptions from memes, also dude-heavy. So I'm determined to enjoy it while I can.

Paulina Rubio had toiled in the pop trenches for over a decade before I noticed her here, and her occasional appearances since have been lively, pop-forward visitations to a chart often mired in sentimentality and cliché. This is her fifth (and, as of this writing, final) Hot Latin #1, and the title is a sweetly carefree echo of her first: 2004's "Te Quise Tanto" (I loved you so much" vs. 2011's "Me Gustas Tanto" (I like you so much). Where the former was a kitchen-sink production from Emilio Estefan half-lamenting and half-celebrating a dead passion, this is a much sleeker, even perhaps naïve RedOne production simply and uncomplicatedly celebrating a current infatuation. Almost forty when she recorded it, she is consciously painting with the palette of a younger generation of pop stars, particularly Lady Gaga, whose collaborations with RedOne had transformed the sound of Anglophone pop only a few years earlier, and Belinda, a Spanish-born Mexican pop princess almost half her age whose 2012 was remarkable (if invisible here).

Pulsing heat-blast synths, programmed handclaps, AutoTuned accents, and Rubio singing largely in her sugary upper register rather than her rocker growl: it's like it was engineered to be a hit. And it was, if only for one week. At the time I preferred the follow-up single "Boys Will Be Boys," in which she embraced a fully grown-up, even a cougarish, sexuality, but it didn't make the Hot Latin chart. Later in 2012, Rubio would accept a role as a judge on the Mexican version of singing competition reality show The Voice, and settled into an elder-stateswoman role, only releasing one album and a handful of scattered singles since.

Of her five singles here, my favorite is still "Causa y Efecto," mostly because I'm a sucker for the schaffel beat, but none of them were bad or uninteresting; if I were scoring these records à la my colleague Tom, she might have the highest average hit rate of any performer with multiple entries.

PITBULL FT. MARC ANTHONY, “RAIN OVER ME”

15th October, 2011

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On Mr. Worldwide's last visit to these shores, I noted that the meatheaded dumbness of the English-language lyrics stood in contrast to the many floridly poetic Spanish lyrics that preceded his over the past quarter century. Well, he raps half a verse in Spanish here, and it's just as dumb. I recall reading an Argentinean blogger around this time who sniffed at the Latin rappers and Mexican regional musicians who were having such great success in the United States, suggesting that the low education level of immigrant populations meant that even when Spanish was their native language it was still a rudimentary, ignorant peasant Spanish untouched by the language's centuries-old literary tradition. Which may well be true; but to quote Mark Sinker it's good not bad. People making the same arguments about English-language rappers would be self-evidently classist and racist; but a lot of intra-Hispanic prejudice is invisible to English speakers because of their automatic association of "Hispanic" with "subaltern."

Against which this song flails mightily. Pitbull and Marc Anthony are two immensely wealthy white-coded men singing and rapping about generic love using liquid imagery (which also happens to plug the vodka brand one of them owns) over a very expensive trance-pop production, itself courtesy of white-coded immigrants. The list of writers and producers on "Rain Over Me" is extensive, but Swedish producer and co-writer RedOne, whose signature heat-blast synth sound is all over early-2010s pop, was born in Morocco, and his collaborators Bilal "The Chef" Hajji, Rachid "Rush" Aziz, and Achraf "AJ" Janussi have similar SWANA backgrounds. We're very far from the Dirty South rap and Nuyorican salsa scenes where the headliners first made their names: the carefully generic adrenaline fuel behind their voices is very intentionally crafted to sound from nowhere in particular, a global (or worldwide) noise that flattens genre as much as nationality or race.

But this is also a victory lap for Pitbull; after the studied genericism of his lyrics for "Give Me Everything," he lets his triumphalist instincts take over in the second verse here, crowing about Latins being on track to be the "new majority" in the US and giving a chat-up line in working-class Spanish. Marc Anthony's chorus, which could have been sung by anyone and makes little use of his gifts, ends up being primarily another flex, a highly expensive guest appearance singing the kind of English-as-a-second-language pabulum that is Swedish pop's specialty. Let what rain over him? There is no idiom in English that this line gestures toward; but it was too obviously anodyne a song for there to even have been a notable rumor that it was really about golden showers.

CHRISTINA AGUILERA, “VEN CONMIGO (SOLAMENTE TÚ)”

14th October, 2000

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Although in low-resolution hindsight it's easy to mistake Christina Aguilera for being part of the wave of young Latinos renovating Latin pop around the turn of the century -- a peer to Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, at least -- this is her sole appearance (as of mid-2017) on this travelogue, and after the comparatively middling sales of Mi Reflejo would rarely record in Spanish again, and then only in duet with an established Latin star.

While she did hire hitmaking Cuban-American songwriter and producer Rudy Pérez (we last saw him assisting Luis Fonsi) to translate "Come on Over Baby (All I Want Is You)" into vernacular Spanish, the production remains pure Stockholm, Johan Åberg's piano, string stabs, and fake scratching ported over wholesale from the English-language original.

So ultimately, despite Aguilera's half-Ecuadorian heritage, "Ven Conmigo" is exactly as much an opportunistic cash-in on the newfound brand-expansion possibilities of the Latin market as any Anglo star might have done: indeed, acts like N'Sync were recording versions of their hits in Spanish, as would Beyoncé years later. That it worked, to the extent that she is one of the exclusive club to have both Hot 100 and Hot Latin #1 hits with the same song, is a tribute to the breezy, galvanic joy of Åberg's production, Pérez' solid work finding rhythmic equivalence in Spanish, and her slightly mechanical but always impressive performance.

It's one of those songs (common early in her career, much rarer later on) when her overdriven vocals sync up with an overdriven emotional state (the excitement of young, sexually curious love), so that her endless elaboration feels like a spontaneous expression of excitement rather than mere showboating. If we're not going to see here again here, at least she left her mark.