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. 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.

RBD, “SER O PARECER”

2nd December, 2006

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There's a reason "come to Brazil" is such a common refrain among internet pop fandom that it's become a meme: Brazilian youth culture in the twenty-first century (like Japanese youth culture in the late twentieth) has an endlessly voracious appetite for pop music from all around the globe, and pop acts who cultivate that audience are often richly rewarded.

RBD, a Mexican pop sextet formed in the 2004 telenovela Rebelde (a teen soap in the Degrassi or 90210 tradition with a students-forming-a-band plot like The Heights), cultivated their Brazilian audience early and often: every one of their Spanish-language releases was closely followed by a Portuguese-language version, years before anyone though to have them record in English.

Like many a "manufactured" pop act before and after them, they released material frequently: "Ser o Parecer" (in Portuguese "Ser ou Parecer") was the lead single from their third album in three years. And the video, although released in Spanish, was shot in São Paulo, with the addition of very Brazilian CGI making the urban landscape even more colorful, fantastic, and otherworldly.

The young women, Anahí, Dulce María, and Maite Perroni, trade off the lead vocals, with the young men (Christian Chávez, Alfonso Herrera, and Christopher Uckermann) only joining in for the terrace-chant chorus. A mixed-gender pop group is such an atypical formation that it's hard to say whether it's unusual for the format for the song to be sung from a female point of view (there are no genders in the lyrics, just the eternal "you" and "I"), but it's notable anyway: the strained vocal fry of the female half of the group is far more distinctive here than the smooth anonymity of the male.

Anahí and Maite Perroni have both remained major pop stars in Mexico since the band broke up in 2009; the rest of them (save Herrera, who was always more of an actor) continue to release music to less fanfare. For all RBD's success between 2004 and 2009, this will be their only appearance here: their playful fashion and innocuous sentiments are very much tied to a time and place. Rebelde (the show) was set in an exclusive private school in Mexico City, an embrace of privilege and whiteness that the concurrent reggaetón revolution is, if not actively rejecting (reggaetoneros gotta make money), at least complicating.

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS, “MÁS QUE TU AMIGO”

15th May, 2004

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I had steeled myself for another exceedingly well-written but interminable ballad, when the opening notes scratched into life and my eyes lit up. Cuuuuuuuuuumbiaaaaa!

It's immediately my favorite Marco Antonio Solís song I've encountered on this travelogue, and the fact that it's the second to last Marco Antonio Solís song (as of summer 2018, at least) on this travelogue makes me wish there had been more uptempo songs among the number ones scored by Los Bukis or him solo: my blind spot with ballads has significantly hurt my appreciation of his work. (Although I just did a quick spin through the archives, and I've overstated how much I disliked his work in the past. The three-song run off En Pleno Vuelo in 1996-7 really annoyed me, though.)

The song itself has been identified by YouTube commenters as a "friendzone" anthem: Solís confesses his love, and begs to be considered "Más Que Tu Amigo" (more than your friend). But neither the cheerful bounce of the music nor the video, in which he happily flits from model to model, takes the lyric seriously. It's so unserious, in fact, that it was used as a telenovela theme: Velo de Novia (bride's veil), a juicy and preposterous melodrama.

Which is all to the good: the burbling organ, wailing reeds, triumphal horns, sinuous accordion, and thumping, beach-friendly rhythm section make more sense as accompaniment to a man dishing out a line of bullshit he doesn't expect to be believed, but he sounds so charming while doing it that you (the genderless, featureless object of his affections; any listener, in fact) don't mind.

JUAN GABRIEL, “ABRÁZAME MUY FUERTE”

27th January, 2001

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The songwriter who inaugurated this travelogue, who was the first truly great artist I learned about for the first time because I chose to do this blog, whose voice and songs were all over its first dozen years, takes his leave of the #1 spot with this valedictory, fifteen years before he took his leave of everywhere else. I am grateful to this blog for letting me share, even if briefly, in the astonishment and adoration that millions of Latinos (but especially Mexicans) have felt towards JuanGa and his work over the decades.

And I note that the impulse which led me to start this blog almost eight years ago, a baffled frustration with an Anglophone music-crit discourse which refuses to acknowledge or understand Latin music as anything but peripheral, an exotic fringe to the English-language center rather than a center (indeed multiple centers) in its own right, was by no means diminished by the conversations which followed his death last year. Comparisons to David Bowie and Prince on the basis of a shallow sense of gender-play and label skirmishes were less than accurate, merely timely: a combination of Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, and Freddie Mercury might have been truer, but in fact comparison itself is useless: Juan Gabriel was himself, a figure so towering and all-encompassing that not only are there no Anglophone equivalents, but even reaching for them is a subtle act of disrespect, another intimation that the fringe can only be understood by reference to the center.

All right, then. "Abrázame Muy Fuerte" was the title song of his 2000 album, which wasn't a comeback -- he had been releasing music regularly since the resolution of his label woes in 1994 -- so much as a final acknowledgement that he was now ceding the pop game to the youth. He turned fifty in 2000, and (not incidentally) got all his publishing back; in the next decade, he would release only one more album of entirely new material, before turning retrospective in 2010.

Characteristically for Juan Gabriel in his late period decadence, it's less a pop song than a tone poem, its structure not a cyclical one of verses and choruses but of plateaus and builds. The orchestral pomp (courtesy of Argentine-born orchestrator and producer Bebu Silvetti) which has characterized much of his work since the 1990s doesn't enter until nearly two-thirds of the way through; the focus is on Gabriel's voice, thin and cracking and full of suppressed emotion, as he recites a lyric so metrically uneven and repetitive that only one singer could ever make it work. But it does work: and it's in this moment that I finally recognize the affinity he always claimed in interviews with the great soul and r&b singers of the US. The late Martin Skidmore on soul music is my reference point here: and the way Juan Gabriel uses the crack in his voice in "Abrázame Muy Fuerte" is as smart a use of the technique of emotion as anything Al Green or Gladys Knight ever accomplished.

"Abrázame Muy Fuerte" means literally "Embrace Me Very Strongly" (an idiomatic English equivalent might be something like "Hug Me Tight"), and the song keeps circling back to that request, or demand, or plea: hold me close, to banish the pain of my past and the awful passage of time. "God forgives, but time does not," is one of the more striking phrases among the rush of philosophical and emotional sentiments he expresses, and although in the world of the marketplace the song is a supremely confident triumph, within the world of in the song it's the rage and terror of an aging man (perhaps even particularly an aging gay man, but vanity is not limited by sexual orientation), full of regret and neediness, an open wound begging to be filled by love. It's an astonishing song, and as the orchestral pomp grows and swirls and Juan Gabriel's voice pushes into the next octave, it can be almost battering.

And then, suddenly, it's over. Breaking off almost in the middle of a thought, with the abruptness of a cut to commercial. Death? Orgasm? The final scene of The Sopranos? It's dramatic tension as an art in itself, and of course it was used as a theme song for a telenovela of the same name: what a way to kick into the first scene.

Because if it's a swan song of sorts, it is also one last challenge to the whippersnappers: "top this." No one did; although its reign at the top was intermittent (as were many Hot Latin reigns at the turn of the century), "Abrázame Muy Fuerte" spent nine weeks in total at the top of the chart, and was ultimately declared by Billboard the best-performing Latin single of 2001, outstripping Ricky, Enrique, and even a newly-blonde Colombian we will catch up with later.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “NUNCA TE OLVIDARÉ”

6th March, 1999

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Growth!

Because Enrique Iglesias still holds the record for the most #1 Latin hits in the US — Luis Miguel would have to stage a decade-long comeback to get anywhere near him — at a certain point, this blog just becomes a means of tracking his career arc. And while this isn't the most interesting song he's sung, it's notable for being his most mature performance to date. The fact that it's the first of his #1s that you could imagine his father singing no doubt has a lot to do with that.

"Nunca Te Olvidaré" (I'll never forget you) was the theme song to a Mexican telenovela of the same name, and it's also the first song Enrique Iglesias brought to number one that he's credited for writing and composing alone. I've touched before on the importance of telenovelas to Latin pop — it's similar to, but not the same as, the effect Hollywood soundtracks had on Anglophone pop in the 90s — but by providing an avenue for creative expression and alternative musical identities outside of the rigorous, micromanaged single-album-single-single release schedule of a major label, novelas throw an element of unpredictability and novelty into the fermenting stew of Latin pop. Not that an Iglesias #1 was anything but predictable in 1999 (and there are more to come), but this relatively old-fashioned, restrained song, the second in a row to employ a real string section, is hard to imagine coming out of the pop-industrial complex that so far had governed his career.

The lyrics are the familiar pledging-eternal-love sort — the opening line is "Three thousand years may pass/You may kiss other lips/But I'll never forget you" — which dovetails perfectly with the novela's plot of star-crossed love across multiple generations. It's so old-fashioned, in fact, that it doesn't have a chorus in the usual rock-oriented sense, only A and B sections with variable lyrics, and of course the repeated refrain of the title phrase. It's been years since we've seen that kind of structure, and my affection for it — as well as my delight that Iglesias isn't making hamfisted rock moves — may be coloring my pleasure in this song. He's still overemoting, making up for his vocal deficiencies with strain, but he's learning to improvise a little, if only emotionally.

ONDA VASELINA, “TE QUIERO TANTO, TANTO”

22nd August, 1998

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One of the flattening effects of examining the Latin chart from this top-down position, as it were, is that we never get much of a feel for the nitty-gritty of a single country's pop scene: with so many competing constituencies making up the US Latin market, it's small wonder the chart moves slowly and relatively lumberingly: flukes excepted, it's the artists that have the widest transnational appeal who consistently show up on this particular radar.

This is one of the flukes. Like most countries, Mexico has long had its little galaxy of well-scrubbed teenpop stars and "manufactured" groups given plenty of time by local variety or light entertainment programs, but that aren't known outside the country -- or even sometimes outside the capital. Onda Vaselina (wave, or sound, of grease) was originally put together in 1989 by Mexican pop lifer Julissa to perform in a production of Grease, at which time their ages ranged from six to twelve. Nearly a decade and several casting changes later, they were perhaps closer in appeal and musicianship to Saved by the Bell: The College Years than to their pop contemporary Ricky Martin.

But then an odd thing happened: "Te Quiero Tanto, Tanto," a seriousface guitar ballad (so seriousface that the chord progression follows vaguely but not actionably in the footsteps of Cat Stevens' "Father and Son") became a hit off the back of the popular telenovela Mi pequeña traviesa (my little imp), and if Youtube is any indication, was the song of choice for Mexican quinceañeras, graduations, weddings, and reunions in 1998. The vocal performances are wobbly, the backing is dull montage-bait, and the song itself is hackneyed and syrupy -- all of which is why, despite myself, I kind of like it. Look at these spunky kids, putting on a show. I wouldn't be surprised if they were trying to save the rec center from some evil developer.

JUAN GABRIEL, “TE SIGO AMANDO”

4th October, 1997

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Because it is occasionally the case that songs given exposure by movies or television shows become massive hits in Anglophone pop, it can be perilously tempting for Anglophone listeners to assume that the relationship between telenovelas and Latin pop is easily analogous. But just about any music supervisor in Hollywood would kill to have the cultural reach the most popular novelas do — far from being merely "soap operas in Spanish," for decades they've combined being Event Television like HBO dramas, telling complete stories like British series, and moving propulsively, not to say trashily, forward with the gonzo pulp energy that fuels not just soap operas but superhero comics, reality television, political campaigns, and pop music. Because telenovelas don't aspire to Art, they can share their giddy, lurid energy with the pop craftsmen who write and sing their theme songs; and if Art takes place incidentally along the way, no one really minds.

Juan Gabriel should be a familiar name in these pages by now; his own tempestuous battle with his label for money, status, and integrity works as an echo for the themes of the novela Te Sigo Amando (I still love you), in which a beautiful young woman is forced to marry a cruel millionaire while her honorable surgeon lover watches impotently. (Per Wikipedia, anyway.) It's a sign of the respect in which Gabriel was universally held by the Latin entertainment complex — for his hitmaking ability, of nothing else -- that his bleat of a voice (sounding all the rougher in these pages after the exquisite dulzura of Luis Miguel) was not sweetened at all for the signature song of a major broadcast event. Just getting him was no doubt coup enough.

It's a traditional-sounding song (not unexpected, given the both the first and the most recent songs we've heard from Gabriel), a florid waltz with big-band mariachi instrumentation, and the lyric is traditional too, a vow of renunciation and at the same time of unending love. The repeated line "Que seas muy feliz" (may you be very happy) is its own classic of the romantic genre; and if it's more calculated to make the man feel he's being noble than to tend to the woman's happiness, there's plenty of precedent for that. This is the level, of course, on which telenovelas function: grand passions, magnificent gestures, sobs all round. Juan Gabriel's voice keeps it tethered to earth, as does an arrangement that manages to be grand without feeling busy: Gabriel's sense of space and when to insert the exactly appropriate instrumental flourish is unimpaired.

JOSÉ Y DURVAL, “GUADALUPE”

16th October, 1993

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I was starting to panic about the lack of information about José y Durval on the Internet, when a stray Youtube comment pointed me to the fact that they were originally called Chitãozinho e Xororó, and that's where their Wikipedia page is. To sum up: they're a Brazilian sertanejo duo (sertanejo is more or less Brazilian country-pop, the traditional rural form of caipira given a modern pop gloss) who used their given names when they recorded for the Spanish-language market because Spanish speakers are just as bad as English speakers when it comes to pronouncing foreign names.

"Guadalupe" was the theme song to a hugely successful American telenovela of the same name, and it's on that basis (and presumably no other) that the song was a hit: it stayed at the top for a week, then vanished. Produced in Miami, the telenovela's high-drama operatics about organized crime, bastard children, insanity, and true love (at least as far as I can make out; I haven't seen it) has precious little to do with the old-fashioned regional ballad that José y Durval sing about the title character. As something stirring to play over the credits, it's only adequate; our last telenovela theme was far more dramatic and involving, but then Juan Gabriel wrote it, and he hasn't been seen in these parts for many years.

JOSÉ LUIS RODRÍGUEZ, “Y TÚ TAMBIÉN LLORARÁS”

28th November, 1987

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Probably the easiest way to become convinced of Julio Iglesias' supremacy in the art of romantic Latin ballad singing is to listen to the imitators that come nowhere close. Which isn't to say that this sweeping entry in the romantic-ballad sweepstaks of late 1987 is terrible; it's just not up to the contemporary standard of Iglesias, which as the past several entries have shown is frankly pretty damn high.

Rodríguez is the first of our company to hail from South America: born in Venezuela, where his relatively poor family was involved in dangerous political activities during the 1950s, he moved around a lot and went without formal schooling, teaching himself music and stagecraft. With hit songs and commercials, he became a local star in the 1970s, and eager for more, moved to Puerto Rico, one of the hotbeds of Spanish-language pop-culture production. He was cast in two immensely successful telenovelas (Cristina Bazán and El ídolo), the latter of which gave him the nickname "El Puma," and began to have enough hit records that he was invited to participate in the Latin Pop version of "We Are The World" in 1985, "Cantaré, Cantarás." Other participants familiar to the readership of this blog include Braulio, Emmanuel, Julio Iglesias, and José José; the full list is here.

"Cantaré, Cantarás" was written by Albert Hammond — the "It Never Rains In Southern California" guy (and father of a Stroke) — who mostly spent the 80s working in Latin Pop, where his talent for big, heartstring-tugging ballads was more widely appreciated than in the Anglophone pop world at the time. (A Gibraltarian, he's fluent in both Spanish and English.) He and José Luis Rodríguez must have gotten along, because two years later he wrote and produced the album Señor Corazón for him, from which "Y Tú También Llorarás" ("and you too will weep") was drawn, becoming Rodríguez' biggest ballad hit of the late 80s.

Hammond's lyrics aren't a patch on Manuel Alejandro's poetic, refractory stuff for Iglesias, but they have their own emotional appeal: the big swooping chorus goes "And you too will weep/For what could not be/Was a torrent of love/That we threw away/You will return to feeling/Like a teenager again/Anxious to arrive/In time for our rendezvous," which turns in the final chorus to "You will never arrive/In time for our rendezvous/It's too late."

It's worth noting that the mid-80s production with which we started out this trip has mostly fallen by the wayside: although the keyboards here are extremely plastic, they have a sonic depth and sustain that's a world away from the tinny production on "La Guirnalda." The balladic 90s (which is when I first became aware of contemporary pop) are within hailing view from this height. Of course, we still have two more years to go before we get there. What's 1988 got for us?

DANIELA ROMO, “DE MÍ ENAMÓRATE”

20th December, 1986

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This is an epochal moment in Hot Latin history: the first time that a song associated with a telenovela has topped the chart. The telenovela in question, El Camino Secreto, starred Daniela Romo in her breakout role as — well, the details hardly matter. I haven't seen it and neither have you (unless you have, in which case feel free to enlighten us all), but word on the Internet is that El Camino Secreto (lit. "the secret road") was extraordinarily popular as 1986 came to a close, and made Romo a star.

She had been a jobbing Mexican pop singer since the late 70s (her biggest influence was apparently Rocío Dúrcal, to bring our abbreviated version of 1986 full circle), and had had the occasional hit, but it was this song, this telenovela, and this album, "Mujer De Todos, Mujer De Nadie" ("everybody's woman, nobody's woman"), which, coming all together at once and reinforcing each other with a consistent vision of a woman in love aching for the object of her love to turn to her, created a potent pop symbolism around Romo, which she parlayed into long-term balladic success in the decade to come.

Her own biography reads a bit like the plot of a telenovela: the poor-but-beautiful daughter of unmarried parents, raised by her grandmother on the mean streets of Mexico City, idolizing a famous Spanish singer/actress, and slowly, agonizingly, achieving her dream of being a famous singer/actress herself. "De Mí Enamórate" ("fall in love with me") represents the happy finale of the story, in which the biggest pop star in the Latin universe, Juan Gabriel, presents her with a suitably dramatic song to sing over the credits of her very own telenovela.

Of the six songs which topped the Billboard Latin charts in 1986, half were written by Juan Gabriel; and this might be the best of them. Romo's ability to switch from the delicate sigh of the verses to the all-out foghorn of the chorus, then chirp the dancy post-chorus breakdown ties the frankly schizophrenic arrangement together. Structurally, it's not very different from "Yo No Sé Qué Me Pasó" — two verses, a superlong chorus, then repeat the second verse and the chorus, and fade, but Gabriel's instinct for flamboyant dramatics comes alive in the stunning three-octave climb which opens the chorus. In pop terms, it's a "defining moment," like the pause in Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" before she comes crashing in again with "AND IIIIIEEIIII, etc." Much as producers salivate over such moments, they're vanishingly rare in practice — so it's no surprise that Romo's performance set a standard for the Hot Latin charts which is still difficult to match; she was the first performer to spend fourteen weeks on top, and this song is still tied for sixth place in the length of its stay at number one.

Lyrically, it retains Gabriel's (and, let's be frank, Mexican pop's) tendency towards flamboyant all-or-nothing statements. The repeated verse translates: "Since I saw you/I've lost my identity/In my head lives/Only you and no one else/And it hurts me to think/That you will never be mine/Fall in love with me." The enormous shift of the chorus, though, functions as a counterweight: the lyrics move into the future tense, and she dreams of the epic perfection that mutual love will be. The majestic, soundtracky sweep of the chorus works for lines like "The day you love me I will be happy/And with pure love I will protect you/It will be an honor to dedicate myself to you/As God desires." The post-chorus breakdown, with its funky synth drops, only repeats the sentiment in an easy glide: "When you fall in love/With my love/I will at last/See the light for once."

It's that funky, cheery breakdown that sticks in the head, rather than the bombastic swell of the chorus. Perfect for a credits sequence easing us into the action. Y aquí viene Gabriela y su amor David; ¿cómo se harán este semana? . . .