ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “POR AMARTE”

1st June, 1996

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Another few weeks, another Enrique Iglesias #1. This is the third single off his debut album, and in a lot of ways it sounds like it. It's more middling and less dynamic than either the assured "Si Tú Te Vas" or the expansive, oddball "Experiencia Religiosa". It's very much a rock ballad — the bluesy guitar licks sound right out of mid-period Clapton or even the late-70s Rolling Stones — but Iglesias doesn't quite know what to do with it, failing to create a coherent performance out of the disparate elements and falling back on his particular brand of underfed overemoting.

The title means "To Love You," and it's another song of devoted love, but this time the images are all extremely hackneyed (chorus: "To love you I would steal the stars from the sky as a gift to you/To love you I would cross the oceans just to hold you close/To love you I would bring together rain and fire/To love you I would give my life just to kiss you"), and while there's always a built-in audience for such songs — inexperienced teenagers will always need something to listen to while crushing on the unattainable — this particular brand of devotion is pretty laughable to anyone with adult concerns.

The only bright spot is in the production dynamics; even after all these years, it's still a pleasure to fall for the trick where all the instruments cut out briefly, then rush back in on a soaring chord. Iglesias even manages a wordless improvisation that's not too embarrassing; right now it seems like he's hitting number one out of sheer nepotistic inertia, but it's tiny hints like this that encourage me to think of what he'll be capable of in the years to come.

CRISTIAN CASTRO, “AMARTE A TÍ”

25th May, 1996

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Perhaps the easiest way to point out what Olga Tañon and Marco Antonio Solís were doing "wrong" in the last entry (scare quotes because it's not actually wrong, just not to my taste and less of a forward advance than I was hoping for) is to compare it with this. This is also a ballad and therefore, by my reckoning, has a strike against it from the outset. But the production isn't the mushed-together goop that is Solís' signature sound — it's vibrant, detailed, even lush, even if little of the actual instrumentation is any different. Except there's an oboe carrying the lead melody! There are never enough oboes in pop music.

Where "¡Basta Ya!" sounded like a holdover from the poorly-funded 80s, "Amarte a Tí" sounds like the most modern and up-to-date version of romantic Latin Pop available, with a pulsating rhythm, sparkling accents, and gorgeously treated female vocals on the chorus which would be a fine addition to any indie pop song today. (The credits I've been able to find don't specify, but it's either Gabriela Anders, Dámaris Carbaugh, Doris Eugenio, or Lori-Ann Velez doing the dream-pop bit.) I've been using the tag "pop idol" for Cristian Castro's appearances here, but on the evidence of this and "Amor", it may be time to graduate him to "pop royalty" — the attention to detail here is worthy of a Luis Miguel or Julio Iglesias.

It is, for once in a way, an uncomplicated love song: "amarte a tí" means "loving you," and if the lyrics are somewhat more formal and metaphorical than those of the Minnie Riperton song (Spanish love poetry rears its head again), the sentiment's the same: "Amarte a tí es soñar despierto/Los ojos abiertos/Amarte a tí es de verdad/El corazón entregar/Lleno de paz" ("Loving you is dreaming awake/Eyes wide open/Loving you is truly/Finding [my] heart/Full of peace"). I am at the kind of place in my life where a song like this will have a particular resonance for me, even outside of its musical sensuousness; uncomplicated joy in mutual love exactly matches my needs right now.

OLGA TAÑÓN, “¡BASTA YA!”

18th May, 1996

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Of course, no sooner is there a new normal — with regional Mexican and border styles suddenly making up a huge proportion of the top of the Latin chart, displacing the old school of blowsy ballads punctuated by sassy dance numbers — than the professionals and the pop lifers start moving in to take it over.

Olga Tañon is a new name in these parts, but a minimum of research uncovers a very familiar name. Marco Antonio Solís, the long-haired, blandly sentimental leader of Los Bukis and latterly a solo artist, wrote and produced the album Nuevos Senderos in a transparent bid to fill the void which the death of young miss Quintanilla-Pérez had left in the affections of Latin Pop listeners all over the hemisphere. Tañon had been singing for years -- in fact her career pretty closely parallels that of Selena's, with Puerto Rico standing in for Tejas, and merengue for tejano.

Still, this is supposed to be a tejano song (you can hear, very faintly, a cumbia rhythm in the verses), and even though it was (briefly) successful, it's no replacement for Selena. Solís drowns everything in his signature bland soup of cascading keyboard riffs and too-patient drum fills, and Tañon's voice is neither as charged nor as flexible as Selena's; the overall effect is that of a script being dutifully followed. Which doesn't mean there aren't pleasures to be had in the song, just that they are minor and without the urgency that the lyrics provide — "¡Basta Ya!" means "Enough Already!", but both the chiming melody and Tañon's too-elegant phrasing give it the sound of a treacly lament instead of the desperate, long-awaited standing-up-for-herself that you get from a straightforward reading of the lyrics.

This isn't Olga Tañon's last appearance in our travelogue, but I'm hoping for something a little more lively in our next encounter.

LOS TIGRES DEL NORTE, “EL CIRCO”

11th May, 1996

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However easy it seems to look back at the decades and identify patterns, make generalizations, and persuade yourself that music is its own through-line, there are always going to be pieces of the puzzle that go missing if all you hear, if all you know, is the music.

So while I've been making a pretty glib case for the increasing recurrence of Mexican norteño music (and American tejano music) at the top of the Hot Latin chart being entirely due to Selena's star power, it's just as much due to demographic shifts — in the wake of NAFTA, cross-border immigration exploded as multinationals opened cheap factories across Mexico, decimating local economies and sending millions looking for a better life in the factories and fields of the United States. But this too is glib (though no less pertinent); focusing on the new immigrants obscures the Spanish speakers who have been here for generations. Border life for Mexican-Americans means being concerned with the politics, the culture, and the wars of two nations, and Los Tigres del Norte, a norteño band from the Mexican state of Sinaloa, are the Clash, the Bob Marley, or the Public Enemy of the region, truth-tellers and gadflies of power who couch their commentary in witty, effervescent music. (The fact that they do most of this truth-telling from San Jose, California doesn't hurt.)

The tool they use for this commentary is the corrido (lit. "ballad"), a standard form in Latin music that can be analogized to the twelve-bar blues in its standardization, its antiquity, and its flexibility and adaptability to any tempo, instrumentation, or topic. Los Tigres' primary lead instrument is the norteño accordion, and their stiff polka-derived tempos may sound corny if you're not hearing with the proper ears (as I didn't for many years), but once you accept these as features instead of bugs, there's a whole world of little runs between verses, ironic chord changes, and most of all, the deliciously biting, sarcastic lyrics.

Los Tigres del Norte (that's "The Tigers of the North" in English) came to fame in the mid-70s with a series of narcocorridos, or ballads about drug trafficking — in humanistic, literary songs, with a cinematic gift for narrative and character — and have remained at the very top of the norteño heap since; but on "El Circo," which hit the top of the Hot Latin chart for a week in the spring of 1996, they turn their gimlet eye on the world of Mexican politics.

Even if you know Spanish, this might not be immediately apparent; after all, as leader Jorge Hernández sings the first verse, it's a song about two brothers who own a circus. (The full text of the song — my translation — is behind the jump.) But anyone who'd been paying attention to Mexican politics from the late 80s to that very week knew exactly who the brothers Carlos and Raúl were supposed to be: ex-president of Mexico Carlos Salinas and his strongarm brother Raúl, then in jail for conspiring in political assassination and under suspicion of money laundering. (It was Carlos Salinas who negotiated the NAFTA agreement with the Clinton administration; under his right-wing presidency, Mexico plunged into debt and suffered economic collapse.) The political enemies of the Salinas brothers tended to meet mysterious but fatal ends; in this regard, both the Tigres' recording of this song and the airplay that pushed it to #1 on the (American) chart can be seen as acts of political defiance.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “EXPERIENCIA RELIGIOSA”

21st April, 1996

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Yes, again already. Get used to it. For the next fifteen years (and counting), nearly every single he releases will go #1. Not all of them, of course, are created equal.

Which makes it sound like I think this one is bad. I don't, quite: there are some quite good things about it, but it's a mismatch of singer, style and song. Iglesias is still singing like a rock singer here, belting grittily in a thin, static register, the audio equivalent of those Rob Liefeld comic books where everyone scowls grimly so much that it looks like they're constipated. He has not yet learned what his voice can do — and, more to the point, what it can't. If he were the singer he thinks he is, if he were Julio Iglesias or Luis Miguel or even Cristian Castro, he'd be able to overcome the repetitive up-and-down-the-scale of the song's melody (if the song's melody were plotted on a graph, it'd be as regular as a heartbeat, but not as warm), but as it is he doesn't even emote, he just groans.

Which is too bad; because the song, outside of the grinding melodic mechanics, is actually pretty good. I won't be so condescending as to translate the title (obvious Latinates are obvious), but the first line of the chorus makes the crucial distinction "casi" ("almost") -- settle down, priests and mothers, he's not saying sex is a religious experience, just that it's like one. Except that, three lines later, he says it straight: "es un experiencia religiosa" ("it is a" etc). But pay no attention to the flip-flopping semantics: the real highlight of the chorus is the sly rhyme "besar la boca tuya merece un aleluya" ("kissing your mouth deserves a hallelujah" — it's, sigh, better in Spanish), the kind of wordplay that died out in English-language pop with Ira Gershwin.

The requisite gospel choir comes in the for the last couple of choruses, which only further underscores how far this is from anything actually religious — Latin Pop audiences are so overwhelmingly Catholic that the gospel choir, a trope imported from American soul and rock music, is a signifier of generalized, and international, ambition rather than anything bone-deep to the culture. The hair-metal guitar solo that wails just after gives it away: this is (not very good) international pop, not particularly Latin in any way. (Enter Boyzone's 1997 cover "Mystical Experience," a pretty direct translation and even less bearable.)

Enrique will find his voice eventually, and material that's worthy of it. But it'll be a rocky road for a while. Buckle up.

CRISTIAN CASTRO, “AMOR”

3rd February, 1996

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When last we saw Cristian Castro, he was peddling a soft-rock version (complete with "tasteful" guitar and sax licks) of Luis Miguel's slick romántico. In the six years since then, however, Latin Pop has changed; what came as a moderately novel modernization then would be an unbearable throwback now. So luckily he too has advanced with the times; instead of Richard Marx in 1990, he's now upgraded to the Gin Blossoms in 1993.

This song is pure jangle-pop of the kind that was the most commercially appealing face of college rock in the late 80s and early 90s, R.E.M. and Gin Blossoms and Wildflowers-era Tom Petty and even echoes of the Lemonheads in Castro's smooth assurance, his mellifluous vocal just about the only thing connecting the song to Latin Pop traditions. If there's even a hint of the Rembrandts' terminally uncool "I'll Be There For You" (which I knew as a radio pop song before I knew it as the theme song to Friends), that's because it was one logical conclusion of the sound: this is surely as much trend-hopping as it is a deeply-felt love for the style, but that's fine. What matters is how convincing the song is.

And it's a feather-light construction, a song of hopeless love (I don't need to translate the title this time, do I?) delivered at such an easy, shuffling remove that, as with the Everly Brothers' proto-jangly "Bye Bye Love," you can't believe he's actually all that broken up about it. The guitars are not just for texture, either: this is straight-up mid-tempo rock, and if the unbelievably pretty Castro is still more pop star than rock & roller that doesn't mean the music is insincere. Rather, this is a hint of things to come. Just as rock is fading from prominence in Anglophone pop, it's experiencing a bullish renaissance in the Latin world. This is far from the last time I will use the Rock En Español tag.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “MÁS ALLÁ”

6th January, 1996

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After a magnificent hot streak, Estefan finally deals herself a bum hand. This is, of course, up to interpretation; clearly enough people liked it to send the song to #1; but it's her worst song, qua song, that we've yet encountered in this travelogue.

The production remains as polished and detailed as ever, with gorgeous flamenco guitar runs and swaying Afro-Cuban percussion; but the melody refers to no Latin tradition, instead rising and falling in the safe, predictable, even cozy patterns of inspirational pabulum. It does not surprise me to learn, when I check Wikipedia, that she sang this for the Pope. I and my immediate circle have been present for people singing things to the Pope on a number of different occasions, and this fits right in, banal Chicken Soup for the Soul-level platitudes married to a melody strenuously wiped free of all secular interest. You can't dance to it, you can't fall in love to it, you can't weep to it, you can't get pumped to it, you can't even — and this is where it fails as an inspirational song as well as a pop song — feel any great interest in changing the world to it.

The song is about stasis: the title, "Más Allá" means "Beyond," and is a metonymy for heaven; and all the sweetly-sung little Christian sacrifices in the verses are promised their eternal reward in the stubbornly not-soaring chorus. It's a vision of heaven as a gated community, "más allá del rencor, de las lágrimas y el dolor" ("beyond rancor, beyond tears and pain"), without any hint that rancor, tears and pain are not the disease we need to escape, but its symptoms; injustice, as even the Pope has acknowledged from time to time, needs to be confronted and beat back. As an anthem for such effort, however, this kind of thing is too heavenly minded to be any earthly good.

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “SI TÚ TE VAS”

2nd December, 1995

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And so we close out 1995, perhaps the most tumultuous year at the top of the Latin chart yet, with the arrival of a new voice bearing an old name. The people's princess is gone, the youth, invitation, and opportunity she represented having dissipated in the San Antonio night. Instead, we have another form of royalty.

He dropped out of college — the University of Miami, he was no scholar — to record this album, having secretly borrowed money from his nanny to record demos which he sent out under a fake name, because he didn't want the old man's prestige influencing the decisions. Of course, once the marketing people found out. . . .

Julio Iglesias was one of the greatest singers of the twentieth century, an interpreter of great sensitivity and a richness unusual in pop. His son inherited little of his burnished vocal quality; Enrique's voice is instead rather thin and pinched, if perhaps more nimble, better suited to a less stately pop era. But he has similar control and, which is what matters in pop, a similar ability to orchestrate emotions; listen, here, to how he clips his voice on the very edge of rock grittiness on the chord change.

But there will be plenty more opportunities to discuss Enrique Iglesias in the years to come; he currently holds the record for the most number ones on the Hot Latin chart, and is unlikely to be unseated any time soon. To the song. At first hearing, it's what I've been mentally cataloging as Another Fucking Ballad; but wait. It's actually been a while since we've had a straight-up ballad in this travelogue, and despite the tempo this isn't particularly Adult Contemporary. The hard drum sound, entirely devoid of syncopated rhythm; the guitar and organ which, though muted and in the background, pull hard in the direction of classic rock; Iglesias' own half-croon, half-groan. This is almost not Latin Pop at all, at least not in any of the traditional senses we've come to identify, neither regional nor tropical nor even, really, romántico. This is just pop that happens to be in Spanish, and could easily be otherwise.

Which make sense for a U of M dropout, who's lived in Florida since he was ten; his heritage is Spanish, but his instincts are all American — or international, same thing, thanks cultural imperialism. Even if he speaks with a Spanish accent (and you can hear the Spaniard when he sings "corathón" in the first line), he's been an international jet-setter all his life, identified with no tradition except that of wealth and privilege, provided with no cultural shorthand except that of universal human emotion. He perhaps oversells it here; he's young, and the song needs an injection of meaning; the premise ("Si Tú Te Vas" means "If You Leave") is some of the most well-covered ground in pop, and the lyrics don't distinguish themselves. Not for the first time, a good story, great personal attractiveness, and a strong publicity blitz have conspired to launch a new pop sensation.

But just how sensational he turns out to be will, of course, be a recurring theme in these pages for some time to come.

GLORIA ESTEFAN, “ABRIENDO PUERTAS”

21st October, 1995

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This song begins what, scanning the horizon, looks like becoming a semi-annual tradition: another Gloria Estefan album, another Gloria Estefan number-one single. After having thoroughly ingratiated herself to the Latin Pop audience with Mi Tierra (the album that produced three chart-topping songs), she'll never again go without that audience's appreciation for her work — at least as of press time. And she repays that appreciation with some of the most joyful and glorious music we've yet encountered in this travelogue.

"Abriendo Puertas," as even a Sesame Street-level Spanish education should tell you, means "opening doors," and the light, scattered-tempo vallenato rhythm of the song reiterates the dance-yrself-free message of the lyrics, which on the chorus run something like "And we're opening doors, and we're closing wounds/Because in the new year we're going to live life/And we're opening doors, and we're closing wounds/Step by step down the path we're going to find our way." It's the sort of pleasingly universalist message that could, frankly, be a hit at any time, but in the fall of 1995 it perhaps inevitably recalled the great grief of that year (at least as far as US Latin Pop fans were concerned), and its call to get up and dance anyway, to tear down barriers and dismiss failure as a lie, sounds both thrilling and, well, healing.

That vallenato rhythm is worth remarking on: it's a close cousin of the cumbia rhythm that Selena exposed us to, with similar origins in the mixed-race cauldron of coastal Colombia, and the guitar/accordion combination (unrelated to the similar combination in Mexican norteño) is one of the genre's trademarks. Perhaps unusually for the highly-vertically-integrated Estefans, the song was written and arranged by Colombian songwriter/producer Kike Santander, who will be a name to remember in the years to come, as the late 90s fade into the 00s.

Still, Gloria and producer husband Emilio, ever the ambassadorial multiculturalists, make a point of letting the opening guitar sound not only tropical but African — a hint, perhaps, of Congolese rumba echoing back to her own native Cuban rhythms? — and mix the rest with salsa horn charts, funky urban bass, Afro-Cuban percussion, and a call-and-response chorus that could have grown out of any of the above, but which in this travelogue is a Gloria Estefan hallmark. They don't call themselves the Miami Sound Machine anymore — they're bigger than Miami, and far more eclectic than any Sound Machine — but she's had the same band her whole career, and they've kept up with her every swerve and wild goose chases. If she sounds now content — like she could just make variations on this record for the rest of her career and not miss a thing — she has perhaps earned it. How many other openers to fifteenth albums sound so irrepressibly joyful?

LUIS MIGUEL, “SI NOS DEJAN”

30th September, 1995

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Let this be a lesson never to assume. You listen to and write about Latin Pop over the course of several years and start thinking you know what the parameters are. But 1994 and especially 1995 have messed with my assumptions so much that WHAT IS HAPPENING seems to be the only appropriate response. Not only have we seen a decisive shift in genre, away from bland romántico ballads towards distinctively flavored regional music whether uptempo or down, but this is the second live cut in a year to make the top of the chart.

Yes, of course it's Luis Miguel at the height of his powers, and nearly anything he recorded was bound to end up here. But this isn't the Luis Miguel we've become familiar, even overfamiliar with in the past eight years. He's looser than he's been in ages — since he was a teen idol, in fact — and deviates from his usual velvet-lunged passionata by letting the band behind him, massive string section and all, play with tempo, even vamp a little. It's a mariachi orchestra, but the song is pure pop in its harmonics and structure, and if it's still a controlled looseness, closer to Sinatra Swings! than to the near-punk of La Mafia's live cut, he doesn't let the side down, acquitting himself handily outside the clinical, glossy perfection of his studio cuts.

"Si Nos Dejan" means "if they let us" (or "if they leave us," but not in this context), and it's either a silly trifle of a love song in which the Always Unspecified They are all that's standing in the way of true love, ultimate happiness, a new dawn, and all the rest, or it's a really powerful, political song about the inescapability of power dynamics and how the system crushes personal happiness with ruthless thoroughness. I think it's the former, but multiple readings is what happens when you don't specify.

SELENA, “TÚ, SÓLO TÚ”

22nd July, 1995

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That's all there is; there isn't any more.

This is our farewell to Selena, just over a year since we first properly said hello to her. We're gliding inevitably on to the horizon, and she must remain behind. If this hurts more than any other voice which has gradually faded from these pages — we've seen the last of Ana Gabriel, of Yuri, of Jon Secada, to name just three who have given us pleasure over the years — it's because Selena held more than just the promise of future musical success in her voice, in her beauty, in her ambition. She could have been so much more. She could have beaten back the inequalities of race and language, bridged the gap between Hot Latin Tracks and the Hot 100, belonged not just to a single region, not just to a single language, but to the world.

And in a way, she did, at least briefly. Her death made her more famous than her life to date had done; and Dreaming Of You, the somewhat motley collection of tracks she had been working on in various studios at the time of her death, rushed out to assuage the grief, was her biggest-selling album ever. "Tú, Sólo Tú" was the second single from that record; the first, and the one song you probably know by her, "I Could Fall In Love," was the biggest Latin song to hit the Hot 100 since "La Bamba" back in 1987. It peaked at #8 there, and became something of a generational classic, especially in the urban US. It also raced up the Hot Latin chart, of course, reaching #2; only the simultaneous #1 of "Tú, Sólo Tú" kept it from being included in this travelogue.

But "I Could Fall In Love" was an R&B ballad, perfect for teary memorializing; "Tú, Sólo Tú" is a mariachi waltz, so perfect a companion piece to "El Palo" that this period of our travelogue is starting to look less like a generational shift in listening patterns and more like black magic. But it's not just a soundalike throwback; "Tú, Sólo Tú" is a genuine classic, written by the great ranchera composer Felipe Valdés Leal for the 1949 film Perdida, where it was sung by La Torcacita (Matilde Sánchez), and would be covered by virtually every ranchera singer ever, perhaps most notably Pedro Infante and Linda Ronstadt. Selena's performance of it is respectful without being reverential; she digs into the emotion of the lament in her own way, rather than trying to resurrect a bygone vocal style, and towards the end begins to sound a bit like Ana Gabriel in the hoarseness of her moans.

Which brings us more or less full circle; she first came to our notice doing something like an Ana Gabriel imitation. But where the music there was thin and tentative, a bad memory of the underproduced 80s, she — and Latin Pop as a whole — had reached the place where she could glory in sumptuous history without being held back by it. There's a kind of confidence here, confidence in the power of the song and of the classic mariachi instrumentation to retain their full meaning almost fifty years after the fact; like Dylan forcing rock to look back at folk in order to flower in a million different directions, she's almost with her dying breath helping Latin Pop hurtle into the future by taking stock of its past.

And if she's not quite going to be the bridge we had hoped — too young, too soon, never forget — that doesn't mean there won't be one. But that's getting ahead of ourselves.

JUAN GABRIEL, “EL PALO”

15th July, 1995

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Strictly from the evidence of this travelogue, Juan Gabriel is a man of moods. He was introduced to us very early on as a singer of synth-pop mariachi; he said goodbye with an extended dance mix; he said hello again with a gospelly march; and now he's doubling down on the mariachi — or rather, on ranchera (mariachi is a specific form that generally includes charro costumes), digging into the 1940s and 50s and 60s heyday of classic Mexican music.

In a sense this is a culmination of all the backward-looking pop we've been seeing over the course of the past few years, from Gloria Estefan's exploration of Cuban traditionalism and Luis Miguel's homages to the greats of Latin music to exercises by Selena and Los Bukis in modernized classicism. Even though Juan Gabriel's visits to the top spot tend to be brief these days (this was only there for a week), he's still something of a key figure in Latin Pop, and his embrace of traditional ranchera music on El México Que Nos Se Fue ("the Mexico that left us," or rather, "that got away from us") is another confirmation that the mood of Latin Pop (as measured by US airplay, anyway) has changed considerably from where it was ten, or even five, years ago.

"El Palo" is a Gabriel original, but it sounds entirely traditional (except perhaps in the rapid-fire syllable-spitting at the end, which owes more to American funk and soul than the strict rhythm and ornate instrumentation suggest). A "palo" is a stick, and the repeated phrase which gives the song its title, "palo dado, ni Dios lo quita" is a variation on a Spanish-language proverb which means, roughly, "what's done is done" (lit. "stick given, neither does God remove it"). It's a scales-from-the-eyes end-of-relationship song, and if it's performed in a rather breathless rush as the guitars and guitarróns and vihuelas and harps propel us forward, while the glossy, feathery strings swirl above and around and the horns break in like spotlights to show the track, it's still an old pop theme, and an old romantic-poetry theme before that.

But if the instrumentation, the lyric, and the melodymaking are all traditional ranchera, Juan Gabriel's voice is not. He doesn't have the burnished tones of a Vicente Fernández or a Pedro Infante: his voice is high and thin and cracked (a bit like David Bowie's, in fact), and the sobbing wrench in his voice doesn't sound stylized in the traditional method of ranchera, but real. He's still unpredictable, even when writing and singing what might be the most predictable form of music there is. The signature sounds, harmonic structures, and cries (the grito mexicano, again!) of classic Mexican music are as immediately recognizable as any traditional music anywhere; the flexibility of the form is less noted by outside listeners, but Juan Gabriel makes it sound immediate even while sounding old.

MARCO ANTONIO SOLÍS & LOS BUKIS, “UNA MUJER COMO TÚ”

3rd June, 1995

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Los Bukis are back! It's been a while since we've heard from them, and in the meantime they've undergone a name change. Marco Antonio Solís, who was always the frontman, songwriter, face, and leader of the band, is billed up front now; the next time we see him, he'll have left behind the Bukis brand entirely.

But if the band was ever more than a collection of guys who played behind Solís, this is a great note for them to go out on. Listening back to their appearances in this travelogue, they've been more consistent than I think I gave them credit for at the time; back to back, their songs form a sort of interlocking pattern of trad-inflected Mexican pop, moving from the synth-heavy production of the 80s to the rhythm-centric production of the 90s. Of course, there were solid rhythms on their earlier songs, and there are synths here. Maybe the real difference is that the trad is just a little more inflected than previously.

The song is a bolero, and Solís gives it the rich, full vocal that bolero tradition demands — and I'm pleasantly surprised. This is the first time I've been impressed by his singing; not that he's Luis Miguel all of a sudden, but especially on the middle eight, where he has to make a difficult leap alone, he acquits himself so well that you can see exactly why he felt that the band wasn't necessary any more. Still, the sensitive arrangement and tasteful guitar and percussion figures enhance the pleasure, and if this isn't quite in the Gloria Estefan range of superbly evocative traditionalism, it's dreamy enough to do.

SELENA, “FOTOS Y RECUERDOS”

15th April, 1995

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And like that, she's gone.

On March 31st, after an argument with a former employee and president of her fan club, Selena turned to leave the Days Inn room where they had agreed to meet and was shot deep in the right shoulder. She died of blood loss just over an hour later in a Corpus Christi hospital.

The immense and immediate public grief that followed was the occasion of most Anglophone music fans' first hearing of her. Tom Brokaw called her "the Madonna of Mexico" on the evening news, but he was wrong. She was the Madonna of America — of that portion of America which, just as free and proud and God-fearing as any other, has worked harder, lived on less, and built more (at least west of the Mississippi). Mexico? Please. Selena was from Texas.

(Which isn't to say she wasn't proud of her Mexican heritage, same as anyone can be of their Irish or Italian or whatever. Just noting acts of erasure where I see them.)

And by now hopefully you'll have clicked play and wondered why I haven't yet mentioned the song. It's a great song even if you don't know Spanish, and you recognized that guitar line right away. But although it was her first number one after her death, it was the fourth single from Amor Prohibido, and so even if the imagery was kind of apt (see below), there was always going to be a feeling of exhaustion to whatever song took this place.

But the fact that it's a rewrite of perhaps the most buoyant, sparkling song of ache and loss ever written (even if Chrissy Hynde's new-wave Kinksisms have little in common with Selena's skanking cumbia) very nearly lifts it above mere fourth-single roteness and into something grander, more eloquent: a self-eulogy. The Spanish lyric, written by Ricky Vela, takes its lead from the opening line of the original — "I found a picture of you" — and sticks to the image. Selena sings "tengo fotos y recuerdos" ("I [only] have photos and memories") over the title melody, and while her background singers gamely imitate the "ooh ahh" chants which Hynde had borrowed from Sam Cooke, the chain-gang metaphor is lost in translation. Still, the rising "oh-oh-a-oh-ohhh" and the descending, patient guitar figures of the original remain, and in any language it's a beautiful song.

We will see Selena from this deck only once more; we barely got to know her, and already she's slipping out of sight. It would probably be too much to say she changed everything. But she changed enough; the rest of this travelogue will be that much better for all the ways she pushed Latin Pop forward.

LA MAFIA, “TOMA MI AMOR”

8th April, 1995

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When the Hot Latin chart goes norteño, it goes norteño all the way. Forget the politesse of Bronco's string arrangement, or La Mafia's own concessions to electronic modernism — this is the raw stuff, accordion and rhythm section and a singer gritando puro campesino. It's a rare example of a live hit, always unusual outside of 70s AOR, and the fact that it was only on the top of the chart for a week detracts nothing from the fact that hey, it was at the top of the chart at all.

But it's not just the crowd noise that makes this the rawest, most rock & roll record we've encountered yet in our journey. The stiff polka-descended rhythms might not sound very raucous, but the accordion positively shreds, and the gritos aren't a million miles away from Joe Strummer's Peter Pan crows on "London Calling," or from cowboy whoops presaging heavy sales at the saloon and a gunfight in the morning. Sure, people who aren't used to norteño might mutter "Chicken Dance" to themselves, and the lyrics are very nearly simple enough to be a playground chant, but there's a magnificent energy to the song, an organic looseness that suggests that maybe more Latin Pop should have been released to radio from concert recordings.

"Toma Mi Amor" means "take my love," but the verb "tomar" ("take") is also used to mean "drink" — and La Mafia doesn't hesitate to let the suggestiveness bubble up to the surface. It's a bar-band singalong from South Texas, where bar bands are just as likely to be brown as white, and their crowds are composed of shitkickers, hard-working alcoholics, and horndogs either way.

BRONCO, “QUE NO ME OLVIDE”

11th February, 1995

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It’s been building up steam for a while now. The tejano pop of Álvaro Torres and La Mafia broke the ground; the unashamedly rustic cumbia rhythms of Selena laid the foundation; and even Luis Miguel’s revisiting the style in his immaculately polished manner helped to get people used to the idea. But Bronco is the first actual norteño outfit, unmediated through the gloss and synths of contemporary pop, to hit the top of the Latin chart since it began. In Anglophone pop terms, it’s like a country-blues singer suddenly hitting the top of the charts in 1995 — and not being a one-off either, but making the top spot safe for roots acts ever after.

But norteño is pop in a way that blues and even traditional country are not (at least not anymore). Partly this has to do with the shifting demographics of the Latin Pop audience in the 1990s; where from the beginning of the chart in 1986 it had been driven by urban, middle-class Cuban-Americans and Puerto Ricans in the East and North and Mexican-Americans who had long lived in the American West, beginning in the mid-90s the boom in immigration of poor Mexicans and Central and South Americans to the U.S. pushed Latin Pop towards including more diverse voices: poor people’s music, in fact.

(The reason for this mid-90s boom in immigration? Conservative pundits pretend to be baffled and blame the inherent criminality of brown skin, but I’ll drop a hint: it begins with N and ends with AFTA.)

Those horns, descanting brightly in muted chords, are the first sign: this is traditional Mexican music. José Guadalupe Esparza's high, emotional vocal style is another —— and then the whoop, half laugh, half sob, entirely artificial, the grito mexicano that more than any other sound defines norteño as something particular and vulgar and sets on edge the teeth of listeners for whom the music codes as poverty, as ignorance, as hickface, as hidebound fakery set to a grossly inelegant march (exactly the reaction I had as a child to the honky tonk whine of country, incidentally), for whom norteño is the music of abuelos, of campesinos, of the patria they want nothing to do with. It is firmly itself, not Americanized, not assimilated, not conducive to being remixed or anglicized. There have still been no norteño hits in English (unless "Ring of Fire" counts), almost alone among global pop musics, because once the blues barrier was broken back in the 20s another sound of Otherized Poverty, with which all Americans are familiar second-hand but never first, had to rise to take its place.

But this is still pop-norteño, those lush strings particularly taking the place of what would, a year earlier, be synthesizers. And I'm not entirely convinced they're not; but it's the mid-90s and gestures towards "authenticity" of any stripe are appreciated more than the sonic novelty and futurism that peaked once in the 80s but will peak higher still in years to come.

The song? It's a traditional-sounding lament (though written by Esparza) — "Please Don't Forget Me" would be a rough translation of the title's sentiment, and the rest can be extrapolated from it. It's the fact of the song, more than the song itself, that excites me. So much more is to come.

LA MAFIA, “ME DUELE ESTAR SOLO”

21st January, 1995

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La Mafia's previous appearances in these pages have been piano ballads, tasteful — of their kind — and even excessively polite, as though they had put on their good suits in order to enter the charts and were reluctant to turn around for fear something might break. But something happened between then and now; even though their previous single was off the same album, it's highly unlikely this one would have made it to the top if it weren't for the gravitational force exerted by the high-mass formation of a new star.

Tejano, the specifically Texan homebrew of cumbia, norteño, and American r&b and pop, was the new sound of Latin radio, and the way La Mafia presses hard on cumbia's Caribbean beat, skanking hard at reggae tempos, may be the funkiest sound we've had to date. As well as one of the tackiest — speaking as someone who grew up in the late 80s and early 90s, there are class and taste implications in the cheap keyboard sounds and drum-machine presets La Mafia use here that still trigger hot floods of embarrassment deep in my subconscious. But I'm learning to own it, to even rejoice in it (the unlikely reappearance of similar off-brand synth textures on the radio in 2011 is some help here), and the groove bounces enough to forgive anything.

Or maybe I'm just overidentifying with the lyrics. "Me Duele Estar Solo" means "it hurts to be alone," and the fact that the self-pitying lyrics are sung with such a smooth, carefree delivery over a very sunny bounce only appeals even more to someone who prefers to wrap unflattering self-pity in a breezy irony that dares anyone else to feel sorry for me. (I didn't say I succeed.) If it's a little hard to imagine raising a maudlin glass to the chorus, that's only because bopping to the rhythm might spill the beer.

SELENA, “NO ME QUEDA MÁS”

17th December, 1994

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We close out 1994 appropriately, with the woman who owned 1994 top-to-bottom. It's her fourth number one of the year, and on first listen it's her least modern. It sounds like it could have been recorded in the sixties or even earlier, all tight-strummed guitars and a mini-orchestra pumping film-cue trills in on every bar. The lush r&b of "Dondequiera Que Estés," the skanking cumbia of "Amor Prohibido" and "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom" are nowhere to be found here; Ana Gabriel, or even Rocío Dúrcal, could just as easily have recorded this.

Which is partly the point. Latin music is just as much invested in understanding itself as existing in continuity with grand old traditions as country music is; understandably so, given the socially conservative makeup of both core audiences. Selena is very much a way into the future, but she knows that her novelty exists on sufferance: without explicit nods, explicit ties to the past, she remains on unstable ground, as easily dropped as any other novelty. And of course she loves the grand old traditions herself; listen to how enthusiastically she rips into the traditional sobbing ranchera style of singing. Juicy melodramatics no know expiration date.

But the song only sounds old; it was written by Ricky Vela, who was in love with Selena's sister Suzette, after she married, and it's not in the old florid poetic style of traditional bolero ranchero. The vivid images of traditional romántico are left behind as the lyrics deal only in direct emotions; this is a song about how loss of love shatters a person's conception of self, and Vela baldly states it. The opening lines, "no me queda más/que perderme en un abismo de tristeza y lágrimas" translate to "I have nothing left/but to lose myself in an abyss of sadness and tears." It's mopey stuff, for sure; but Selena's vibrant performance, and the refusal of the music to get maudlin, rescues it. Which isn't to say that the song isn't better-written than Selena's previous number ones (not that great writing is everything) — Vela's Spanish is much less basic than A. B. Quintanilla's.

Selena has conquered her world. Dance, ballads, funk, traditional music; she can do it all. Naturally, her sights are set higher still; there's a whole other market out there still to conquer. 1995, and all it will bring, waits right around the corner. No spoilers.

LUIS MIGUEL, “LA MEDIA VUELTA”

26th November, 1994

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Again, before listening to Luis Miguel's version, I highly recommend that you hear the original, recorded by its composer José Alfredo Jiménez in 1963. Jiménez was one of the great ranchera composers and performers in the 50s and 60s, a self-taught songwriter of proletariat origins who contributed immensely to the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, producing a body of work that few songwriters anywhere have equaled in scope and quality.

This particular song takes a bolero form (the punctuated guitar rhythm is what gives it away), making it even dreamier and more classically-minded than usual for ranchera, and ranchera is usually one of the more dreamy and traditional Latin genres. Luis Miguel plays up the classicism, holding the power of his voice mostly in check throughout. As I've had occasion to point out again and again, he's a singer of consummate skill: here, the quality of power held in reserve mirrors the lyric.

"La Media Vuelta" translates literally as "The Half-Turn," and it's a term borrowed from the art of bullfighting; the media vuelta is a method of sticking the bull that requires perfect agility and timing — like a dance, which is the other use of the stock phrase. The singer of "La Media Vuelta" is renouncing his love for her own good; all the power in the relationship lies on his side, as he admits when he says "yo soy tu dueño" (a tricky phrase which translates as "I am your lord and master," but connotes something like "you're so in love with me that you'll do whatever I say"). The sentiments are horrific from a feminist point of view — dude's just dictating to her regardless of her own wishes, can't they sit down and talk this out? — but as a representation of a certain floridly Romantic scenario (it's all a bit Mr. Rochester), it's an effective character portrait. He's aware of the damage he's doing, but power is its own reward.

LOS REHENES, “NI EL PRIMERO NI EL ÚLTIMO”

19th November, 1994

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Already Selena has begun changing the landscape of Latin Pop. Los Rehenes, a zacatecano band (from the central Mexican state of Zacatecas) which had had some local popularity on an independent label, suddenly zooms to the top of the charts not because they're anything special, necessarily — lots of local regional dance-and-corrido bands could have done as well — but because they're working the cumbia beat with modern electronic flourishes: those drum-machine fills are almost identical to the ones on "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom."

Which isn't entirely fair to Javier and Roberto Torres and their bandmates. Their sound, both classic and modern, was what the moment demanded as Selena opened up an appetite for tejano and related music in the U.S. Latin market, and they could write. "Ni El Primero, Ni El Último" means "neither the first nor the last," and the shrugging fatalism and class-consciousness of the lyric — he's not the first to strike out in love, he's not alone in being despised for his poverty, he doesn't offer the sun and the moon because they're not his to give — is charming and refreshing after the steady diet of extravagant emotionalism which the past eight years of baladas románticas have fed us, punctuated occasionally by silly dance songs.

This is in fact the closest we have come yet to the Mexican version of what country music has traditionally been in the United States: the place where showmanship meets heartbreak, where lower-class solidarity meets pop tunefulness, and wry grins and cowboy hats go hand in hand. It's not quite puro regional, it's slickly produced and major-label poppy, with that pumped-out keyboard hook and those juddering post-industrial fills, but we can see regional from here. We'll see more of it.