GLORIA ESTEFAN, “TU FOTOGRAFÍA”

8th May, 2004

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In the spring of 2004, Gloria Estefan was 46: the perfect age, you might say, for a stock-taking ballad about the emotional gap left by elders who had passed on, leaving nothing behind but old black-and-white photographs. On the cover of the single, she clutches a photo of her in-laws, Emilio's parents, taken on their wedding day in Havana in the 1940s.

The fact that this obviously very personal, even intimate song still went to #1 perhaps owes less to the undeniable universality of its themes (everyone but the very young has experienced loss and grown sentimental over an old picture) than Gloria Estefan's stature as an icon of Latin pop twenty years in to her hitmaking career. 2003's Unwrapped spawned four singles, but the third, "Te Amaré," was only issued in Spain, where it was a substantial hit, and the second, "I Wish You," was only pushed to English-language radio, where it was a modest adult-contemporary hit; but the two Spanish-language singles released in the U.S. hit #1 on the Hot Latin chart as if duty-bound.

The song itself is perfectly lovely, also co-written by Peruvian songwriter Gian Carlo, with an intelligent, unpredictable chord structure and marvelous, emotionally literate work from drummer Manu Katché and percussionist Archie Peña. Gloria's performance is understated but resonant, reminding me not for the first time of the warmth and yearning in Amy Grant's 1980s records, which is a higher compliment than you may suspect.

It was only #1 for a week, but it only needed to be. In some ways it's the tail end of Gloria's imperial period: we will see her again, but not with the frequency we have since 1989. She's moving towards brand management rather than pop stardom, and as her and Emilo's portfolios diversify, the charts take a back seat. Never mind; the kids are always coming up from behind.

MANÁ, “MARIPOSA TRAICIONERA”

5th July, 2003

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I've been using the "rock en español" tag quite liberally since starting this blog eight years ago (real time) and fourteen years ago (chart time), but this may be the first time it actually applies, at least to the degree that "rock en español" was ever an organic musical movement and not just a marketing campaign. (And to the degree that, under capitalism, there is a difference.)

In the 1980s, "Rock en Tu Idioma" (rock in your language) was a publicity campaign started by a Mexican subsidiary of an international (originally German) record company to sell the middle-class youth of Latin America on local bands playing in styles which had originated in the US and Great Britain between 1956 and 1980, as a complement to rather than as a replacement for the English-language originals; what "rock en tu idioma" was meant as a replacement for was local (and often heavily racialized) styles of music which working-class audiences played and enjoyed, and which nationalist elites, after enough time had passed for nostalgia to do its work, always appropriated for propaganda purposes. What young Mexican Maná fans in the early 90s were rejecting was not the imperialist ubiquity of U2 or Pearl Jam, who they also loved, but the supposed provincialism and sentimentality of Los Bukis or Juan Gabriel (and never mind the traditional bolero, trova, and ranchera music which would have been the Mexican equivalent of jazz song).

When the English-language music press caught on to the Spanish-language rock scene in the 90s as part of their dilettantish interest in "world music," they used "rock en español" as a replacement for "rock in tu idioma," boosting acts like Maná and Café Tacvba whose massive popularity throughout  Latin America was scarcely increased by a handful of semi-adventurous English-language fans. My introduction to Maná was in this English-language press (my younger siblings, who paid closer attention to local popular culture when we lived in Guatemala in the early 90s, knew them already), but it wasn't until I began to really dig into Latin music in earnest in the late 2000s that I listened to them with any attention.

And? They're fine. The trouble with "rock in tu idioma" was the same trouble that rock in general was having in the 1980s and 90s: genre-requisite signifiers of rebellion and Dionysian menace had long since turned itself into the complacent, self-perpetuating mainstream, which by its nature shuts out the poor and otherized, so that truly countercultural rebellion and visions of sexual freedom were taking place elsewhere: in the underground, in hip-hop, dance music, and (in Latin America) the electronic blends of Jamaican and Latin music which would eventually coalesce into reggaetón. (Which in 2018 has become its own hollow, self-perpetuating mainstream, but one thing at a time.)

This is a long way to go without talking about the actual song. Which is unrepresentative of Maná's dully earnest hard-rock catalog, but perfectly representative of where the top of the Hot Latin chart was at in the early 2000s: "Mariposa Traicionera" (Betraying Butterfly) is an old-fashioned swaying bolero played by a rock band with high-gloss studio accompaniment, not wholly unlike recent entries from Gloria Estefan, Alejandro Fernández, or Charlie Zaa. The main "rock" signifiers are singer Fher's hoarse tones and guitarist Sergio Vallín's tasteful guitar runs, which also fit into the Cuban-Mexican tradition the whole song is cast in. The final refrain, with its repeated "ay ay ay ay ay dolor," is even specifically Mexican, a nineteenth-century corrido trope which the trova (troubadour) tradition kept alive in the twentieth century.

Our first encounter with Maná is late enough in their career trajectory that Revolución de Amor was heralded as a masterful self-reinvention; if they're comparable to U2, it's their Achtung Baby. It won't be the last time we see them, but the genius of the charts, the way they flatten out all subcultural distinctions and actually lived patterns into sheer unmeaning numbers, is that they sound here not as a revelation but as continuity.