WISIN Y YANDEL FT. CHRIS BROWN & T-PAIN, “ALGO ME GUSTA DE TI”

20th October, 2012

Wiki | Video

The first #1 of the streaming era is almost a caricature of the immediate effect that replacing the carefully-calibrated audiences of radio with the undifferentiated firehose of streaming had on the chart. Puerto Rican reggatoneros-turned-dancepop-bros Wisin y Yandel are familiar faces to the #1 spot, but their guests on this track, the uncancellable Virginia R&B bad boy Chris Brown and the cuddly Atlanta electro-soul king T-Pain, provide the crossover juice that made this not just the last Hot Latin #1 of 2012 but the first of 2013, with an unbroken thirteen-week reign that had only been exceeded four times in the history of the chart: 1986, 1988, 2005, 2007. (It had been matched two additional times, by "Rompe" and "Danza Kuduro".) But long unbroken (or briefly punctuated) reigns are now the new norm: the rest of 2013 will only feature seven different songs at the top of Billboard's principal Latin pop chart.

So in an attempt to reconcile this new chart with the history I've traced heretofore, each new entry on this travelogue will end with an Airplay Watch: a list of songs that were at #1 on the Latin Airplay chart (a new chart calculated using the old Hot Latin metric) during the reign of the Hot Latin #1 under discussion, with brief capsule reviews, excluding only songs that will become future Hot Latin #1s.

But for the body of this post, we'll still have to wrestle with this thing, a jocular party anthem in a vein that was feeling pretty exhausted by this point. Puerto Rican producers Luis O'Neill and Chris Jedi do their best thumpa-thump, sine-synth imitation of megasuccessful Swedish maestros like Dr. Luke and RedOne, but it's not 2008 anymore for anybody, and the Chris Brown and T-Pain bits just make me want to put on "Forever" or "Can't Believe It" instead. Even Wisin and Yandel sound pretty checked-out themselves, running through standard come-ons and exhortatons to party as though their stock portfolios will dip if they don't. Even the big-budget crossover reggaetón of "Sexy Movimiento" feels like it was ages ago, never mind the hungry, horny, beat-forward "Rakata", their first single (which still hit #2 back in 2005; they've always been a creature of the charts.)

If the first song of the streaming era was a better or more distinctive effort rather than just about the most generic party crossover thing the era could produce, I still wouldn't have been thrilled about the change; but watching this thing stick in the craw of the chart for months on end just as I was attempting the most foolhardy and ultimately destructive change of my life didn't help my feeling that everything was going to shit, that the idiots and the algorithms that catered to them were winning, that nothing interesting or beautiful or meaningful would ever happen again.

Stay tuned, I guess.

Airplay Watch:

• Wisin & Yandel ft. Chris Brown & T-Pain "Algo Me Gusta de Ti"
• Discussed above.
• Leslie Grace, "Will U Still Love Me Tomorrow"
• One of my favorite minor hits of the period, from a Dominican New Yorker bachatera attempting to replicate Prince Royce's playbook by leading off with a classic US pop song in Spanish and English. Grace would go on to have a middling pop career of often very fine Latin pop and little notice before being cast in the film adaptation of In the Heights, and is now primarily known as an actor.
• Arcángel, Zion & Lennox, Lobo, RKM & Ken-Y, "Diosa de los Corazónes"
• The "Danza Kuduro" beat gets another workout on this posse cut/pretty-boy summit from two Puerto Rican duos and two Puerto Rican solo singers (although Arcángel had been in a duo with De La Ghetto). A lot of energy and tremulous vocalizing to very little effect.
• Gerardo Ortíz, "Solo Vine a Despedirme"
• One of the tragedies of the streaming makeover of the chart is that great Mexican regional hits like this are now relegated to footnotes like this one. Ortiz takes this heartbroken farewell song at such a breakneck clip that it's practically punk rock.
• Prince Royce, "Incondicional"
• A bachata cover of the 1989 Luis Miguel hit, dispensing with Miguel's dramatics for Royce's smooth airiness.
• Gusttavo Lima, "Balada (Tchê Tcherere Tchê Tchê)"
• A pop-sertanejo singalong, the spiritual successor to "Ai Se Eu Te Pego", a year later. I probably like it better, because it's more rhythmically interesting, but it's just as vacant of meaning.
• Enrique Iglesias ft. Sammy Adams, "Finally Found You"
• A late and unimpressive entry from Iglesias' Swedish-produced club-pop phase. Guest Sammy Adams is a terrible rapper, but Daddy Yankee doesn't do much better on the Latin-market version.
• Carlos Vives, "Volví a Nacer"
• Discussed in the previous entry.
• Gocho ft. Yandel & Wayne Wonder, "Amor Real"
• Producer Gocho takes another crack at an above-the-line hit, with Yandel along for moral support. The reggaeton riddim haunts the song like a ghost, intangible even as the actual beat echoes it in absentia.

WISIN Y YANDEL FT. JENNIFER LÓPEZ, “FOLLOW THE LEADER”

7th July, 2012

Wiki | Video

The rolling timeline of this blog's updates means that the cultural meanings of the songs I'm writing about, even filtered through as limited a lens as my generally out-of-touch sensibility, have drastically shifted by the time I get to them. In 2012, I thought this song was great: it was exactly what I wanted out of modern pop, blending English and Spanish without making a big deal out of it or trying hard to cater to one market or the other, merely confident in its ability to appeal to both. Jennifer López's authoritative diva choruses gave Yandel's burly raps and Wisin's AutoTuned wheedling something to focus around; and they lent her a structural range that some of her solo work lacked.

Eleven years on, however, "Follow the Leader" no longer sounds modern, but very much a product of its time. Latin pop production (at least of the kind that interests me most) has shifted in the past decade toward grittier, more syncopated rhythms and away from the Eurodance maximalism provided by the Swedish production house Cave Music. In hindsight it's a late, and not a particularly distinguished, example of post-subprime pop, the gleefully vulgar, party-centric but apocalyptically-minded genre embodied by Ke$ha and occasionally referenced in these pages: but López's steely self-assuredness doesn't let the apocalypse creep in.

Wisin y Yandel are credited as the principal performers, with López as a guest, because its parent album was the duo's 2012 Líderes; but as a single, it acts much more like a Jennifer López song with the boys along for the ride. Notably, it was performed during the finale of the eleventh season of American Idol, where López had been a judge for two years (and would be for another three) -- and it has the generic feel-good sentiments of a singing-competition reality-show number. Wisin and Yandel's horndog personas are sanded down, and Jennifer López as "the leader" sounds more like a Zumba instructor than anyone who wields a more complicated or interesting form of power. The video, in which the three of them engage in parkour chases across the rooftops of Acapulco, is sufficiently high-energy but even less narratively coherent.

In another few years I could reverse on it and fall in love again; right now, it falls between the stools of being too far away to still feel keyed to the energy of the moment, but not yet far enough away to have gained a nostalgic glow. It's just faintly embarrassing, where some of its contemporaries have aged into either hardy perennials or underrated gems.

WISIN Y YANDEL, “TU OLOR”

8th October, 2011

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Wisin y Yandel's seventh top-lining #1 (ninth if we count features and remixes) in five years sees them still acting as a bellweather for urban Latin pop. Nesty and El Nasi's slick, turbo-charged production is in line with the trancey synths and urgent dance-pop that have been the signature sound of the summer of 2011, and the syncopated rhythm once more recalls the reggaetón beat without actually using the dembow riddim.

"Tu Olor" was the second single off the duo's seventh album, and comparing it to the lead single "Zun Zun Rompiendo Cadenas", which did not reach #1, is a little instructive. "Zun Zun" was much more firmly an electro song aimed at crossover dancefloor success, with Yandel's voice flanged all to hell by AutoTune; "Tu Olor" is grittier and even more romantic, in the surly masculine way that hip-hop-derived forms tend to be.

The title means "your scent," and Yandel's chorus, "Se me quedó tu olor en mi ropa / la fragancia de tu piel, tu rico sabor a miel / que probé yo de tu boca / Vamo' a repetirlo mami una y otra y otra y otra vez" is a minor masterpiece of erotic pop poetry: "Your scent is still in my clothes / the fragrance of your skin, the sweet honey flavor / that I tasted from your mouth / Let's do it again mami again and again and again." Meanwhile, Wisin's verses expand the narrative from pure nostalgic eroticism: it's much more indirect, but essentially the same premise as T-Pain's 2005 classic "I'm 'n Luv (Wit a Stripper)." And the video turns it into a high-octane action movie with a lot of expensive shots and very little meaning, except of course to communicate how successful and important the performers at its center are.

It was only #1 for a week, though: in a chart where Don Omar's "Taboo" and Pitbull's "Give Me Everything" were still hanging around, it was a relatively small blip that spoke to the dedication of the W&Y fanbase rather than the duo's global dominance in 2011. We'll see them again, in a stronger position.

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.

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

19th December, 2009

Wiki | Video

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. 

WISIN Y YANDEL, “ABUSADORA”

1st August, 2009

Wiki | Video

The third Wisin y Yandel #1 in a row without the distinctive reggaetón riddim, although the hip-house beat keeps the same staggered rhythm: the market seemed to be pushing away from puro reggaetón in the usual way that Black music gets coopted and watered down by white practitioners. Still, "Abusadora" was produced by Tainy with W&Y's usual collaborator Víctor El Nasi, so it's not like they were trying to abandon the formula that gave them their success by working with pop producers; if anything, they were demonstrating that reggaetón was a bigger tent than a blinkered focus on the riddim would suggest.

"Abusadora" is, like so many of Wisin y Yandel's songs, a worshipfully horny celebration of a sexually assertive woman at the club. The title literally translates to "abusive woman," but what or who she's abusing is never clear: maybe it's the singers (although Yandel repeats "Bendita sea la hora en que te encontré" -- blessed be the hour in which I met you), maybe it's substances, maybe it's simply her own pretty privilege. But if they're suffering, they don't complain: Wisin brags about his ability to keep up with her, and Yandel croons in silvered fragements of AutoTune about how little control he has over himself.

The sawtoothed synths and AutoTune are more than anything else a time capsule: this is post-subprime mortgage pop, big and splashy and dance-friendly, the cheap blare of foreclosed futures. The long, embittering crisis of the 2010s will temper the noise and energy on display here, but for the next couple of years at least, we'll keep on partying like it's the end of the world.

DJ NESTY FT. WISIN Y YANDEL, “ME ESTÁS TENTANDO”

21st March, 2009

Wiki | Video

Reggaetón's evolution out of underground dancehall versioning and hip-hop mixtapes in the 1990s has meant that even as it became the most dominant commercial force in the Latin world, its discographies remained untidy, sprawling across all kinds of release formats on a variety of label-sanctioned (or not) modes.

So this song, which is only found under Wisin y Yandel on today's streaming services (the video link above has it hosted on their official YouTube account), was initially released as the first single from DJ Nesty's 2008 compilation album Wisin y Yandel Presentan: La Mente Maestra (Wisin y Yandel present: the mastermind), a mixtape of previously unreleased tracks featuring a host of more underground Puerto Rican reggaetoneros and producers. The song was later included on the deluxe edition of Wisin y Yandel's 2009 album La Revolución as a bonus track, but Billboard listing it as DJ Nesty ft. Wisin y Yandel at the time (they now list it as "Wisin & Yandel Featuring Nesty") was only following the original parent album.

And to an extent putting the producer first makes sense, because while this is definitely a Wisin y Yandel song, it's not technically a reggaetón song: the dembow riddim never appears, only a stuttering loop during Wisin's verses. Wikipedia lists it as EDM, which whether accurate or not would be the first appearance of that particular tag on the Hot Latin #1s. There's definitely a sawtoothed synth rather reminiscent of the "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These)" riff that cycles throughout, and the percussion is more or less disco: the detailed production by Nesty, Víctor "El Nasi" and Marioso could slot this directly into a turn-of-the-decade synthpop mix, no questions asked.

But Wisin and Yandel are still Wisin and Yandel: you can take the boys out of the reggaetón riddim, but you can't take the reggaetón out of the boys. Yandel's electro croon, Wisin's punchy rapping, and their constant shouted interruptions make even this moodily sparkling track as rowdy and cheerful as the rest of their #1 hits. The lyrics are their usual declarations of horniness and machismo: "Me Estás Tentando" means "you're tempting me" and Yandel's portrait of a dancing woman getting him excited is punctured by Wisin's more free-associative hype, calling himself "el tiburón a comerse la sirena" (the shark to eat up the mermaid). The video is all late-00s electro classiness (I swear I've seen dozens of rap, R&B, and dance acts on that set or ones very like it), the boys and some models striking poses against austere black-and-white light grids.

Wisin y Yandel (and their management) could be excused for believing that pure reggaetón would not be sustainable for a long-term pop career, some three years after it broke into #1 here, and so moving in a broader pop direction would only be canny. And this song was only #1 for a week in between Banda El Recodo reigns -- maybe the market was shifting away from urban tropical music entirely. Maybe. Stay tuned.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “LLORO POR TÍ”

8th November, 2008

Wiki | Video

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.

WISIN & YANDEL, “SEXY MOVIMIENTO”

19th January, 2008

Wiki | Video

Reggaetón enters its decadent phase. The banging rhythm is buried below layers of whooshing electronics, the wordplay and intertextuality of its hip-hop and dancehall origins is streamlined into bone-simple repetition, each of Wisin's verses choosing a single rhyme and hitting it over and over again without regard for sounding cool or making sense. The economic bubble of the mid 2000s was in full effect: it was the era of "My Humps," of Soulja Boy Tell 'Em, of Two and a Half Men -- the week before "Sexy Movimiento," another superb single that closely resembles its ethos of stupidly horny excess was released: "Low" by Flo Rida featuring T-Pain.

The heist-driven music video closely apes the style of the Fast and Furious movies, and it's not a coincidence that the stylized W and Y on the single cover resemble a high-end automobile logo. The aesthetics of the automobile industry, especially the testosterone-marketed muscle-car sector, are those adopted by the trio of name producers -- Nesty, Victor "El Nasi" and Marioso -- necessary to give the song its gleaming finish: a powerful engine, velvety shock absorbers, chrome detailing, the sense that it could run forever without getting tired. Even Yandel's voice, not yet treated with the flanged AutoTune that will overrun the genre within a year, is filtered and doubled as if in imitation of thrumming pistons.

It's extremely macho music, but like the aforementioned film franchise its hypermasculinity is not overtly toxic: to the extent that there's a coherent thought in the lyrics, it's appreciation of feminine beauty, fascination, and self-possession. Although even the video spends as little time as possible on the curves of the female models, preferring to showcase Wisin and Yandel's exquisitely-tailored good looks: they are firmly aware of their audience, and at least in their big pop singles are not above catering to it.

WISIN & YANDEL, “PAM PAM”

4th November, 2006

Wiki | Video

It made sense, during reggaetón's first imperial period, when many observers considered it a flash in the pan, a novelty that would be finished in a season or two as the Latin youth audience moved on to the next shiny thing, that one of the hits of the era would join the dots to a flash in the pan of a previous generation. If you're not listening for it, it might be easy to miss the pitched-down flute from Bolivian folklorico group's 1981 rendition of "Llorando Se Fué" in the mix, playing a melody last heard on this blog as played by an accordion in French dance-pop group Kaoma's 1989 "Lambada".

I definitely did not do "Lambada" justice when I covered it in 2010, trying to connect it to contemporary English-language material I already knew rather than working backwards through the Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Peruvian, and Afro-Bolivian roots of the material. But this revival isn't the last time we'll encounter it in the reggaetón era, and the novelty connection I made above is once more an Anglocentric one: the real connection is that the new pan-Latin music of the 2000s is harkening back to an earlier pan-Latinism of the 1980s, giving it a a grittier, minor-key hip-hop gloss, but retaining the dance-centric fusion that an electronic age demands.

But that's just one sound in the stew of sounds cooked up by producers Luny Tunes, Tainy and Naldo for this one-week-wonder, an organic hit which was never released as a single but topped the charts anyway. The lyrics consist largely of the usual boasting: Yandel's refrain "Bailando la toqué y ella se dejó/Me aprovecho y pam-pam-pam, la toco y pam-pam-pam" is perhaps more of a reference to the sexual legend of the lambada than to the actual song (although it structurally echoes the original "Llorando Se Fué" lyrics). I'd translate it "Dancing I touched her and she let me/I seize the opportunity and bam-bam-bam, I touch her and bam-bam-bam."

But in the video (shot in Brazil, and it wants to make sure you know it), the rhythmic "pam-pam" of the title is keyed to the hip and thigh movements which will later be formalized in English as twerking. Some Anglophone musicologists' dismissive attitude toward reggaetón as "just" dancehall in Spanish sometimes makes me eager to catalog the ways in which reggaetón has developed into its own distinctive genre: but it should never be forgotten that all post-hip-hop Afro-Caribbean music, from Jamaican dancehall to Puerto Rican reggaetón to Dominican dembow to New Orleans bounce, feeds on each other, especially in the real physical spaces in which the music is celebrated.

WISIN & YANDEL, “LLAMÉ PA' VERTE (BAILANDO SEXY)”

1st April, 2006

Wiki | Video

One of the reasons for doing this project is to tease out unexpected resonances. So rather than comparing "Llamé Pa' Verte" to "Rompe," its immediate predecessor in reggaetón chart-crashing, I'm reminded instead of the last male duo to appear at #1, all the way back in 2004: Andy & Lucas, two Spanish pretty boys peddling Idol-approved sentimental nostrums. It's not just "real," "raw" music as opposed to "manufactured," "telegenic" pop: Juan Luis "Wisin" Morera Luna and Llandell "Yandel" Veguilla Malavé, rough-voiced rapper and smooth-voiced singer respectively, are if anything better-looking than the rather callow teen pin-ups Andy and Lucas; Yandel in particular serves such excellent smolder that he very nearly outclasses the hip-thrusting bikini-clad models in the video.

It's not even a forthright representation of adult sexuality as opposed to fanciful youthful ideas about romance: dance music is certainly a stylized representation of sexual activity, but the stylization is just as important as the sex. Yes, Wisin and Yandel play booty-calling ("Llamé pa' verte" means "I called t' see you") horndogs, Yandel's chorus extremely unambiguous about the sexual metaphor of the dembow rhythm ("a ella le encanta como lo hago y le doy" -- "she loves how I do it and give it") while Wisin's verses are only slightly more clever in their entendres ("yo tengo la crema pa' tu piquiña" -- "I have the cream for your itch"). In its way, it's just as hyperbolic and idealistic as Andy & Lucas, only making grandiose, exaggerated claims about sexual competence rather than the similarly grandiose claims about emotional competence and eternal devotion that romantic balladry promises.

Perhaps it's simply more realistic: love cannot be guaranteed, but sex can, so reggaetón (especially early, up-from-the-streets reggaetón) concentrates on the latter: not just because of its inherent attractions, but primarily because of its fungibility. Every reggaetonero, like every rapper and dancehall toaster before them, is, before anything else, a capitalist. Which is what makes this, even more than "Rompe," the first street-level reggaetón #1, with no concessions given to the pop market. With nearly a third of the track left to go, Wisin begins to shout out the track's producers and brag about how many records they've sold, the kind of coda designed for a DJ to fade into the next song.

If your primary conception of music consumption revolves (like mine) around songs as discrete units, every mp3 or stream functioning like an imaginary 45-r.p.m. record, this kind of extra-musical information, an essential element of brand maintenance in a musical world ruled by mixes and soundsystems, takes some getting used to; but pop music doesn't belongs to the bedroom listener carefully placing the stylus on "Surfer Girl" any more (and probably much less) than it belongs to the basement raver screaming to be heard over the bass of a song they'd never know the name of if its performers didn't shout it at them repeatedly. Buckle up; the new world is only starting.