GLORIA ESTEFAN, “SI VOY A PERDERTE”

16th September, 1989

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Notable firsts watch: this is the first song we've encountered that simultaneously went to #1 on the Hot 100 (the main Billboard pop chart). Niggling caveats watch: "Si Voy A Perderte" isn't quite the same song as "Don't Wanna Lose You," despite having the same backing melody, the same backing track, and even the same competent-but-bland performance from Estefan. Also, "Don't Wanna Lose You" spent only a week at #1, her fifth top-ten entry since 1987, while as if to make up for her previous absence from this travelogue, she spends a solid month at the top of the Hot Latin tree.

For this is also our first encounter with the woman who most readily comes to mind if you say the words "80s Latin" to an American pop fan. We're almost done with the 80s, of course; but in a lot of ways this song sounds like the first of the 90s to me.

You see, my memory of the 90s is as much Adult Contemporary ballads as it is grunge, g-funk, or garage. (In order: quite a lot, a bit, not at all.) And only people who have never seriously listened to a ballad — instead of just hearing them and seething, or whatever — could imagine that the conventions of the form haven't changed, sometimes quite dramatically, over the years. The hushed verse/soaring chorus Estefan employs here isn't precisely a new idea, but the miles of space within the production, everything polished to a carefully tasteful sheen, is, at least in the Latin provinces. In other realms of the pop universe earlier in the decade, it was called sophisti-pop; as the 80s wheeled gracefully into the 90s, it became simply The Way Pop Gets Done.

But I started to talk about the difference between this and "Don't Wanna Lose You Now." I'm assuming you've heard "Don't Wanna Lose You Now" — in waiting rooms, if nowhere else — and it is, as I'm sure you know, a fine-to-middling example of the Dance-Pop Diva Sings A Ballad of the era. (See also: Paula Abdul, Janet Jackson, even on occasion Madonna.) The title says it all: she don't wanna lose you now, you're gonna get through somehow, she don't wanna lose you now (or ever), baby she's finally found the courage to stand her ground, etc., etc. As a vaguely empowering "we can make this work" anthem, it's fairly rote; as an sample of the Inspirational Pop of the period, it's Why Grunge Had To Happen. (That's, um, a joke. No letters, please.)

But the Spanish-language version (written, as was the "original," by Estefan herself) is something else. The differences in the title reflect the differences in the song: "Si Voy A Perderte" translates as "If I'm going to lose you," and rather than trying to rescue the relationship, she's making an ultimatum. The empowerment remains, but it's no longer vague: "If I'm going to lose you, it will be for the last time. This is forever, understand? I'd rather let you go and learn to live without you, because if I'm going to leave you, don't come back."

(Admittedly, this is a somewhat biased reading; the jut-jawed "understand?" could be a sympathetic "you understand me," and "don't come back" could also be a fatalistic "you won't come back." But it's worth noting that that sort of — or any — ambiguity is not available in the English-language version.)

This is far from our last encounter with La Gloria, and it doesn't necessarily show her off to her best advantage (I'll rep for the Miami Sound Machine any day), but it's indisputably the arrival of a major figure in Latin Pop. Nothing yet has sounded quite so clinically lovely, so (for lack of a better phrase) professional, which is no slur on the previous three years' worth of pop. This isn't the first song we've seen that was produced in the US, but it's the first that sounds like it.

It won't be the last.

ANA GABRIEL, “SIMPLEMENTE AMIGOS”

2nd September, 1989

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Well, this was unexpected.

Not the fact of Ana Gabriel's reappearance in this travelogue (I'd peeked ahead), or the fact that she was peddling another ballad — according to my theory, September is prime ballad territory — but the song's subject matter.

In these posts I've usually started out by talking about the sound of the song, then worked my way into discussing the lyrics; since Spanish isn't my first language, that's often seemed like the most natural way to approach them. But there are times when the lyrics suggest so much, and are so startlingly different from what I in my ignorance would have expected, that they insist on being dealt with first. Here, then, are the lyrics to "Simplemente Amigos" in full (my translation); I'll meet you again below:

ONLY FRIENDS

Always, like usual, from day to day the same

There's nothing to say in front of people like this

Friends, only friends and nothing more

But who knows in reality what happens between the two

If each one when night falls feigns a goodbye

How much I would give to cry to them of our love

Tell them that when the door closes we love each other uncontrollably

That we wake up embracing, hungering to go on loving each other

But I know that in reality they won't accept our love

Always, with looks we always give each other all our love

We speak without speaking, everything is silent where we walk

Friends, only friends and nothing more

But who knows in reality, what happens between we two

If each of us when night falls feigns a goodbye

How much I would give to cry to them of our love

Tell them that when the door closes we love each other uncontrollably

That we wake up embracing, hungering to keep on loving each other

But I know that in reality they won't accept our love....

No, oh no, they won't accept our love

No, oh no, they won't accept our love....

I might as well confess that I'm generally unsympathetic to the pop convention whereby every love is threatened by an unspecified They. The origin of that convention, the girl-group songs of the sixties, grew out of a specific time and place, the class-conscious (which often went musically coded as race-conscious) bourgeoisie of the American Northeast, and had specific enemies in mind: parents, school boards, The Man. Even Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach" located the resisting force in a character; but more often since the 80s pop expresses a generalized truculence aimed at anyone who would in any way sideline or doubt the Intensity of What We're Feeling. Even with a song I love very much, like Alicia Keys' "No One," I'm always left with the nagging feeling that she's being overdramatic: you ain't no Capulet, girl, hush up and live your damn life. Exactly no one is stopping you.

But I do not feel that way about this song. The reason should be obvious: even though the song is scrupulously careful not to give away any identity tags about the "we," the psychology of the closet is too obvious to go unremarked. With the benefit of hindsight, she could hardly have been more blatant if she had sung "amigas simplemente amigas." (I, uh, don't have to explain gendered nouns, do I?)

Ana Gabriel has always stated that she sang it in solidarity with her gay fans, and I see no reason to doubt her; the internet is rife with speculation — and plenty of flat-out assertions — that she's gay, but she says she loves women as people, not as lovers. It hardly matters; her gay following is large and devoted, and she doesn't have to be a lesbian to be an outspoken defender of gay rights in the Mexican media. (Her vocal style, it turns out, is only one of the things she has in common with Melissa Etheridge.)

From what I can tell, the song has long been understood as an anthem of gay identity in Latin Pop, even if people who wish to believe otherwise are able to do so; and Gabriel's assumption of it as one of her signature songs is something I did not expect to encounter so early in this travelogue. Clearly that has more to do with my own prejudices and assumptions — Latin audiences are more conservative, gay rights didn't really gather steam until the 90s in Latin culture, pop stars are normatively heterosexual — than with reality. (And the fact that the word "reality" is repeated twice, with opposite meanings, in the lyrics of "Simplemente Amigos" is no accident: in pop, reality depends a lot on who's looking.)

But I'm glad to acknowledge reality over my assumptions. Frankly, that undertow makes the song a lot better, far more intense and gripping than some half-hearted run through a memory of West Side Story.

JOSÉ LUIS RODRIGUEZ, “BAILA MI RUMBA”

14th July, 1989

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This is the second extended dance song we've seen here, and while it's not quite as epic as Juan Gabriel's "Debo Hacerlo," it's the kind of song that if you don't like the sort of thing it's doing wears out its welcome very quickly. Luckily, I like the sort of thing it's doing. A lot.

It's also our first real encounter with Cuban music. Not that most modern Latin dance doesn't have some cubano in it somewhere -- the New Yorkers who invented salsa were all Cubans in exile -- but this tale has so far mostly focused on Mexican music at the expense of the Caribbean. But this song is far from entirely Cuban -- in addition to rumba, I can hear Trinidadian soca, the "Miami Sound," and of course the juddering beats of post-New Order British dance.

Rumba is often used as a generic term in Cuban music, and in the generic sense it bears the same general relationship to Cuban music as jazz does to American music, a black-originated, dance-based music that swiftly evolved into many disparate forms. But there are also specific rhythms and sounds that are unique to rumba as a music and a dance form: in the opening to this song, the piano plays rumba while the percussion is rather busier, evoking the southern Caribbean as much as the north.

Soca is to calypso what dancehall is to ska/rocksteady/reggae: a modernized, electronic update of an island music that isn't nearly as respected, musicology-wise, as its venerable ancestors. Which only means it's a living music, not having been trapped in amber by the killjoy curatorial instincts of the Hundred Best Ever listmaking set. (Among whom I of course count myself.) The hip-shaking jollity of the percussion, in fact, reminds me of no late 80s music so much as Buster Pointdexter's Latin-kitsch-and-the-kitchen-sink cover of "Hot, Hot, Hot," originally a soca hit by Monserratian singer Arrow.

But this song wasn't recorded in the Caribbean; though it fleshes out its curves with tropical signifiers, its throbbing spine moves with the sleek, violent precision of drug-glazed, neon-decadent Miami. Emilio Estefan, Gloria's husband and the ringleader of the Miami Sound Machine, co-produced it, and it is the clearest example we have yet seen of the impact new American pop music was having on the overall Latin scene. Those stiff jackhammer beats are like nothing we have heard before; and while neither José Luis Rodriguez, a soap opera actor taking a flier on an uptempo summer jam, nor his overly-sweet backing singers really have the vocal fire to match the banging music, it's still the party-heartiest number we've heard yet, the first song on this travelogue it wouldn't be impossible to imagine working into a DJ set today, provided the crowd was either callow or knowing enough to not hear it as Pointdexterian kitsch.

The lyrics barely matter, and he sings the back half in English anyway. Twenty years later, the only arresting words are a mondegreen: the backing girls sing "ritmo ritmo" (rhythm, rhythm), but it sounds a couple of times like "Gitmo ritmo," which has a whole lot of other, entirely unintended connotations; but it made me realize where I'd heard those jacking beats before. Of course! Paul Hardcastle's "19."

LUIS MIGUEL, “LA INCONDICIONAL”

27th May, 1989

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This project has really been testing my patience with the Big Ballad, the single song form which I have to work harder to appreciate and, appreciation won, have less desire to revisit, than any other. I'm hardly alone: the single most widely-hated song of the last twenty years (at least among respondents with pretensions to youth and cool) is "My Heart Will Go On," and I'm willing to bet a fair few of you who clicked play on the song above had to resist the impulse to turn it off at the mere sound of that glassy electric piano. (Or maybe you didn't resist.)

The first listen through, it took all my attention just to find things to like in the recording; and those watery flecks of guitar in the chorus, punctuating the beat like a slow-motion skank, helped. On the second and third listen I began paying attention to the lyrics: there's some worrying gender politics at work there (though I think the worry is in the response to the song rather than in the song itself, which like all good pop presents an unbroken fictional narrative), which I'll get to in a bit. This most recent go-round (watching the high-production and largely perplexing video) (maybe if I'd ever seen Top Gun it might make more sense), I focused on Miguel's voice.

He's certainly got one. This is the kind of Big Ballad which would be intolerable with a weaker set of lungs behind it (Michael Jackson, for example, couldn't pull off its plodding directness — he'd need a lot more key changes and skittering rhythm), and while Miguel isn't exactly operating in the bel canto tradition there's a long and proud lineage of belters in Latin Pop to which he is undeniable heir. It was in fact his Today I Am A Man moment, the song with which he graduated from the teen-pop where we last saw him to the big leagues represented (in the 1980s at least) by Juan Gabriel, Julio Iglesias, and José José. As if to mark the moment definitively as an irrevocable step, he cut his hair. The windblown mane on the cover of the album was what fans were expecting, his signature look for the past ten years; but the slick power-coif in the video was what they got.

If he was to sing with the big boys, he also had to share their complexities: no more puppy love songs or simplistic kiss-offs, but oddly tortured dramas in which he acknowledges having preyed on an angelically faithful woman without expressing regret beyond a shrug: "No sé por qué." (I don't know why.) She was always the same, unconditional in her love, making no demands of him, and his response? "No existe un lazo entre tu y yo/No hubo promesas ni juramentos/Nada de nada." (There is no bond between you and I/There were no promises or vows/Nothing at all.) All delivered, of course, with a passion just short of tears, which rescues the cold-hearted son-of-a-bitch lyric and places it in a familiar context: the trifling man who realizes too late, etc.

But I wonder about the response to the song. It was a massive hit, firmly establishing Miguel among the all-time greats of Latin Pop — the decade to come will more than anyone's be his, as far as this travelogue is concerned — and Wikipedia's brief list of covers far outpaces any other song we've seen here save "La Bamba." It's become something of a standard, in effect, but unlike similar Big Ballads in Anglophone pop around the same time (say, by Richard Marx or Bryan Adams), it's not much of a love song, unless you consider praising a woman for faithfulness despite her man's being a dick romantic. Was it heard as a love song? There's no doubt that Latin American gender norms don't quite match up to the egalitarian utopia that Anglophone pop (yes, even hip-hop, in its way) tends to assume. Just something to keep in mind as we hurtle towards the present.

JOSÉ JOSÉ, “COMO TÚ”

18th March, 1989

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As someone without strong memories of 80s pop culture — I was twelve by the time they were over, but I had spent most of that time in Narnia or the 1950s of Beverly Cleary and Franklin W. Dixon — there isn't a lot that makes me automatically think of those years, as opposed to the later years when I first encountered most of the usual 80s signifiers. (The early 2000s were my personal golden age of synth-pop.) So when this song came on and I was immediately back to lying on my side in a pastel apartment that belonged to a friend of my mother's, playing her radio very quietly as I flipped through stations for the first time ever, searching for I didn't know what but feeling the scary thrill of doing something unpredictable and secretive, I was startled. Perhaps because my main memory of that first experiment with that forbidden world, secular pop, was disappointed surprise that it didn't sound very different from the Christian pop I knew. (I couldn't possibly hazard a guess as to what I heard then; extracts from the Top Gun soundtrack? Whitney, Debbie, Chaka? The "terrible suddenness" of Rick?) I don't know what I had expected, but it wasn't the same pastel-colored vaguely electronic splashiness I knew from Michael W. Smith and First Call and Teri DeSario; when, two years later in Guatemala, I first heard Megadeth, I knew that that was the terror and ecstasy I had feared.

Personal history aside, this still sounds very close to the Platonic ideal of 1980s music, at least in that familiar narrative in which the 1980s was a nadir for music, only rescued by the grunge revolution of 1992. The electronic timekeeping, neither quite throb nor chug, the drumpad rhythm, the saxophone from which all memory of r&b sweat and lust has been leached away (and which thereby anticipates the Kenny G-ridden 90s). I don't intend to suggest that this is in any way a bad thing, though some will no doubt see it as such — in fact, anything which can stand in so completely for an abstract idea (here, "hairsprayed commercial music of the 80s") is admirable.

In tracking José José's previous appearances in this journey, I've compared him (with slight justification) to Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. But the oblique, reserved way he delivers this song, in a tender, exaggerated croon over a bed of bustling electronics, reminds me of no one so much as Bryan Ferry. Not that I'm claiming this as the Latin response to "More Than This," or anything so foolish; rather, both Ferry and José were inspired by vocalists of the pre-soul era, and the electronic, high-gloss production which Roxy Music did so much to make the standard sound of adult pop reached a particular kind of cheesy apogee here.

The lyrics are a fairly standard, if admirably economical, narrative of how Love Changes Everything (call it the "I'm A Believer" template). He watched life go by, he couldn't disguise his sadness, hurt or loneliness, at time he lost hope of someday sharing his life with . . . (wait for it) . . . someone like you! "Como Tú" means "like you" (the comparative like, not the verb), which doesn't quite count as a complete phrase in English the way it does in Spanish — there have been at least four other hit songs since 1989 with the same title. Chorus: [someone] like you, he dreamed of someone like you, who would immediately change his dreams and his luck, and you arrived. Well done, the idealized you!

This is exactly the kind of fluff its expiration-dated production would suggest, the romantic nonsense on which pop careers have always been built, and which goes down so easily it hardly leaves a trace on the tongue. Hating it would be as disproportionate as loving it: it's just there, the soundtrack to a pointless reverie without which life would be slightly duller.

YURI, “HOMBRES AL BORDE DE UN ATAQUE DE CELOS”

18th February, 1989

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The phrase "cultural tourism" has been bouncing around in my head lately, and I thought it was worth taking a moment to explore it, especially as it relates to this song. As a thirtysomething white American of indeterminate but definitely European ancestry, I'm not exactly the ideal person to be examining this music. I speak Spanish, and I've lived in Central America, but all my critical instincts are still very much in line with normative Eurocentric American culture. So anyone who wanted to accuse this project of cultural tourism would have a strong case, my only defense being that it's a worthwhile project and no one else seems to be taking it on.

But cultural tourism, and the attendant appropriation necessarily involved, is far from being the exclusive province of us hetero white males. Case in point: this song, and its parent album Isla Del Sol. A hasty or inattentive Anglophone listener might just categorize it as self-evidently Latin, i.e. What Those Spanish-Speaking People Do, but Mexico is not Bermuda or Trinidad, and though Yuri was born in the Caribbean port of Veracruz, she was very much a product of mainstream Mexican culture by this point in her career. The video makes the tourism explicit: Yuri is the only Hispanic (meaning Spanish ancestry) person in it. Everyone else is Afro-Caribbean — with her shock of platinum hair, she stands out as quite literally a tourist in an underdeveloped island neighborhood — and the underlying rhythms are calypso and soca, rather than the harder-hitting Cuban salsa which has formed the basis of most tropical dance music in the Latin charts so far.

In fact, a case could be made for racist imagery in the video, though the image of an attractive blonde woman being chased by a crowd of clearly horny black men doesn't have quite the same dog-whistle connotations that it would in the US. Nevertheless the narrative — overtly sexualized white woman arrives in sleepy, dingy West Indies and causes chaos with her good looks — is pretty awfully regressive. But that's the video; we're here to talk about the song.

If anyone had the strongest claim to being called the Latin Madonna in the late 80s, it was Yuri. And not just for the blonde mane, the upbeat dance music, the winking sexuality — then every pop starlet ever would be Madonna. The sexuality in this song would be better called brazen, especially by the conservative standards of Latin pop culture: rather than being ashamed of or scandalized by her effect on men, she revels in it: her first words are a list of what makes her hot to trot. High heels, miniskirt, plunging neckline, sunglasses, tight belt, loose hair — it's pretty much a catalogue of What To Wear If You Want To Be Called A Whore (or worse) in 1989 Mexico. Which is why locating the song in the Caribbean makes a kind of sense; in Latin America as everywhere else, foreign places are decadent and depraved, and the normal rules don't apply there.

And of course the title is a reference to the sexual playfulness of Pedro Almodóvar's Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women On the Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown), which in Yuri's hands becomes "Men On The Verge Of An Outbreak Of Jealousy" — because, of course, they all want her. It's all done with a light touch, of course, as befits a cod-soca dance number; in a comic bit of outrageousness straight out of Zuleika Dobson, she even claims that they're lining up to commit suicide.

This is the second uptempo dance song from Yuri that we've had, and if it's not quite as great as "Qué Te Pasa," that's a lot to live up to; it's certainly my second favorite Yuri song so far, which puts it well ahead of the pack.

ROCÍO DÚRCAL, “COMO TU MUJER”

10th December, 1988

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We began with her, and we end 1988 with her; and unforeseen revivals aside, we will not meet her again.

It's tempting to call this the passing of the old guard in Latin Pop — or an old guard anyway — but as any honest pop follower knows, there are no clean breaks. Dúrcal, who began her career in as a girl singer in 1950s Spain, may be the earliest-born singer to top the Hot Latin chart (I haven't crunched the numbers yet), but she doesn't sound particularly old here, just authoritative.

That relative agelessness is due in part to the production, massive and tender by turns (while being very much of its moment), with those great trombone farts punctuating the hook; but it's also due to the direct, even stark simplicity of the song. This is nothing like the vague postcard-prettiness of the song with which she ushered in this project: instead of romance-novel guff, this is a showcase for adult passions, with real regret, rejection, and hungry longing despite it all. And where "La Guirnalda" was written and produced by Juan Gabriel, who gave her a pretty frame in which to pose, "Como Tu Mujer" was written and produced by Marco Antonio Solís, who pulls out stops he had left firmly in place with Los Bukis.

The lyrics are a monologue, a woman confronting her cheating lover. She still loves him — the first thing she says is that she's given him her life and more besides — but he's laughing, playing with her trust in him, and in a moment of breathtaking otherworldliness for ears used to the norms of Anglophone pop, she insists that she has to leave in order to prevent God from punishing him. Religion isn't a common enough theme in pop for there to normally be a noticeable gap between the way (ex-)Protestant English speakers and (ex?-)Catholic Spanish speakers approach it, but when it does make its presence known it's a very different beast.

The title, "Como Tu Mujer," translates as "As Your Woman," and comes from the final line of the chorus*:

Es lo mejor, me vuelva libre si tú vas a ser

El hombre aquel que siempre quise ver,

Aunque a tu lado no me puedo ver

Como tu mujer

Which I translate as:

It's better this way, I'll be free again if you will be

That man that I always used to see,

Though I can't see myself at your side

As your woman

I'm not sure anything this indebted to traditional gender norms (playboy man, suffering woman) can be called feminist, but the way it takes a principled stand for what's right is certainly better than, say, "Stand By Your Man."

*I say chorus, but like a lot of the songs we've seen, the structure isn't the standard ABABCB of Anglophone pop, but more like ABCDBCD. Which is a perfectly legitimate structure, of course — I just have to guard against thinking "oh I've heard this bit already" and remain caught up in the emotion of the singer.

ROBERTO CARLOS, “SI EL AMOR SE VA”

19th November, 1988

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Although you can't tell just by looking (or listening), this is the first Hot Latin #1 by a pop star who usually sings in another language. (Los Lobos don't count because they were never pop stars, just a rock & roll band with a lucky hit.) Roberto Carlos is Brazilian, and his long, hit-filled career has mostly been in Portuguese, with occasional side trips to the Spanish-language market, as though just to prove he could. He's the kind of silky-voiced ballad singer that is much more successful in Romance languages than in English, with this song in particular sounding as much like French chanson as Latin romántica.

("Romántica," I should point out, is the catch-all marketing term for much of the music we've been seeing and will continue to see on this journey: modern Latin ballads, generally with only a hint of any originating local or national tradition. For example, mariachi singers can also sing romántica, but they don't sound very mariachi when doing it.)

"Si El Amor Se Va" translates as "When Love Goes Away," and the lyric is more or less a high romantic list of all the terrible consequences of love’s disappearance — "faltan los detalles/Y en las mismas calles/Nada es igual" (the details fade, and in the same streets, nothing is the same). And then the key changes, and he sings "Pero cuando está" ("but when it's here"), followed another list of the happy changes when love returns. "Vuelve la confianza/Nace la esperanza/Todo es especial" (trust returns, hope is born, everything is special). It's very much the sort of thing that could have been sung a hundred years ago in the streets of Madrid, or Lisbon, or Paris, or Rio de Janeiro at that, and the production takes the hint and sounds very like what hymns recorded in the 80s sounded like.

Or country songs — there's something very period George Jones about the way the stark opening, just Carlos' voice over cheap synth chords, builds and builds as new elements are introduced, ending with a lighters-up singalong choir. Which may be a reminder that neither country nor Latin pop are as far from hymnody as many Anglophone pop fans would like.

ANGELA CARRASCO, “BOCA ROSA”

22nd October, 1988

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Tracing the contours of the #1 Hot Latin songs throughout the year, I'm starting to see a pattern emerge: the summer and early fall contain upbeat songs, songs for dancing, for public display, and even when they're talking about lost love they do it with a smile. But as the nights grow longer and the air colder — even in Miami and Los Angeles, where a significant portion of the Hot Latin audience resides — the songs grow more reflective, more poetic, more in line with the long tradition of Spanish love poetry and song. And the singers grow older, more traditional too.

The Dominican-born Angela Carrasco's boom years were the 1970s, and here she assumes the confidence of a pop survivor, taking a witchy, gothic synth cathedral of an intro (it sounds a bit like a slightly cheaper take on the Siouxise of five years previous) and singing instead in a Diana Ross purr over a light synth tango rhythm.

That hint of tango — the Argentinean dance-music-turned-art-song that is global Latin culture's strongest riposte to American jazz — serves to locate this song in a specific tradition going back much further than anything we've come across yet. It comes on like a less-ironical "Love For Sale" from the opening line: "Vendo una boca rosa, ¿quién me la puede pagar?" (I sell a pink mouth; who can buy it?). We are in the eternal twilit, noir-shot underworld of tango song peopled by romantic pimps, sarcastic prostitutes and "hombres necios" (foolish men) who fall into the "trampas hechas de labios" (traps made of lips) among whom only Cole Porter and Kurt Weill, of all the major songwriters in the American tradition, would walk easily.

But of course it is still 1988, and it is still the top reaches of the Hot Latin chart, and so there is a nagging synth hook that owes more to mariachi horn lines than to tango bandoneones, and if a disco remix is more easily imaginable than a faithful tango reading, that may be due more to Carrasco's kittenish mock-sultry performance than to the structure of the written song. Except via self-conscious revivalism, tango can only be glimpsed through the distorting lens of modern pop, which (as with the way swing informed 80s R&B) is how it should be.

MARISELA, “YA NO”

1st October, 1988

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This may be an appropriate moment for noting, in an offhand sort of way, the ways in which history both remembers and forgets. Marisela is precisely the kind of low-level star that gets forgotten by history (or did before the age of the Internet and obsessive documentation of everything). She may have been called "the Latin Madonna," but any blonde female singer in the 80s was; she may have hit the top of the Hot Latin chart, but it was only for a week (and there was no return engagement); and she certainly had a voice, but her lack of attendant personality (at least any discernible from this distance) consigned her to the dustbin of one-hit wonders whose Wikipedia pages are silently scolded about citing references and sources.

Not counting "La Bamba" (because why would we?) this is the second hit song based on an English-language original from the first generation of rock & roll; but unlike what Luis Miguel did with "I Only Want To Be With You," "Ya No" is a fairly direct translation of Barbara George's 1962 R&B hit "I Know (You Don't Want Me No More)." Which makes sense: Marisela first sang the song in English for the soundtrack to the forgettable 1988 those-sensual-Latins movie Salsa: The Motion Picture. It was her first real breakthrough into the larger pop market after about four years of bubbling-under popularity in Mexico (she was born in the U.S., but Mexico was her primary market). Said bubbling-under came thanks to a romantic involvement with Marco Antonio Solís, who gave her songs he wasn't using and gave her extra column inches when he threw her over for another pretty, vaguely talented starlet who needed his promotional help. However, "I Know" would equally be her last breakthrough to the larger pop market; she would slip back into regional obscurity, cultivate a devoted if minor fanbase, and record sporadically with diminishing returns over the next two decades.

Her "I Know" is what you would expect: heavy on 80s synthesized production, some massive timbale hits in order to tie it into the salsa of the movie, but otherwise a standard, gospelly take on the song, with a choir of backup singers high in the mix. "Ya No," however, is a slightly odder beast. It was produced by Enrique Elizondo, who seems to have taken the bouncy hook and the crashing timbales and fed them into a sequencer with New Order and Madonna presets, creating a much more exciting rhythm track that introduces, occasionally punctuates, and plays out the song. Unfortunately whenever Marisela sings it's the same old vaguely r&b-ish shuffle (the choir makes an appearance too, mixed mercifully down), so Elizondo's clubbification is only partly successful, but those bursts of electronic percussion are something to look forward to.

FRANCO, “MARÍA”

3rd September, 1988

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Wikipedia has this to say about this song:

"María" is a song written by Marcelo Molina and performed by Cuban singer Franco. It was released in 1988 as a single from Franco's album Definitivo and became his second number-one single in the Billboard Top Latin Songs chart, after "Toda La Vida" in 1986.

Now you know as much about it as I do, or from what I can tell, as much as anyone anywhere on the Internet does. I spent more time tracking down and manipulating the jpeg of the album cover than I will writing about the song — generally I try to like music, or at least work out how to like it, but this song has defeated me.

If there's an Anglophone equivalent, it's Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," except this could never have anything as interesting as Rickrolling happen to it, because Franco doesn't even have Astley's dorky charm: he's a toothy smile and an anonymous voice, and the fact that this is his second appearance in this story is the kind of thing that makes me wonder whether it's worth telling.

I don't even need to translate the lyrics: he's just met a girl named María, how does he solve a problem like María, oh María love to love oh his María; there are only so many changes that can be rung on the name. The song is too thin and insubstantial, especially compared to the monster that preceded it, for me to want to even put any effort into learning how it came to spend most of September at #1, then make a return engagement after the next entry fizzled out. How does a song that can't possibly be anyone's favorite song do that?

Rick Astley is fundamentally mysterious to me too.

YURI, “QUÉ TE PASA”

14th May, 1988

Wiki | Video

If Juan Gabriel gave us our first taste of modern dance music — oddly elongated and strangely unecstatic as it was — Yuri plunges us right into the cross-currents of post-disco baile: this isn't some paranoid, agonized personal statement set to robot rhythms, but a massive splash of fun which topped the Hot Latin chart throughout the summer of 1988, a giddy call to dance and selfhood which deserves to be rated along with the best of Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, the Bangles, and Donna Lewis as a creamy pinnacle of 1980s pop, with day-glo instrumentation and cocaine-funky rhythms, orgasmic whoops and sexy salsa breakdowns.

This was Yuri's peak as a pop star; we'll meet her again, but this was the culmination of about a decade's worth of hard work, success, and more success after that, invisible to the exclusivity of a #1 list that didn't start until 1986. She had her first hit in 1979, and was one of Mexico's biggest pop stars in the decade that followed; in fact I knew her name and the curves of her cleavage (if not her music) well as a thirteen-year-old in Guatemala in 1991 looking through newspapers that were way sexier than the ones back home. (Hers may be the earliest name I ever knew to appear in these charts, unless Amy Grant or Barbra Streisand turns up.)

Like Madonna, her self-presentation was more important than her vocal ability; unlike contemporaries like Ana Gabriel or Daniela Romo, she didn't have the kind of voice that could make you thrill regardless of the song. But she could play up her sexuality (she posed in Playboy in 1986), and her dance moves, and she could work with canny producers and get great songs and be nearly the first "manufactured" pop star to appear on this chart.

"Manufactured" is in quotes here because I don't subscribe to the criticism implicit in the word (and neither should you); "self-made" might be a better adjective. What I mean is that she successfully engineered a pop career without coming out of a more "authentic" tradition first, whether regional, tropical or folklórico (the three traditions in Latin music which are most often set against pop; in American music the closest historical analogues would be country, r&b, and folk). Everything about Yuri, from her hair color to her musicianship, was artificial; which only means she was a late-twentieth-century pop star.

But simple-minded party songs, however giddily danceable and well presented by a sexy singer, are a dime a dozen; "Qué Te Pasa"'s historic run at the top of the chart (the longest stay at forteen weeks, a record unbroken for the rest of the millennium) needs more explanation. Which, if you understand the lyrics, it has; they are very nearly existential in their insistence on the Party as source of meaning. "El amor y desamor/Son plumas en el viento" ("love and lack of love are feathers in the wind") is a shockingly wise, practically Brelesque lyric in a giddy pop song, and the imagery of leaving behind depressive solitude for communal ecstasy could be tailor-made for 2000s indie vs. poptimist fights. "Qué te pasa" translates as "what's up with you?" and could easily be interpreted as "what's wrong with you?" or "what's your deal?" as the verses urge the listener to stop moping, get out on the balcony, and dance.

But the middle eight proves that the song isn't just about bullying the shy and depressive into uncomfortable partying: "Stop looking already/For that five-legged cat*/It doesn't make any sense/In the depths just like me/With your soul in pieces/Begin again/Always from zero."

It's a call to arms (or to feet!) that more of us could always use. Thin production or not, this has become one of my favorite pop songs in the few weeks I've been listening to it, and while I'm still a little surprised that I'm taking Yuri (Yuri! The one with the breasts!) seriously, this is exactly what I was hoping to find when I began this project.

*A Hispanic idiom meaning something so rare as to be unobtainable.

LOS BUKIS, “Y AHORA TE VAS”

23rd April, 1988

Wiki | Video

We're still on the earlier legs of our journey, early enough for me to still be obsessed with marking firsts. And this is two big ones: the first real regional (pronounced rayhee-oh-NAL) song, which I'll get into later, and our first encounter with a man who will be a more-or-less constant companion throughout the next two decades: Marco Antonio Solís.

Solís, with his cousin Joel, founded Los Bukis in the early 70s in Michoacán, one of Mexico's southwestern states. From their first single ("Falso Amor," 1975) they became one of the most popular bands in the country, with strong followings in the United States and Puerto Rico. Their name means "the kids" in the Yaqui language of northern Mexico, and that identification with the indigenous underclass (however superficial) pointed to the sort of panamericanismo to which most Latin Pop stars would at least pay lip service in the years to come.

But Los Bukis were no trad outfit, singing old songs in old styles and busking for tourist dollars. (It's worth noting here that the questions of authenticity and keeping-it-realism which exercise so many commentators in the American and Anglo pop spheres have very little to do with how Third World pop stars actually make use of their own native pop forms. Solidarity with the poor is better expressed financially than through canons of taste.) Their regionalismo was a glossy, uptown take on the country-fried rancheras and corridos, with plush up-to-date instrumentation and a versatile, tempered instrument in Solís' lead vocals. Like a Mexican version of the countrypolitan movement of the 1960s, Los Bukis gave their listeners a thoroughly Mexican, thoroughly modern music that worked just as well in the bustling urban centers as in the open spaces of the countryside: an aspirational music for the emerging middle class on both sides of the border.

"Y Ahora Te Vas" ("and now you leave") was written by Solís, who wrote nearly all the group's material (his going solo several years down the road, spoiler alert, was less an escandalo de pop than a foreordained conclusion; no one flocked to Los Bukis concerts to see the other guys), and is a solid if unpretentious regional song. My comparison of the genre with country music in the American market is both illuminating and misleading; like country, regional relies on specific images to tell universal stories, but unlike country it's not really relegated to a specialized market (at least in Mexico, and since we're telling the story of Latin Pop in the U.S., there's going to be a lot of overlap with the story of Mexican pop).

It's a breakup song, the kind that George Jones did so well — "and now you're leaving, knowing I couldn't find/The motive in your soul, the love I feel for you/To whom will you give everything you never gave to me/Who will cry for you, as I do, some day" — the faithless beloved throwing over our creamy-voiced hero, but he'd take her back in a heartbeat nevertheless. The instrumentation is dominated by cheap synthesizers, but in 1988 that still coded as uptown, classy, and American in regional music. The occasional interpolation of regionalismo into our story has its own story of change, cool, and identity which doesn't always correspond with the shifts in the larger Latin Pop scene. But more about that when we come to it.

JUAN GABRIEL, “DEBO HACERLO”

16th April, 1988

Wiki | Video

There are three reasons this installment of our journey is running a bit late. First, I'm having a hard time concentrating enough to write anything at all, as readers of my other blogs might have noticed. Second, I recently went through the spreadsheet I've compiled of all the Hot Latin #1s to date and I think got a little intimidated at just how many there are left to cover. I should catch up to the present in a couple of years, but damn. A couple of years. I never make plans more than two weeks in advance. And third, tackling this song in particular has seemed more and more foolhardy the more I've listened to it.

Let's begin with the dry, three-minutes-on-Wikipedia basics: recorded two years earlier, this was Juan Gabriel's last original song for six years thanks to a dispute with his label and publishers. (Shades of another major pop star of the 1980s going into the 1990s.) It is an uptempo dance song with elements of freestyle, mariachi, merengue, and house. And it is nearly ten minutes long.

We've had uptempo songs before: the Franco/Emmanuel double-header, Luis Miguel's Dusty Springfield cover, and of course Los Lobos. But this is the first Dance Song in the modern meaning of the phrase, with electronic rhythms and the sort of bloated running time that would raise suspicions of this being the twelve-inch version if there had ever been a seven-inch. But no; this is it, the song as it appeared on Gabriel's "farewell" compilation of the same name, and as far as I can tell the song as it was played on the radio in late 1987 and early 1988.

And it's the kind of song worthy of that running time. Not only does it have a hot beat that practically demands dancing (I broke into a white-boy boogie almost reflexively the first time I heard it), but Gabriel's performance, pushing himself to the very edge of his range, almost in tears, is a hell of a swan song. He pitches the opening just an emotional notch below opera, with as many dramatic flourishes as he can muster, and when the beat drops he simply rides it. It's a tropical beat, equal parts Havana and Miami (which for thirty years have practically been the same thing) the punchy horn charts which accompany it practically the only concession to the Mexican mariachi on which he made his name in the 70s and early 80s. Aside, that is, from his own near-frenzied performance.

(Mariachi, of course, practically requires being sung with a sob in one's voice. Or more strictly speaking, norteño does. This isn't the moment to get into the distinction, but there is one.)

Structurally, this song is a complete mess, following Gabriel's own circuitous route through whatever sections he apparently felt like singing at the time. There's no particular chorus, although everything gets repeated more than once; there are about five different main hooks, and though it's compulsively danceable throughout it changes tempo so many times and so abruptly that I'd imagine it would be a DJ's nightmare. (If you're feeling brave, though, I dare you to throw it on at a busy club night and see what happens.)

But ultimately, I don't have a whole lot of reference points for this kind of thing. The best I can do is gesture vaguely in the direction of Miami Sound Machine, the only outfit I know of that was making anything like this in the 1980s (we'll be meeting their most famous alumnus before long), and not even they were as garish and cheap-sounding as this can be.

Because while I don't have a lot of reference points in professionally recorded music, I'm intimately familiar with some of the sounds in this song: they were produced by the same cheap not-even-Casio keyboards that I fooled around with as a kid in the 80s: those telltale tinny "bass" notes and the upward flourishes on some "harpsichord" setting or other irresistibly recall the embarrassment I felt when I tried to show off to a more worldly-wise friend and he mocked those sounds. I rarely played with the keyboard again. (Come to think of it, that was probably the first instance of snob-oriented criticism making my revise my musical opinions. It would not be the last.) So I have instant and deeply-set aversions to some of these sounds; but the propulsiveness , rhythmic density, and luxuriant emotionalism of this song overwhelms everything else.

Even the lyric is something of a mess; he needs a love, he's tired of being alone, but he's also rejecting a lover — and finding one, all to the same thumping beat and righteous salsa horn charts. If nothing else, it's a tremendously camp performance (though by Anglo standards what piece of Latin culture isn't?), the kind of florid, flamboyant spectacle that not only invites but practically compels comparisons with Prince or Michael Jackson. The electro-soul, the rhythmic chokes and sighs . . . I can't help wondering what kind of collaborations might have taken place had Gabriel not chosen to walk away at just this moment.

It was only at the top of the chart for a week. You could hardly expect more from a nine-and-a-half-minute camp techno-tropical suite.

ANA GABRIEL, “AY AMOR”

23rd January, 1988

Wiki | Video

Fifteen songs in, this song is only our third to feature a female vocalist. I don't know what your understanding of pop is, but mine is more or less predicated the female voice. Which is among the reasons that taking this travelogue has been both educational and challenging for me: I've had to patiently work out the differences between hearty male singers that I would otherwise instinctively dismiss as "all the same." But Ana Gabriel cannot possibly be mistaken for Daniela Romo or Rocío Dúrcal, and it's not only the timbre of her voice that sets her apart.

The immediate comparison I want to make with this song is to "Total Eclipse Of The Heart." There are obvious points of reference: the big, crashing production, the rock-operatic melody, and Gabriel's own raspy but perfectly controlled voice; but where Jim Steinman and Bonnie Tyler stretched out, luxuriating in an operatic running time (nearly seven minutes!) and setting several themes against each other, Gabriel remains a pop traditionalist, singing a spare three-minute-plus song as simplified and direct as the title (which translates to "oh love").

She wrote it herself; she sang it in the 1987 OTI Festival (the Latin Pop version of the Eurovision contest, which ran from 1972-2000) and won the chance to represent Mexico in the finals — it didn't win, but the song was a major hit in both Mexico and the U.S., tying with Daniela Romo's "De Mí Enamórate" for the longest time spent at the top of the Hot Latin chart yet (fourteen weeks) and not incidentally launching her as a major pop star in the Latin American market. (She remains the Mexican cantadora [female singer] with the highest ever international sales.)

And it's the sort of song which inspires that kind of response: not only does it sound big — we've had that before, from Romo and Julio Iglesias — it sounds unmistakably modern. The much-bemoaned-by-me thinness and plasticness of 80s Latin Pop is nowhere to be found here; this isn't just a ballad, it's a power ballad, and Gabriel sings it like a rock star. It made her one; and as Wikipedia puts it, she became a success in three separate fields: Rock En Español, Latin Pop, and Ranchera. She will appear in at least two of these guises again (and again) throughout this tale; but rarely sounding better (I'm going to guess) than she does here.

That scratchy, impassioned vocal style, in 1988 falling decidedly out of favor in Anglophone pop circles (Bonnie Tyler, Kim Carnes, and the 80s Tina Turner were about its last exponents in female pop, unless you count Marianne Faithfull's cult) would have a sizable impact on Latin Pop over the next decade; rock was not yet uncontroversial in many traditional communities, and while the most flamboyant inheritor of Ana Gabriel's technique will not be a part of our history (as of early 2010, anyway; you never know), this is an early loosening of the metaphorical tie.

The lyrics are more or less standard stuff; Gabriel was not yet one of the great poets of Latin Pop. (Will she ever be? Stay tuned.) The dramatic heft of the production isn't quite matched by a chorus that runs "Oh, love/I don't know what it is about your look/That day after day conquers me more and more." (Though it, uh, sounds better in Spanish.) But I do admire one line in the second verse: "Y busco entre mil cosas una que me hable de tí" ("and I search through a thousand things for one that speaks to me of you"), which is such a perfect encapsulation of a universal but very specific emotion that I have high hopes for Ana Gabriel's many return engagements on this stage.

JOSÉ JOSÉ, “SOY ASÍ”

16th January, 1988

Wiki | Video

The last time we saw José José in this space I compared him to Frank Sinatra for his exquisite phrasing and almost jazzy cadences. Well, those have fallen by the wayside now: this is not a gentle, reflective flamenco song, but a roaring ballad of self-justification, a "My Way" for the late 80s.

Though to be fair this is a far more nuanced and even classically structured work than "My Way." In fact it has more in common with the great self-justifications of George Jones in the 1970s as he spiraled into abuse both drug and domestic. Both country music and Latin pop draw on deep wells of tradition that is mostly invisible to the ordinary pop audience — this is what gives both genres a uniform sound to the uneducated ear — and they also play to their dedicated audiences' knowledge of and investment in the singer's personal lives. Just as "He Stopped Loving Her Today" was that much more powerful to a listener who'd been following the Jones-Wynnette soap opera for over a decade, so "Soy Así" gains in emotion and relevance under the knowledge that it was written and sung at a low point in Jose Jose's career, when his wife was leaving him, his manager (and brother-in-law) had abandoned him, and he was drifting into alcoholism and despair, his life an unending circuit of "aviones, camiones, encerrado en un cuarto de hotel" ("planes, trucks, locked in hotel rooms"), as he later put it to the music press.

In that light, the forthright stomp and aggressive rise of this ballad, with its military tempo and big crescendos, is less pompous than angry. Wikipedia translates "Soy Así" as "The Way I Am," but it literally means "I am this way." (Shades of Popeye as well as Old Blue Eyes.) The chorus, with its blustery bangs, goes "I am this way/This way I was born and this way I will die/With all my faults I know it's true/I never deceived you, I never lied to you, I never denied it/I am this way/And I know very well that I will never change/And I accept my fate just as it is/I never deceived you, I never lied to you, I never denied it." In fact the chorus repeats only twice, and it's over, which is one up on "My Way."

We will be meeting José José once more (so far!) in this travelogue, so I won't finish up his life story just yet. But here's a hint: as Frank Sinatra knew well, hit songs rarely do much for personal demons.

JOSÉ LUIS RODRÍGUEZ, “Y TÚ TAMBIÉN LLORARÁS”

28th November, 1987

Wiki | Video

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?

JULIO IGLESIAS, “QUE NO SE ROMPA LA NOCHE”

14th November, 1987

Wiki | Video

What, again? He was just here! Indeed — and more recently than the strict chronology of this blog might indicate; he and Luis Miguel traded off the top spot a couple of times throughout the late summer and early fall of 1987. A fitting symbolism, in fact: this song would be (as of this writing) Julio Iglesias' last solo visit to the top of the Hot Latin chart, and few people would dominate that spot more completely in the years to come than — but that's getting ahead of ourselves.

Here and now, this second single from Un Hombre Solo did exactly what it was supposed to do and made a worthy follow-up to "Lo Mejor De Tu Vida." Also written and produced by Manuel Alejandro, also sounding like the proverbial million bucks — listen for the harp glissandi and be surprised: it's so closely miked it sounds like a particularly silvery guitar.

But in classic singles-release fashion, the second is the same as the first, But With A Twist! The twist here being the bolero rhythm, which provides a poignant counterpoint to Iglesias' lovestruck crooning: this is a late-night, last-dance kind of song, only just uptempo enough to qualify as more rhythmic than "Lo Mejor De Tu Vida," and so much in love with the classic Spanish romanticism on display that the song very nearly forgets to be contemporary. Luckily some airy keyboard flourishes accenting the rhythm are on hand to remind us of the date on the sleeve.

The lyrics are typically (for Alejandro) evocative, using the concise allusiveness of poetry to build up the scenario without wasting our time on unnecessary details like setting, narrative or identity. And those lyrics, translated in full:

LOS LOBOS, “LA BAMBA”

19th September, 1987

Wiki | Video

This record, on this list, is a first in a number of ways. In fact let's try to catalogue them all:

It's the first time an act from the United States has topped the Billboard Hot Latin Chart. This might be surprising, considering that the Billboard Hot Latin Chart is after all compiled by counting sales and airplay statistics within the United States; surely locals would do better than otherwise. But the competing demographics, loyalties, and audiences measured (probably pretty poorly and incompletely) by the Hot Latin Chart makes that suggestion a massive oversimplification of a reality that I'm in no position to describe in any detail. I'll confine myself to the observation that after this it is not unusual, though I'm not sure it ever becomes unremarkable, for estadounidense-born acts to top the chart.

It's the first time a rock & roll record has topped the Billboard Hot Latin Chart. There may be some cavilling at this: Luis Miguel, Emmanuel, and Franco have all had hits that derive (some of them fairly loosely) from rock music. I can only claim popular usage: it's the first guitar-driven uptempo song with a strong backbeat and audible connections to the music of the 1950s. This is only an important point in the sense that anyone following this blog hoping for much more guitar-oriented rock music will not be very much in luck. Enjoy it while you got it, in other words.

It's the first time a Hot Latin #1 has also (not quite simultaneously) topped the Billboard Hot 100. In fact, it dropped off the top spot of the national pop chart the week before it ascended to #1 on the Latin chart; which suggests several possibilities, most of which are probably true: that records on the Latin chart, which is driven far more by airplay than by sales, tend to take longer to get up a head of steam; that the movie-driven success of the single (see below) in the wider arena was a factor in driving the record up the Latin chart; and that the dreamy Luis Miguel was hard to beat. (This last is reinforced by the fact that the record that replaced "La Bamba" at the top of the chart was also the record that preceded it.) But not only the US pop chart, but at least seven (according to Wikipedia) other international pop charts featured "La Bamba" at the top spot throughout the latter half of 1987. What's notable is that they were all European or Anglophone countries; perhaps Latin America had little use for rock & roll nostalgia in 1987. (Fun fact: as of this writing the Wikipedia Español page for "La Bamba" doesn't mention Los Lobos at all.)

It's the first time a Hot Latin #1 has been released as a commercial single. This is undoubtedly closely related to the above paragraph: the single was for the broader pop market (it was released by the venerable L.A. punk 'n' roots record label Slash, Los Lobos' home at the time), and it would remain rare for Hot Latin #1s to be available as singles until the 2000s. I note this only for the record; even in 1987, we are no longer living in a singles world.

It's the first time a Hot Latin #1 has come in off the back of a movie. It will not be the last. The movie in question, a biopic of Ritchie Valens starring Lou Diamond Phillips, is a blank to me. I haven't seen it and probably never will; I generally dislike biopics and am unreasonably irritated by the movies' colonization of pop. Unreasonably because I love this song and I wouldn't get to talk about it (I will eventually I swear) if a movie hadn't given it the publicity that sent it to #1, irritated because too often conversation about music ends with how it's been used in movies or TV. (I of course reserve the right to talk about music only through the lens of cinema or television if that's how I came to it.)

And it's the first time I knew the record before listening to it for this project. In fact I knew the record before I knew Valens' original; in those heady premillenial days of Napster the first mislabeled mp3 I downloaded was a 96kbps version of this, attributed to "Richie Valen." (Well, either that or "I Melt With You" by "the Cure.") Out of vestigial resentment at the error, I've never listened very much to Los Lobos' version of the song, and it is still my third-favorite, after Ritchie's original and Lila Downs' magnificently haunted 2004 recording.

But Los Lobos have long been one of my go-to bands when I don't know what else to listen to; their musicianship and attention to detail is always welcome, and their ability to blend as many different traditions as possible into one heady rock & roll stew is frequently inspiring. Typically, I like their early work best, from How Will The Wolf Survive? to Kiko — in recent years they've become something of a token Latino band for classic-rock boomers like my dad (like Los Lonely Boys, except not so goddamn jammy), and they've nearly always been more popular with white rocker-types than with the broader Latino audience. But then I am a white rocker-type.

Their "La Bamba" doesn't treat Valens' original as a sacrosanct document (and rightly so, or it never would have been a hit), fleshing out its sound with their ornate full-band orchestration. Instead of Valens' one, they have three guitars dueling for rhythm, ornamentation, and solo space, and Louie Pérez' drum line, shuffling just a little behind the beat, is sexier and funkier than Earl Palmer's straight-up R&B snap in 1958. In fact Los Lobos play up the folklórico roots of the song by adding in elements of traditional Latin music: flamenco flourishes, banda accordion, and into a charanga breakdown in the outro. David Hidalgo's sweet croon of a voice isn't as punchy as Valens' raver (but Valens could also be sweet when he tried, viz. "Donna").

Hmm? The lyrics? "To dance the bamba, you need a little grace." "For me, for you, go man go." "For you I will live, for you I will live." "I'm not a sailor, I'm a captain." Shouldn't you have learned this stuff in second grade?

LUIS MIGUEL, “AHORA TE PEUDES MARCHAR”

22nd August, 1987

Wiki | Video

Get used to that name; we'll be seeing it regularly from here on out. In fact Luis Miguel makes an excellent case study in the evolution (maturation? commercialization?) of Latin Pop: his career mirrors the trajectory of the time period we are covering. Of course Latin Pop has existed for decades before this, but it tended towards parochialism and regionalism: the gooey embrace of transglobal pop stardom is something new, and Miguel is one of its key players.

We meet him for the first time here, at the age of seventeen. He has been in show business for most of his life, scoring his first hit record when he was eleven. (Shades of another child star turned leading light of the global pop overground.) He has just fired his father as his manager and signed on with Spanish pop empresario Juan Carlos Calderón. A standard hitmaking formula is brought to bear, with excellent results: a number-one song, which will give way twice to Julio Iglesias and once to — but that'd be telling. It's a bumptious dance song, funky in that mid-80s cheap keyboard bass way, with a sax solo that dates it as surely and minutely as counting tree rings. And you know the song.

You probably don't know it as "Ahora Te Puedes Marchar," because the original English title of the song was not "Now You Can Leave." It was "I Only Want To Be With You," and it was first released by Dusty Springfield in November 1963, her first single after leaving folk group The Springfields, and the third British-Invasion hit in the US. Ivor Raymonde's billowy Swinging London production is swapped out for a sub-Huey Lewis go-go, and Mike Hawker's giddy lyrics about new love are refashioned into a don't-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out anthem (directed at Miguel's money-mismanaging father?), but the giddiness remains. Miguel sounds downright gleeful to be singing this song, to be on his own, to be making modern dance music out of classic pop.

Most of the album from which "Ahora Te Puedes Marchar" was drawn is taken up with modernized covers of pop songs from the sixties and seventies — "Reach Out," "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me," "Only You," "All By Myself" — and given a glossy 80s sheen. It's very much, even designedly, a disposable teen-pop record; Miguel is only seventeen, and his pouty lips on the album cover don't invite us to expect much more. But you can hear a bit into the future: he has a fine, strong cock's crow of a voice, he's good with rhythm, and he's interested in raiding the closet of history to enhance his own throbbing good looks.

He will come to be called the Frank Sinatra of Latin music; but as of right now, Michael Jackson is the far better comparison. If Jackson had been born in Puerto Rico ten years later than he was, this — triumphalist, a little cutting, and interestingly sexually ambiguous in terms of who his forebears are — might well be the record he'd have made in 1987.