Latino

938. ‘The Ketchup Song (Aserejé)’, by Las Ketchup

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Ah, the classic autumn Eurotrash hit. Played in bars across Europe all summer, and belatedly making #1 in the UK after the leaves have started to fall…

The Ketchup Song (Aserejé), by Las Ketchup (their 1st and only #1)

1 week, from 13th – 20th October 2002

To Whigfield, Eiffel 65 and DJ Ötzi we can now add Las Ketchup, with this slice of Spanglish surf rock. And, of course, the accompanying dance routine. They were a Spanish girl group, three sisters, and this was their first hit. And call me cynical, but when your group and your first single share a title, and that title involves ‘Ketchup’, then it’s safe to assume you’re not aiming for longevity.

But also, call me surprised, because this isn’t at all as bad as I’d expected. It’s horribly catchy, sure, and largely nonsense (‘aserejé’ is not a Spanish word, nor is ‘buididipi’, nor ‘seibuinova’) with a chorus based on ‘Rapper’s Delight’, but it’s much more of a rock song than I recalled, with the guitars switching between eighties soft, and growling surf, rock. It’s not as in-your-face irritating as some of the Eurotrash that’s gone before and, despite its obvious disposableness, it still sounds like a real song.

This is all a revelation, presumably because sixteen-year-old me wrote this off as novelty crap without giving it a proper listen. I’d still not choose to listen to it, but couldn’t promise that it wouldn’t get me on a dancefloor in double quick time after a jug of sangria. And at least it came out when I was too old to be haunted by its dance routine at primary school discos, unlike ‘Saturday Night’ and ‘Macarena’.

My teenage aloofness has also caused me to miss how bloody massive this song was in 2002. It made #1 in twenty-seven countries, and Wiki lists it as being a chart-topper in every territory in which it was released except the US, Japan, and – the only European hold-outs – Croatia. It didn’t lead to any lasting success, however, and Las Ketchup are gold-star one hit wonders in the UK. Their last release was in 2006, when they represented Spain at Eurovision, finishing twenty-first with ‘Un Blodymary’, though they continue to perform.

One other thing that had passed me by regarding ‘The Ketchup Song’, as well as its relative quality and its success, was the fact that the gibberish lyrics are alleged in Latin America to be secretly demonic… ‘Aserejé’, some religious types argued, sounds like ‘a ser hereje’ (‘let’s be heretical’), with other lyrics supposedly referring to hell and Satanic rituals. The song was banned by a TV station in the Dominican Republic on these grounds… So, press play below at your peril!

929. ‘Light My Fire’, by Will Young

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‘Pop Idol’ champion Will Young returns with something a little more original than his bland winner’s single…

Light My Fire, by Will Young (his 2nd of four #1s)

2 weeks, from 2nd – 16th June 2002

Okay, original might be a stretch. It is another cover, this time of the Doors’ ‘Light My Fire’. But the treatment he gives this sixties classic is light and breezy. Presumably knowing that he couldn’t give it the full-blooded Jim Morrison treatment, Young goes for a slinky, still very sixties-coded, approach. There’s a sexy bossa nova beat, and a pretty cool guitar solo. It owes much more to José Feliciano’s version (a bigger hit in the UK) than the original.

It’s actually… okay. You may detect a hint of surprise there, and you’d be right. Back in 2002, when I was sixteen, it was very much the done thing to write this single off without actually listening to it, and to make sure everyone knew that you knew this was a cover. ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe he’s done that to the Doors’, we could be heard saying, probably without very many of us having actually ever heard the original, or even knowing about the existence Feliciano’s version.

This was the first sign that Will Young might have had something about him, a hint at a career beyond the Simon Cowell sludge factory. That wouldn’t become fully apparent until his second album, but the signs were here. Compare this with Gareth Gates’ – still very successful – second single (coming up on top of the charts soon, don’t you worry!)

Young had performed ‘Light My Fire’ during his auditions for ‘Pop Idol’, so he presumably liked the song – not something that he would say about ‘Evergreen’. He also performed it at the Eurovision-esque ‘World Idol’, in which the winners from various ‘Pop Idol’ franchises around the world competed against one another. He finished fifth.

With all this talk of ‘Light My Fire’s different versions, we need to mention Amii Stewart’s disco version, twice a UK Top 10 hit, and Shirley Bassey’s fabulously dramatic version from 1970. However, and possibly quite boringly, I’m going to stick my neck out for the seven-minute acidic psychedelia of the Doors. Sometimes the original is simply the best. And as much as Young’s version is tolerable, it’s still unfortunate that it gave the song a higher chart-placing than any of these classics.

834. ‘Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit Of…)’, by Lou Bega

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Ladies and gentlemen…

Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit Of…), by Lou Bega (his 1st and only #1)

2 weeks, from 29th August – 12th September 1999

…this is Mambo Number Five. Autumn may have begun while this record was at number one, but the Latin summer of 1999 is still going strong. As with both our previous Latin chart-toppers – ‘Livin’ la Vida Loca’ and ‘Mi Chico Latino’ – yes, this is cheesy, and yes, this is Latin music with all the raw edges softened. But I challenge anyone to listen to this and not smile, just a bit. And even today, you throw this on at any kids party, or wedding, hell even at a funeral, and the dancefloor will light up.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a mambo at number one. Forty-four years, to be exact, when Rosemary Clooney scored her second chart-topper with ‘Mambo Italiano’ (which was mambo in name more than anything else), and Pérez Prado had an instrumental smash with ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’. It was Prado himself, the King of Mambo, who originally recorded ‘Mambo No. 5’ in 1949. He had also been back in the charts in 1995, despite dying in 1989, when ‘Guaglione’ made #2 thanks to a feature on a Guinness advert.

Lou Bega, a German-born Italian-Ugandan rapper, had the idea to sample ‘Mambo No. 5’ and turn it into a modern pop-rap song while living in Miami, where he had been turned on to Latin music. The brass band, and the shouts, are that of Prado; but Bega added lots of ad-libs, and some wonderfully dated record scratches and tapes-getting-all-tangled-in-the-deck sound effects (kids these days will never know the pain…)

And of course, he also added the words. Seven ladies that went down in history. Monica, Erica, Rita, Tina, Sandra, Mary, and Jessica. There is a particular joy in knowing someone by any of these names, and of trying to crowbar their accompanying line into conversation. I used to work with a Rita (all I need), while I also know a Mary (all night long), but my personal goal is to meet a Sandra (in the sun).

What’s interesting is not just how big this genre of music suddenly became in the summer of 1999, but how much songs like this and ‘Livin’ la Vida Loca’ remain in the public consciousness, far more than the Westlife’s many ballads and anonymous dance tunes. Lou Bega managed one more minor hit in the UK with the follow-up to this, ‘I Got a Girl’, in which he yet again lists his many girlfriends. He remains active, still dressing like Pablo Escobar on his summer holidays, still peddling his schtick (his most recent release on Spotify samples ‘Macarena’).

Still, he’ll always have ‘Mambo No. 5’. Stick a random pin on a map and chances are you’ll hit a country where this record made #1. In France it was there for a mind-blowing twenty weeks… The success wasn’t all positive though, as Bega and his producers spent seven years locked in a legal battle with Pérez Prado’s estate, before a judge ruled that the writing credits be split evenly. Meanwhile my favourite story connected with ‘Mambo No. 5’ is that it was originally chosen as the theme song for the US Democrats’ 2000 convention, before someone pointed out that having Bill Clinton walk out to A little bit of Monica in my life wasn’t such a hot idea…

833. ‘Mi Chico Latino’, by Geri Halliwell

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After a slightly disappointing start to her solo career, missing out on #1 by a few hundred copies to Boyzone, Ginger becomes the second Spice Girl to make top spot away from the band, and the first to do so completely on her own…

Mi Chico Latino, by Geri Halliwell (her 1st of four solo #1s)

1 week, from 22nd – 29th August 1999

Just a few weeks on from ‘Livin’ la Vida Loca’, Geri Halliwell hops aboard the Latin-revival bandwagon. Or is it the mid-80s Madonna bandwagon? For this slice of Spanish silliness owes quite a large debt to Madge’s 1987 chart-topper ‘La Isla Bonita’. It also reminds me of holiday classic ‘Lambada’ in the melancholy chord progressions, not to mention ‘Viva Forever’s flamenco guitars, and even ‘Spice Up Your Life’ in the propulsive beat.

But what ‘Mi Chico Latino’ lacks in originality, it makes up for in camp charm. From the start, Geri clearly knew that her core fanbase were gay men, and she had no illusions of much wider appeal. (The video features a liberal amount of men in trunks, while the ‘B’-side was literally titled ‘G.A.Y.’) And she is, as has been well documented, no great vocalist. But she carries this tune along with a likeable purr in her voice.

Geri has, I have just discovered, a Spanish mother, which gives the lyrics a little more respectability. She chucks around some GCSE-level stuff like confetti – Donde esta… Yo no se… – but I’m fairly sure there was no mention of el hombre con fuego en la sangre in the textbooks my school used… I might have studied a bit harder if there had been.

Like the Westlife song it replaced at number one, nobody is going to argue that ‘Mi Chico Latino’ is a classic. But at the same time, it is. Sort of. A classic of the summer of ’99, when Latin pop was having a resurgence, and a one-time Spice Girl was on her way to becoming the country’s biggest female star, for a year or two at least. There’s something quite appealing in the way this record barrels along, on the castanets and the ayayays. ‘Loveably crap’ might be a good way to sum it up. That might also be a good way to sum up the entire solo career Geri Halliwell, my now-favourite Spice Girl.

830. ‘Livin’ la Vida Loca’, by Ricky Martin

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In my last post, on ATB’s ‘9PM’, I wrote about how rooted in the late-nineties that song seemed. I get a similar feeling about this number one, although they sound nothing alike. It’s just so 1999…

Livin’ la Vida Loca, by Ricky Martin (his 1st and only #1)

3 weeks, from 11th July – 1st August 1999

And I don’t mean that as an insult. This is a fun slice of Latin-pop, played at breakneck speed. It’s got ska horns. It’s got surf guitars. Not enough number ones feature surf guitars! In one of the most pure-pop years in chart history, ‘Livin’ la Vida Loca’ can count itself as one of its catchiest, and poppiest, number ones. But it also manages to do so with selling its soul to cheese – there is something respectably real about this, sounding like it was recorded by an actual band, with actual instruments.

It also has some memorable lyrics, about a fairly unhinged femme fatale, who’s into superstitions and voodoo dolls. She’ll make you take your clothes off, And go dancing in the rain… So fun are the words, and so fast do they rattle by – this really is a breathless song – that we don’t mind when she slips Ricky a sleeping pill and nicks his wallet in the second verse. Plus I’d argue that the title entered the wider pop culture for a good few years after this had been a hit.

I don’t whether this sounds so of its time because a) it’s a classic, b) because it reminds me of being thirteen (that devil nostalgia again…) or c) because it kicked off a big latin pop resurgence at the turn of the century. Think Santana’s ‘Smooth’, a Geri Halliwell #1 soon to come, as well as a bit of Mambo No. 5, not to mention J-Lo, Shakira, and Enrique Iglesias. This record’s popularity cannot be denied, though, and can be proven in one simple statistic: we’re over halfway through 1999 and ‘Livin’ la Vida Loca’ is the first chart-topper to spend more than a fortnight at the top!

From Puerto Rico, Ricky Martin had been a star in the Spanish-speaking world since the age of twelve, when he’d joined boyband Menudo. They had been going since the seventies, and had a policy of chucking members out when they reached sixteen, though Martin survived until he was seventeen. He clearly had something special… In 1991 he released his first solo album, while ‘Livin’ la Vida Loca’ was from his English language debut (though he’d had a smaller hit the year before with his ’98 World Cup theme ‘The Cup of Life’.)

I have a friend who is somewhat Ricky Martin obsessed, and have been with her to see him live in concert, in the front row. He put on a great show, and my friend is still a big fan of his, despite him announcing in 2010 that she is officially not his type… Meanwhile ‘Livin’ la Vida Loca’ may be his biggest hit, and his only UK #1, but I’ve always had an even softer spot for the similarly chaotic ‘She Bangs’, a #3 in 2000.

775. ‘Spice Up Your Life’, by The Spice Girls

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Just thinking about the Spice Girls’ schedule for 1997 makes me feel tired. Live shows, sponsorship deals, a movie, adverts, awards ceremonies around the world… And, of course, a second album to record and promote.

Spice Up Your Life, by The Spice Girls (their 5th of nine #1s)

1 week, from 19th – 27th October 1997

‘Spice Up Your Life’ is classic pop group lead single fare. It’s brash, it’s catchy, it has the name of the band in the title… In fact, it’s basically a call to arms for Spiceys everywhere: When you’re feeling, Sad and low, We will take you, Where you gotta go… set to a pounding, gyrating samba rhythm. People of the world, Every boy and every girl… Spice up your life!

I may have mentioned in previous posts how much of a fan I was of the Spice Girls’ first album. And I distinctly remember hearing ‘Spice Up Your Life’ for the first time… and hating it. It was annoying, it was chaotic, it felt like ‘Wannabe’ (never my favourite Spice Girls’ song) times a hundred. Maybe it was my age? I was almost twelve by this point, approaching the too-cool-for-school stage… Or maybe the song was just a bit naff?

Listening to it now, I’d say it was the latter (I’ve never been too cool for anything). By the second verse, the chaotic energy starts to rip the song apart… Kung Fu fighting, Dancing queen, Tribal spaceman, And everything in between… Then there’s the gibberish of the middle-eight: Flamenco, Lambada, But hip-hop is harder… While it’s perhaps best not to get into the yellow man in Timbuktu…

What does redeem it for me, slightly, is the fact that the chorus is an earworm, and provides its own dance moves: slamming it to the left, shaking it to the right. Plus, the song in its entirety doesn’t outstay its welcome. It blows in, upends your furniture, and blows out all in under three minutes. It charged straight to number one, of course, just as it looked like Elton John’s Diana tribute might stay there for the rest of the year (that was #1 on the Billboard charts well into 1998).

At the same time, ‘Spice Up Your Life’ only stayed on top for one-week, compared to the seven weeks of ‘Wannabe’. Although the ‘Spiceworld’ album was a massive seller, and the singles off it all big hits, it didn’t quite match the impact of its predecessor. In the video to this single, the girls descend in a spaceship to a post-apocalyptic world in which everything is ‘Spice’d. It’s visually impressive, even with the dated CGI, but you wonder what the thought behind it was. If you were starting to feel Spice Girl over-saturation, then that video wouldn’t have changed your mind…

732. ‘Jesus to a Child’, by George Michael

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1996 kicks off in the most understated way imaginable – with a slow, slinky, seven-minute bossa nova from George Michael.

Jesus to a Child, by George Michael (his 6th of seven solo #1s)

1 week, from 14th – 21st January 1996

I listen to it, properly, for the first time ever I think, and try to pinpoint the musical reason for this making number one. It’s not catchy – there’s no identifiable chorus – it meanders, weaves its smooth spell, then eventually departs. My thoughts are cast back a decade, to Michael’s similarly understated ‘A Different Corner’. He has a knack for taking unlikely songs to the top. But ‘Jesus to a Child’ makes ‘A Different Corner’ sound like the most instant, bubble-gum pop.

The reasons for it making #1 may have been largely to do with the power of the name. It was his first release for three years, since the ‘Five Live E.P.’, or for four if we only count original material. It was the lead single from ‘Older’ – his first studio album in nearly six years – though he had been performing the song live for over a year. You have to admire the sheer disregard for commercial success he showed in picking this as the first single.

The reasons for George Michael wanting to release this are now well-known, and very sad. ‘Jesus to a Child’ was written as a tribute to his late boyfriend, Anselmo Feleppa, who had died in 1993 after an AIDS-related brain haemorrhage. Michael had been unable to write anything for eighteen months after Feleppa’s death, until he wrote this elegy in under an hour. He set it to a bossa nova beat as a tribute to his lover’s Brazilian heritage.

The lyrics are beautiful: Sadness, In my eyes, No one guessed, Or no one tried, You smiled at me, Like Jesus to a child… and it sounds churlish to call this song ‘boring’. I imagine writing it was powerfully cathartic, and so perhaps we should view it as a poem, or a reading at a funeral. One that just happened to become a chart-topping hit, thanks to the enormous star power of its singer.

What is worth noting that is that even though the song is so clearly about a lost lover – The lover I still miss, Is Jesus to a child… – Michael couldn’t mention anything explicitly. There was rumour, and innuendo, like Freddie Mercury before him; but it would be another two years before he would come out (or be brutally outed, let’s be honest). 1996 is within my living memory, but the idea that a pop star nowadays wouldn’t reveal that a song was about their gay lover seems thankfully unlikely.

In my previous posts on George Michael, I’ve admitted that I don’t quite get the adoration for his music. A lot of it is good; but a lot of it is a bit too glossy, a bit too smooth, for me. Like this, even though many sources class it among his very best work. If this had been his last UK #1, I’d had to have written it of as a bit of a flat ending. Luckily, he has one more chart topper to come very soon, his 7th, and it’s probably my favourite of the lot. What’s not in doubt about George is that he seems to have been an incredibly warm and generous person – it was revealed after his death that all the royalties from this single had been donated to the charity ChildLine, a fact kept secret at his insistence.

595. ‘La Bamba’, by Los Lobos

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We’re hitting a bit of a latin groove in the summer of ’87. After Madonna’s two ‘¿hablas español?’ chart-toppers, here are some actual Mexicans…

La Bamba, by Los Lobos (their 1st and only #1)

2 weeks, from 26th July – 9th August 1987

OK. Los Lobos (The Wolves) are from California, but they’re of Mexican heritage, and sound to these untrained ears like the real deal. This is a nice, insanely catchy, interlude at the top of the charts – not just because it’s something a little different, but also because actual guitar-led number one singles were rarer than hens’ teeth in the mid-1980s.

It’s also not often that we get a fully foreign-language record at the top, either. In my initial notes on this, I wrote that it was only the 3rd of the decade. Now I’m struggling to think what the other two were… There’s Julio Iglesias’s similarly Spanish smoothy ‘Begin the Beguine’ (which, to be fair, has a couple of lines of English). Oh yes, and how could I forget Falco’s ‘Rock Me Amadeus’ which, title aside, was fully auf Deutsch.

What is a ‘Bamba’, I’m wondering? It’s not a thing, as such… More of a dance. There’s no direct translation, but the verb bombolear means to shake, or wobble, and so a derivative dance would presumably have a bit of hip wiggling. Put the rest of the Spanish lyrics through a translator, and it turns out to be a bit of a nonsense tune: To dance ‘La Bamba’, You need a bit of grace… I’m not a sailor, I’m a captain… Bam-ba, Bamba…

‘La Bamba’ was originally a hit for Ritchie Valens, and the Los Lobos version featured in a biopic released at the same time as the hit record. Which taps into another emerging theme of 1987: soundtrack hits. ‘Stand by Me’, ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’, ‘Who’s That Girl’, now this, have all made top-spot at least in part thanks to movies. The Valens film told the story of the first Latino rock ‘n’ roll star, whose rise to fame ended in the same plane crash that killed Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper when he was just seventeen.

‘La Bamba’ has a much longer history, though. It’s a Mexican folk song, of the son jarocho school, meaning that its roots stretch back centuries and that this is actually a pretty unique and culturally significant chart-topper. The earliest recording of ‘La Bamba’ is from the ‘30s. Valens took a song he presumably knew from childhood and gave it a rock ‘n’ roll twist… And it eventually ended up on top of the British charts some thirty years later, sandwiched between Madonna and Michael Jackson. The instrumental fade-out in particular sounds very authentically Mexican, though I think that was cut from the single edit.

Los Lobos had been around since the 1970s, and remain around today – having just released an album last year. This cover was by far their biggest hit, though, and what a hit: a #1 from the USA to New Zealand, via the UK, France and seemingly everywhere in-between. And, like I said in the intro, it’s been a refreshing change of pace. Up next, though, we’re back with the eighties big-hitters. The biggest of hitters: MJ himself.

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594. ‘Who’s That Girl’, by Madonna

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Madonna scores her 4th chart-topper within twelve months, joining a very exclusive club…

Who’s That Girl, by Madonna (her 5th of thirteen #1s)

1 week, from 19th – 26th July 1987

The ‘4-in-a-year club’ are The Beatles, Elvis, The Shadows, Slade and, um, Frank Ifield (do shout at me if I’ve forgotten anyone else!) and one thing you might notice about those five acts are their… well, their manhoods. Yes, Madonna is now officially (probably) the most successful female in chart history!

The sad thing is that, for such a ‘big’ #1, ‘Who’s That Girl’ is a bit of a non-event. It is ‘La Isla Bonita’ Part II, a watered down and remixed version of her previous chart-topper. The intro in particular, with its drum riff, is nigh on identical; while the subsequent latin-funk synths are, if not identical, then heavily influenced by their predecessor.

Plus, there’s even more Spanish thrown in this time. Quién es esa niña…? Señorita, más fina… Who’s that girl? I wasn’t a huge fan of ‘La Isla Bonita’, and it’s therefore inevitable that I’m even less a fan of this diluted version. There’s nothing wrong with it, blandness and lack of originality aside, but it’s well overshadowed by the bolder moments in Madonna’s back-catalogue. And out of her thirteen chart-toppers, it’s the one I’m least familiar with (I could probably have attempted the title line from memory, but that’s it…)

It’s from the soundtrack to a film of the same name. A ‘screwball comedy’, as Wikipedia puts it, that presumably nobody has watched since 1987. And that’s about all there is to write on this most slight and forgettable of #1s. To be fair, in order to achieve four chart-toppers in a year you need a combination of massive popularity and a winning formula. Nobody would deny that at least one of Elvis’s, or The Shadows’, or Slade’s four #1s was a re-tread… ‘Surrender’, ‘Dance On’, ‘Skweeze Me Pleeze Me’… While the sound of 1962-3 was Frank Ifield’s yodel popping up, time and again. The one act who managed to sound new and fresh with every single song was The Beatles, but there’s no point in competing with them…

Perhaps Madonna knew she was treading water at this point, because she took 1988 off and drew a line under what we’ll call Madge MK I. In two years’ time, when she scores her next chart-topper, she’ll be a different beast altogether!

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589. ‘La Isla Bonita’, by Madonna

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Four Madonna number ones down; four very different sounds from the soon-to-be Queen of Pop…

La Isla Bonita, by Madonna (her 4th of thirteen #1s)

2 weeks, from 19th April – 3rd May 1987

‘La Isla Bonita’ is a Latin-funk tune, with a nice strong bass line, some horn blasts and a sharp Spanish guitar. Everything is fine-tuned, and tight. It has a gloss to it, a modernness to the production, that suggests Madonna had available to her the best studios and equipment. It’s got a steady beat, but it’s still likely to fill a dancefloor.

Except, yeah… I don’t love this one. It’s my least favourite of the four so far. Something about it feels gimmicky to me. Why is she singing in Spanish, for a start? Como puede ser verdad, she purrs in the intro. How can it be true…? If Madonna knows one foreign language, surely it’s Italian?

Anyway, Madonna has fallen in love. Not with a Cuban hunk, rather with an island. I fell in love with San Pedro… Tropical island breeze, All of nature wild and free, This is where I long to be, La isla bonita… Problem is, when non-Latina stars go Latina, they tend to resort to these cliches of warm breezes and Spanish lullabies.

To be fair to Madonna, ‘La Isla Bonita’ may have been her first attempt at Latin music, but it was far from her last. She has a love for it that goes beyond mere musical shapeshifting. Problem is, Madonna is a bit of a trendsetter. She opened the floodgates for every female pop star going to have a ‘Latin phase’: from Lady Gaga to Geri Halliwell. And I’m a traditionalist: no woman has done Latin nonsense better than Rosemary Clooney back in 1955!

So, to me, ‘La Isla Bonita’ feels like a default chart-topper from the biggest star in the world. It was the fifth single to be released from the ‘True Blue’ album, and you have to be pretty darn popular to get the fifth single off your album to number one. This was her 3rd of four #1s between the summers of 1986 and 1987. Again, not many artists manage four chart-toppers in a year.

I was amazed to see that this was Madonna’s 4th most listened-to song on Spotify, above ‘Like a Virgin’, ‘Like a Prayer’ and ‘Vogue’. It just feels like such an average moment in her back catalogue… Not terrible – far from it – but nowhere near her best. Rolling Stone has it as her 40th best song, apparently, and that sounds much more reasonable.

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